Green smoothie question again!

[faith4u]

Can you eat non blended foods with a green smoothie or is it best to wait a while before eating something else?

Thanks

[fiddler]

That's a good question and one I haven't really thought about or seen asked before. I guess it depends on lots of things such as 1) what is the non-blended food you want to eat with your green smoothie, 2) what is in the green smoothie and 3) how well combined your smoothie is compared to the non-blended food.

For example, if you blend some bananas with romaine lettuce you'd probably do okay to eat bananas and lettuce with or after your green smoothie without much of a problem. However, I like the idea of just drinking the smoothie to allow the fluid to be digested quickly without my stomach having to deal with the more solid food at the same time. Does this make any sense? Alissa talks about this in her book "Living on Live Food" and has 3 pages devoted to food combining. Alissa includes Doug Graham's chart "The High Energy Diet Nutrition guide". This one page chart really clarifies food combining.

When I make a green smoothie it usually lasts me for awhile. For example, earlier I made the following smoothie since I've got 70 or so more apricots to eat :)

A full blender (ktec) full of romaine lettuce (nearly a head -- 5 cups)
Added some distilled water and blended.
Then added 6 apricots and 2 large ripe bananas and blended some more.
[ Yielded 6+ cups worth ]

After drinking the above smoothie I was "good-to-go" (to borrow from the recent Taco-bell commercial) for awhile.

If you have Alissa's book, turn to page 81-83.
Otherwise, there are many good resources for food combining that might assist you if you don't already know about 'em. Graham has his food combining chart available for order on his website -- www.foodnsport.com (http://www.foodnsport.com) However, if you buy Alissa's book you can save the $6.00 (or whatever amount it is I forget).

Hope this helps,
Fiddler

[sport]

At one stage I was taking my smoothie in a very liquid form and I was swallowing it too fast.
I realise that I was not getting any saliva mixed with it so I began to consider it more as a soup and added chopped apples to it after blending. As my smoothie was apple based to begin with I did not consider this to be a problem from a combining point of view.
I would take a spoonfull and chew the apple before swallowing. This ensured adaquate saliva mixing.
Now I make very thick smoothies and have developed the habit of keeping each spoonfull in my mouth for a while so I do not need to do it.
It is all down to combining and chewing.