Chocolate Banana Almond Butter Smoothie

To me, smoothies are the easiest ways to take a healthy meal on the go. You can change up the ingredients so that you never get bored of the flavor as well as increasing your variety of foods and therefore nutrients too.

Meal or Snack?

Depending on the size and what you put in it, a smoothie can substitute for a meal or serve as a delicious snack!

My smoothies are usually pretty simple because I don’t like to mix too many ingredients. I’ve always thought that the simpler the ingredients (and the fewer of them) the easier it would be for your body to digest and absorb all the nutrients from those foods.

In my smoothies I usually use bananas as a base. Bananas are sweet (enhancing the flavor of my drink) and potassium-rich (providing a necessary nutrient for heart health). Potassium also helps prevent muscle cramps, so a smoothie with a banana is great for a post workout snack.

To the bananas, I add a fruit that is complementary (another sweet fruit or sub-acidic fruit) and a leafy green or celery. This combination, along with the high speed blending of my Vitamix blender, helps me to digest the foods properly.

Other sweet fruits include grapes, dried fruits (figs, dates, raisins), persimmons, and papaya. Sub-acidic fruits are apples (sweet), apricots, blueberries, cherries, kiwis, mangos, peaches, pears, and plums. Sweet fruits do not mix well with acidic fruits like grapefruit, orange, lemon/lime, apple (sour), pineapple, strawberry, raspberry, or sour plums. And melons should be eaten alone entirely. The reason for all this combining is so that foods that digest faster don’t sit around or get “caught” waiting for foods that take longer to digest to do so. And, it’s easier on your body to only have to produce certain enzymes at a time, not having to produce other enzymes at the same time. It just simplifies the process of digestion.

This time, instead of adding greens, I added almond butter and a little raw cacao powder. Raw cacao powder is minimally processed so that it retains it’s antioxidants (and is better for you!).

Makes 1 smoothie and takes no time!