For the past 8 months or so, I’ve been making a 1 liter dense smoothie about 3 times a week. On those days it makes up a little more than 50% of my caloric intake I would imagine. I tried to come up with something that would cover most of my micronutrients as well as have a low glycemic load, taste decent and be easy to consume (drink). It’s nice, I get lots of energy and never get that tired feeling that comes after most meals. I also think it tastes good, but not everyone agrees 🙁
I’ve been curious as to the actual nutritional breakdown of my typical recipe. The ingredients vary slightly but are usually something very close to the ones listed below. I suspected I wasn’t getting much protein, and that appears to be the case. I’m not worried about the relatively low carb intake as it’s pretty easy for me (and most people) to eat carbs. My dinners (and lunches on non-goop days) are vegetarian about 75% of the time with probably more carbs than necessary in a single meal.
Here’s the ingredient breakdown. There’s obviously variation between this and what I’m actually eating, but it’s pretty close. I checked the nutritional info on the packages of the stuff I have that comes in packages and it seems close enough to the numbers below.
CALORIES | QTY | MEASUREMENT | FOOD | |
80 | 4.90% | 2 | 1 individual (packet) | Almond milk Blue Diamond Unsweetened |
227 | 14.00% | 1 | 1 fruit | Acovados, raw, California, without skin and seed |
105 | 6.50% | 1 | 1 medium | Bananas raw |
42.2 | 2.60% | 0.5 | 1 cup | Blueberries raw |
33.5 | 2.10% | 1 | 1 cup | Kale, chopped, raw |
114 | 7.00% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Almonds |
130 | 8.00% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Brazilnuts, dried unblanched |
110 | 6.80% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Cashew, raw |
125 | 7.70% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Hazelnuts or filberts |
137 | 8.50% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Pecans |
130 | 8.00% | 0.71 | 1 ounce | Nuts, Walnuts |
389 | 23.90% | 1 | 100 grams | Oats |
1.9 | 0.10% | 1 | 1 pepper | Pepper, serrano, raw |
Data is from the USDA database, and the extra metrics + pretty pictures is generated through http://nutritiondata.self.com. The site makes pretty graphs but is very painful to use. Most of the time when updating the meal composition it would fail and load stale data or miss some new data that was saved already. I would not want to try to use that to try variations on a combination of ingredients but I wasn’t able to find a better tool. I also don’t like building GUI’s, otherwise I’d make my own.
More or less what I expected. My guess is it may be worth putting a scoop of protein powder in and maybe cut down a little on the nuts to keep it from getting too viscous.