Monday, January 10, 2011

Smoothies are a nutritional gold mine!

Good morning! Dawn from Florida Coastal Cooking shared a cool website with me...Spark Recipes. It is free and calculates the build up of your recipes. It's not exact because some of the things I used were not listed (it looks like you can add information about your favorite products too!) but this is a general idea.

I made a smoothie this morning and while I know they are good for me, I was shocked at HOW good they are for me!

This morning my smoothie included the following. (NL means the product was not listed on Spark Recipe so I had to improvise...but I think it's pretty close).

1 cup fresh spinach
3/4 cup frozen blueberries
1 frozen banana
1 TBSP flax meal
1 TBSP Peanut Flour (NL)
1 tsp bee pollen (NL)
1 cup hemp milk (I added this one in, although it does not allow a spot for Omega 3 ALA, and my hemp milk has 46% the daily recommended amount)

While my smoothie was high in calories, it is extremely high in nutrition too! look at this!

Calories479.4
  Total Fat19.4 g
     Saturated Fat2.6 g
     Polyunsaturated Fat10.3 g
     Monounsaturated Fat5.7 g
  Cholesterol0.0 mg
  Sodium236.1 mg
  Potassium1,002.5 mg
  Total Carbohydrate73.8 g
     Dietary Fiber12.6 g
     Sugars40.8 g
  Protein12.7 g
  Vitamin A69.6 %
  Vitamin B-1220.0 %
  Vitamin B-645.2 %
  Vitamin C38.4 %
  Vitamin D15.0 %
  Vitamin E20.1 %
  Calcium42.5 %
  Copper11.7 %
  Folate25.7 %
  Iron21.7 %
  Magnesium22.8 %
  Manganese37.5 %
  Niacin19.0 %
  Pantothenic Acid    6.5 %
  Phosphorus    11.4 %
  Riboflavin14.7 %
  Selenium4.1 %
  Thiamin9.2 %
  Zinc6.2 %


Not a bad way to start a Monday! Have a great week, everyone!

2 comments:

  1. I like the new background! Isn't Sparkrecipes great? You are right though, it's not exact, but at least it gives a good idea. There have also been a few times that the ingredient I'm looking for isn't in their list so I end up not being able to do the nutrition info.

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  2. Thanks, Dawn! Yes, it does seem to be a mostly good tool. I just have to remember to enter products that I use before I dump them into clear jars and toss the nutritional info!

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