Smoothie Prince wrote:
This is probably a dumb question because it seems so simple. I use a VitaMix and make a green smoothie a day with a buttload of kale, spinach, beets, carrots and make it palatable by adding frozen blueberries, strawberrys and greek yogurt and add chia seeds and a high grade protein powder. This is how I consume 90% or more of my veggies not including potatoes and maybe corn. I have actually stopped worrying about eating vegetables because of the smoothie. Is drinking veggies the same as eating them?
This is a minor but valid point of debate in the Low Fat Raw Vegan community. I forget some of the ideas and notions, because I've been struggling with the nutritional basics. So what you're doing is overall great, but,
first, my own idea is that mastication, chewing action, of fresh foods has a lot of physiological benefits. There are immediate flavour compounds and even bitter compounds that affect our mood, trigger nervous system and hormonal responses (which affect the body and the digestive system). I know empirically time and time again in my own experience that certain bitter compounds, processed, chewed, CONFRONTED and SAVORED in all their bitterness, in the mouth, can create a bit of a high and an analgesic effect and even a performance-enhancing effect.
Second, is the idea and various variations of "food combining" and, even more strictly, "mono-meals." One raw food lecturer I knew, a very gentle looking young lady of middle-aged, married, liked to expound mono-meals (not eating more than one species of fruit in a single meal) for many reasons--digestive reasons, taste reasons, focus and mood reasons. This is a lady I'm sure with a bit of hidden wisdom, not revealing the meaning behind her mystic deeds, someone who'd fasted for 17 days.
There are also enzymes in our saliva which, combined with the mechanical breakdown in the mouth, began to have action on the food before it proceeds in the digestive system. You would theoretically lose the benefit of that if you only drank all your liquified smoothie.
So I would say both have its purposes. Drinking liquified smoothies and even strained fresh raw juices, have many purposes, like giving your teeth and your digestive system a rest, making it easy, and providing some convenience in your life so you can eat healthy, pack nutrients, and not sink too much stress and effort into preparing food all the time. The goal is not to sink the entire ship, so worrying too much about the little things can hurt.
There are also those of the parapsychology community, and a very nice middle-aged dark haired lady, who talked about the "energy" fields of foods and of being "gentle" in the Vitamix when possible and not introducing violence into the foods, and praying upon food and bestowing good energy. You can laugh all you want, and there is a lot of pseudoscience out there, but she was a great lady in many other regards and being respectful and reverent, at least some of the time, is good policy. So, supposedly, eating whole food whole, chewing it one by one, or manually slicing it into reasonably small pieces, rather than doing something more violent, brings good vibes, I guess. If that concerns you.
Again, I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff, if I think of it maybe I'll say so later,
but keeping it natural and in-tune with evolutionary practices is a wise idea. I mean, living off an entirely liquified diet, for too long just doesn't seem natural and comfortable to me.