Don’t Add Bananas To Your Smoothies – New Research

Smoothies are a pleasant and simple way to add healthy fruits and vegetables to your diet. But is a smoothie with blueberries and bananas the greatest combination?

According to recent research from the University of California, Davis, the way some fruits are combined in smoothies may affect how much nutrients your body absorbs.

In the study, which was just released in the journal Food and Function of the Royal Society of Chemistry, smoothies were used to examine how different concentrations of polyphenol oxidase, an enzyme found in many fruits and vegetables, affected the amount of flavanols in food that were absorbed by the body.

Apples, pears, blueberries, blackberries, grapes, and cocoa are frequent smoothie ingredients that naturally include flavanols, a group of bioactive components that are beneficial for your heart and brain health.

“We sought to understand, on a very practical level, how a common food and food preparation like a banana-based smoothie could affect the availability of flavanols to be absorbed after intake,” explained the study’s lead author, Javier Ottaviani, director of the Core Laboratory of Mars Edge, a division of Mars, Inc., and an adjunct researcher with the UC Davis Department of Nutrition.

A banana or an apple that has been peeled or cut will immediately turn brown. Polyphenol oxidase, or PPO, a naturally occurring enzyme in certain foods, is the cause of it. When the food containing that enzyme is chopped, bruised, or exposed to air, browning takes place. The question the researchers sought to answer was if ingesting freshly made smoothies made from various fruits high in PPO affected the quantity of flavanols the body could absorb.

Bananas Versus Berries

Participants were given smoothies made with mixed berries, which naturally have low PPO activity, and smoothies made with bananas, which naturally have high PPO activity. The participants also took a flavanol pill as a control.

To determine how much flavanol was present in the body following consumption of the smoothie samples and capsule, blood and urine samples were examined. When compared to those who drank the control, individuals who consumed the banana smoothie had 84% lower levels of flavanols in their bodies.

“We were really surprised to see how quickly adding a single banana decreased the level of flavanols in the smoothie and the levels of flavanol absorbed in the body,” said Ottaviani. This demonstrates how meal preparation and combination can impact how well nutritional components in food are absorbed.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics recommended consuming 400 to 600 mg of flavanols daily for cardiometabolic health in a dietary recommendation last year. According to Ottaviani, consumers attempting to ingest these flavanols can think about making smoothies with fruits like berries that are high in flavanols along with other components that have low PPO activity, such as yogurt, pineapple, oranges, or mango.

Bananas continue to be a fantastic fruit to eat or use in smoothies, he added. The recommendation is to avoid adding flavanol-rich fruits like berries, grapes, and chocolate when making smoothies with bananas or other fruits and vegetables with high PPO activity, including beet greens.

Future studies on how other foods are prepared and their effects on flavanols may be sparked by the study’s findings, according to Ottaviani, who said that tea is a significant dietary source of flavanols and that the amount of flavanols that are available for absorption depends on the method of preparation.

In the context of polyphenols and bioactive chemicals in general, this topic unquestionably merits greater investigation, Ottaviani stated.

Avoid adding bananas to your smoothies when you are preparing one.