Steady Green Avocado & Chia Smoothie
Avocado, kale, cucumber, and chia in unsweetened almond milk, with lime and cinnamon and barely any fruit at all.
Why it works
This is the green smoothie built for someone watching blood sugar. Most versions of it are two bananas and a mango with a leaf for colour. Here the sweetness comes from a single small green apple and the body comes from fat and fiber, so the total sugar stays under 10 grams. Cinnamon appears for a reason: meta-analyses of trials in type 2 diabetes show modest reductions in fasting glucose. Kale rather than spinach is deliberate. Spinach is very high in oxalate, and a daily habit of large raw spinach smoothies is a known route to kidney stones in people prone to them, whereas kale is low-oxalate and swaps in cleanly.
Cinnamon shows modest fasting glucose reductions in meta-analyses of type 2 diabetes trials. The oxalate load of large daily raw spinach smoothies is a documented kidney stone risk in susceptible people.
Ingredients
- 1/2 ripe avocado (about 70 g)
- 40 g curly kale, stems removed
- 120 g cucumber, roughly chopped
- 1 small green apple, cored (about 120 g)
- 300 ml unsweetened almond milk
- 1.5 tbsp (18 g) chia seeds
- 1 tbsp fresh lime juice
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Method
- Pour the liquid into the blender first, then add the soft ingredients, then anything frozen or hard on top. Blending in that order keeps the blades in liquid instead of spinning against a frozen block.
- Strip the kale stems out and blend the leaves with the milk first. The stems are what make green smoothies taste bitter and stay stringy.
- Blend on low until it breaks up, then on high for 45 to 60 seconds, until no flecks remain and the texture is even.
- Taste and adjust: a splash more liquid if it is too thick to pour, a squeeze of citrus if it tastes flat, a few more ice cubes if you want it colder.
- Drink it soon after blending. The texture separates within about ten minutes, and the colour dulls as the cut surfaces oxidise.
