Minimize your Risk of Osteoporosis with these Healthy Smoothie Recipes! (The OCD Foodie Series, #1)

Did you know that by the time you're 30, your body stops storing calcium in your bones? Yeah: whatever calcium your body managed to store during the first three decades of your life, that's it - you're not going to be getting any more.

And when I say "by the time you're 30", I'm being generous: for most people, peak bone mass is reached in their early 20s.

And do you know what the body does when you don't give it enough calcium? That's right: it borrows it from your bones. "Borrows", that is, if you're younger than 30. If you're older than 30, it just takes it - and you'll never see it again. Ever. Hello bone fractures! Osteoporosis, here I come!

Source: Wikipedia commons

Good news and bad news

So this is the bad news: if you haven't been taking enough calcium when you were young, there's nothing you can do about it now. But one thing you can do (this is the good news) is minimize calcium loss in your bones. You can do this by giving your body its DRI Recommended Intake of calcium, and thus lower your risk of osteoporosis. (Osteoporosis is when your bones - osta - become porous - porosis - because the body has been mining them for calcium. The more porous your bones get, the more fragile they become. For more on calcium and nutrition, see the book Nutrition, Concepts and Controversies, 13th edition, pp. 299-302.)

I lift, therefore I eat

Now for me, I have to eat 4 times a day. I make the smoothie Meal 1 of my daily dine. If I weight-lift that day, I drink it right after I'm done. It gives me the protein and the carbs I need.

No protein powders in these smoothies, by the way! One of my Food Rules is to avoid highly processed foods, and protein powders - though there's no evidence that they're harmful - sound awfully processed to me.

What I'm going to do in these series

Probably none of the recipes I'll be presenting to you will be my own. I consider myself a creative person, but coming up with novel recipes isn't something I've ever done, or tried to do.

What I will be doing, though - what I have been doing for a few years - is buy recipe books and cook everything that's in them. Oddly, you'll be lucky if you get a cookbook where 70% of the recipes in it don't suck. I never understood why that is. The same book will contain a recipe for the best dish you've ever had in your life, and recipes for dishes you can hardly try without getting a gag reflex.

So consider me your own personal cupbearer. I try it, so that you don't have to.

OCD

Where these recipes deviate from others, is that you'll be getting a complete table of the vitamins and minerals in them. For most recipes, you'll be lucky if you get the protein and carb and fat content. But that's only a small part of the picture. We want our recipes to be dense. We want to pack as much nutritional value in those recipes as possible. A recipe that contains the same amount of protein and carbs and fats, but includes more nutrient-dense ingredients, is superior. We want to do more with less, so that we can eat and cook less often. The aim is to get all of our DRIs from our food - and from all the different food groups and subgroups - so we can finally kick the vitamin-pill bottle. And we can't do that unless we know what vitamins and minerals we're getting from our recipes.

Time

A scant resource. None of these recipes will take more than 30 minutes to make. And some will feed you for 4 days or more.

Expense

The aim is to get the biggest-health-for-your-buck value. No redundantly expensive ingredients here. No faddy-fancy matcha powders or whatnot that confer no real nutritional advantage over cheaper and more widely available options. If it's cheap, or the container lasts for a long time (like chia seeds), then fine. But we won't be using black truffle anytime soon.

How do I get hold of these recipes?

Some I will directly link to. Others, you might have to get by purchasing some book. There are other ways, like internet piracy, that I don't condone, but for the sake of completeness I had to mention— —

Now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way, here's the recipe (the heading is clickable):

Orange Strawberry Smoothie

Now here's some advice on how to make it:

1. If you don't own a high-powered blender that can handle anything you throw at it, then I suggest using a meat hammer. With teeth. Like so:
   

   

2. My frozen strawberries don't always come in large sizes (some are medium- or small-sized), so I compensate (by buying a Porsche). It comes out to about 260 g.
   

   

3. You don't want strawberry fragments to be flying all over the place. I use the ring from a springform pan.
   

   

4. Hulk smash.
   

   

5. Hulk place strawberries in the blender and give it a couple blends.

6. Peel the oranges. Halve them. Remove the seeds.
   

   
   

7. Don't just add the whole oranges to the blender: squeeze them a bit so the blades have some liquid to work with and you don't have to constantly scrape.

8. Add the rest of the ingredients, converting ml to g unit for unit. So 360 ml yogurt is 360 grams yogurt. No need to dirty a cup over this. Same for milk. Just stand the blender (sans motor) on a digital scale, and pour in the milk and scoop in the yogurt.

Now on to the table:

As you can see from the table, you're getting almost 60% of your calcium RDA from just this one recipe!

Note that the amounts in the table are for double the recipe. For a male in his thirties like myself, that's fine. If you're a female and smallish, you might find it hard to drink it all down in one session.

The numbers in red are the ones derived from the packaging of the product itself. The rest I had to get from here:

For the yogurt: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=124
For the oranges: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=37
For the bananas (my large bananas weighed 145 g, so I multiplied the amounts here by 23%): http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=7
For the strawberries: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=32
For the cow’s milk: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=130

The amounts in the actual drink will, by necessity, be approximations.

If you prefer an easier way to calculate your daily intakes, the DASH Diet is ideal. With this recipe, you're getting ~6 cups fruit and ~2 cups milk or milk product.

A note on the yogurt

The yogurt I use is traditional Greek strained yogurt. It contains a whopping 6.5 g protein per 100 g of product.

It contains only two ingredients: yogurt doesn't really need more than milk + a culture.

This is the brand though I doubt it will be available in your country:

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So there you have it! Follow me for more OCD recipes like this one! If you follow long enough, we might get to the point where you'll have your whole week scheduled out, and you'll be kissing your vitamin-and-mineral-supplements dependency goodbye, as well as avoiding your hypothetical future-osteoporosis!