Jennifer Thompson

Green smoothies, which are packed with nutrient-dense fruits and veggies, are gaining popularity for one main reason: They actually work. Even better, they're made from whole foods and they're totally affordable, even for a large family. In just five minutes, you can start making your own green smoothies. Get ready to see and feel a real difference in your health.

The texture of your green smoothie is also a matter of personal taste. Some people enjoy a thick green smoothie and actually prefer to eat it with a spoon, like a soup. Others prefer a much more drinkable or juice-like consistency. As you try new recipes, you can experiment with different textures and choose what works best for you.

Include more greens in your green smoothie if it tastes too sweet. The bitter taste of green leafy veggies helps balance the sweet flavor of the fruits. A smoothie can be sweet from using naturally sweet fruits such as pineapple, mango, guava, passion fruit, or melon. Fruit that is really ripe or overripe can also make a smoothie taste sweet.

You’ve made a delicious-tasting green smoothie, and you have a blender on standby for the next healthy creation. You may also have a small pile of leftovers: apple cores, some kale stems, lemon skins, and maybe some tomato stems, wilted celery, or celery ends that didn’t make the cut. If you have a juicer at home, you can use certain leftovers in a juice.

When using small leafy greens such as fresh parsley, baby spinach, watercress, or celery leaves, add the whole leaves with the stems to your green smoothie. Not only does it save you time spent cutting away each small stem, but you also get more minerals, chlorophyll, and fiber simply by eating more of the leafy greens in each smoothie.

Although balance and variety are the keys to success in eating a healthy diet, certain preexisting medical conditions may dictate which greens you use in your green smoothies and how often. If you suffer from kidney disease or have only one kidney, you should minimize parsley and greens that are naturally high in oxalic acid, including spinach, Swiss chard, beet greens, kale, and collard greens.

You may think that most people would shy away from green smoothies because they’re afraid of greens, but the idea of adding fruit is what usually sends people running. How could that be? In a society both obsessed with diet and plagued by obesity, the thought of any type of sugar, even the healthy natural sugar in fruits, is immediately associated with weight gain.

What better way to start the day than with your healthiest meal first? Drinking a green smoothie in the morning gives you the best chance to make better food choices for the rest of the day. If you do things right from the starting gate, you naturally want to keep feeling good all day. From there, making better food choices is so much easier.

Getting the perfect smoothie is all about adding the right liquid. You can add many types of liquids to a smoothie; some common choices aren’t actually as healthy as you may think. Can or should you add coffee to a green smoothie, too? Some do, but it's not a good idea. Coffee is acid-forming, a characteristic that goes against the alkaline nature of the fruits and greens.