In Search of The Healthiest Smoothie
This article is part of a series, please refer to the first post for more info.
Smoothies. Maybe the best and tastiest way to get all your day’s nutrition in one place. Buying the blender is the easy part. But getting a delicious flavor while maximizing nutritional value is hard to master without advice, so a simple Google search is the natural first step. What are the healthiest smoothie ingredients? Getting a straight — and useful — answer to that question is more complicated than it might seem.
Here’s a breakdown of the top ten results we get when we search for:
‘The healthiest smoothie ingredients’
1. Eating Well. Note the pagination, six pages to one result. It’s a favorite trick of websites (and pet peeve of most everyone else) for getting more clicks per page visit. Definitely not good for a quick and effective search.
Out of principle, we’ll skip this one.
2. This one’s also a result from Eating Well. Again the pagination, the first mention of fruit is on their third page. They don’t say how much of which you should use, and given that too much fruit can result in insulin shock, this is not a good start.
3. Men’s Fitness, more pagination, this time sending us to a bunch of specious slides about various ingredients, without any coherent advice as to how they should be combined, or in what proportion. It’s enough to start making a list — bananas, spinach, spirulina — but not much more.
Ok I don’t want to bore you with this breakdown, so please skip the list to get to the meat of this article, or if you like reading about each of these search results please contact me about becoming a popsnip moderator :)
4. LiveStrong, and again with the pagination, a whopping 22 pages of it. There’s some pretty great ingredient suggestions in here though, and it’s presented well. We can definitely find some useful information in here, and some interesting suggestions.
5. Prevention, some pretty yummy looking smoothies in here, but they look high in sugar. Remember, we asked for the best healthy smoothies, not just the most tasty (we already know what tastes good!).
6. Swanson Health Blog. Simple presentation of what seems like solid advice, but pretty light on specifics about what purpose the various ingredients have besides being tasty. Our question was health specific.
7. Men’s Health. nice pictures, content seems good if a bit dated. Healthy smoothie ingredients are an ever-evolving, cutting-edge industry, and we want the most healthy stuff. That’s what we asked for after all.
8. Well and Good, a very nicely designed site (with pagination though…grr), and some good content so maybe I’ll keep reading oh wait it’s an ecommerce store. Hey actually that’s not such a bad thing. They’re making good, informed suggestions, providing links and it all looks nice, to boot. The notebook fills up a bit more.
9. Popsugar, surprised how much I like this one. They don’t offer a lot of ingredients, but the content is solid with links to a variety of smoothie recipes. Big plus, they let you change the paginated content into a list. Though some of their recipes are high in sugar involve protein powders, which might be ideal if you’re a vegan but are something I try to avoid.
10. Total Beauty — A Well and Good competitor that’s similarly e-commerce driven and very similar in terms of content. Still, it includes some useful quotes from nutritionist bloggers, who are generally much more reliable sources than any single Google search. Including their insight is a big plus.
Our results were a mixed bag of content, insight, and generalities. We’ve got a good amount to work with after doing the work of visiting ten sites. I know I picked on their UI quite a bit in the process, but information architecture is important. After all, it’s up to us to pull the useful bits of information from the depths of the click mines
In fact, all of the above is just a snippet of what would be a much longer process. The more I learn, the more questions I learn to ask. After seeing ginger mentioned a couple places, it can inspire its own search. ‘Ginger for your smoothie,’ ‘How to use ginger root in smoothie,’ etc.
And wait a second, isn’t green a big buzzword in health? I should search for that, because I need Google to know that this is a really, truly, super healthy smoothie I want to make. Searching for ‘Healthiest green smoothie ingredients’ leads us to this Mind Body Green post with some decent new info. Here we see the process that can go on for months before really providing a complete answer to our original question.
Alright, full disclosure. I actually know quite a lot about how to make a properly healthy smoothie. In fact, I have a long list of nutritionist blog sites where I know good, reliable nutritional content can be found. I know from experience that health experts like Rhonda Patrick, Ben Greenfield and Shawn Stevenson can be trusted as sources devoted to pub-med and being a resource for the best of the best when it comes to nutrition, food and fitness.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could skip everything you’ve just read, and go straight to the answers someone who knows the subject would provide? Now I’ve got the best bits of all that searching, but why couldn’t that be the result that came up first?
If you asked the question of the popsnip community, you would have. I’ve taken all that information (and more) and created a place for it. With the same search parameters as before, here’s the result. If you don’t think I have the best answer to the question up on my PopSnip page, please feel free to add your own snippet of info and make it better!
That’s a lot less than ten steps, and will provide better information, and information that can evolve and improve with time as better answers are provided (rather than based on who pays more for SEO this month).
We also invite you Medium readers to suggest future searches by replying here.
Enjoy your smoothie
