This is the last of my “boost your immunity” posts and luckily the swine flu hasn’t been much of an issue in the US.  Our last and favorite way for boosting immunity is our breakfast smoothies.  I know I’ve already posted about these, but I really believe that they help keep me healthy.  When Jeremy and I have been traveling or when we are out of the ingredients and don’t eat these every day we tend to get sick more frequently.  So what’s in these that is helping keep us healthy?

First, we are getting around 8 servings of fruit split two ways between Jeremy and I, so around four servings of fruit each in our breakfast smoothies.  We also put raw honey in our breakfast smoothies which alone is good for you (see my previous post about it).  We add flax seed oil which I’ve read the omega-3′s in it are also good for your immune system health.  Blueberries are the #1 fruit for antioxidants, followed by cranberries, and strawberries.  We put blueberries, cranberry juice and strawberries in our breakfast smoothie and get a bunch of antioxidants every day.  Antioxidants help your immune system by eliminating free radicals, and can also help eliminate cancer cells and have a lot of other health benefits as well.  Strawberries and orange juice have tons of vitamin C (a cup of strawberries has the same amount of vitamin C as a cup of orange juice).  There is debate over whether vitamin C actually stops colds but in some instances after you already have a cold it has been shown effective.  Cranberry juice has anti-microbial properties as well as being the juice highest in antioxidants.

The best part about the breakfast smoothies is you can swap out whatever fruit you want and pretty much any real fruit you put in there is going to taste good and be good for you.  And since we put mostly whole fruit in our smoothies instead of all juices with sugar and ice cream like they do at smoothie stores it is a good way to get a bunch of servings of fruit without it seeming like a chore to get your 2-4 servings a day.  If you substitute out other fruits and want information on the ways it benefits you check out the World’s Heathiest Foods website and search for the fruit you’ve substituted, I’ve found a lot of good information on it, and they are run by an independent non-profit that’s goal is to keep people informed of the latest research on nutrition in foods.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 9:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.