 Unhealthy lifestyle behaviors associated with increased risk of premature death include things like smoking and excessive drinking, and not eating enough greens. The best way to get your greens is in whichever way you'll eat the most of them, and one way to sneak extra greens into your daily diet is with whole food smoothies, a potent blend of good nutrition in a quick, portable, delicious form. The Mayo Clinic offers this as a basic green smoothie recipe, combining the healthiest of fruits, berries, with the healthiest of vegetables, dark green leafies. Two ounces of baby spinach is about a cup and a half. Curly parsley is another mild beginner green to start with. Surprisingly, the sweetness of the fruit masks the bitterness of the greens, such that the pickiest of children love them, along with any adults who would otherwise not be consuming dark green leafy vegetables for breakfast. Or even fruit, for that matter, the average teen may only be getting about one twentieth of a serving of fruit, otherwise, and loops don't count. But offering smoothies can have a dramatic effect on fruit consumption for students who do not want to take time peeling or chewing fruits. Who doesn't have time to chew a fruit? But the milkshake-y textures smoothies may not just boost the quality of fruit and vegetable consumption, but also the quality. Crotinoid phytonutrients, like beta carotene and lycopene, can exist as microscopic crystals trapped within the cell walls of fruits and vegetables. And they're only released when the cells are disrupted. That's why we need to chew really well. Mastication is doctor speak for chewing. We either have to chew better or choose plants that are easier to chew. For example, lowball tomatoes have more beta carotene than watermelon does, the watermelon's beta carotene is more bio-accessible because it has kind of wimpy cell walls, but the cells of other fruits and vegetables are smaller and tougher to maximize nutrient release. Food particle size would ideally be reduced down to smaller than the width of the individual plant cells, but you can't do that with chewing. Most vegetable particles end up greater than two millimeters when you chew them, which corresponds to way up here. Whereas if we broke open all the cells, we could release much more nutrition. We can never chew as well as a blender. The particle size distribution from chewing is about what you'd get blending in a food processor for about five seconds or one of those high-speed blenders for maybe half a second. 40 seconds in a blender and you can break spinach down to a subcellular level. Why does that matter? Well take folate, for example, the B vitamin in greens, especially important for women of childbearing age. Feed people a cup of spinach a day for three weeks and their folate goes up compared to control. But even just chop it up finally with a knife first before chewing it, and you end up with more than twice as much ending up in your bloodstream. And the same absorption boosting effect with lutein, the green's nutrient so important for our eyesight. It's not what you eat, it's what you absorb. But for lutein the boost was only 14%, so a few extra bites of the whole leaf greens would have gotten you just as much. And some other nutrients such as vitamin C aren't affected by pre-chopping at all. And this is less of an issue with cooked vegetables. This is for raw carrots. Boil the carrots for three minutes first, and even just regular chewing can release like 10 times more. But not as much as blended. Intense cooking boiling for 25 minutes so damages it to cell walls that even gulping down large particles can result in significant absorption. But even then blending may double crotinoid availability, explaining why we may be able to absorb three times the alpha and beta carotene from pureed cooked carrots compared to mashed cooked carrots. So blending vegetables, raw or cooked, into soup sauces and smoothies can maximize nutrient absorption. You went to the store and bought it, or toiled in your garden to grow it, you might as well take full advantage of it. Might there be a downside to enhanced absorption though? We'll find out next.