Tropical Morning Sunrise. How to make a luxuriously satisfying & healthy breakfast smoothie

I often like to start the day with a healthy and sustaining smoothie. It can be an excellent and effortless way of getting a wide range of nutrients into your diet.

I'm half Jamaican & I've never been there and can't do the accent to save my life,  but I think this explains my love of tropical fruits. Although they're high in beneficial antioxidants including carotenes that (can be converted to vitamin A) and vitamin C,their fairly high sugar content gives them an unfairly bad reputation.  High levels of sugar of any kind can lead to many health issues including weight gain, unstable energy levels, insulin resistance, diabetes and inflammatory conditions. This does not have to mean they are out of bounds and they can certainly have their place in a healthy diet.

When consuming the higher sugar more fast releasing fruits (dried fruits, grapes, bananas, pineapple, lychees, mangoes) it's good to include a good source of protein and some healthy fats in order to slow the release of sugars into your system.

In terms of protein, this can be in the form of nuts such as ground almonds, seeds, soya yoghurt, soya milk, silken tofu or protein powders such as pea (split pea) or brown rice protein.  






Protein powders can sometimes make smoothies taste disgusting & have a gritty texture I've had some disasters along the way.  The secret is to use the right ones, use the right proportion of fruit to protein and add a texture improver such as coconut milk or avocado. Here I've used SunWarrior brown rice protein (because I wanted to try it) but I've found that pea protein is the most easily disguised & it's affordable too. When making a smoothie with tropical fruits I find a ratio of 10:1 fruit to protein powder works well.  

do store in your fridge to preserve the goodness!

Regarding fats, the omega 3 kind can be found in flax and chia seeds and their oils. It's important for vegetarians and vegans to consume a source of these fats daily. I could bore you to death with a list of their benefits and that could be a whole new blog post but in short, they're essential for brain function & hormone signalling and can help reduce the impact of foods on blood sugar.

Flax and chia oils are not great tasting & I personally would not use them in a salad dressing but I find I can add about 10ml without the taste being noticable at all.

The soya milk I use to thin out the smoothie (it would be too thick otherwise) and it also adds a bit of extra protein.  Soya protein that is not fermented can sometimes be difficult to digest but papaya, mango and pineapple contain protein digesting enzymes that may aid digestion.

Coconut contains a kind of saturated fat that differs from that found in meat and dairy. Saturated fat was demonised for so long & I was so happy to find out coconut wasn't unhealthy! It has anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial properties and is used for energy rather than stored as fat. What's more it adds a beautiful creamy texture to smoothies. With coconut milk a little goes a long way.  I like to use a little bit of creamed coconut and dissolve it in a bit of boiling water but using canned coconut milk is fine if you can think of a use for the rest of it.

Here I've used 200g tinned papaya in pineapple juice, 20g protein powder, 10ml chia oil, 15g creamed coconut dissolved in boiling water and 200ml soya milk (Sojade vanilla soya milk is lovely & I get it delivered to me from Abel & Cole). Substituting a combination of different tropical fruits (mangoes, pineapple, banana, lychees) would also work well & flax oil has almost as much omega 3 as chia oil & is more affordable and widely available.

Et voila! Tropical tasting, 25g protein, 6g omega 3 fats, vitamin C, antioxidants, potassium, iron, calcium.

I LOVE ALL THE FRUITS! :)