Anyone who looks to improve their diet nowadays has considered buying a blender at some point.
Most of us have a blender on the countertop right now.
How should you choose your blender, though?
Any place that sells blenders will aim to sell you the most powerful and practical one.
Here are some considerations about why you need not spend extra money on the top models.
Ordinary models will do just fine.
Even more, they might be better for you.
Power is overvalued
We usually buy a blender in order to eat and live in a healthier manner.
That, for us, means first and foremost quality ingredients, minimally processed.
Most blenders nowadays are priced and marketed in regard to their power and “blending force”. We agree that the more power, the smoother the result will be.
However, it is rarely spoken about what happens during this “smoothing” process to the ingredients of our smoothie.
Blending does change your food, but it doesn’t destroy it. It breaks open plant cell walls, which can make some nutrients easier to absorb: in one trial, people absorbed nearly twice as much beta-carotene from spinach once its cell walls were broken down. The trade-off is that you can lose a little vitamin C, so drink smoothies fresh.
Some brands will boast that their blenders are so fast and powerful, that they unleash the hidden nutrition of fruits, vegetables, and whatnot.
Do they?
Blending does warm food through friction, and vitamin C and some B vitamins are sensitive to heat. How warm it gets depends mostly on how long you run the blender: a smoothie blended for under a minute barely warms, while making hot soup takes several minutes at top speed.
The higher-end models are so powerful and fast, that they can create a piping hot soup in about 5-6 minutes from cold ingredients!
Imagine the heat that is created when the blade hits your fresh produce.
Even with a less powerful blender, you can feel that your beverage is noticeably warmer than it was before.
You do not need to unleash the nutrition of your food
Many high-end brands claim that their products unleash some hidden nutrition your food had.
A blender doesn’t break molecules apart. It breaks open the cell walls that hold nutrients in, and for some nutrients, like the beta-carotene in spinach, that really does make more of them available. Brands oversell it, but the basic idea isn’t made up.
Cooking, mashing and blending are all ways people have always made plants easier to eat, and blending is just one more of them.
Buying the most powerful blender is unnecessary.
You still can go for a top-of-the-line Vitamix blender and use it at lower speeds. Why spend the money, though?
A reasonably powerful, glass jug blender such as an Oster BLSTMB-CBG-000 Pro 1200 Blender will blend most of your smoothies just fine.
Plastic is to be avoided
Plastic isn’t poison, but it isn’t inert either. Even BPA-free plastic can release hormone-like chemicals, and heat makes that worse. Can we avoid it altogether? No. We should try to reduce it, though.
With glass-jar options like the Oster around, there’s little reason to buy a plastic blender.
There are a lot of glass-jug blenders that are reasonably powerful and can produce great results.
High-speed blenders don’t come with glass jars, since glass can shatter at those speeds, but some offer a stainless steel jar instead.
There is a small challenge if you want a completely non-plastic blender, as we do.
It is the fact that the blade housing is almost always made out of plastic.
There are those rare models that have a metal housing. So it is not an issue, you only have to look around.
You can even buy Vitamix’s own 48-ounce stainless steel container (check that it fits your model).
Do we need blenders, after all?
Personally, we are using our blender for soups, sauces, and other cooked food but not for smoothies.
A blender can cost you a little vitamin C, but it keeps the whole fruit, fiber and all.
We also own a masticating juicer, but we don’t treat juice as a better smoothie.
Juicing throws away most of the fiber, and in three large US studies, eating whole fruit was linked with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes while drinking fruit juice was linked with a higher one.
Still, if you feel that you will not eat your fruits and veggies in any other way, blending is a great way to go.
Just, blend gently.
Read next
- The most useful appliance for a plant based kitchen: if you are only buying one thing, buy this one.
- Plastic free cooking appliances: which parts touch hot food, and which materials to look for.
- Non toxic kitchen utensils: same questions, applied to everything smaller than an appliance.
