Benefits of Smoothies
There’s a new documentary that is going to be released this year about how some patients with Alzheimer’s disease ‘woke up’ when they wore headphones and listened to music that they heard as a child.
Your brain is totally amazing in that you have five senses that can lead directly into the brain and access it. When the patients heard the music from long ago, it activated numerous parts of their brain. The light came back on in their eyes. They started to talk again, and were coherent.
Why not do the same thing with taste? Taste buds as well as the sense of smell (the olfactory system in the body) directly access the brain. What tastes you had as a child in different foods created a neural pathway in your brain that connected with many other parts of your brain. By accessing these tastes, you can directly affect these other parts of the brain and perhaps minimize the progression of your loved one's Alzheimer's.
The first thing to do when your loved one has Alzheimer’s is to find out what that person ate as a child. Certainly there are other family members that can tell you the answer to this question. Cinnamon flavored foods are always a good choice – perhaps your loved one ate cinnamon toast, cinnamon flavored candy, or cinnamon muffins. Licorice is another one. People in their 80s and 90s often grew up taking cod liver oil, too so you might find this as a way to an Alzheimer’s patient’s memory but don’t put it in their smoothie!!
There are already many health benefits of smoothies; once you identify four or five familiar tastes, start creating! Here’s an example of what to do with cinnamon:
- Smoothie with yogurt, one teaspoon cinnamon, lemon, Swiss chard, kale, spinach, and a ripe peach.
- Smoothie with coconut water, coconut cream concentrate, pineapple, cinnamon, kiwi, orange, and lemon.
- Smoothie with vanilla ice cream, one teaspoon cinnamon, Swiss chard (it’s very bland tasting), spinach, mint.
You might even try a cinnamon day where every meal and snack contains cinnamon. There could be cinnamon pancakes with cinnamon-flavored maple syrup, cinnamon yogurt or coconut smoothie for snack, lunch has a cinnamon pudding for dessert, cinnamon graham crackers for snack, and dinner is steak and dessert is cinnamon ice cream. This way your loved one gets the pathway in the brain activated; if it is going to turn on the brain, you should know and see signs by the end of the day.
Use this concept to construct your loved one’s return back to normalcy from Alzheimer’s disease.