If you're making a smoothie for a health boost, especially for your brain and heart, you might want to leave out bananas. New research suggests that adding a banana to your drink can actually block your body from absorbing key healthy compounds. Bananas have always been a big favorite for healthy drinks and desserts. You may have seen many healthy smoothie recipes like banana and coffee smoothie, or bananas and berries, being listed along with other healthy food recipes. While it does have many health benefits, how healthy it is with other nutrients involved has been questioned. Researchers at the University of California-Davis found that bananas interfere with the absorption of powerful nutrients called flavanols. These compounds are fantastic for health, but if you blend them with a banana, you might not get the benefit you're looking for. Should You Add Bananas In Health Smoothies? The researchers found that bananas block how well we absorb flavanol. Flavanols are beneficial natural chemicals found in foods like berries, apples, grapes, and cocoa. When you eat enough of them regularly, they are known to help your memory, reduce swelling inside your body, which is called inflammation, and make your blood flow better. So, why does the banana stop this? The culprit is a specific enzyme, a kind of protein, that is found in high amounts in bananas. It's called polyphenol oxidase (PPO). This is the same enzyme that makes a peeled banana or apple slice turn brown quickly. The researchers found that when PPO mixes with flavanols in the blender, it somehow stops your body from being able to use them. Lead researcher Javier Ottaviani said it was surprising to see how quickly even just one banana dropped the levels of flavanols your body could absorb. Why Do Bananas Block Nutrients? The scientists conducted a very clear experiment to figure this out. They had people drink three different things and then measured the flavanols in their bodies, by testing their blood and urine: The Banana Test A smoothie made with banana, which is high in the PPO enzyme. The Berry Test A smoothie made with mixed berries, which are low in the PPO enzyme. The Control Test A plain capsule of pure flavanols, just to see what 100% absorption looked like. The results were impossible to ignore, the people who drank the banana smoothie had 84% less flavanols show up in their system compared to the people who took the pure flavanol capsule. This clearly proved that the banana was the reason the healthy compounds weren't getting absorbed. How to Get Your Daily Flavanols? If you're trying to meet the daily recommendation of flavanols, which is about 400 to 600 milligrams, to help your heart and overall health, you need to be smart about your smoothies. The main takeaway is to skip the bananas if you're mixing it with high-flavanol foods like berries. If your smoothie already contains ingredients that are low in the PPO enzyme—like berries, pineapple, oranges, mango, or yogurt—then you are maximizing the amount of healthy flavanols your body will actually get. This finding opens the door for more research into how simple acts of cooking or preparing food, like how you brew tea (a major flavanol source), can change the nutrients you absorb.
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