Getting your five servings of fruits and vegetables each day shouldn’t be difficult. But sometimes it is. Although fruit juices count toward your “Five A Day”, they can be high in fruit sugars (fructose) and often don’t have the nutritional benefits of the whole fruit (especially when it comes to fiber.) Also, many bottled fruit juices are made from concentrate and don’t even contain 100% fruit juice.
So I was intrigued when I ran across the Bolthouse Farms line of fruit and vegetable juices at the grocery store. These 100% all natural juices had all kinds of cool names like Blue Goodness, C-Boost and my new favorite, Green Goodness. I’ve tried some of the Odwalla juices in the past and wasn’t terribly blown away, so I decided to give Bolthouse Farms a shot.
I was particularly interested in something called Green Goodness – a vegetable/fruit juice (actually it’s more like a smoothie) that had all kinds of interesting, healthy ingredients that frankly didn’t sound like they would taste very good blended up in a bottled juice. But being the healthy food adventurist that I am, I decided to spring for a bottle of Green Goodness just to see for myself. The worst that could happen, I figured, is that I’d be out a few bucks.
Bolthouse Farms Green Goodness is a blend of wheat grass, de-odorized garlic (curious as to how they do this), spirulina, spinach and blue-green algae. I told you it wasn’t going to sound very appetizing. But hang with me here. Bolthouse then adds in some pretty tasty fruit including apple, pineapple, mango puree, banana puree and kiwi juice. There’s also a bunch of exotic sounding ingredients like jerusalem artichoke, Nova Scotia dulce, dragon fruit juice, open-cell chlorella and even echinacea purpurea extract.
Oh, did I mention the broccoli and barley grass?