Green smoothies: for football loving 13-year-olds

There is very little more rewarding than watching your child down a pint of natural organic goodness like this on a daily basis.

What might look a lot like sludge to one 13-year-old, actually looks inviting to Salvador.

Football is his passion, and keeping himself fit, healthy and strong is his focus. He's a brilliantly self-regulating healthy eating 13-year-old. So, admittedly, getting him to drink a pint of green smoothie every day is not a struggle.

This, I know, is not always the case.

Salvador makes his own smoothie as soon as he gets in from school. The beauty of a blender versus a juicer is that all he needs to do is chuck in a big handful of kale, celery, cucumber, a few blueberries and raspberries and a piece of banana, plus some protein powder and some fibre powder. This is the choice he made yesterday, but each day brings a slight variation of fruit and vegetable mix and ratio, depending on what's in the fridge and what he feels like eating.

The blender blends it all up and he drinks the lot - as opposed to juicers which throw away a majority of the disease-preventing phytochemicals and fibre that are contained in fruit and vegetables. Carrot juice may be pretty nutritious, but it contains the sugar of several carrots - minus the fibre, so there is nothing to slow the absorption of the sugar into the bloodstream. Smoothies waste nothing - so we drink all the goodness without the massive clean-up. It couldn't be easier.

This isn't a passing fad. Salvador understands that this is a lifetime habit that he's acquiring; a habit which cleans out his 30-foot digestive tract with the insoluble plant fibre. We may not be able to digest the insoluble fibre but it's critical in removing toxins from our body. The fibre stabilises our blood sugar, and prevents constipation and every disease of the colon.

Green smoothies also give us more live enzymes than any other food. Enzymes are retained in foods that aren't heated above 116 degrees. Eating raw greens, especially leafy greens, daily, gives us the much-needed enzymes to help digest all the other cooked food we eat.

We eat so much dead food that we're asking our bodies to produce enzymes to help us digest our food, robbing more important needs for enzyme activity in metabolic processes.

Stealing enzymes leads to cell damage, aging and disease -which is all preventable if we eat our greens.

And I make sure I tell him this. I also remember to tell him that I'm so proud of him for the choices he makes. He's a pretty humble soul so he pretends not to hear the compliment.

And he may think he's doing this to be a better footballer. But he's actually achieving so much more.