A month after my post comparing Vitamix & KitchenAid, my old Oster died. The glass container simply cracked under the pressure of my daily smoothie habit.

So off to Costco and Bed, Bath & Beyond I went. I bought 3 blenders (Cuisinart, KitchenAid and a new Oster) and tried a smoothie a day, testing for the ability to crush ice, mix frozen bananas and quickly achieve smoothie consistency with my ingredients. The winner was the KitchenAid and I returned all the others. Thank you Costco for such a great return policy since they had the two losers.

Now, I’m whipping up my yummy smoothies daily in my Kitchenaid. Here’s the secret recipe:

1 small frozen banana or 1/2 of a large
fresh berries (blueberry, strawberry or both)
4 ounces 0 fat greek yogurt (mine’s from Trader Joe)
2 tbs of oat bran
1-2 ice cubes

This makes a thick, sweet and awesome smoothie. More awesome still is that I just had my annual blood tests and my cholesterol dropped by 60 points! It’s still a crappy number but the lousy # (ldl) went down a bunch. First thing that’s ever worked for me. Over the years, I’ve cut out cheese, added oatmeal, special vitamins,  red yeast rice and CoQ10 and all that other stuff that’s supposed to work. But they didn’t as my numbers continued to soar.

Clearly, the oat bran addition is doing magic and mixed in my smoothie I’m not tasting sawdust which is what happens when you  sprinkle that stuff on cereal!

My morning smoothie takes a little more work to prepare before I head out the door but I pack it in a thermal mug and have the perfect breakfast when I arrive. It’s still cold, thick, creamy, sweet and low in calories & fat along with protein, calcium  and my new magic bullet for lowering cholesterol.

Salud!

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