Gluten-Free Berry and Rainbow Chard Smoothie

Get all the vitamins & nutrients you need in this tasty vegetable & fruit #healthytreats smoothie!

Yield: 1 smoothie
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: No cooking required

Raw Swiss Chard Smoothie with Berries

Usually, green smoothies (not the colour green, but the generic name for any smoothie made with vegetables) contain spinach. But, when I received a bushel of the most vibrant rainbow chard I've ever seen, I know I wanted to use it in an unusual way. Swiss chard, the proper name for the vegetable in my smoothie, is actually a part of the chenopod family, along with beetroot and spinach, so it's an easy, natural substitute for it.

’This post has been supported by Rennie®, but all thoughts are my own’.

Rennie has teamed up with online supermarket Ocado to challenge bloggers to come up with healthy recipes for their #healthytreats campaign. As soon as I received the brief to come up with a healthy meal, I immediately wanted to use chard in some way. In terms of health, rainbow chard has the market cornered. It provides high servings of vitamins A, C and K and is a gold mine of minerals, fibre and protein. In addition to all those healthful accolades, every bit of rainbow chard, from the leaves to the colourful stalks contain oxalic acid. If you travel in circles with health conscious individuals, you've probably heard every angle of the oxalic acid debate: some dieticians believe it causes kidney stones, whilst other raw food enthusiasts believe it to have cancer-fighting powers. The bottom line, though,is that in moderate amounts, oxalic acid is beneficial to the blood and helpful.