The idea that you need to avoid bananas in your smoothies started in 2023, when a study published in the journal Food & Function found that bananas can reduce the bioavailability of flavon-3-ols in smoothies.
The press release announcing the study probably started this mess (it calls adding a banana to your smoothie a “mistake”) but it also mentions that the lead author of the study, Javier Ottaviani, “said bananas remain a great fruit to be eaten or consumed in smoothies.” So clearly the banana warnings are overblown.
What the study actually found
Antioxidants are a broad class of chemicals. For context, vitamin C is an antioxidant, but so are lycopene and resveratrol (compounds famously found in tomatoes and grapes) and so are anthocyanins, the red and blue pigments found in berries. The antioxidant studied here is not any of the above, but a different one found in tea and cocoa. It’s called (-)-epicatechin, and it’s part of the antioxidant family called flavon-3-ols.
A smoothie made with bananas, almond milk, and an epicatechin-containing cocoa extract.
A glass of milk and a capsule containing the cocoa extract.
Somewhat surprisingly, it did! Our bodies convert epicatechins into other chemicals in the same family, and the researchers took blood samples from the volunteers to look for these chemicals after each of the experiments. After drinking the berry smoothie or taking the capsule with milk, blood levels of these chemicals were elevated. But after drinking the banana smoothie, they weren’t.
The study did not test a berry smoothie with an added banana. None of the smoothies or experiments combined berries and bananas. The study did not test levels of antioxidants or other nutrients from berries. They were looking specifically at what happened to the antioxidants provided in the cocoa extract. The study also did not look at other aspects of nutrition besides this very specific chemical reaction (PPO from bananas plus (-)-epicatechins from cocoa extract).
Why you can’t really “destroy” nutrition, anyway
If an enzyme in bananas can reduce the bioavailability of a certain family of antioxidants...what does that matter? Were you drinking smoothies for the express purpose of increasing your intake of flavon-3-ols? More likely you were trying to get some fruit in your diet and/or have a nice breakfast or snack because you were hungry.
The recent study did not take any of that away from you. You still get all of the benefits above, no matter what’s happening to the flavon-3-ols in your smoothie.
If you’re really worried about your flavon-3-ols, there’s a better solution than giving up bananas
If you want to get more flavon-3-ols, the best thing you can do is drink some tea. You can hit that 400-milligram recommendation with just 10 ounces of green tea (two small cups), or 12 ounces of black tea. There are flavon-3-ols in berries, but in lesser amounts; it would take 6 cups of blackberries or 40 cups of blueberries to provide the same amount as those two cups of green tea.
By the way, the same AND paper that recommended 400 milligrams of flavon-3-ols says it’s best not to get this nutrient from supplements. That’s because the most common supplements to provide it are green tea extracts, and green tea extracts can cause stomach upset and even be toxic to your liver in large amounts.
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