As a follow-up to yesterday’s McDonald’s-bashing post, I thought I’d post another perspective — namely, that not all chain smoothies are bad. I can’t claim to have tried them all, but I can report with confidence that, for raw most foodists, a trip to Jamba Juice can be awesome!

Even before becoming a raw foodie, I loved going to Jamba Juice. If you’re unfamiliar with this retail food franchise, it’s pretty much (to my knowledge) the largest chain in the “smoothie” category. I first “discovered” them during a visit to New York City back in 2006. Each day, I found myself gravitating to the delicious smoothies they offer.

And then we returned to Jamba-less Pittsbrugh, and I all but forgot about them for a few years (well, with the exception of a Jamba Juice napkin that I have pinned to my office wall as a quirky souvenir). But, fast-forward a few years, and we’re moving to Portland — and *guess* what they have?! Yep, Portland has Jamba Juice!!

Of course, my diet had changed a good bit since 2006. So, when visiting a Portland location (in the Lloyd Center mall), I wondered: Can a person be a raw foodist and still enjoy something from Jamba Juice? The answer is … YES! Here’s the trick…

Jamba Juice has a number of juicy “bases” to choose from. (By “base,” I mean the liquid that most smoothies use as a sort of foundation. As a health-conscious chain, they cater to pretty much any diet out there, offering many vegan and/or vegetarian options.) One happens to be fresh-squeezed orange juice. You can even get them to squeeze the oranges fresh for you, instead of taking juice that’s been squeezed earlier. (They have one of those neat orange juicing contraptions that accepts whole oranges and then presses them for the juice.)

So, request the fresh-squeezed orange juice as your base (I think they also actually offer carrot, but am not 100% sure on that), and then select some fruit and ice to go inside it. Voila! They do use mostly frozen fruit, but it’s not mixed with any sugar or other sweeteners like you’ll find as some large-chain places such as Orange Julius and now McDonald’s (see yesterday’s post). (I know that some raw food purists won’t touch frozen fruits, but we have no issue with that here. If ingesting some frozen fruit is your worst dietary offense, then you’re doing better than 99.999% of everyone alive at the moment!)

So, you have some frozen ingredients, and it’s probably not all going to be organic. But, it IS raw, it IS fairly inexpensive, and it IS delicious! So, give them a try sometime. (You can click here to see if there is one near you!)

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