Hi and welcome to another Honours video and today I wanted to tell you why I eat banana skins. No, I haven't lost it in lockdown. Well, not totally. But regardless of where you are in the world right now, there has never been a better time to focus on our diets and our general wellbeing. So though what we eat and drink can't totally protect us from getting on well, there has been evidence to show that a healthy diet can help boost our immune systems and give ourselves the best possible chance and that's all we can do of fighting off illnesses. For a couple of years now, I've been following the research and reporting around gut health. Will all be aware of the messages that we get on an almost daily basis around the importance of eating fresh fruit and vegetables, protein in the form of meat or fish or dairy or plant based proteins, and also including a small amount of carbohydrates to keep us going plus fiber. And all that helps us meet our nutritional needs. However, there's another layer on top of this now where there's a lot of evidence to exist showing that if we can encourage good bacteria to flourish in our guts, that's going to further improve our health. Which brings me to the humble banana peel. So from everything I've read, forgetting expensive probiotics and the like, the best thing you can do for your gut health is to eat as a wider variety of fruit and vegetables every day, including bananas. And you want to think about eating as many colors of the rainbow as you possibly can in a day. So we know that fruit skins are one of the most nutritious parts of a plant because they're rich in fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Banana skins are no exception. In fact, they contain more fiber, vitamins, B6 and C than the fruit inside and as well as potassium and magnesium. So the best time to eat a banana is when they're just underripe, so when the skin still has that kind of greenish tinge to it, as bananas age and the skin starts to turn brown, the starch inside them is turning to sugar, so it's less beneficial to eat them at that point. So there's a variety of ways that you can eat banana peel. I use it in banana bread, blend it to use in cakes or muffins. You can even add it to curry sources and smoothies, which is how I eat it most often. So for the smoothie, I would find a bit hard going on my stomach just to have raw banana peel in there. So what I do is I steam it very quickly for a couple of minutes and then add the skin in from there. So I'm going to show you now how I make my fiber-charged banana peel smoothie and all you're going to need implement wise to make it is a handheld blender like this one. This is all those hills and a pan. So here's my banana. I've given the skin a good wash and what I'm going to do now is just chop the ends off and I'll strip the peel and give it a little steam. Okay, so I'm just going to take my knife and peel the banana and I just chop it into to make it easier on the blender when the time is right to go in and popping the skins into this pan. And at the bottom of the pan, I don't know if you can see, I've just got a little bit of water, tap water in there, which I'm going to use to steam it. And lid on and I'm going to put this on medium heat just literally for a couple of minutes to kind of flash steam it. All I'm looking to do is soften the skin to make it easier on the stomach. Okay, so the skin should be ready now. That's what they look like. The skin goes a little bit brown on the edges. That's absolutely fine. So as soon as the water was hot, I just let that steam for two minutes only and that's I'm ready to use. So I'm just going to tip the banana skins into this jug here that I'm going to use for the blending. I've got a little bit about half a cup of tap water in the bottom. Chop up my banana and then I usually add just a few grapes or blueberries or something like that to sweeten it, give it a little vitamin C boost as well. And my final ingredient is live yogurt. Now include live yogurt for more of a probiotic boost. The other thing you can use is kefir and just putting the yogurt in gives it that smoothie taste and texture as well. It would be a little bland if it was just left, just the fruit. Okay, so that's about four or five spoonfuls. I mean you can adapt to your own taste obviously. So now I'm going to give it a very quick blend with the hand blender and then that's it going to be ready. Okay. And that's my smoothie ready. I did put in a little bit of the water from the pan because I figured it's got extra nutrients from the skins boiling down and I'm just going to pour it into my glass. You'll see that it's got chunks in it. I mean you can blend it to smooth as you like. The banana skins themselves are never going to go entirely smooth. So I've still got some little strips of fiber through there. Having steamed the banana, you'll find that when you come to drink the smoothie, the taste of the skin itself is really quite neutral. It probably means it's a little less sweet than it would have been if you'd just been using the fruit inside. The biggest difference you'll notice is really in the texture because you've got those little fibrous strips of banana peel in there. Four kids, my older son who's about 15 will drink this but I have to put a bit of honey in it just to sweeten it and you can adapt taste but I have it without any honey. And that is my fiber charge banana peel smoothie. Cheers. So you've been watching another honest video. I would have taken a big old slurp out of this by now but for those of you who watched my Smile Direct Club review, you might remember that I am wearing aligners at the moment. I've got another couple of months to go and you can't eat or drink anything with aligners in. Check out that video and lots more like it on the honest channel and I'll see you next time. Don't forget to like and subscribe.