for today's smoothie Saturday we will be making chia seed pudding hello and welcome to smoothie Saturday's I'm dr. melissa west and today as per tim's request we're going to make chia seed pudding because he loves it so much so chia seed pudding has been all over Instagram and Pinterest and um I really love it it's super yummy week and it's also really nutritious but what I found is the recipes that are floating around there are really high in sugar and not refined white sugar but usually maple syrup or agave nectar and even though these aren't refined sugars they are still sugars and so I wanted to create my own recipe that had less sugars in them and so it seems like whenever I put the pressure on myself to make my own recipe comes down to the 11th hour before finally get it right and so yesterday afternoon I finally got my recipe just the way it it tasted sweet enough and I was happy with it and I was able to manage to half the sugar in the recipe that I was previously using so I was really happy with that so what I did was I used fruit to sweeten the chia seed pudding and drop back on the sweetener and what I also do is I usually double up the recipe so that I have more than one serving available in my fridge we make this the night before well what I usually do is make it the night before and then I have lots available in my fridge so let's talk about chia seeds they are incredibly nutritious they are high in protein they're high in omega-3 fatty acids in calcium they help to keep your blood sugar in check they're high in fiber and they're loaded with trace minerals so just two tablespoons of chia seeds and we're going to be using a quarter cup in our recipe have 11 grams of fiber 4 grams of protein 80 milligrams of calcium 1.1 milligrams of iron seven percent of the recommended daily allowance of diamond four thousand seven hundred and fifty milligrams of omega-3 s 1,750 milligrams of omega 6 and 7 580 milligrams of omega nines there are 27 nutrients trace nutrients found in chia seeds so far calcium phosphorus potassium sodium zinc copper manganese alanine oz per tick acid vitamin b12 fatty acids tryptophan day owning a bunch of ones i can't pronounce that i'll put in the show notes as well so lots of great stuff in chia seeds they're grown without pesticides in mexico and guatemala and they're part of the mint family which I found interesting they're easy to digest they're gluten free and they have a gentle flavor making them easy to blend with other foods let's make our chia seed pudding so this is a bit of a two-step process because we're using the fruit to sweeten it what you're going to do is take a cup of hazelnut milk we showed you how to make hazelnut milk last week i believe so take a cup of that will use this jar again and then you're going to take half a cup of blueberries and you could use any fruit for this that you want it too to sweeten it so blueberries are nice and sweet you could use whatever fruit you have on hand that's sweet to sweeten this and then we are still going to sweeten it but not a lot of sweetener we're going to use two tablespoons of agave nectar you could use maple syrup you could also use stevia if you wanted to use a herb that's not going to mess with your blood sugars at all you can use then we're going to use a teaspoon of vanilla and then we're going to blend all these ingredients together okay so once you have your ingredients blended what you have is like a blueberry milk or a fruit milk and you're just going to take that I have to use your Blendtec for a while these things don't stick together too well that's okay you're going to put this back into your jar I find mason jars work well for this because I'll show you what you're going to do next and then you add your quarter cup of chia seeds so this is just so fantastic because you get to use so much chia seeds so we'll take a quarter cup and add this to it and then what you do is you shake it up and you're going to leave it in the fridge for four hours you need to check it in a about halfway through and just give it another shake because the seeds collect at the bottom and you want it to be uniformly mixed in the middle so that will what will happen with that is here's my pudding that I made last night that's been in the fridge and this is it's kind of like tapioca it becomes kind of like gelled this makes a great breakfast and you can put fruit on top of this as well and have it for breakfast it's super yummy mmm nice and sweet when super nutritious the other thing I wanted to say about chia seeds is that unlike flax seeds you don't have to grind them to get the nutritious nutritional benefits from them you can eat them whole so that's it that's how to make chia seed pudding it's all the rage right now I like word to your comments below thanks for watching finding a great yoga class is becoming more costly and difficult now there's a better way to self-improvement in the privacy of your own home visit dr. melissa west at melissa wescom and start getting free weekly online videos real yoga for real people