What can I use instead of banana in a smoothie?

For creaminess, Greek yogurt, 2 oz of avocado or a quarter cup of oats. For sweetness, mango or pineapple, though a cup of mango has 23 g of sugar to a banana’s 14. Use frozen fruit of any kind and the glass stays thick and cold without the banana.

A banana does two jobs at once. It makes a smoothie thick and creamy, and it makes it sweet. When people drop it, because they don’t like the taste or read about the flavanol study, they usually replace only one of those jobs. The glass comes out thin, or sour, and then the honey comes out.

Taking out the banana is like taking the egg out of a cake. You need one thing to hold it together and another to make up the flavor.

For creamy

2 oz of avocado (102 calories, 3 g of fiber, no sugar), a quarter cup of rolled oats (76 calories, 2 g of fiber), or more plain Greek yogurt.

For sweet

A cup of mango (99 calories, 23 g of sugar) or a cup of pineapple (82 calories, 16 g of sugar). A banana is 105 calories and 14 g.

What happens to the glass?

We took our strawberry banana yogurt glass (a cup of 2% milk, 7 oz of plain Greek yogurt, a cup of frozen strawberries and a banana) and graded each swap on the six meters at 165 lb.

Leaving the banana out with nothing in its place drops the glass to a B+. At 291 calories it’s under half a meal, and the banana’s 1 g of protein was what kept it at the 30 g line. Avocado and oats put the fiber back with the least sugar. Dates still grade A, since date sugar doesn’t count as added, but they push the glass to 58 g of sugar, the most of any swap, from just two dates.

When should I skip the banana?

When the glass is about cocoa or berry flavanols. In a 2023 study of 8 men, flavanols drunk in a banana smoothie reached the blood at levels 84% lower than from a capsule, while a berry smoothie matched the capsule. The banana’s own browning enzyme seems to break them down. It was a small study, funded by Mars, and it only covers that one family of plant compounds. For a berry glass, oats or Greek yogurt do the banana’s thickening job without that question. Is banana bad in a smoothie? has the details.

Any other tricks?

• Freeze everything. Frozen strawberries, blueberries or mango thicken a glass the way a frozen banana does.
• Use less liquid. Start with half a cup and add more until it moves.
• Add a spoon of chia and let it sit a few minutes before you drink it.

How to make a smoothie thicker has the rest, and the builder grades any swap you try.