Do You Need a Blender to Follow the McDougall Program?

Before I answer the above question, let me give you a basic introduction of the McDougall Program

The McDougall Program was created by Dr John McDougall in the 70’s

The short story is that Dr McDougall was working as a doctor in Hawaii when he observed something that got him intrigued. The older generation of Japanese people was healthy and slim. The younger generation was overweight and unhealthy. He studied both of them and realized that diet had lots to do with health.

The older generation was eating a diet based on starches.

The basis of McDougall program is a low-fat diet, based on starches and vegetables.

The program does not use oil to cook. There is a whole theory about why oil is not healthy for you, and I will not be discussing that in this article.

The McDougall way of eating is a simple way of eating. Meals can be prepared in less than 15 minutes, and the cleanup process is also a breeze since there is no oil involved.

Having established the basis of this way of eating, lets move on to answer if you really need a blender to follow a starch based diet.

Do You Need a Blender to Follow the McDougall Program

The short answer is no. You do not need a blender, not even an immersion blender.
The main starches are potatoes, rice, pasta, beans. Do you need a blender to cook potatoes? Not necessarily. You can eat baked potatoes, or you can do fries in the oven with no oil. You can eat, rice, beans or any starches without using a blender to prepare them.

You could have plenty of delicious salads, with no need of using a blender for the salad dressing. You could also feed yourself on delicious roasted vegetables.

You do not need a blender to cook beans and legumes.

You can cook a range of meals without a blender.

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But a blender brings some variety in your meals. It also helps to prepare meals from scratch. Like instead of buying non-dairy milk like oat milk, you can use the blender to prepare your own oat milk or almond milk.

The blender is handy also to prepare desserts, that by the way are allowed in the McDougall way of eating.

There are many meals you can prepare with a blender, and it will spice up your food preparation process, but a blender is not a must. There are many days, even weeks, during which I do not use my blender. Or perhaps for easy and quick meal preparation I just use my cheap immersion blender. You can even resort to using a fork instead of a blender. That will work out your arm muscles.

Having said that, a blender will make your life so much easier and an immersion blender is quite affordable. So start with an immersion blender and then you can save for a counter top blender.