Food is Medicine Part 2 – Wednesday Wellness Video

Food is Medicine

Video Timestamp: 07:02

[00:07:02] And so what should we eat? Well, we’re going to. And we’re going to show you the good rainbows of colors, and we want to eat the purest forms of food, and we want to feed our body wisely. And so let’s show you that big, beautiful pyramid.

I like Dr. Weil’s anti-inflammatory diet for me as a simple guy. It’s simple. It’s a pyramid and we’re going to go through each one of these, and please don’t look at all the words and things that are in it. You can read all that later. I’m just going to make some highlights as we go through this pyramid.

And remember in our previous discussion. I don’t believe in diets, diets don’t work. If they did, there would only be a few of them, but there’s hundreds of diets out there. It’s all about choices and quantities and living in the 5 pillars of wellness.

And so let’s just go through this and we’ll just share some examples.

Healthy Sweets

Okay. I’m certainly not a [00:08:00] dietician, but they should start treating, uh, teaching a lot more nutrition in medical school. So my healthy sweets, I’m a dark chocoholic  my wife will tell you that. And I like to have a couple pieces, a couple squares, which is about an ounce a normal bar is about three ounces.

And I’m going to show that after the presentation. And I usually have not just a couple of times a week or sparingly. I like to have that with a scoop of peanut butter every day. And that’s my treat. If you will. And dark chocolate has a lot of positive Anti-inflammatories, polyphenols with a lot of antioxidant activity.

They’re high in magnesium as well. And so they are a good source of nutrition for us. And so we can treat our bodies and dark chocolates, one of those ways.

Wine

Okay. Let’s move on to the next slide. And I’m not advocating alcohol. In fact, if you don’t drink, I [00:09:00] wouldn’t start drinking. For most people alcohol controls them. They don’t control the alcohol. And so making no judgment on people, there are some benefits and antioxidants with red wine. And so a class or so in the evenings, or sometime during the day with a meal is something that people may enjoy. Okay. And then we’ll keep going here on that pyramid and supplements, you know, supplements are just that.

There are supplements to an already good anti-inflammatory diet, the rainbows of colors. And, you know, we use a lot of these supplements right now and our COVID therapeutics. We used 5,000 units of vitamin D. We use vitamin C, a thousand milligrams twice a day. We use vitamin E two to 400 international units a day. We use Zinc a care day. And we’re going to show you some of [00:10:00] those at the end of the presentation. Okay. Again, supplements are just to supplement a good diet.

Let’s talk about when you should take these vitamins and supplements on an empty stomach. We want to take iron and our complex B vitamins folic acid, which is a B vitamin and probiotics 30 minutes before.

With food, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin C, fish oil and magnesium. I like to take them either with, uh, a little bit of avocado, those good fats to help them be absorbed or a scoop of peanut butter. And so that’s a good time to take the vitamins and the minerals.

Tea

I’m a big tea person, especially in the winter months, how much I drink it all day long.

And a lot of our teas are with ginger and we put in the raw honey, we put lemon and Annette, you can use white or [00:11:00] green tea. I have Sage or lavender. There’s camomile. So all kinds of different teas. And so they’re very, very nutritious for us. And it’s nice to have something warm in our stomach. First thing in the morning as well.So tea has a lot of great benefits.

Healthy Herbs and Spices

So I encouraged a lot of tea and the decaffeinated type of healthy herbs and spices we cook with. And I put in a lot of our dishes, our rose and on our salads, ginger, garlic, rosemary, thyme and basal and into my coffee in the morning with my raw honey, I always put cinnamon, a very powerful anti-inflammatory and no one not mentioned on here is kind and pepper.

If you feel a little cold coming on, you can just put a sprinkle, a little cayenne pepper in a tea with the raw and unfiltered apple cider vinegar, lemon, and tumeric raw honey. And I tell you, that’s a great [00:12:00] toddy and it’ll kill any bacteria viruses that might want to get a start in your upper respiratory system.

Okay. Very powerful. Very powerful. Back to food as medicine, all diseases start in the gut. All right.

Sources of Protein

Well, after the herbs, let’s talk about some sources of protein. You know, folks, I’m just going to show you, this is kind of like about the size of a deck of cards. Okay. That’s what our meat should look like.

Not the salad, the size and the meat, the whole plate. We should reverse those. The meat should be the size of a deck of cards over our phone. And the salad should be the size of the plate. Those nice rainbows of colors. I’m a wild game guy. I like to hunt. And most of my meat is wild game and I really like Buffalo and elk and a lot of our fish.

Best to grill it or bake it rather [00:13:00] than have it fried in a pan. And a lot of our game, if it’s pheasant chicken or whatever, it might be best to eat it without the and the, certainly the loud game is free range. And that’s one, another reason why I like to eat wild game. And if it’s not, you might want to look for choices that are grass fed or free range.

Dairy – We talked about that in the past. Dairy can really cause leaky gut and problems with. Immune system, especially with lactose. And so I’m not a big fan of it, the little cheese, every once in a while, you might want to limit it, you know, too much dairy, like you say, makes making little cows into big fat cows.So just be careful with dairy, cashew, coconut or almond may be a better choice.

Other Sources of Protein

Other sources of protein you might want to consider. And when we travel to third world or underdeveloped countries, eggs and chickens are huge sources of [00:14:00] protein and they’re great sources of protein. Egg has a lot of zinc and selenium, and that’s good for our immune system and males for their prostate.

A lot of the B2, B6, B12, vitamins, um, and so lots of trace minerals and vitamins in our eggs. So I’m a big egg fan and yogurt is also a good source of protein, you just have to watch the sugar content and some of the yogurt and the, in some of the. Otherwise, I think that’s a good source of protein for a lot of people.

And so some different Swiss cheeses, a true Parmesan cheese, Jarlsberg. And so other types of cheeses might be an alternative for you to get some protein in your diet if your stomach can tolerate it. Okay. So I’m a big proponent of eggs. I think eggs are good. I love a hard-boiled egg three to four times a week and they’re good on the salad or just with breakfast.

Okay. So we’re going to move on to [00:15:00] that next slide. And what are we talking about here?

Cooked Asian Mushroom

Mushrooms and Shiitaki mushrooms, the different crimini and portabella mushrooms. All very powerful. Anti-inflammatories a lot of mushrooms are being used in patients that have cancer. And so they’ve, they’re helpful to prevent and to treat and to reverse some of the cancers and enhance our immune function.

We’re not supposed to eat them raw and certainly they taste a lot better cooked whether in, with eggs, in an omelet or in a casserole, or with our salmon on the grill with a bunch of onions. And I like asparagus and mushrooms, and that really makes a good colorful meal packed with nutrients. So mushrooms are a good choice. Good for it.

Fish and Seafood

As we move on here, this is what I like about fish. I love to eat and catch walleye, trout, and up in Alaska, it’s just beautiful to eat that fresh. Alaskan salmon. It just doesn’t get any better than that. And that as a lot of our omegas and our vitamin D and very, very helpful healthy forest, that’s why those grizzly bears get so big up there.

And Alaska is from that salmon, salmon runs just packed full of a mega as anti-inflammatories the EPA and DHA, you know, in doses of two to three [00:17:00] grams per day, you could get through a supplement, but look at that piece of salmon there with the surrounding. Green’s there and, and the vegetables that’s, that’s a healthy meal.

Butter, Olive Oil

Okay. Efficiency, food, just powerful. And now we can talk about the different oils and whether that was talking about, there you go. Thank you. I, so we have butter olive oil, and you know what McDonald’s is now using canola oil instead of the other hydrogenated oils that were. Not healthy for us, the saturated oils.

And so coconut oil is good for us. All the oil is great to put on salads and you can cook with that. You could also cook it with coconut oil and avocado oil. As well as avocados are a great source of fat. I like to eat at least a half or a full avocado each day. It’s a good snack. It has good staying power.

It’s just, you don’t feel [00:18:00] hungry when you get good fats in your system. Okay.

Healthy Fats

Now we’re going onto that next slide. And how much should we have in terms of our healthy fats? Well, I like to have half an or announcer of an avocado, one or half of an avocado a day. How can you just do two walnuts? Right. You got to have a handful of walnuts.

So I like your handful of walnuts and other nuts. Tablespoon of flaxseed is good for you. You’re good at that. We can use that extra Virgin olive oil for cooking that helps the omega-3 fats and our fish and our eggs, our soy foods, walnut and hazelnut oils in their salads. And so why healthy fats? We want those mono unsaturated fats, the omega-3 fats that we need for our bodies to synthesize cholesterol and to have those to make with the steroids that our body needs to function.[00:19:00]

So we do need fats. And so the healthy fats are the ones that we should be consuming. Two to live fully alive in our minds. Our body and our spirit. Okay. All right.

Pasta (Al dente)

Let’s transition here to pasta. Al dente right where it had the little tooth in it. It’s a little firm yet. Why? Because it has a lower glycemic index than fully cooked pasta.

As I shared in a previous live stream. I’m a big fan of spaghetti. Squash actually is my favorite vegetable because you can put a great red sauce there and you don’t have those high-glycemic sugar content and the spaghetti squash. And so two to three servings per week, about a half a cup of cooked pasta spaghetti squash, or you can use buckwheat noodles or rice noodles, so you can stay away from the gluten. If gluten is an issue, you can stay away from that. Okay, so pasta al dente. My [00:20:00] preference is spaghetti squash. All right.

Beans and Legumes

As we move on here, beans and lagoons, one to two servings per day, one servings about a half a cup of cooked beans or legumes. And there’s all kinds of beings. I like black beans. I put those in my chili.

I like to put chickpeas in my chili and I like those in my salad as well. The black eyed peas, lentils lentil soup. That’s a beautiful source of protein for us. These beans, and look at the Richard folic acid, magnesium, potassium, and that fiber we’ve talked about. They’re very low-glycemic so good for anybody that might be a diabetic and it keeps our blood sugars at a steady rate.

And it kind of keeps things from going up and down too, too fast.

Vegetables

Okay, Hummus is a great source of which is God bonds or the chickpeas. I love hummus. Okay. Vegetables, look at that rainbow [00:21:00] colors. And I know in the Philippines, when we visited, there’s so much lush vegetation there that that’s a blessing. Guatemala, the markets, the vegetables, the fruits are just lying in the streets.

They look like that. It’s just wonderful. And so that should be the mainstay of our diet, a plant-based diet. We don’t have to be vegetarians. But most of our diet should come from the rainbow colors, four to five servings, a minimum per day. I like most of my vegetables in the different casseroles and the roast and the crockpots.

I like a lot of them cooked, especially carrots and peppers. You know, some of them just tastes better for me when they’re cooked. And so, you know, whatever works for you. You know, raw tends to, tends to keep all the minerals and the vitamins in the vegetables, but it’s better to eat vegetables, whether [00:22:00] cooked or raw and cause you’re certainly having the juice for them when they’re being cooked and processed as well.

But all those that are listed there, I like broccoli actually, cauliflower kind of upset my stomach a little bit. So I have to be careful with that. But as you saw, we make our own sauerkraut or cabbage. I love the brussel sprouts. Kale is one of my favorites and that’s a super food.

I love beets and other superfoods. Just eat. From that basket, whatever resonates with you, whatever, whatever your diet likes, whatever tastes good for you, you know, and even potatoes and corn, they talk about a high-glycemic index. That’s okay. You know, it’s better to eat those and then processed foods. Okay, good.

Fruits

Now the fruit. So the vegetables are 4-5 servings a day,  fruits 3-4 servings a day. And there’s so many beautiful fruits out there. Some of my favorites, [00:23:00] as I shared with my team up in Montana is I’m a blueberry person. Some people liked raspberries, most of them like watermelon.

And so just as long as you’re getting. Some of that rainbows of colors in, and yes, pineapple is a higher glycemic fruit. Watermelon’s a high-glycemic fruit. Again, as I said, in previous live streams, it’s moderation. So it’s best to eat the fruits because they have the flavonoids, the carotenoids, the anti-inflammatory, the antioxidant activities that are healthy for our bodies.

Remember everything goes to the gut. All those nutrients get absorbed. You get disseminated through our body to keep our bodies healthy. So fruits and vegetables should be the mainstay of our diet. Okay. And as we talked about bananas, pineapples could be high-glycemic. I like apples and blueberries.

I like to put them on my [00:24:00] oatmeal or my cereal with some flax and chia seeds and the raspberries blackberries all just make you feel healthy when you eat those and fruit juices that are from concentrate, have a lot of added sugar, and that’s why you want to limit it. It’s the best. If you could have freshly squeezed, which is kind of hard to do.I mean, I understand that, but that would be the ideal.

Water

And here we go, folks. Here’s my Mni Wiconi Aguas es Vita  – water is life.

I talk about this every day with our patients and our body is 70% water. So we need to drink half or weight ounces each day to feel healthy and good water, pure water, filtered water, excuse me, spring. And a lot of times I’ll add the raw and unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the mother, to my water. Some honey ginger sliver, tumeric and you can add a teabag to that as well. [00:25:00] If you want to, just to flavor up the water a little bit throughout the day, some people tell me, doc, I don’t like to drink water and, you know, It really is necessary for the optimal functioning of our immune system, our brain bone and in water is life.

Okay. So just encourage you to get it somehow and it can’t be through alcohol or through caffeine. Those all, all dehydrate you, and you’ll have to drink a lot more water to compensate for that. All right. Water is life.

Beans and Nuts

Here we go, folks. We talked a little bit about beans and we’re going to show you some nuts at the end of the presentation.

And I tell ya, nuts are one of my go-to snacks, cause they’re easy and they have staying power too. They’re good for you. Good protein, good fat. And they stay in your stomach. And I liked the almonds, walnuts, the pecans, uh, my nurse, Carrie up and [00:26:00] brought us. She loves the pistachios. And, and so, you know, it’s, we’re all unique and we’re all made in the Lord’s image.

And so pick some seeds that you really like and use them as an augment your diet or, or put them in your diet. And they’re a great snack for us to eat, including nut butter. It’s a good snack. Good to put on our toast or on our bread as well. K beans and nuts are very, very powerful, good sources of energy and protein. Okay.

Trans Fats

Now we talk about burger king and Hardy’s and KFC McDonald’s. Although McDonald’s has gone to canola oil, and I don’t know about those other fast food chains, that’s where trans fat becomes an issue. That’s hydrogenated H that is attached to that fat causing it to gel. And you know, that gels in our body and it doesn’t do our body any good. It harms our [00:27:00] body.

It makes our cells resistant to insulin, and that’s where we’re getting bigger. And there’s no safe amount of trans fat in our diet. And that’s why obesity, especially in children, is on the rise. Diabetes is at record levels and we’re seeing so much cancer and chronic disease and autoimmune diseases because of our diets.

So we can do better than that folks. Let’s just keep going here and let’s show you what we mean by that. It’s all good. It’s all good. All right,

Standard American Diet

Instead of the standard American diet, it really is sad. And so we need to feed our body wisely and we’ll feel better. And we can reverse a lot of these auto-immune problems by fixing our gut, eating the right foods, reclaiming our health.We are born healthy and we can reclaim our health with five pillars of wellness, food is medicine and look at [00:28:00] this gentlemen, Morgan Spurlock, 33 years old for one month, three meals a day and McDonald’s gained 25 pounds. Weight went up 50 pounds, developed headaches, depression, libido dropped, his liver test became very, very abnormal.

Got a huge gut knee, pain began CRA craving fat. Because the brain started craving all that junk food. Okay. And so it only took 30 days for that. Just like exercise. If we don’t exercise, we get out of shape and it just takes so much more to get back into shape. And so the same thing with foods, if we get into a poor habit or poor lifestyle, it doesn’t take long to not feel well and cause disease getting back to our water.

And this is a wonderful point for us to remember even mild dehydration. You might not think [00:29:00] you’re thirsty, but when you’re thirsty, you’re really dry. And so we gotta keep drinking water. I tell people our water coming in should look like our water coming out and it can slow down our metabolism. So if you want to lose weight, you gotta drink water.

And by drinking a lot of water, you’ll be full more and you’ll eat less and the metabolism will be running higher. And that’s how you lose weight. That’s part of lifestyle medicine. Remember 70% of ourselves  makeup is water, and most people are chronically dehydrated. And every time we talk about this in the clinic, everybody says I don’t drink enough. And so people know it. And so working in a ranching community, I just love it when I can use the occupation of the ranchers to kinda make a teaching point and say, what makes your cattle and your sheep healthy? Well, It’s good water and lots of it and it’s good food that is a plant-based diet: the hay, the alfalfa, [00:30:00] and that’s what makes them healthy. We should do the same thing. We should eat a plant-based diet. and drink a lot of water. And so it’s kind of a nice give and take back and forth. But I think, you know, we all understand that we just, we just need to be more disciplined to do that. And a glass of water. We’ll take our hunger pains away for most people.

Okay. And thyroid problems are not the number one cause of fatigue. It’s because of the lack of water. And so when we have that fatigue, let’s get up. Go get a big glass of water. Take some inhale, low exhale, and gratitude. You can do some good grounding exercises, swing, arms, a little brain yoga, head, shoulders, knees, and toes.

Instead of reaching for the caffeine, the energy drinks, the soda. That causes the problem to be worse. Okay. So again, emphasizing the beauty of water. Water is life. All right. So what do [00:31:00] we have next after water is life or it looks like our slide.

There we go. And so a suggestion, start your morning with a large glass of room, temperature, water, squeeze the lemon and lemon wedge raw and unfiltered apple cider vinegar with the mother raw honey, and a little cinnamon. That’ll wake up your body, help detoxify the liver and get everything moving.

Okay. Even the bowels get a good detox going first thing in the morning and then have a cup of coffee or two. Okay. And so it keeps our liver and our gut healthy. So that’s a suggestion and so

Seven Rules to Live Fully Alive

1. Cut out the sugar, especially soda  – and we’re going to talk about that here in a bit.

2. Drinking water  – halfway at announces water is life,

3. and we don’t want to eat after 8:00 PM or three hours before bedtime – Some of my patients, farmers and ranchers they’re in bed by eight or nine o’clock. So, you know, by after five or six, o’clock no more eating. Okay.

4. We want to move daily – At least 10 minutes a day. Okay.

5. And so the snacks try to keep them about the size of your fist  – and

6. Good meditation – you know, staying in the present moment, inhaling love, exhaling in gratitude, you know, focusing on Jesus, our creator, focusing on Jesus. Yes. Or, and

7. Keep a Food Journal –  Those are also helpful too. Okay.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]

We’re going to introduce post-traumatic stress disorder.

A prudent boss will listen to his team. And last night folks, while we were talking and preparing post-traumatic stress, we felt that it was going to be too long of a presentation to include this with The food is medicine. And so my team suggested, and I agree that we would be able to discuss this topic and a much better way that wouldn’t take a lot longer for us here because attention spans 30 minutes or so, right and I understand that’s mine anyway.

And so we’re going to come to you with the and Khai came up with this yesterday. The team, when we discussed it, we’re going to come up with you to talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, which is a mental health problem.

Some people develop after experience or witnessing life-threatening events, like our soldiers and sailors, Marines, and airmen in combat a natural disaster, a car accident, sexual assault or something horrific that happens to people and it’s fairly common, 44 million out of, or about 20% of the us population at any one time. So we want to be a soft landing spot for people. And [00:34:00] so we’re going to devote the whole live stream next week to post-traumatic stress. And the three P’s that we’re going to talk about : are going to change the

Perspective

Pure love

Prayer

The 3 P’s to address PTSD. And we’ll introduce that one that is responsible to help heal this whole process. So there’ll be an exciting live stream next week, folks. So that’s something to look forward to. We look forward to presenting that to you, uh, for you next week.