healthy substitutions for comfort foods, lesson 1, by...

Healthy Substitutions For Comfort Foods, Lesson 1, by Ritamarie

Trevor Justice: Hello everyone this is Trevor Justice with the Vegetarian Health Institute.

Tonight’s call is with Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo and the topic is Healthy Substitutions for Comfort

Foods. Dr. Ritamarie is a chiropractor and a women’s health expert and she’s very

knowledgeable about nutrition for vegans and raw fooders. We’re really happy to have her with

us tonight. How are you doing Ritamarie?

Dr. Ritamarie: I’m doing great, thank you Trevor. I might add to that that I do have multiple

degrees in nutrition and certification. I feel highly qualified – just to make sure people are clear

on that. I have a master’s degree and I’m a certified clinical nutritionist as well.

Trevor Justice: Well let that be a lesson for us all. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn.

Dr. Ritamarie: Well sometimes it’s not so much tooting my own horn. Sometimes I just want

people to be aware that there’s a lot of studying behind everything that I talk about. I don’t base

it on 'hear-say' or 'popular science'.

Trevor Justice: Good point. That’s true for all the experts we’ll be interviewing in the mastery

program. I know that there’s one particular point, that we’ll be getting to later, that you did some

research on, just to get ready for today’s Q&A. I really appreciate that.

Dr. Ritamarie: Sure.

Trevor Justice: All right, so let’s see. Let me get the student’s questions in front of me. So we

have questions coming in from both vegans and raw fooders. First one, “Is air popped popcorn

okay on a vegan diet?”

Dr. Ritamarie: I love these questions Trevor. So I’m going to answer first with some philosophy

and also some science when questions are asked like that. Popcorn seems to be one of the

favorite all-time comfort foods.

of 35


I know that in my family right here, the boys and my husband are crazy about popcorn. It

depends on the person and you’re going to hear this a lot from me tonight. A lot of the questions

– there’s no blanket answer.

Corn happens to be one of the top six allergy foods and you may have an overt allergy to corn

but you also may have a subtle allergy to corn. So what you’re going to need to do is figure out

how corn affects you.

People with diverticulitis or diverticulosis or Crohn’s Disease shouldn’t be eating corn because

those little kernels and the little… I don’t even know what you call those, but the kernels that are

kind of inside when they pop open – those little pieces really aggravate and irritate the lining of

your intestine if you’ve got some irritation or inflammation.

So on a whole, it is a whole food. It hasn’t been denatured. Nothing has been taken away from it.

It does have all the whole food goodness or almost all the whole food goodness of it being fresh.

Of course once it’s heated to high temperatures you do lose some of the nutrients, the fat soluble

nutrients, and some of the antioxidants. So is it a bad food? No. Is it an ideal food? No.

I love the way you classified it in your little booklet that you put out, you put things in three

different compartments. I’ve been doing that for years when I work with people. I say, “Okay,

let’s just take everything that’s in the realm of what you could eat and we’ll divide up and make

a little pen mark and on one side is this stuff that you should never, ever, ever, ever eat under any

circumstances.

“And then there’s the stuff on the other complete opposite side whereas stuff like you should be

just you know, just getting tons of it in your system because it’s so loaded with nutrition.

“And then there is this stuff in the middle that is sometimes like filler food.” If you can eat

popcorn without having adverse effects and if you could sit down and eat a normal size portion

without craving more, then it’s probably just fine. But if you crave it, or you don’t feel good, you

of 35


feel more tired after you eat it, you want to go onto other comfort foods after you’ve eaten it,

then that’s a warning sign that it’s probably not good for you.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. Yeah, I mean I agree with everything you said. I also want to point

out that if it’s not organic popcorn and you can pretty much assume that nonorganic popcorn is

GMO, Genetically Modified Popcorn. So I’d stay away from that for sure.

The other thing that we teach in lesson 17 of this program with Dr. Klapper is the dangers of

acrylamides. Basically any starchy food that’s heated over 248 degrees F has acrylamides. So

we’re talking about all flour products, we’re talking about corn and popcorn.

Any time they’re baked or toasted – or in this cased popped – over 248 degrees, they have these

things called acrylamides that are not good for you. There are a small… how would you say?

They’re slightly carcinogenic. Maybe you can talk more about that.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah. You know I have kind of avoided the acrylamide issue. I’m glad you

brought it up. It would be a huge battle in my home. We’ve just gotten rid of just about every

other possible thing and to say to my kiddos that they can’t eat their baked potatoes or their

baked whatever yum chips or whatever, any more it would be a huge battle.

I have kind of been picking my battles. I agree with you that that’s a good point and it’s good to

know that it is the 240 degrees. And you brought up another… You triggered me to think of

another issue with popcorn. It’s high in omega 6 fatty acids. We had a couple of things we’re

going to talk about later related to omega 3 versus 6 ratios and…

Trevor Justice: Yeah let’s save that conversation.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah we’ll have that later but it is a source of omega 6.

Trevor Justice: Excellent point so everyone listening make a mental check mark, we’re going to

come back to that discussion in a little bit.

of 35


You made a point a few minutes ago that I think is really pertinent to this particular lesson

because this is the first lesson of our program and so we understand that most people are used to

eating foods like bread and margarine and salt and sugar, you know, or some kind of sweetener.

We don’t expect people who are brand new to instantly give up all their comfort foods and only

eat healthy fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains and beans, and nothing else. Although

that would be – for a vegan – that would be the optimal diet and obviously on a raw food diet

you would leave out the legumes and whole grains.

So my point is that, like you said, we have a book called Super Charge your Health with Whole

Foods, some of the listeners have seen and if not, you can download it from this website, it’s

www.veghealth.com/supercharge. What we do is: For a bunch of food categories, we divide the

options into most processed, less processed and optimal.

So in this category I would say Doritos or cheese-puffs would be the most processed. Popcorn

would be in the middle category, it’s definitely less processed, but what would be ideal? Perhaps

kale chips, and that’s a recipe that we give you guys in one of the lessons coming up in the

program. I think it’s the one called wholesome snacks. Anything else before we move on?

Dr. Ritamarie: No I think we’ve kind of beat that one, let’s move onto another.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. We’ll talk about acrylamides in lesson 17 with Dr. Klapper. This is

from Leila: “I have a question about using sprouted, dehydrated buckwheat groats for raw

granola. I use it as the base with dates, raisins, flax, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I love

it and eat it every day. Is the nutritional profile such that I shouldn’t? Is it too high in fruit, sugar,

or omega 6 or fat?”

Dr. Ritamarie: Okay. Here’s another one where I’m going to bale on the individual. Sprouted

buckwheat: Excellent, it doesn’t have too many omega 6s, it doesn’t have too many omega 3s,

it’s not too high in starch, it hasn’t been heated, and it’s a really good source.

of 35


If you eat too much buckwheat – like trays and trays of the buckwheat sprouts – you can actually

a poisoning from it which I did once. There are toxins in it that actually causes some neurologic

problems. It happened to me when I was so addicted to buckwheat sprouts.

The fresh ones that I was just blending – whole trays of them and making these great green

drinks – until I started to lose sensation in my hands. Fortunately I was able to research and find

out what it was and corrected it before it got bad, I mean too bad. But with the buckwheat, the

whole groats, you just can’t eat the concentration plus you’re mixing it with other things.

If you have a candida overgrowth, having too much raisin or date or some of the dried fruits

could aggravate that. Glycemic: I don’t think glycemic issues come about with that combination

because you’ve got so many low glycemic foods and slowly digesting foods.

You’re not going to have the problem of spiking your blood sugar because you have a few

raisins in there. Unless, of course, you have mostly raisins and a few buckwheat sprouts in there,

then you’re probably in trouble.

But overall it’s a balanced meal. I’m not a huge fan of eating the same things over and over and

over again day after day. So variety is really key because that way you get more of a balance of

nutrients and the small amounts of toxins that are in just about every food – I can’t think of any

that don’t have small amounts of toxins – don’t have the opportunity to bio-accumulate.

Meaning you eat it every day like that buckwheat, if it has a little bit of that toxin in it, it was

fagopyrin toxin, if you do it every day and you do substantial portions, you do run the risk of that

building up in your system. Especially if you have a sluggish liver and not being able to

eliminate it effectively.

Variety is key. It sounds like a really wholesome treat. Watch how you feel. I’m a really big fan

of conscious eating, meaning you eat a meal and you just pay attention to how you feel. Do you

of 35


feel sluggish or slow every time you eat a certain meal? Well that’s an indication that there is

something about that meal that’s not agreeing with you.

Maybe you’re not digesting it properly. Maybe you have an allergy to one of the components

etcetera. So really observe how you feel if you have questions about how a particular food is

acting in your body.

Trevor Justice: Good, okay great. That’s a very good point that if you were to just eat dates and

raisins by the handful, then the sugar would get into your blood a lot quicker. Whereas

combining them with protein foods, like seeds, is going to slow down the absorption of sugar

into your blood stream.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yep. What you read sounded like a very balanced, there were some flax seeds

and pumpkin seeds, there was sunflower seeds, there was a balance of different nuts and seeds to

give you a wide variety of omegas and minerals that are in there. It did seem like a pretty

balanced approach.

This is one of my biases, but I find it holds up in the science is that I like to add green to every

meal. So if you’re just eating a big bowl of cereal with almond milk on it for breakfast, even it is

a sprouted buckwheat cereal and you’re not getting green with that, then I think it’s an

unbalanced meal. But if you’re having like 16 ounces of green juice with it, or a green smoothie

with it, or having a salad shortly before or after, then you’re bringing balance to the meal.

I like to encourage people to figure out ways to get green into every meal and that’s why a lot of

my recipes – even the ones that don’t seem to be green – have green snuck in the middle of them.

Trevor Justice: Right, excellent point. I always have a green smoothie first thing in the morning

and then 45 minutes later I have my second meal of the day. So I’m having kind of two

breakfasts, or maybe I could call it a two-course breakfast, with a big break in the middle.

of 35


Dr. Ritamarie: With a break in between, yeah to let the food get in your system.

Trevor Justice: Yeah that’s a good way to get greens in the beginning of your day. Then if you

have something like this after, you still got greens in one half of that meal.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yes, exactly.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. I also wanted to commend to you Leila because I see that you’re only

including seeds in this granola, and no nuts, and that’s really commendable. One thing we talk

about a lot in lesson 2 of our program, which is on pH balance is which foods are alkaline, which

is all seeds – and which foods are acid-forming, which is almost all nuts.

And so we’ll talk about that more on next week’s call, but needless to say it’s good to eat most of

your foods from the alkaline side and so that’s really smart that you’re sticking with seeds. Do

you want to add anything Ritamarie?

Dr. Ritamarie: No and again... With the balance of the seeds, she’s getting a good balance of

omega 3s and 6s. Whereas, if you throw the nuts in there – almonds and cashews tend to be the

more alkaline nuts – but almonds are very high in omega 6 and very out-of-balance with the

omega 6 to 3. When you do nuts, there is a small amount of the nuts and you get the seeds in

there, then you get a much more favorable omega 3-6 ratio.

Trevor Justice: We should talk about that now. My original thought was in the lesson we talk

about some specific comfort foods that people eat like bread, salt, sweeteners and margarine but

let’s go right to margarine because we’ve talked a few times now about omega 3s and 6s and in

the lesson originally.

I had recommended either coconut oil or earth balance, as you know, better alternatives to

margarine although not what I would call optimal foods because they’re not whole foods. So my

question to you, and I know it’s the reason you did some research leading up to tonight, was

what do you recommend as a healthy alternative to butter or margarine?

of 35


Dr. Ritamarie: Right, and again I’m on your side too with the oils. I prefer not to use oils. In

fact, I use very few oils. It’s not one of the things I tell people they've “got to be off of it 100%”

because it is a matter of transition and degree.

Whole foods are better but if you are eating the margarine and the butter type of thing, it’s a

spread, it’s liquid, it needs to be an oil. It’s really hard to do a whole foods version of it. You

know almond butter just doesn’t cut it when you’re really wanting butter. So what I’ve used is

this: I take half coconut oil and half flax oil and I mix them together in a dark opaque container

(so that light doesn’t get into it) and I stir it really well.

I allow both of them to sit at room temperature to cool down. Well flax oil doesn’t have to

because it’s always liquid but the coconut tends to get more solid in the refrigerator and

sometimes even in the house when you’ve got the air conditioning on at this time of the year. So

you want that to warm up and melt.

You mix it half and half with flax and then you put just a little bit of a whole sea salt, like a

Celtic sea salt or a Himalayan sea salt that’s got a lot of mineral in it. Use just a pinch of it. So

that’s like a salted butter. I’ve done this and then I put it back in the refrigerator. I’ve taken it out

when guests come over.

My kids never grew up on margarine or butter, they never had it. They’ve been vegan since birth.

So it wasn’t like I have to fool them with an alternative, but when their friends come over, they

would want butter for their toast. We’re like, “Well here’s the flax oil.” My kids just go, “Well,

we’ll just pour flax on everything,” you know?

But that wasn’t good enough for them so we made this and everybody without fail said, “Wow

this tastes like butter.” My brother came over with his kids who eat just a standard American

diet; they love their butter. They said the same thing. They said, “Wow Aunt Ritamarie, this

tastes just like butter.”

of 35


I'm like, “I don’t know, I haven’t eaten butter in 26 years so I don’t remember what it tastes

like.” I took their word for it and so that’s what I’ve served people.

Trevor Justice: Great. That’s a good suggestion. Before we explain how the coconut butter can

actually be helpful to you, why don’t you give people a summary of the whole issue around

omega 3s and 6s and how they affect each other. ALA versus EPA and DHA. We’re going to be

covering this in detail in lesson number 5 with Dr. Klapper, we have a whole lesson and Q&A

call devoted to this topic, but would you just give people a summary?

Dr. Ritamarie: Sure I can do that. So you hear it all the time and when we start talking about

omega 3s and 6s and ratios and conversions. If you’re not really up on the science of that, you’re

just kind of looking around going, “What are you talking about?”

We can make just about every fat that our cells need with the exception of two. They’re called

the essential fatty acids, meaning that they have to come from our diet because no matter how

many raw materials you get, you can’t make them. So we need to get them in their alpha-linoleic

acid and linolenic acid and the ALA is the third one, right?

Trevor Justice: Yeah, well, there are three types of omega 3s: alpha-linoleic, which is

abbreviated ALA and there’s also EPA and DHA, they’re all omega 3.

Dr. Ritamarie: Well those aren’t essential though. Those are the long chains and those get

created from the ALA.

Trevor Justice: Well if you’re eating the right foods and eliminating the wrong foods, that’s true.

Dr. Ritamarie: Exactly, that’s what I was going to get to, because that tends to be a very

inefficient conversion when you’re on a standard American diet.

of 35


Trevor Justice: So hang on. So let me just clarify, because I think I might have confused people.

So you said there are two essential fatty acids, one is alpha-linoleic that’s ALA and the other is

actually an omega 6 and what’s that called?

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s linolenic acid.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. So those are the only two fatty acids or fats that we have to get from

food.

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s right. We have no ability to make those.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. That means that any other kinds of fats are not essential for the

human diet.

Dr. Ritamarie: Right, but they’re needed in the human body so what we need is a good external

source of the ALA and LA and really good enzymes systems for doing the conversations. And

the ones that we get in our diet are alpha-linoleic acid and linolenic acid.

ALA and LA. They are shorter. They are 18 carbons.

Things like EPA and DHA, which you hear a lot about in relation to having to eat fish to get

them, those are longer carbons. So they are a 22 carbon chain.

I like to think of EPA as your body’s firefighters. Those are the chemicals that get converted to

what’s called prostaglandin that fight inflammation. You need to have a good fire department in

order to keep inflammation under control. Otherwise, every time you get any kind of bump or a

bruise or anything your body would become inflamed to heal it but you wouldn’t have the

firefighter staff in-house to say, “Okay, enough is enough, let’s put that fire out.”

So we need the EPA for that. You can convert ALA into EPA but in order to do so you need

your B vitamins, especially vitamins B3 and B6, you need vitamin C, you need some

of 35


magnesium, you even need a little bit of copper and biotin. So there’s a whole list of nutrients

that you need in order for your body to be able to do that.

And guess what? If you’re eating a processed food diet, those nutrients are nowhere to be found.

They’ve been stripped out of the food. When they take bread or rice and they process it from

brown rice into white rice or you know, brown flour into white flour, they take off the bran

which contains your B vitamins and a lot of your minerals. They take out about 22 minerals and

vitamins when they do that. And many of those are important for your fatty acid pathways.

You’ll see a lot of research that says vegans can’t be healthy because they don’t get enough

omega 3s. Well that’s only partially true. If you’re conscious about it and you’re getting good

sources of plant-based omega 3s and you’re really replete with all those minerals and nutrients,

you generally can do that conversation.

Of course there may be metabolic imbalances in certain people that allows them not to do that

efficiently but if you’re replete, meaning you’ve got all of those things that you need, you

generally can do the conversation. You have to have enough of “the beginning”, “the substrates”

if you will, the ALA or the LA, ALA in this particular case. So it’s just really important to be

eating whole foods, not the processed foods.

Now the other thing that can mess you up with that – on the other side of the fence – is omega 6.

Omega 6 is important as well, but the issue is omega 6 is abundant in the diet. So we mentioned

corn, but everything has a lot – safflower, sunflower, all your seeds, your almonds, Brazil nuts,

walnuts, they all have a lot of omega 6 in them.

When you have too much omega 6, the ratio of omega 6 to 3 gets out of balance. The ideal ratio

is that you have no more than three times the amount of omega 6 as omega 3. The average

American diet has anywhere from 12 to 22 times and the 12 is usually the “healthy people”, you

know, the more conscious population. People that are eating just fast food and processed food all

the time, theirs are way up, which means they're much more prone to inflammation.

of 35


So when Omega-6 intake is high, it interrupts that conversion from the short omega 3s to the

long omega 3s, and then you become deficient in EPA.

Trevor Justice: So to sum it up: There’s obviously certain nutrients that you need enough of to

help the conversion of ALA into EPA, DHA. But even if you’re getting all those nutrients, if

your diet is too high in omega 6s, so that the ratio of omega 6s to 3s is out of balance then that’s

also going to hinder you from being able to convert the ALA in things like flax seeds, hemp

seeds, chia seeds or walnuts into EPA and DHA in your body.

Dr. Ritamarie: Exactly. The key critical piece, which I mentioned to you earlier in an email, is

an enzyme. It’s called delta-6-desaturase. We need a really robust delta-6-desaturase to make

that process go. Delta-6-desaturase can get damaged by the excess omega 6s and by a lot of the

inflammatory fats that are found in meat, it’s like arachidonic acid can damage the delta-6-

desaturase.

Trevor Justice: So what is this delta thing? I haven’t heard of it before today.

Dr. Ritamarie: It’s an enzyme. In our body everything happens with enzymes because,

otherwise, you know, things would go too slow. So enzymes basically catalyze, they speed up

reaction.

In order for you to efficiently convert ALA into EPA and DHA you need this enzyme delta-6-

desaturase to be happy, to have all its cofactors that make it come along. So that’s what you

basically need all those B vitamins and minerals for, is to support delta-6-desaturase in doing its

job of converting.

Trevor Justice: And so that brings us to the benefit of combining coconut oil with flax oil, can

you explain that?

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah. So I mentioned this to Trevor probably a month or so ago. Coconut oil

combined with your omega 3 is supposed to have a ten-fold increase in the conversion from the

of 35


ALA to the EPA. When I went back and tried it. I couldn’t find my reference for that. I have one

somewhere and it’s not a widely researched area.

I think my original source of that information was Gabriel Cousen’s and it’s buried somewhere

on his website. I wish I would have saved the link to the page so I knew. So I started to research

this again and the reason I probably found the article when you did Trevor was that I started

looking for data on delta-6-desaturase and what helps delta-6-desaturase.

It turns out that there are some fatty acids in coconut oil, in particular one called myristic. There

was a study done… I have it pulled up in here. I found it on the NIH website and it was done

at…

Trevor Justice: National Institute of Health, that’s their website.

Dr. Ritamarie: The NIH… Yeah, myristic acid increases delta-6-desaturase activities. It’s a

French study, it was done in Reims, France, Laboratoire de biochimie… and it was published in

Pubmed…

Trevor Justice: So the bottom line is: By combining coconut oil with a flax oil, the ALA that’s in

the flax oil will be much more likely to convert – your body will be aided in converting it to EPA

because of this myristic acid in coconut oil.

Dr. Ritamarie: Right, exactly. A little bit with the lauric acid which is another one but most of

the effects were found with the myristic acid.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. We’ve talked about the ALA converting to EPA. Where does DHA

fall in this process?

Dr. Ritamarie: DHA can be… you can get DHA directly from the ALA but it’s usually

converted from the EPA. So you get EPA and then you convert it into DHA, but DHA is much

of 35


easier to get in plant food. It’s very abundant in your algae – marine algae. So if you take any

form of algae… your sea vegetables have a fair amount of it in there.

So most of the people… I run fatty acid tests and a lot of people who are on a vegan diet do tend

to have low EPA because they’re eating a lot of the omega 6s. I get them to switch that around.

I have this little flow chart – this little spreadsheet – that I have people put their daily intake on.

They can tell when the foods they’re eating are high in 6s or 3s and can come up with a ratio at

the end of the day. Then you can adjust your meals according to that. So when you have people

adjust it so that their ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 is 3 to 1 or less then we do another test down

the road, we see major changes in that ratio.

Trevor Justice: Okay good. So the algae that we recommend is at www.bestvegandha.com and so

from what I understand now, we can get DHA directly from algae but there’s no plant food that

has EPA directly…

Dr. Ritamarie: Well no that’s not true, the algae does too but it just has a smaller amount. So if

you look at it, it’s a very… the DHA, if you look milligram wise of algae oil, let’s just say you

find a DHA that has say 275 milligrams of DHA, it’ll have maybe 40 or 50 milligrams of EPA.

But we just found a new EPA supplement and I haven’t had an opportunity to test it with very

many people yet, but it’s got 600 milligrams of EPA per capsule.

So for those of you who are vegan and do not want to supplement with fish oil but find yourself

in a situation where you’re pretty deficient in EPA, it’s a really awesome source. It is from a

company called Futurebiotics, that I found it on. So like I said, I’ve just gotten my hands on it

and just started to do some testing.

Trevor Justice: Great, okay good. So ideally if you’re eating pretty much all whole foods and

minimizing packaged foods and unhealthy restaurant foods then your body could convert the

ALA and flax, hemp and chia seeds or walnuts into EPA, which then becomes DHA, correct?

of 35

http://www.bestvegandha.com/


Dr. Ritamarie: Yes. If you’ve got a longstanding deficiency though, you may have to correct the

deficiency. I’m sure you talk about that in your vitamin section, right?

Trevor Justice: Yeah. Is there something you want to say quickly about?

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, well, quickly, it’s just… Sometimes people get frustrated because they

changed their diet, and they’re doing a really good job of just eating whole foods, but some of

the health issues they’ve built up over time are not just disappearing over night. I attribute that to

the fact that it’s really hard to get so much more than what you need on a daily basis.

So say you have a minimum requirement, and you decide, well, you really want to up that and

get rid of these deficiencies that you’ve built up over time from eating a processed diet. It’s

going to take a long time to be able to eat enough in your foods. You have to be really strict to be

able to fill the gap.

But, once you fill the gap, you should be easily able to maintain the right levels on just the food,

or maybe a little bit of extra supplementation when you’re not as careful as you should.

So that’s the thing that a lot of people I run into with them – they’re expecting that they should

be able to just do it with food . Sometimes you need to do some supplementation. I know that

you have the sources of the best and the vegan whole foods kinds of supplements as well.

Trevor Justice: Great. I just wanted to share a few numbers. This is from a chart that students get

in lesson 5 which is on omega 3s. It tells you the omega 6 to 3 ratio of a whole bunch of different

oils.

For example… let me take one that’s pretty bad: Corn oil has a 57 to 1 ratio in favor of omega 6.

That’s way, way, way more omega 6s than omega 3s. That’s why if you were to eat packaged

foods or unhealthy restaurant foods that were prepared with corn oil, you’re going to put your

omegas out of balance. That’s going to keep you from being able to convert ALA to EPA.

of 35


Some of the others that are have really high ratios are safflower oil 76 to 1, sunflower oil 71 to 1

and olive oil is not as bad as those, but it’s still a 9 to 1 ratio in favor of omega 6s.

Dr. Ritamarie: Here’s the deal though with olive oil though, Trevor. This is true of olive oil and

macadamia and coconut: Their ratios may not be favorable, but they have so little of either one

of them that it doesn’t much matter. So that’s why where looking at not just the ratios but the

actual quantity makes a difference.

Trevor Justice: Excellent point. In that case, since most people make the mistake of eating too

many calories from fat and as listeners go through our program they’ll learn more about this. We

try to really encourage you to eat more whole foods and minimize oil more and more. So based

on what you just said, there’s really not a lot of reason to be including olive oil in one’s diet.

Dr. Ritamarie: Not really, it’s kind of a neutral. Monounsaturated doesn’t have much. It is the

polyunsaturates which we’ve been talking about. There are some studies that have shown the

Mediterranean diet and the benefits of the Mediterranean diet that the monounsaturates may have

some independent benefit outside of the whole omega 3-6 realm but yeah, I use it as a

condiment. You know, a little tiny bit, just to give it the Italian flavor.

Trevor Justice: Sure, okay great and I keep saying… I’ve used the phrase “unhealthy restaurant

foods” a few times. I’m not meaning to imply that all restaurants have unhealthy foods. If you go

to one that you know is catering towards people who are health conscious...

For example, where I live here in Oakland, California, there’s Café Gratitude, which is a raw

food restaurant and actually they have some cooked vegan food now too. There’s a really great

macrobiotic restaurant nearby. So these are places I trust to serve healthy foods.

But if you’re going to let’s say a typical restaurant that stir fries things or fries things, chances

are they’re going to be using the kinds of oils we talked about that have poor ratios of omega 6 to

omega 3.

of 35


Dr. Ritamarie: Right. Worst case, they use peanut oil. Peanut is a high source of arachidonic

acid which is an omega 6 that’s very highly inflammatory. It’s the only plant source of

arachidonic acid. Mostly you get arachidonic acid in meats and cheese and eggs.

Trevor Justice: Right. Yeah we generally recommend for nut butter substituting almond butter

for peanut butter, partly for that reason.

Dr. Ritamarie: Right, absolutely.

Trevor Justice: Okay good, well that was a good discussion. Let’s go to the next question. Now

let’s just touch on this because you and I cover this one in detail in lesson 34 on sweeteners. The

question is: “I have recipes that call for maple syrup, like raw macaroons, and other desserts.

What might be a good substitute?”

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s a good question. I would take some dates and put them in the blender with

water and blend it up and make date paste. It’s a great substitute.

Trevor Justice: Do you want to give out that recipe for date paste? Because it’s really simple.

Dr. Ritamarie: Oh yeah. It’s really, really simple. You take some dates, pit them – make sure

you pit them – and then put them in the blender with a cup of water. I’ve missed a pit or two and

it just really messes the whole thing up. You put it in with a cup of water, equal amount of water,

you blend it.

If it’s really kind of getting stuck in your blender you can add a little bit more water. If you find

that it is a little bit thinner then what you think the recipe is calling for, then just throw a few

more dates in there. So it’s approximately a one to one ratio. It just makes this really nice paste

that you can substitute for honey, maple syrup, agave, or any of the more liquid refined

sweeteners.

of 35


Trevor Justice: Great. Yeah and in our book Supercharge Your Health – which I gave out the

website address for earlier – we provide your recipe for that. We show it side by side, we

compare maple syrup to dates in terms of the nutritional profile of each one. I have to look again

and see how much we measured. I think we compared an equal amount in terms of volume.

So it might have been a quarter cup of… I’m not even sure if it’s quarter cup or a tablespoon.

Either way, it was an equal volume of both. The dates just blow the maple syrup out of the water

in terms of how much vitamins and minerals they have.

Dr. Ritamarie: And minerals, yeah, they’ve got a really good source of calcium, they even have

protein in them, you’re not going to get any protein in maple syrup, or calcium.

Trevor Justice: Okay great, thank you. Then we have another question about sweeteners: “I’ve

just heard that rapadura is one of the first products of processing cane sugar, thus, it’s one of the

best products of cane sugar. Is this right?”

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, well, the whole cane sugar, you know, there’s a lot of different ways of

processing it. When you read the label – I believe rapadura is the one that says it’s dehydrated

cane juice – which would be the most nutritious, versus evaporated cane juice.

When the talk about evaporated, they’re heating things up to really high temperatures and killing

off whatever little bit of nutrition might have been in there.

If you were to take fresh whole cane you know and take the hard outer bark off of it and juice it,

that would be cane juice. In fact, this is an interesting comparison. When you get sugar cane,

when you go to like some of the islands... We were in Hawaii several years ago with family and

we found this big stick of cane, sugar cane, for like $2 at the supermarket. It must have been 3 or

4 feet long.

We bought it, thinking you know, like, “Okay, let’s see what we can do with this.” And every

day we’d all like to take a little nibble, we’d take a piece of it and we’d open it up and we chew

of 35


on the inside. By the time we were ready to leave, two weeks later, we still had this huge piece

left. We tossed it out.

I went back to research how much it takes of that sugar cane to make a teaspoon of sugar and

found out that it takes 2 feet of sugar cane to make one teaspoon of sugar. So my whole family

had a delightful culinary experience with sweet treats for two weeks on less than two teaspoons

of sugar.

Trevor Justice: So what’s the answer to this…?

Dr. Ritamarie: So the answer is, if it indeed, if it is rapadura, where it’s dehydrated versus

evaporated, that would be the best source of the cane. It would be the one that would have the

most nutrition intact. So it would definitely be the best.

Trevor Justice: Good. Someone asked you... Sherry asked if you would repeat the way you make

your butter, the combination of one to one ratio of flax oil and coconut oil.

Dr. Ritamarie: Sure. Usually what I do is I let the coconut oil come to room temperature. Then I

take flax oil... and in general the coconut oil that I buy comes in these dark containers, but if you

don’t have one, you just want it to be an opaque container, and you can usually purchase those at

any kitchen store.

Fill it halfway with coconut oil, halfway with flax oil, stir it real well and then put a pinch and

maybe a quarter teaspoon at the most of salt and stir it up and this is for about you know, an 8

ounce container.

Trevor Justice: Great.

Dr. Ritamarie: And then just put it back in the refrigerator and it will have that yellow kind of

butter look to it, and from what I’ve been told it tastes just like butter.

of 35


Trevor Justice: Excellent. Laura asked us if we could run through the healthiest comfort food in

each category. Now we did that in the lesson, the written lesson but let’s just do that real quick.

So I’ll tell you what we listed and I think in at least one area, you can have some… You’re going

to have some other opinion.

For healthiest sweetener, we listed Stevia which is one of a few good options. I listed it because

it’s zero glycemic and there’s really nothing negative or unhealthy about it. Do you want to

throw in your two cents on a couple of good alternatives if someone wants a powder and date

paste isn’t going to do the job?

Dr. Ritamarie: If date paste isn’t going to do the job, the powder… let’s see. There’s the latest

thing and it hasn’t been around long enough to really know if it has some negative side effects is

the coconut sap. So they supposedly stick knifes into the coconut tree and drain out the sap or let

it drip down, and then they dehydrate it. The question is how high a temperature and how much

is lost? So that’s a possibility.

Rapadura, you know the dehydrated cane juice, versus the evaporated cane juice would probably

do better in terms of the…

Xylitol is another one, it has very little negative press to it. Sorbitol is kind of one of its sisters in

the sugar alcohol family has more negative press that can cause diarrhea and you know, stomach

upset and bloating. Xylitol has had very little bad press and it’s actually found to be very

protective of your gums and your teeth and so a lot of chewing gums are made with xylitol.

From what I understand, if you mix it half and half with CBA, cut some of that kind of bitter

after taste that Stevia might have, and also between the two they’re really good at alkalizing the

environment in your mouth which decreases your risk of dental cavities.

Trevor Justice: Both Stevia and xylitol?

Dr. Ritamarie: Yes.

of 35


Trevor Justice: Okay great. Yeah, I actually have been using xylitol for probably going on a year

and a half now. I do use coconut nectar now and I’ve also used brown rice syrup as another

alternative, sometimes you want something syrupy. Sometimes you just want a powder, and so

xylitol is good in those cases.

Dr. Ritamarie: Oh, you know what you can do is get date powder. You can get granulated date

power. That used to be a lot easier to find. I haven’t found that very much. Date sugar, they call

it. It’s really just granulated dried dates. That’s another option.

Trevor Justice: Good. So we’re just going to leave it there on that topic. We have a whole lesson

devoted to sweeteners and that is lesson 34. Ritamarie and I talk all about these sweeteners and

others in greater detail and if anyone is wondering, “Well what about agave nectar?” that is in

lesson 34.

Dr. Ritamarie: We have a long discussion there.

Trevor Justice: We address it in lesson 34. While I’m saying that, some of the people may be

thinking, “Well gee I don’t want to wait 34 weeks to learn about that.” Well guess what, there

are two ways that you can participate in our program. You can pay a monthly fee and in that case

you just get one lesson a week for 50 weeks.

Or if you want to get all the lesson upfront, you can pre-pay for the year, you get a discount of

about 25%, and the best part is after your 15-day trial, you get all the remaining lessons in one

swoop so you don’t have to wait to read everything else. So if you’re interested in that, just email

us at [email protected] and let us know that you want to change from a monthly to a

prepaid membership.

All right good, so let’s go to the next comfort food. We listed sprouted whole grain bread, such

as manna bread, or Ezekiel bread, or of course homemade bread that you can make from

of 35

mailto:[email protected]


sprouted whole grains. We teach you how to do that in lesson 22 with Steve Mirawich who’s our

guest expert on that call. So what are your thoughts about that?

Dr. Ritamarie: Okay, I have been working with people for long enough that there’s a lot of

hidden gluten allergies, a lot of people have problems with gluten and they don’t even know it

until they go off of it and suddenly their brain fog lifts, or suddenly the extra five pounds they’ve

been carrying around their waist drops, or their depression lifts, or their skin rashes go away.

It wasn’t the kind of thing where, you know, they ate gluten, and then they felt bad. It’s more the

buildup of gluten in the system. So at least initially when you’re making healthy switches, I like

to see people get off of the gluten completely. So the sprouted wheat breads and the sprouted

grains and all that.

Unless you can find them that are gluten-free, which I haven’t seen. I am not a big fan of that.

Sure it’s better than the processed stuff, and there are a lot of rice breads and millet breads, but

those are flour versus the sprouts that have been crushed. So from a theoretical standpoint that’s

not as good as the sprouted whole grains. But if you have a gluten issue, then the sprouted grains

are not going to be good for you.

The other issue is not just people who have a gluten intolerance, like a measurable antibodies to

gluten but there have been studies, there was one big study – I can’t remember the university it

was out of – but they took two groups of people. They took one that were known celiac people

that had antibodies to gluten.

And then they took another group that they had done all of the tests with. These people didn’t

have problems with gluten, they didn’t notice symptoms, they didn’t have the antibodies. They

gave both groups a dose of gluten.

They measured before and after chemical markers in the blood of inflammation, called

interleukins, and guess what? The interleukins went up in both groups, meaning that there is

something even independent of allergy that in gluten, that causes inflammation.

of 35


So I would caution you if you have any kind of health issue at all, then I would stay away from

the gluten, it’s just simple as that. If you are perfectly healthy, you're at your ideal weight, you

put on muscle when you exercise, you feel energetic, you feel great, everything is working hunky

dory, then you know, I wouldn’t worry about it.

But if you have any health issues at all, I would just encourage you to try a gluten-free trial. It’s

pretty darn amazing.

The other thing with gluten – and this is again independent of allergies – there are certain

protein, like mini proteins, and I’m sure when you talk about your protein lesson you’ll talk

about peptides and dipeptides and amino acids, but when you take a protein in a food, it’s like

this long chain of blocks.

I always think about them in terms of the little kid blocks that they attach to each other and they

chain together. It's your body’s job to break those down into its individual blocks, the individual

amino acids. That process tends to get less and less efficient as we age. The more we abuse our

body and the more alcohol you drink and caffeine and all those things that interfere with your

efficiency of your protein digestion.

There are a few breakdown products. In fact, in wheat, there’s 20 different peptide structures that

are actually opiate-like, they call them gluteomorphines. They have numbers and names for all

these different ones. One of them is actually 20 times more powerful than morphine at

stimulating opiate receptors in your brain – 20 times more powerful than morphine.

So what this does, it sets up an addictive eating pattern. The whole idea of comfort food stems

from a relationship with food. Let’s just say is a little bit altered from the “eat to nourish

yourself, stop when you’re full, and move on.” So it actually helps to trigger more of those

addictive things.

of 35


I’ve had people where they’re so addicted that they’ll go off of gluten and they’ll be off of gluten

for a couple of weeks. Then they’ll get an accidental exposure without even knowing it, it’s like

some soy sauce in a Chinese restaurant and those soy sauces always have gluten in them, they

always have wheat flour. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere they’re finding themselves having

this uncontrollable urges to go eat bread and pasta.

I see it over and over and over again. So I’m a big fan of, at least… you know when you’re

embarking on this journey, if this is all new to you, these healthy changes is to do yourself a

favor, save yourself a lot heartache and a lot of time, is do the gluten-free route.

My favorite substitute for bread is actually – sprout, not sprouted but they can be sprouted – is

dehydrated bread. Breads that you basically take your high omega 3 nuts and seeds, you take

vegetables, greens and all these things, you take herbs and spices, and by following recipes that

somebody else has charted before you, you can turn them into breads.

You can do it on your own if you’re really good in the kitchen. But if you’re not, you’re going to

have a lot of failures and disappointments before you get there. You put them together in such a

way that they glop together, they kind of come together like a dough, spread them out on

dehydrator trays and you slow-temperature bake them at 118 degrees F.

It turns them into breads that you can actually make sandwiches out of. You can have an open

face sandwich and stack things on it, you can have a closed face sandwich. You can make pizza

crust. You can make crackers, chips, all the different bread-like things that we know. They’re not

doing us as much good as they could. You can substitute with these dehydrated treats and it’s

pretty darn amazing.

Trevor Justice: Great. You’re the expert on that. Most people who know you and I, in our circle,

know that you’re the expert on those kinds of recipes. We set up a link for people to get a free

course on making those kinds of comfort foods with a dehydrator and this is a course that

Ritamarie has created.

of 35


You can go to www.veghealth.com/go/dehydrator-recipes-free-course and now that I say that, I

probably should have come up with a shorter version but I’ll repeat that again. It’s

www.veghealth.com/go/dehydrator-recipes-free-course. So I recommend checking that out if

you want to learn how to make those kinds of dehydrated breads that Ritamarie just talked about.

I know that you make some great dehydrated… not only bread but pizza crusts and what are

some of the other recipes people learn from you?

Dr. Ritamarie: Well, breads and crackers and cookies and tortillas and brownies and cake, I’ve

made multiple layer cakes. For my husband’s birthday once, had these people over and they were

eating this cake and they go, “Oh my God this is the best cake I’ve ever eaten in my life.” I'm

like, “Really? Do you know this is made from dehydrated nuts and seeds and fruits?” He’s like

“What?” So yeah, there’s layer cake and all that.

Now the course that Trevor is talking about is actually an eCourse and there are several videos.

There are two of them that teach you how to make breads, one is a banana bread, and one is

squash onion bread. There’s also the basic information to help you make decisions that help you

to kind of move away from using food as comfort. Also there’s a lot of information about gluten

and its effects.

I think the very last – it’s a six-part eCourse and you get immediate access to it – the very last of

the videos is a webinar that I did with my friend who also did this book with me. Alicia Ojeda,

she’s a chef that used to teach out at Living Light Culinary Institute.

She and I went to the store and we bought all these foods that are supposedly health foods and

we went and we read the ingredients and we talked about why some of those ingredients were

not in your best interest. So also on that free eCourse is probably three or four hours worth of

material that will really give you an overview, really good foundation and give you a few

recipes.

of 35

http://www.veghealth.com/go/dehydrator-recipes-free-course



Trevor Justice: Well they’ll learn all about that once they get their free course. Okay good, so

let’s see, so that covers bread. I just want to say again that there are three categories of food.

There is the most processed. The less processed that are good transitional foods. And then the

optimal.

In this case, I would say if a person does have the kind of sensitivities you’re talking about then

perhaps the sprouted whole wheat bread like Ezekiel or manna, it is the less processed alternative

whereas a completely gluten-free homemade bread is the optimal. Do you know for a fact that

every human has these kinds of gluten sensitivities or is this only some people?

Dr. Ritamarie: No, I wouldn’t say it’s every human. I don’t think I would go so far as to say

anything is like that, but a very large percentage. I would say that in the general population, it’s

estimated that 30% to 50% has some degree of gluten intolerance. But as the people who are not

well, who are actively in problem situations, I would say it’s more like 90% to 95% who have

problems with gluten, yeah.

Trevor Justice: All right. Good. Let’s see if we can go through the last couple of comfort foods

here. We talked about cereal – now obviously you can talk about the optimal granola you make

in your dehydrator like... What was her name?

Dr. Ritamarie: Leila.

Trevor Justice: Leila had asked about earlier. The one we recommended Ezekiel cereal which is,

as I understand, baked at a low temperature. I don’t believe it’s below 118 degrees F, but it’s low

enough that it won’t have acrylamides. And it’s made from sprouted whole grains.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah. Well I know another way to do cereal. This is not a cereal per se but

people I’ve taught this too really love it as a cereal. I call it apple ginger medley. We just

basically…

of 35


We’re chopping really fine into cereal-size pieces, some almonds, and some apple, and a little bit

of ginger. You can throw in some cacao nibs if you like. You can throw in some coconut and

other things like that and you can make a really nice cereal. It's a cereal-like thing – pour some

almond milk over it and you’ve got this really nice cereal.

Trevor Justice: And do you dehydrate that whole thing or do you…

Dr. Ritamarie: No, no, no, that’s fresh. That takes you all of like five minutes to make. It’s very

filling and satisfying for many hours. Chia makes great cereal as well. A chia makes a kind of

porridge – it’s more like an oatmeal kind of a cereal – not a dried cereal, but a chia porridge can

be made into an excellent cereal. I've gotten so many people “addicted” to that.

Trevor Justice: We'll talk about this more in later lessons, but... One of the challenges of people

that only eat raw foods and rely a lot on seeds and nuts, is that it’s hard not to get a lot of your

calories from fats. There are really only two choices, right? You’ve got to eat a lot of sweet fruits

like bananas and dates which are high in calories or a lot of fatty foods.

I would say that, if you’re not a raw fooder, I would recommend including things like whole

grains and legumes in your diet because they’re low in fat. Then you don’t have to have an over-

reliance on sweet fruits and you also don’t have an over reliance on fats.

Dr. Ritamarie: Quinoa is one of my favorite whole grains, quinoa is really awesome, really

highly mineralized, and lots of protein in it. Q-U-I-N-O-A for those of you who don’t know but

that’s a really nice one and you can do a nice breakfast cereal with quinoa as well.

Trevor Justice: Great point, yeah we have recipes in lesson 1, this very lesson on how to make

quinoa, amaranth and I think the other one is millet.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, millet is a good one.

of 35


Trevor Justice: Yes, quinoa, amaranth and millet. So for anyone that’s new to these whole grains,

lesson 1.3 has recipes. They’re very simple to make. They're pretty quick as well. Amaranth and

quinoa can both be made in 20 minutes, and there’s hardly any prep. It’s just putting some in the

pot with water and letting it sit for 20 minutes.

Thank you for that. Thanks for pointing that out. We already talked about margarine, and how

we can combine flax oil and coconut oil and equal parts to make a butter or a margarine

substitute.

Going on healthy substitutions for comfort food. The only one we haven’t really talked about it

is salt. So what do you recommend?

Dr. Ritamarie: Well again, there’s a lot of biochemical individuality. Some people are very salt-

sensitive and do really well with a very low salt diet.

Other people tend to need a little bit more. The people that tend to need a little bit more are the

more high-strung folks that tend to have burned out adrenals. Your adrenals use up a lot of that.

You end up peeing away a lot of your own sodium and you get sodium deficiencies if you’re not

careful about replenishing it. So people are at different ends of the spectrum.

I know there are some alternative practitioners out there who are just adamantly opposed to any

salt at all passing your lips. I know that celery is a great source of salt. If you really want to be a

whole-food-only person you can put celery juice into things, or celery salts, or you can dehydrate

whole fresh celery until it’s really dry and crumple that up and put that into things.

You can put sea vegetables as salt, very good source of sodium, and that salty flavor, and a lot of

other minerals. But I’m not opposed to small amounts of salt, like Himalayan salt.

My favorite way to do it is to get those big Himalayan rocks, the kind of pinkish rocks, and you

get like a gallon jar and you put the rocks in there with a gallon of water and the let it sit until it

all dissolves and then you can use that in recipes – obviously not dry recipes because it will

of 35


moisten it – but in soups and stews and baked goods and things like that. And then second to that

would be a whole salt, a whole unheated, unprocessed salt.

Trevor Justice: And so what’s the benefit of dissolving the pink salt versus just getting powdered

Himalayan Sea salt?

Dr. Ritamarie: You know where it’s been. You know it’s not contaminated. You’ve watched it

disintegrate. So it’s like anything else, you’ve gotten it whole, you’re not letting somebody else

process it for you, you’re doing it yourself.

Trevor Justice: Interesting, it’s kind of like getting your own almonds instead of almond oil or

something.

Dr. Ritamarie: Exactly. Well yeah oil is different. But almond butter, like making your own

almond butter, instead of buying a jar of almond butter, you know that you didn’t – if you’re

really careful about it – let the blades go for too long and create heat and maybe oxidize some of

the fats in there. You know what the processing is. We can’t always do that. There’s ideal and

there’s real. So yeah, you did the best you can.

Trevor Justice: Okay great. So we’re at an hour, I’m wondering if you want to go maybe 5 or 10

more minutes?

Dr. Ritamarie: Sure, no problem.

Trevor Justice: Great we have a few more question here, thank you.

Dr. Ritamarie: Sure.

Trevor Justice: So let’s see, we talked about rapadura already. Here’s an interesting question

from Ella, “How about seaweed roasted with olive oil, freeze-dried fruits, raw bars with seed

plus nuts and agave syrup.” – oh boy.

of 35


Dr. Ritamarie: Okay we got a lot. Let’s take them one at a time.

Trevor Justice: Let’s not talk about agave syrup now because that’s a big topic and we already

covered it in lesson 34. Let’s start with seaweed roasted with olive oil.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, well seaweed is an awesome snack. A lot of people really don’t like the

taste of it raw but when you roast it in olive oil it kind of takes on this really nice crunch to it. So

that’s certainly a better snack than eating potato chips, and all those sort of things for your

crunch and for your salt.

Olive oil would be the better oil to heat with, olive or coconut versus heating with something like

safflower or sunflower or an omega 3 or 6 oil. So, I think that that’s a decent snack, it’s not an

unhealthy snack. When we talk about three categories, the better would be if you take your sea

vegetables and just eat them raw, or you mix them and make them into cookies or cakes or

whatever like that.

Trevor Justice: So let’s talk about ways to eat the sea vegetables raw. For example, when I buy

dulse in flakes, I’ll just rehydrate it in water, kind of clinch it in my hand, squeeze out most of

the water and throw it on my salad. That’s one way, but how do you like to eat seaweeds raw?

Dr. Ritamarie: Well, there are a couple of ways. One is, I take the big kelp fronds and grind

them down or I buy them ground and I keep that jar in my kitchen with my spice rack. I just

sprinkle little bits of it throughout my food.

With the dulse, there’s a couple of really fun ways you can make dulse. One is, you get it instead

of the little flakes like you’re talking about, you get them in the whole pieces and you can just eat

them as-is. They’re kind of chewy.

If you want something more crunchy, you can soak it and then you can season it a little bit, you

can put some garlic on it or onion or any of your favorite seasonings, some cayenne. You could

of 35


even stick it in the dehydrator or in an oven at low temperature and you can crunch it up. It’s

kind of like the crunchiness of bacon and things like that. So people enjoy that.

What else do I do? Oh sea palm. Oh, sea palm, you could just eat right out of the bag. It’s

crunchy and it’s really addicting – really good.

Trevor Justice: Excellent, all right, good. Also of course nori you can make sushi, like a vegan

sushi or raw vegan sushi just by wrapping it in nori. That’s a really good way to eliminate bread

as well, or reduce the amount of bread in your diet. Just wrap your sandwiches in nori or other

green-leaf vegetables, like collard greens, right?

Dr. Ritamarie: Right, one of my favorites. I go into these stages but about a week ago I was

demonstrating to a new client how to do nori rolls and collard green rolls and I just put on my

video and I took a video of me making it.

I loaded it up with arugula and I sprinkled on some sauerkraut and some sprouts and then a little

drizzle of a cashew macadamia cream cheese and rolled it up. It’s all of like a couple of minutes.

They are so delicious and they make excellent wraps.

The other day I made a recipe – which I’m going to put on my blog this week – I called it

Mangle Mole. It was mango and avocado mashed up together and then it was put in a shell of a

really crispy romaine leaf, as a taco shell, and then piled up with some other goodies and eaten

that way. So it’s a really great way to get off of the carbs and the breads.

One of the favorites of people – especially in transition people – is they take the lettuce leaf and

load it up with hummus instead of eating it on pita bread, they load it up on romaine leafs and

it’s really, really nice.

Trevor Justice: Yeah, excellent point. We have a lesson called… Lesson 28, “12 Ways to Make

Leafy Greens Delicious” without drenching them in oil. The strategies we’re talking about now,

it’s just one of the twelve strategies we talk about in that lesson. In that lesson we also have links

of 35


to some videos that show you how to soften collard greens so that you can more easily wrap

them around the guts of your sandwich.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yep, yep, yep.

Trevor Justice: Okay great, let’s go to the next question... So that was from Ella, oh all right, she

also wanted to know about freeze-dried fruits.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, freeze-dried fruits, they have those as just fruits and they’re really crunchy.

I’d say those are pretty good. The good thing about those versus your regular dried fruits is all

the pieces don’t get stuck in your teeth. The real chewy dried fruits tend to be a dental hazard

because it’s really hard to get all of that out of your teeth.

You do have to be careful either way if you tend to have irregularities in your blood sugar or you

tend to have like fungus and candida type overgrowths that you have to just make sure that it

doesn’t throw you too much on the sweet side. And again, eat them with greens before or after

right? So have your dried fruit, but have some celery sticks before or after.

Trevor Justice: Yeah, great point. Naomi Shannon, our friend, says that one of her favorite

traveling foods is what she calls “date romaine roll ups.” She basically just pits a date, or maybe

a couple of dates, and puts them in a romaine lettuce leaf and rolls it up.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah that’s yummy. I did something similar.

Trevor Justice: She has this huge purse and she’s able to put two heads of romaine lettuce in

there. For some reason it will last for like 24 hours.

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s so cool. I traveled with Naomi and it’s kind of fun. We actually have a

YouTube video up of Naomi and I making a sandwich in the lobby of a hotel. It was kind of riot

to do, but yeah.

of 35


One other thing, getting back to that with the dates, you reminded me of a snack that my kids

love. I even made it once for my father in law and he loved it. It was a celery stick spread with a

little drizzle of almond butter and then take a date and just spread it into pieces and spread it

along that, and eat it. It’s really, really good, a really yummy treat.

Trevor Justice: Sure, isn’t that similar to – what do they call it?

Dr. Ritamarie: Ants on a log.

Trevor Justice: That’s really close right?

Dr. Ritamarie: It’s very close.

Trevor Justice: Peanut butter with raisins on a celery stick?

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah, instead of peanut butter it’s like almond butter or tahini, with the dates

instead of raisins, but yeah, it’s basically the same concept.

Trevor Justice: Good idea. Okay let’s see Kika asks, “How healthy is it to substitute raisins or

dates instead of refined sugars, how safe?” So I guess what she probably wants to know about is

our dental issues and blood sugar issues.

Dr. Ritamarie: Definite improvement by far, definite improvement. You’ve got the fiber that’s

going to slow down the blood sugars from rising the same way it would with refined sugar. It’s

got all the minerals, vitamins and protein in them, so the nutrients that are going to slow it down

as well.

As far as dental issues, you can have just as serious dental issues, I’m afraid to tell you, if you

don’t brush your teeth. I’ve even gotten to the point of just I carry one of those little portable

tooth brushes with me. You don’t have to use toothpaste. After a meal, just brush to just get the

stuff out of your teeth, because it’s not good for your teeth.

of 35


Trevor Justice: Right, it’s an excellent point, unlike white sugar which really has no nutrition,

dates have a ton of nutrition, and they’re sticky. So, if a little bit sticks to your teeth or sticks

between your teeth that’s a lot of nutrition for bacteria to grow.

Dr. Ritamarie: Yeah.

Trevor Justice: A lot more than white sugar in fact. So you know, as I said earlier, dates are a

nutrition power house compared to refined sweeteners, even what we thought of as relatively

healthy sweeteners, like maple syrup.

It is really important to floss and brush your teeth. I would say any time after you eat dried fruit

that’s very dry and sticky. You know the only way I really use dried fruit, Ritamarie, is when I’ll

put it in a glass of water in my fridge overnight so it rehydrates and gets softer and more watery.

Then I’ll throw it in my smoothie the next day. I really don’t eat dried food except for that.

Dr. Ritamarie: That’s great. I don’t generally anymore either. Every now and then I’ll have

something but then when you soak it like that it’s no longer really a dried fruit anymore. It’s

more close in context to a fresh fruit...

Trevor Justice: Yeah. When it comes to fruit, we talk about this in our future lesson on fruit, but

it’s always best to eat a whole fruit that’s not dried, not refined, not juiced because the fiber in

the fruit will slow down the absorption of sugar into your blood. When you dehydrate it the sugar

content is higher, more concentrated.

Dr. Ritamarie: Absolutely.

Trevor Justice: So I think that’s about it for tonight. I really appreciate your time.

If you’re listening to this call and you’re wondering how you’re going to prepare food that kind

of meets all the requirements we’ve talked about in terms of having plenty of all the vitamins and

of 35


minerals and the right balance of omega 3s and 6s, we have a service now where you can get a

gluten-free vegan menu plan every week with a grocery list and recipes that go with it. You can

check it out at www.veghealth.com/gluten-free-vegan-meal-plans.

So I think that’s about it. I’ll give out your link one more time Ritamarie for people that want to

learn how to make gluten-free breads, crackers, cookies and brownies and things like that and

that’s www.veghealth.com/go/dehydrator-recipes-free-course. So I really appreciate you being

on the call with us tonight and everyone have a great night.

Dr. Ritamarie: Thank you, bye-bye.

Trevor Justice: Okay, good night.

of 35


http://www.veghealth.com/gluten-free-vegan-meal-plans/?=500

healthy substitutions for comfort foods, lesson 1, by...

Documents