TMHS 394: 10 Powerful Nutrition Tips From The World’s Top Experts

Making meaningful and intentional choices with your nutrition is one of the most powerful ways you can influence your health on a daily basis. The way you eat can impact the health of your microbiome, the way your genes behave, and more. But with so much information (and misinformation) out there, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and confused about the best way to nourish your body.

Today you’re going to hear a compilation of some of the best nutrition tips from the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show. These insights cover topics from the biochemical aspect of nutrition to developing a healthy mindset about eating. You’re going to learn about appropriately fueling your metabolism, how to make optimal nutrition choices, and how to become more competent when it comes to food.

Most importantly, this episode contains actionable advice you can implement to cover all of your bases, nutritionally. I hope this episode serves as an in-depth resource to support your nutrition, your health, and your life. Enjoy!

In this episode you’ll discover:

Why it’s necessary to be flexible with your metabolism.
The two main rules of metabolic function.
What ECGC is, and how to incorporate it into your diet.
How food restriction can disrupt your body’s natural intelligence.
The problem with assigning morality to food.
How to support your intestinal flora.
The importance of eating a wide variety of colors.
What it means to eat stressed out foods.
The benefits of eating foraged and wild-caught foods.
What xenohormetic molecules are, and how they contribute to longevity.
Three important questions you should ask yourself before purchasing food.
How your liver health can contribute to leaky gut (and how to fix it!)
The role of resistant starches, and sources you can add to your diet.
What it means to increase your kitchen IQ.
How embracing variety in your diet nourishes your body.
Why you should avoid food that’s purposely engineered to be delicious.

Items mentioned in this episode include:

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Transcript:

Shawn Stevenson: Welcome to The Model Health Show. This is fitness and nutrition expert Shawn Stevenson and I am so grateful for you tuning in with me today.

What a year this month has been already. Seriously speaking, 2020 is off to a crazy start for some of us. Some of us are off to start with momentum and working on our goals, but some of us have been hit really hard, alright. And this is just part of the process. When we are working on, taking our lives to another level and to execute on our goals things are going to come up along the way, there's going to be obstacles that are there to help us to develop the qualities necessary to keep moving towards those next levels.

I know personally that January, whatever this is right now, it really feels, for me, it feels like it's January 78th right now, alright. It's been a long month. And we're moving towards episode 400 of The Model Health Show, so not only have we had these about an hour-long episodes 400 of those but the thousands and thousands and thousands of hours behind the scenes, working on how can we make sure that we're providing people with the very best information from the very best people in the world.

And of course, our masterclasses that I do for you guys as well. And it's really been stretching me to keep thinking about how can I grow, how can I get better and really looking at what do we need as we move here deeper into this year. And I think that for a lot of us we can use some support when it comes to our nutrition.

And so what I wanted to do in celebration, a little pre-celebration because it's coming up here soon, there's not a lot of props for 400, all right, 300 gets some props it's like the Spartans number, 500 definitely, but 400 doesn't get a lot of love. But I want to do a little pre 400 celebration, put together a compilation of some of the best nuggets of wisdom from the past 100 episodes from some of the top experts in the world.

So I've got that here for you today to really just provide some inspiration and some support for your nutrition as you move into these next levels of this new year and this new decade. I think you're really, really going to enjoy this. And also, if your 2020 has gotten off to a little bit of a rocky start, a couple of obstacles, stuff just getting on your nerves, I've got something for you.

Speaking specifically of the nerves, listen to this— there are now several recent studies indicating that Lion's Mane mushroom can encourage nerve cells to grow and repair more quickly. So if life is getting on your nerves, people getting on your last nerve, you might want to be checking out Lion's Mane. How does this apply into clinical evidence? There is a study published in biomedical research on women and these individuals had a variety of health complaints including anxiety and poor sleep quality.

And what they did was have these women to eat cookies containing Lion's Mane mushroom or placebo cookies. I've never heard of a placebo cookie, but it sounds good. Alright, so Lion's Mane cookies or placebo cookies for 4 weeks. At the end of the study, the participants who ate cookies containing Lion's Mane mushroom reported lower levels of irritation and also lower levels of anxiety than those in the placebo group. It works.

For those that are working your nerves, with things that are working your nerves, Lion's Mane is actually proven to be effective in supporting that function. Why does this matter, your nerves, your nervous system is really kind of the outermost connection to the external environment and also your internal environment giving you direct feedback on how you're feeling.

And if those nerves get pressed or get hyper irritated, this can be due to several things in our lives— just an overabundance of stress or even dietary deficiencies can cause issues with our nerves and our nerve processes. And so Lion's Mane is one of those things, very few things that are proven to directly improve the health of our nerves, and if we're talking about the science of the doctrine of signatures, which translates to mean the sign of nature or the information that nature gives us about certain foods based on the way they look, how they taste or how they function, nature has kind of instructions and just based on the way that a food looks or the way that it functions in nature can tell you what is good for in the human body.

And if you take a look at Lion's Mane, it gets his name because it looks like this mane of hair but it doesn't necessarily look like thin hair, but when you see all of these kinds of tentacles coming from this mushroom, you'll see that it kind of looks like a really interesting nervous system. Your nervous system, if you remember like in our biology books, it's like this internal wiring or circuitry that's just spreading throughout our body.

And just looking at Lion's Mane in nature you could see that, wow, that might have an impact on our nervous system. So I thought that was really fascinating as well. But here's the good news— you don't have to go out into forage and try to find like, "Is this Lion's Mane," or, "Is this Panther’s Mane," you know, like you don't have to try to figure this stuff out. I don't think panthers have a mane.

But the good folks at Four Sigmatic have done this for us, organic, high quality sourced, dual extracted, and this the most important part, it's a dual extraction of the medicinal mushroom, so this ensures that you're actually getting the medicinal aspect that you hear in studies like this. Did they use a hot water extract or alcohol extract— it doesn't matter, you're getting both in Lion's Mane mushroom.

And this is why I really enjoy the Lion's Mane coffee from Four Sigmatic as well because if we're looking at different ways that we can get this stuff into people's bodies, people will drink coffee, let's just upgrade that coffee. And we know that especially like for mental clarity and for focus and for productivity, Lion's Mane also has been found to improve and increase something called neurogenesis which is the creation of new brain cells.

So really cool stuff, pop over there, check them out ASAP, it's foursigmatic.com/model, that's F-O-U-R-S-I-G-M-A-T-I-C.com/model, you get 15 percent off everything they carry, the Lion's Mane coffee, the Lion's Mane elixir and everything else that they carry over at Four Sigmatic which is incredible. I have Four Sigmatic products every single day, huge fan, definitely pop over there, check them out. And on that note, let's get to the Apple Podcast review of the week.

iTunes Review: Another 5-star review titled "Life-Changing" by Kelly Stilts. "Long-time listener here, and want to give a shout out to our boy Shawn. I just listened to episode 388 "Positive Psychology"— mind blown! Listening to Shawn is something that brings me joy. I laughed out loud several times. His combination of personal stories and science is just one thing that sets him apart. His mixture of guests and individual shows is another. Thank you, Shawn, for inspiring us as individuals and inspiring us to spread health, happiness, and positivity to others as well. What a way to ring in the new year! Cheers."

Shawn Stevenson: Awesome, thank you so very much for leaving me that review over on Apple podcasts, I really, really, really appreciate that. And thank you so much for that acknowledgment. And listen, if you've yet to do so please pop over to Apple podcasts, leave a review for the show. And again, I appreciate it so very much. And on that note, let's get to our topic of the day.

In this episode, we're doing a compilation of some of the best nutrition advice from the past 100 shows here on The Model Health Show. And I really love these episodes because we get these really great nuggets of wisdom that we can take and execute on, just very digestible, very punchy, very value-packed insights from some of the top experts in the world.

And these nuggets and a lot of good stuff come in nugget form, it's chicken nuggets, gold nuggets, better than chicken nuggets, Denver Nuggets, shout out to Denver. But getting these really value-packed nuggets of wisdom is just one of those ways that I want to continue to add value to your life and to make sure that you are well equipped to absolutely crush it this year and far beyond.

And to kick things off, I've got a clip for you from doctor Jade Teta, this is one of my all-time favorite episodes. And in this clip, he is talking specifically about how your body learns to burn what you give it, your body learns to burn the various macronutrient fuels that you provide it with. So let's jump into this clip from the amazing Dr. Jade Teta.

Dr. Jade Teta: Look our metabolism is exposed to lots of different things and it likes to have a clear path. It's kind of adaptive and reactive. So you drove across from the Valley over here, right. And you were using waze and waze were essentially saying, because you were telling me, "I got waze, the waze that get me where I want to go."

Well, your metabolism likes to adjust and adapt that way, right, so it says, "There's an angle I can go, there's an angle I can go. Oh, Shawn's feeding me this, I'll use that fuel. Oh, Shawn's eating this way, Jade's doing or working out this way, I'll adjust to that." That's how our metabolism likes to function.

Now, when we start feeding it the same things every single day and doing the same behaviors every single day, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we start to create problems in our metabolism, especially if we're doing the standard American overeating.

And so this happens, you can kind of think about this imagining all these fuel sources coming into your system. You've got carbohydrates from let's say you eat a pizza or something like that, you got fat, you got carbohydrates, you got adjuvants, these sorts of irritants to the gut lining in tomato, you've got gluten if you're sensitive to that as well.

And your mitochondria and your gut have to handle all of this stuff and all of this information. You essentially begin to create what I like to call "metabolic smoke" so to speak, in these mitochondria, these little energy factories in your cell, that then begin to damage themselves. And so what ends up happening is if you can imagine it's just like if you're driving down the highway and you're constantly slamming on your brakes right or you're in the park and you're revving your engine in idle all the time.

You may not necessarily be moving, but you're doing damage to that system, and that's what all of this stuff is essentially doing to our metabolism. And the gridlock sort of way of thinking about this is literally when we're on a diet let's say or we try to do something, when we first go on a diet, it works, right. I remember the first time I did I was like 19 years old, I was like, "Hey, I want to do a bodybuilding show," I got super lean super fast.

But what happens is when I repeat that again and again, I end up getting less of a response. So it's not just the overeating aspect, but it's also, and this is the part, it's also the under eating and overstressing aspect. Either one of those extremes causes this kind of metabolic gridlock. And so we have to be very aware and the end sort of thing to this for me, Shawn, just to kind of drive home for people, the one message is that we have to be flexible with our metabolism because it is an adaptive-reactive system.

And so we cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again, either on the one side, where we're overeating constantly or on the other side where we're under eating and over exercising constantly if that makes sense.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, absolutely, man. Guys, so you already see why I love having you on here man, talking to you. It just makes so much sense but also so with that metabolic flexibility, just to kind of dig in a little bit deeper, this is also considering the fact that your body can use a lot of different types of fuel sources, but we commonly just think of those main 3 macronutrients. But there's more, alcohol is one, for example.

Dr. Jade Teta: Yeah. All these things go down to sort of a common endpoint right, so it's sort of like when you dump these, if you dump carbs into your system, fat into your system, alcohol into your system, they all come to acetylcholine. And then that, the amount of that acetylcholine is a signal to your metabolism, "I've got enough fuel or not."

And so to make this simple with alcohol let's say, it's not that it's a fat-storing sort of macronutrient so to speak, and it's not technically a macronutrient, but it is a fat inhibiting, it inhibits fat burning because when you drink alcohol you basically have a very quick sort of breakdown to acetylcholine and the body sees that and goes, "I don't need to burn sugar, I don't need to burn fat, I've got plenty from alcohol," and it will use that source of energy.

And that's the first thing to understand about metabolic flexibility, what you give your body it will learn to burn. So if you're eating mostly carbohydrates it revs up all those enzyme systems to burn carbohydrates, you become a sugar burner as a result. If you're eating mostly fat, the body revs up all those enzyme systems to begin to burn mostly fat. If you're doing lots of the mix, this is where the gridlock begins to happen.

As soon as you dump carbohydrates on top of fat, on top of alcohol, on top of protein, the body is not a good multi-tasker, it's kind of the biochemical equivalent of rubbing your head and tapping your tummy or what is it rubbing your tummy and tapping your head. Either one, so that's what we have to kind of keep in mind, what we eat we can train our body to burn. But when we overload it with lots of things all at once, this becomes a problem.

There's a really interesting science behind this at the level of the mitochondria that essentially says that those mitochondria do much better when they have a straight path to energy, carbohydrate right down to the mitochondria, fat right down to the mitochondria. It's sort of like a funnel. So we all know what it's like if you start dumping a lot of water into a funnel very quickly, it will eventually overflow.

And so this is where some of the new stuff about maybe some intermittent fasting or small frequent meals, both work by the way, but this large, frequent meal mentality or one continuous meal mentality that we currently have going on with a lot of people is the major problem.

And just real quick so everyone sort of knows, carbohydrate for the body, it's kind of like jet fuel, it's very quick energy, it likes to use that— like if you and I hit the gym together and we do some high-intensity interval training or CrossFit, it is going to grab that energy system. Fat is sort of like diesel fuel, alcohol is kind of in between the two of them, we can use that as energy but it doesn't give us any nutrients as a result of that.

And protein to me is sort of like the more like the infrastructure of the car— it can use protein to go to fat or carbohydrate, so it's kind of like a flex-fuel, but it likes to leave that for sort of muscle development. So the rule here then, if the first rule is sort of the metabolism is adaptable and reactive and we need to be aware of that, then the second rule is it's also not a good multitasker. And so for the vast majority of us, we have to be very clear on not overloading it with lots of stuff and lots of different macronutrients all at the same time.

Shawn Stevenson: All right, next up on our compilation of some of the best nutrition advice from the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show, we've got another one of my favorite, all-time guests Dr. William Li. He wrote a New York Times bestselling book called "Eat To Beat Disease," and his appearance on the Model Health Show was a big catalyst for the book really taking off.

And here we're talking about some very specific foods and nutritive sources that you can take action on and proactively add into your nutrition protocol over the next upcoming year and beyond. All right, so let's check out this clip from Dr. William Li with some things that you can take action on.

Dr. William Li: I want to tell you some things that are not as well known, like for example, kiwi fruit. Right? Everybody who's seen a kiwi, it's like this monkey ball-shaped thing, furry. Cut it down the middle, open it up, it's got this bright green flesh, really juicy and sweet. It's packed with vitamin C and other vitamins, and there have been studies in humans, clinical studies in which they've actually taken young people and measured their blood at the beginning and looked at their DNA, how well it does, how well it can protect itself, and then they gave them one kiwi and they ate them, and they measured after a couple of days that eating that one kiwi can protect their DNA, increase it by 60%.

So you can just see one kiwi a day and it pops up your defense mechanisms. If you eat 3 kiwis a day, it helps your DNA rebuild itself. So it actually repairs itself. So here's simple lowly kiwi fruit, like I might have one for breakfast, for example, that can actually do a lot for you.

Shawn Stevenson: I want to ask you about one more because I am a huge fan of this, and I've even recently gotten more into the green teas because I'm a big fan of like mushroom elixirs, and teas, and Yerba Mate, and even black teas. But I've been getting more into like the matcha lately. I've been really digging that. And so one of the things you talk about is EGCG being one of those really powerful nutrients that we find in sources like green tea.

Dr. William Li: So the tea plant, which grows in a bush, is picked a couple of times a year in places that actually have tea. Tea doesn't grow in bags on a plant. It comes as little leaves and there are people that pick these leaves and they dry them out in the sun. And then in the case of the matcha, they grind them into a powder, so in fact, you're drinking the whole leaf, which is why it's more potent.

But if you're just brewing the tea, it's the leaf that kind of sticks around inside the teabag or sits at the bottom of the cup. I just drink tea with leaves, with whole leaves, and all the good stuff kind of is coaxed out of the tea leaf or out of the powder into the liquid, which we then drink. So EGCG is one of the hundreds of natural compounds, natural chemicals that are found in tea leaves.

But it seems to be one of the most potent. It's certainly been the most researched. It inhibits angiogenesis, it helps protect our blood vessels in the heart from heart disease, it might actually lower our blood pressure, protect us against high cholesterol in the blood, probably coaxes out stem cells as well.

A lot of reasons to love green tea. Here is the surprise that I write about in my book— I found it was surprising myself, I am glad you mentioned matcha. It turns out that matcha and probably the high levels of EGCG in matcha actually can kill cancer stem cells. So while most of the stem cells we have are good and help regenerate our cells when cancer grows, they also have their own stem cells, and those stem cells keep that cancer coming back. Right?

Those are really deadly. That's the Holy Grail of cancer research, is trying to find a way to kill those cancer stem cells. Just this past year, researchers found that matcha and the ECGC in it can kill the cancer stem cells in breast cancer. So another reason to like matcha.

Shawn Stevenson: I hope that you're enjoying this compilation of some of the best nutrition advice from the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show. And next up we've got an episode that we did with Kelsey Heenan and she is truly one of the biggest fitness and health influencers on the planet right now. And she's working with all these incredible organizations and she's really bringing an important message and talking about our relationship with food.

And in part of her story, she had a very devastating and dangerous relationship with food early on in life and her evolution through that process, which we detailed in the episode, and by the way, we'll put the links to every single episode for you in the show notes if you happen to miss any of these. And in this clip, we're going to be talking about one the most valuable parts from that episode which is the discussion around intuitive eating and the dieting mentality.

Because it's this dieting mentality that keeps us imprisoned and creates so much conflict in our lives and how we're relating to food. And we want to be free, we want to be free in 2020, we want to be free to have a better relationship, a more productive and health affirming relationship with food as we move forward into the new decade. So let's jump into this clip from the amazing Kelsey Heenan.

Kelsey Heenan: So intuitive eating basically is learning how to honor hunger and fullness and having the absence of dieting rules. There are lots of different ways that people put this into practice and there really are some different phases. For me, going through a history of disordered eating there was a really long phase where I was not worrying about nutrients whatsoever because mentally I needed to get over having all of those rules in place and that was a really important process for my healing.

And then afterward it's there's nothing wrong with being informed about nutrients, I think that's actually very important so that you can understand how to fill your body well and understand that protein is using your body differently than carbohydrates and all of those types of things.

But you can be informed and also not have all these really super strict rules, you can be healthy and still be able to honor your body's hunger and fullness because our bodies are smart they know how to run well but we so often restrict and create a disruption in our bodies because of all these prior history of dieting. So I think it's really a beautiful thing once we learn how to become more in tune with what our bodies are telling us and intuitive eating is so important.

I think that it can be learned, but it's the kind of thing we're born knowing how to do this but we just, we don't trust it and then we go through all of these different things. And so people think often, "If I eat intuitively I'm just going to eat pizza all the time I am just going to eat cookies all the time," and if you did that you'd realize that you don't really feel that good when you do that. And so that's where you can be mindful and also honor your body at the same time.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, yeah that was a tough word for me early on, being a very analytical person, science-minded person, when I would hear intuition I'm like, "Huh, I don't know." But there is something that like we all experienced and I experienced but I couldn't describe it so I just like sweep that under the rug.

But for me, I feel like the best definition of intuition is advanced pattern recognition and just being able to recognize the patterns and paying attention to your internal conversations, internal feelings, you could see the patterns like, "Oh this feels good/ that doesn't feel good. This is attractive/ this isn't attractive," whatever the case might be.

But with intuitive eating, you're also opening it up to experience all of it and that's so freeing because it's breaking away from which we'll also talk about which is the dieting mentality. So what is that?

Kelsey Heenan: Dieting mentality that's a great question, because so many people live in this, every single day, no matter what way of eating if you experience fear and anxiety and guilt and stress around eating, you're probably experiencing some sort of element of dieting mentality where you're having strict rules and regulations about the types of foods that you eat and what you don't eat and there's often a morality tied to it.

So I am good or I am bad if I eat or don't eat this food. So this food is off-limits, or this food is allowed, and it just is this whole this or that, right or wrong, and it becomes something that can be really detrimental to people. Because it's one thing to, again, be informed about nutrients but if something is working for you physically but your mindset is a mess and you are so stressed all the time and feeling guilty and hating yourself, that's not really working for you, you need to have all of it working together.

Shawn Stevenson: Okay, next up on a compilation of some of the best nutrition advice here on The Model Health Show over the past 100 episodes, we've got a clip from doctor Alejandro Junger. And in this clip, he's going to be talking about the real reason why diversity in our diets really does matter.

Now, if you close your eyes and listen to this, or actually that's if you're watching on YouTube, but if you're listening already, you can imagine that doctor Junger is Antonio Banderas, I'm just going to say it, all right, just go in this adventure with me and picture Antonio Banderas, it could be Zorro, it could be Puss in Boots, he's got that vibe, he's got that vibe, but incredibly powerful teacher and somebody who has been in this field helping people for a very long time. And he's got some great, just really poignant advice on why we need more diversity in our diets. So let's jump into this clip from Dr. Alejandro Junger.

Dr. Alejandro Junger: Really taking care of your intestinal flora which is doing 50 percent of the detoxification work for you anyways. So how do you do that? By not eating the foods that could kill them, trying to avoid antibiotics when they are not necessary, trying to not eat processed foods that contain preservatives and conservatives and other chemicals, so eat whole foods as they come from nature, right.

And the more the variability on the color of your diet, the more the variability on your intestinal flora. So eat the rainbow. Tan foods will make you sick, eat the rainbow— blue, green, red, yellow right. So that is really important, the more variability of colors in your diet, the more your intestinal flora will thrive. But it happens to be also that the more variability of color in your diet the more of the nutrients that your liver needs to detoxify will be available. So this is a really important aspect and very easy for people to remember.

Shawn Stevenson: Next up in our compilation of the best nutrition advice from the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show is another one of my all-time favorite episodes and this is with Dr, David Sinclair. Now, David Sinclair is a Harvard trained researcher, lecturer and wrote one of the really most important books of our time, we're talking about his book "Lifespan" and looking at the real science of aging. And again, definitely check out that episode if you happen to miss it, it's just loaded with nuggets of wisdom.

But in this clip, we're going to be talking about the essential need to include more foods that are stressed, foods that are themselves stressed. And you might be like, "What does this actually mean?" We'll dive into it, he'll talk a little more about it, but it just taking a broad meta-perspective on what this means. If you hear the statement, "You are what you eat," we don't want to eat a lot of foods that have a tough time making it, that have a tough time growing.

We want to eat foods that are more resilient, more foods that are not easily killed off, we want to eat foods that are more like, that are hard to kill like that Steven Seagal movie right. And I just happen to see a little clip of that the other day and man, wow, okay, going and watching it now with my updated knowledge, my updated eyes, and just seeing him like this, and doing his stick training. And his running— oh my goodness, it's a spectacle to see but he's hard to kill, all right.

So eat more Steven Seagal type foods or Uma Thurman type foods, Kill Bill, or Arnold Schwarzenegger type foods in basically every movie, ever, including "Jingle All The Way," even on that he's hard to kill, going after, trying to get his gift for his son, was it Turbo Man, you know he was going hard.

But actually, I think Sinbad's character in that movie is even harder to kill, I think he actually got blown up and still survived. But see the hero there, we want to eat foods that are stressed, more resilient, they're not easily taken out, add more those type foods in and here's why. Let's jump into this conversation with Dr. David Sinclair.

Dr. David Sinclair: Eat foods that are stressed out which is a weird concept, right but we do it naturally, we drink, some of us drink red wine which is a stressed grape before we pick it. We often eat colored food so spinach is a dark green food, there are blueberries which are dark. The whiter ones are not as good, so why is that? Well, stressed food produces a lot of what we call Xenohormetic molecules and I'll explain what that means.

It's a terrible word we coined but Xeno means from other species and hormesis is a very important word. You've got to remember the word hormesis because every day you should think about it. Hormesis is what doesn't kill us makes live longer. And it's a term that means you've got to get your body out of its complacency, you've got to trigger those defenses, those longevity genes. So Xenohormesis is you don't have to only run and eat well at the right times, but you can also get these molecules from the right animals and plants, but particularly plants that are stressed.

Because when plants are stressed they're making these molecules of health for their own benefit, they're trying to survive, they are turning on their longevity genes. We forget plants have longevity genes too. So a stressed plant will make these colored molecules to protect from UV and dehydration when we eat them, they trigger our own body's defenses and you can get the benefits. So that's nutrition, colored foods, stressed foods, organic is stressed, you don't want the perfect lettuce that's been not put any stress. And we need to do more of that, we need to let our plants stress a little bit before we eat them.

Shawn Stevenson: All right, I hope that you enjoyed that clip from Dr. David Sinclair and if you're wondering like, "So what are some of the good examples of stress foods?" Well, this would be foods that are grown, that are growing wild, right, wild foods, so wild foraged and wild-caught foods that are just out in the elements in the environment and being forced to adapt to conditions and not this kind of mono-crops that are constantly interacting in needing human assistance in order for them to thrive.

So we want to eat more foods that are wild forage, wild-caught if at all possible, just proactively adding in more foods like that. And also specific foods like Maca, right so Maca is in the same category of family as cabbages and turnips, and it kind of looks more like a turnip and it's one of these "superfoods" that have really hit the scenes in the last few years but is known to be a very potent adaptogen and that's one of those foods that it grows in some of the most harsh conditions on the planet and it thrives there. Like high up elevations in the mountains and things like that.

And so Maca is one, Dandelion greens is another, this is something that people get the very best weed killers and Dandelion still pops out like what's up, can't kill me, can't that's me, I'm the gingerbread man like it just keeps on going. And so Dandelion is another thing you could add Dandelion grease to salads or juices, things like that. And just any foods that are rich in chlorophyll, that's part of the resilient nature of the Dandelion is that chlorophyll content.

So chlorophyll in plants it's just like a protective mechanism that it's utilizing as it has this really intimate and interesting relationship with sunlight. And so us imbibing and taking in foods that contain chlorophyll is one the greatest advantages that we have as far as consuming more stressed foods.

And this is why I'm a big advocate of every single person getting themselves a green superfood blend. It is the most efficient and effective way to get in some of the most nutrient-packed potent green superfoods in one source rather than trying to find a "multivitamin" that is generally synthetic and it's not giving you nowhere near as much true efficacy.

And if we're looking at chlorophyll for example and for me and my family and my friends, and I get this as gifts for so many people I do giveaways all the time, I'm a big fan of Organifi's Green Juice because it tastes good, it has these super-dense sources of chlorophyll but it tastes amazing as well. And just listen to this, so the ingredients in Organifi Green Juice have been proven to boost stem cell genesis which is just flat out remarkable.

And the chlorophyll content specifically, there was a study published in 2014 so this is spirulina, chlorella, wheatgrass, the study published in 2014 in a peer review journal "Appetite" found that chlorophyll which is some of the highest concentration is in like chlorella that's in Organifi, the chlorophyll can actually aid in weight loss and reduce the urge to eat hyper-palatable processed foods. So it's helping to reset the palate, that's very powerful.

And another study found that the consumption of more chlorophyll-rich foods and especially dense chlorophyll foods like spirulina, wheatgrass, chlorella triggers the release of glucagon-like peptide one which according to research published in the journal of endocrinology, has the potential to trigger body fat redistribution. Taking body fat from the visceral area, the more dangerous visceral omentum fat area and moving that fat out to the more usable and safer type of subcutaneous fat that's right underneath our skin.

Actually eating the stressed foods helps your body to redistribute body fat in a more safe and intelligent way rather than just holding up shop around our belly and our organs. So if that's not enough, I don't know what to tell you, you've got to get yourself a green superfood blend, the very best one out there is Organifi Green Juice, pop over there you get 20 percent off using this link, go to Organifi.com/model, that's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com/model, 20 percent off the Green Juice formula and every single thing that they carry. So definitely get yourself a green superfood blend.

And on that note, let's get to our next nugget of wisdom from this compilation of some of the best nutrition advice over the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show. And next up we've got Vani Hari a.k.a the Food Babe, all right. And Vani has just been a huge pioneer and she is a major reason why huge multi-billion dollar corporations like McDonald's and Kraft Foods have been taking out some of the most dangerous, in clinical trials proven to be dangerous ingredients that are banned in other countries.

Vani's work has helped them to pull those ingredients out of their products and she knows she's still got a lot of work to do but just huge credit and gratitude to Vani. And so in this clip, she's going to be talking about 3 questions to ask yourself when deciding what foods to buy. So let's jump into this clip from Vani Hari.

Vani Hari: I think eating is really simple. The only people that have made it complicated are really the food scientists that have created these products, right? Eating is really simple, and if you boil it down to these three questions every single time you go to eat something, you are going to set yourself up with success. And so the three questions are, number one, what are the ingredients?

And you need to ask yourself, and I go through this in detail in the book, but you need to ask yourself, "What are the ingredients? What are the ingredients of what I'm eating? Do I know what's in this food?" And you need to know what's in it, and you need to know what the ingredients are, and if you don't understand the ingredient, and you don't know why it's there, you need to put it back down.

And if you understand the ingredients of what you're eating, you're going to be doing really well. Secondly, you ask yourself, "Are these ingredients nutritious? Yeah, I know that's sugar, but is that nutritious?" Right? "Oh, I know that's canola oil over there, or I know that's some other ingredient, a natural flavor." Right? "I know that's natural flavor." Okay, I kind of know.

Shawn Stevenson: It sounds natural.

Vani Hari: It sounds natural. Right, but is that nutritious? And if it's not nutritious, put it back down. Right? And then you go and you take it a step further and you say, "Where is this food coming from? Where are the ingredients coming from? Are they coming from a farm, an organic farm that removes all synthetic pesticides, that isn't produced with sewage sludge, that doesn't have GMO, that is grown to its best ability? Or is it coming from a factory farm?"

You need to ask yourself these questions. And that is how you get to real, the integrity of how to eat. And it sounds so simple when I break it down that way, but if you were to do that at every meal, and just ask yourself those three questions, and commit to doing that for a week, I guarantee you will learn so much, not only about what you're eating and your habits, but you'll start to make some changes.

Shawn Stevenson: Next up in our nutrition compilation we have a clip from Doctor Alan Christianson. And in this episode, he really broke down some of the really remarkable things about our liver and how our liver function relates to our diet and metabolism and he's talking about a category that we don't really talk a lot about and we have a lot of misconceptions about in regards to this particular nutritive factor in foods. And so I'm going to let him explain it to you a little bit more so let's take a look at this clip from Dr. Alan Christianson.

Dr. Alan Christianson: So you want to get adequate protein for liver function. You want to have some fuel, not none. Resistant starch is really helpful. I talked a bit about how the liver modulates what comes from the gut, and it turns out that the way liver makes bile is one of the biggest things that determines whether or not there's leaky gut. So we used to think that leaky gut hurt the liver. Now we're seeing is the liver is one of the biggest causes of leaky gut. And when the flora gives the liver the short-chain fats that it needs, that's a big part of reversing it.

Shawn Stevenson: So fiber?

Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, so this is a funny thing. So resistant starch is a category- it's a type of fiber, and then the fiber itself is a category. So one of my projects is that I want fiber not to be a singular word anymore. It's got to be a plural word, it's a category.

Shawn Stevenson: Like fat.

Dr. Alan Christianson: Well, there are about sixteen kinds of dietary fibers, and I'd love people to really have their body get healthy, and get resilient, and be able to eat a broad range of natural food categories. If you cover all the main food categories, you can get sixteen types of fibers. If you're cutting out a lot of food categories, you cannot get more than a handful of fiber types.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, so there are different types of fibers, resistant starch is under that umbrella?

Dr. Alan Christianson: It's straddled between fiber and carbohydrate. So fiber is non-caloric and not useful for fuel directly. Resistant starch is but by half. So it's half the caloric load of carbohydrate, but it feeds the flora and it comes in the bloodstream from the colon versus the small intestine. So there's no insulin signaling or no glucose regulation.

Shawn Stevenson: Resistant starch.

Dr. Alan Christianson: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: That's so fascinating.

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, that clip from Doctor Alan Christianson provided this insight about this part of the category of fibers and this one is resistant starches and how important they are for liver function and the health of your microbiome. And if you're wondering what are some sources of these resistant starches and again, any of these episodes just if you want to get the full meal not just a little snack, of course, check them out in the show notes and jump into the full episode.

But a couple of the resistant starches, high sources of resistant starch you're going to find in food would be green banana is probably the most readily available for folks. So when bananas are in their green stage they're very high in starch. And as they get more and more yellow that starch translates over to ultimately being totally absent of starch and has just a really high fraction of sugar, so it's switching over as it gets more and more ripe.

And so now be clear here, green bananas are not tasty, but taking a little bit of a green banana and adding that to a smoothie or there is like green banana flour you can use to like add into to baked goods and things like that, there are all kinds of creative ways you can get that in. That's just one source, green bananas, you've also got the category of beans, peas and lentils so just depending on your digestion and how those foods interact with your body and how you cook them is also a really important factor in this equation as well.

And so that's another category that we can add in and get some resistant starch. Also, white rice and white potatoes after they're cooked and then cooled, as they cool their content or ratio of resistant starch begins to go up, it climbs higher and higher so that's a little interesting hack to increase the resistance starts ratio of those common foods as well. And then another one that's arguably the highest or one of the highest sources of resistant starch is actually tiger nuts.

Now I can't say tiger nuts without laughing inside, and I stop myself from laughing because it just sounds really funny and it's not the nuts of tigers, by the way, no tigers were harmed in the making of this podcast. It's a type of nut, all right, well it just sounds bad, but you can get it as a flour and add it into the— same thing kind of with like with the banana flour, you know, adding the big goods, you can throw a little bit in smoothie, things like that. So tiger nuts, alright, if you're more interested in that just go to Dr. Google, check it out a bit.

Alright, so those are some actionable things for resistant starches and now we're going to jump into our next clip with, I just love this guy, this is Kevin Curry from Fit Men Cook. And we did a really fun episode and in this clip, he's going to be sharing with you how to actually increase your kitchen IQ. All right, it sounds like a really interesting and valuable like I want that, I want to increase my kitchen IQ and he's going to talk about what that is and why that matters in your life as you're really taking control of your nutrition going into the 2020 and beyond. So let's check out this clip from Kevin Curry.

Kevin Curry: With cooking, you know exactly what you're putting into your body.

Shawn Stevenson: Exactly.

Kevin Curry: You know exactly what you're putting in. You don't have to worry about GMOs, you don't have to worry about preservatives, extra sodium. You could actually customize a meal for you and your family and for your health, more importantly. And so I think that cooking is really important because it allows you to become a lot more competent with food too. Sometimes whenever you buy a finished meal, the meal may taste great, but you don't know what the individual flavors of the food taste like, and when you begin to cook, you kind of increase your kitchen IQ.

So that way you know, "Okay, this bell pepper tastes great here, and it has this flavor. I wonder if I can put this in this recipe over there." And so more or less with cooking, you're actually giving yourself more ideas, and if you give yourself ideas, then you can fuel your health and wellness journey for a lifetime. If you're just buying things out of the box, it's fine for that convenience, for the long haul is it sustainable? So cooking is the most sustainable form of wellness that we have.

Shawn Stevenson: Absolutely. Man, that's so powerful. Kitchen IQ, I love that so much, man. That's incredible. So I want to kind of dive in now and talk a little bit about how do we do this, man? How do we make a great meal? And if we could, you've got these ten kitchen commandments, right?

Kevin Curry: Yeah.

Shawn Stevenson: And I just thought that was brilliant right off the bat. So if we can, let's just go through some of those.

Kevin Curry: Sure. Sure, the first one is something that I think that we're all kind of guilty of, and that's what I call aspirational buys. And one of my commandments is to buy only what you're going to eat for meal prep.

Shawn Stevenson: I like this already, man.

Kevin Curry: And when you walk in the grocery store, you see all the fresh produce, all the colors, and you're like, "Yeah, I'm going to get this. I'm going to eat this over here, I'm going to grab some spinach. I'm going to buy this broccoli I guess, okay this red chard, these apples." And you know darn well that in about two weeks, you're going to reach into that produce drawer and throw that away. Or maybe in about one week.

So the whole idea here is when you're looking at meal prep, you've got to approach it in a much more incremental and small way. Don't try to boil the ocean on day one. So only buy what you're going to eat, and that is frustrating, because if you go through the food, it's going to cause you to go back to the grocery store, and that's a good thing because then you can buy something else and you can have variety. And then it's not seen as a chore, it's just much more seen as a part of your routine.

That leads me to another one, it's actually thou shall embrace variety. So what you were talking about tasting other things, and deconstructing the burger, it's the exact same thing when it comes to meal prep. I think especially people in the fitness world, and I hope that trainers are listening to this too, because I think that trainers, sometimes they can get into this mindset that, "I'm only going to eat for fuel." And competitors can do that, too. That's not the way that most people are built. And I think that sometimes we inadvertently kind of push that onto clients.

Shawn Stevenson: Yeah, they say eat to live, don't live to eat.

Kevin Curry: Right, and that's great for about a good five days. And that's why they're always having to constantly encourage their clients. So I think that one thing that you have got to be ready to do for meal prep is to embrace variety. There are tons of different cuisines and flavors in the world, and I think that you just need to find little by little, small ways to introduce those things into your own diet.

For me, it looked like this; about every two weeks I would introduce a brand new complex carb into my diet. And if I didn't know how to cook it, I would just go to Google and type in 'vegetable' and then 'recipe,' and that's how I began to add variety. That's how I learned a lot more about Thai cuisine, about the Mediterranean, about different Latin cuisines and the different flavors out there, so that way you can always have something different, and your diet- it keeps your palate guessing while also nourishing your body.

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, we're in our final clip in this compilation of some of the best nutrition advice from the past 100 episodes of The Model Health Show and this personally for me was one of the most eye-opening interviews and books and researchers and it's Mark Schatzker and he is the author of the book "The Dorito Effect." And in this clip, he's going to be sharing with you the rules of flavor and how it's an important and informative guiding force in all of our lives, flavor matters, and you are going to find out why in this clip from the amazing, incredible Mark Schatzker.

Mark Schatzker: The simple take-home message from all this is that the one thing- we all know this, but we all pretend it's not true— we are flavor craving creatures. We love the taste of food, we love it at least three times a day. You're not going to get rid of that. Only the most strong-willed among us can deny themselves the pleasure of food. The rest of us are in its grip, and for a reason.

Because this is the second rule; in nature, there is an intimate connection between flavor and nutrition. The flavors that we crave, the flavors that bring us delight, bring us more than delight. They bring us the nutrients that we need. We know that flavor can build food. You take something like a peach that can be incredibly delicious, that isn't chock full of calories. You just couldn't eat a basket of peaches the way you could a basket, or like a whole bucket of junk food.

But we also know that with flavor technology, we slice this intimate relationship between flavor and nutrients right down the middle, and we're only left with the pleasure, none of the nutrition. So I want everyone to think about that, and then you think, "Well what do we do to try and fix things?" It's very simple. You avoid the stuff that's been engineered to be delicious.

You do that by looking at the ingredient label and if you see the words 'artificial flavors,' or 'natural flavors'— you just need to know, somebody in a lab sat there and tried to figure out how to make this as delicious as possible. The second thing you do is trying, it's not just about eating real food. It's about eating the most delicious real food that you can find. It's really hard to eat a bland tomato. It's really not hard to eat a flavorful, amazing tomato.

And I think when you look at the parts of the world that are much leaner than us, you look at countries like Japan, and Italy, and France, they're not all on diets, they're not obsessed with whether it's carbs that are killing them. They eat for pleasure, and they eat real food, and I think if we all did that, there'd be a lot more joy in our lives, and we'd all be a lot healthier.

Shawn Stevenson: Alright, I think that was an awesome closing message from Mark Schatzker and I hope that you enjoyed this compilation so much. And if you did please make sure to share this out with all the people that you care about, you can share it on social media and of course, tag me, I'm @Shawn Model on Instagram and Twitter and @themodelhealthshow on Facebook.

And if you need to, you can, of course, even in the app the podcast app that you are listening to you can just hit the button and send this over to somebody that you love and let them know that, hey I've got your back, we've got some great nutrition advice to help to support your transformation as you're going to 2020 and beyond. And we've got some powerhouse, epic stuff that's coming your way, so make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day and I'll talk with you soon.

And for more after the show make sure to head over to themodelhealthshow.com, that's where you could find all of the show notes, you could find transcriptions, videos for each episode and if you got a comment you can leave me a comment there as well.

And please, make sure to head over to iTunes and leave us a rating to let everybody know that this show is awesome. And I appreciate that so much. And take care, I promise to keep giving you more powerful, empowering, great content to help you transform your life. Thanks for tuning in.

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Alan Hanks says:
2022-05-31 at 8:31 AM
Thanks a lot for sharing such a great piece of article! I found it a good helpful write-up with a good sound and explanation. Here I have seen some valuable ideas that are definitely helpful for every health-conscious person who wants to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Please keep sharing more updates!
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