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Food is Medicine or Poison part 2 - Let them eat Cake!
20 Plays14 days ago
But seriously who doesn't like cake? And with all the carb bashing on this podcast you might think you have to give up your tasty treats. But what if we told you, you could have your health and eat cake too? Cake for breakfast you say? Now that's a diet we can all get behind.
Steven's Recipe:
Keto Shortbread
8 tbsp Butter (or 4/5 coconut oil and 1/5 almond milk)
1 tbsp Vanilla extract
1.5 cups Almond Flour
1/4 cup Coconut Flour
1 tsp pure monkfruit powder
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp Sea salt
8 egg whites (1 cup) (or sub 8 tbsp ground flax seed with 24tbsp water, mix first and let sit for a few minutes before adding the rest of the ingredients)
4-8 tblsp almond or coconut milk
Optional but recommended:
¼ tsp or more of freshly grated nutmeg (esp for cold spleen/stomachs)
½ tsp of Saigon cinnamon OR sprinkle on cake after baking (esp for those wanting a little more Yang)
Mix together and put in an oiled glass cake pan (8x8 works well) or something of similar size, bake at 325-350F for 25-35 min until slightly browned on top and toothpick comes out clean.
A fun chocolate variation of the shortbread!
Same recipe as above, but I recommend using the flax seed meal instead egg whites, and adding 1 whole bar of dark chocolate, we use 86% Ghiradelli, since it’s been shown to have some of the lowest lead and cadmium levels of all chocolates on the market. I melt the butter in the baking dish in the preheating oven, and when it’s mostly melted, I add the chocolate bar for a few more minutes until melted, than fold all the melted butter and chocolate into the batter, then back into the baking dish to back. Bake until butter knife or toothpick comes out mostly clean, that way it stays a little fudgy in the middle.
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Transcript
00:00:02
Speaker
you
00:00:09
Speaker
So the sugar on one
Foods to Cut from Diet
00:00:12
Speaker
side. Yep. so yeah yeah Should we keep finishing the spectrum just so people know where to cut this? So we got the first thing to cut would be the things that are ground up and are made of flour. So that's the breads and the pastas.
00:00:23
Speaker
Then we go to the next worst thing, which is the grains, white rice, brown rice, whatever. That also does not really make a huge difference. Brown rice has got a little bit more fiber. It's not a big difference.
00:00:34
Speaker
How about the ancient grains though? If we get into like quinoa and some of the other ones, those are relatively low on this grain scale, right? That's in fact, they're low enough. i give them a full another click into the category.
00:00:47
Speaker
So now we're basically in the middle of the the guys to avoid. So we came from the worst end of the spectrum and we're kind of like clock ticking up. And now we get to exactly what you just said, the ancient grains. And these are primarily actually seeds.
00:01:00
Speaker
So wild rice, I would even put in this category, just because the amount of fiber in a wild rice is way higher. Like brown rice to white rice, okay, a little different. Yeah.
00:01:11
Speaker
You know, wild rice isn't even a rice. It's just like a weird swampy thing. Yeah. Yeah.
Evolution of Diets and Health
00:01:17
Speaker
ah Then like the seeds. So quinoa is technically a seed, and that makes a huge difference because every seed in in the world will have way more protein and less carbs than grains. It's just quinoa tends to be carvier one of the seeds.
00:01:33
Speaker
Again, it's so interesting that the more we've cultivated and gone through evolution in and agriculture evolution, the more problems we're creating for ourselves with our diet.
00:01:45
Speaker
Oh, it's so true. It's so true. It's nuts. I mean... she ah fun side one is if you just look at the dental work that the average person needs now versus the dental work of any skeleton from thousands of years ago, it's like all they didn't need orthodontists any of this stuff because their diet was working their jaw, mouth, teeth in ways that kept them ah resilient and healthy.
Modern Dietary Fads
00:02:12
Speaker
That's such a good point. That's such a good point. I might even be able to like summarize what you just said is like, someone's like, what's the worst path, worst pathogen in the world? Human intervention.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah. totally Well, and this is like, and so in this kind of thought, and then you see like paleo fads or other whatever. And it's like, there's a reason that, that we've had dietary fads for so long is because,
00:02:37
Speaker
we're very far off track. Yeah. um And it's kind of hard to find, you know, our way back to a healthy ah symbiosis or homeostasis.
00:02:49
Speaker
I think you're so right, man. And it's interesting because, yeah, I think some people are unreasonable, but the majority of us are fairly reasonable. And we're ah like, most of us know that we're not where we need to be with that.
00:03:02
Speaker
Like there is this gut sense of like, literally gut sense, right? We're like, my gut is not, In right, uh, in a right balance point here and they know it. And that's where I think a lot of these, like you said, fat diets come from.
00:03:15
Speaker
Paleo is an interesting one too. It's like, um, you know, i know paleo loves the sweet potato
Natural vs. Modern Consumption Habits
00:03:21
Speaker
and some other things. I think I forget what sweeteners they use figs or honey or something like that too.
00:03:25
Speaker
And so people are like, oh wait, but you know the paleo diet says I can have that. But if you go back to like, you know you don't even have to go back in time. Just go to a place that has no human intervention, like modern intervention, right? With ah like native humans there.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah. Go get yourself some honey from that beehive over there. See how much to work it is for the carbs you get. Exactly. Exactly. And you don't have like a bee suit and you don't have like, right? And how many of those hives are you really finding? Yeah.
00:03:52
Speaker
And so when people are like, oh, well, I can have sweet potatoes and then they eat one at every meal. And you're like, no, dude, no. So it's just better, in my opinion, to avoid them. Um,
00:04:03
Speaker
because people won't eat them in the right ratios that they would have found in nature anyway. And it's kind of a difficult one. I sometimes I think of, and I'm not trying to throw shade on any diet here, but like, I kind of think of paleo as like, as the language arts version of a diet.
00:04:18
Speaker
And I think keto is the science version of a diet. And you're like, it's still a carb, man. It's still starch and it's still inflaming stuff. That's so true.
00:04:29
Speaker
Because like I could imagine eating this as ah as a monkey, but it's like, but that apple that you're eating now isn't the same apple that the monkey was eating. That's exactly right. Because you took out all the science bit. And so someone said, right? I didn't mean to, you know, I think paleo is a pretty, pretty healthy diet compared to the standard American diet, but there's some tweaks that would make.
00:04:53
Speaker
But, you know, the it's the same thing. It's like, well, some people would be like, why are you using science-based diet then? If you just said that human intervention is the main pathogen, well, because we wrecked everything and now our apple isn't an apple, we have to use science to figure out what that thing really is.
00:05:09
Speaker
And it's a sugar bomb. And that's what, you know, it's what it tells us. It tells us that once it's in a body, it tells us that outside of a body, we know it's a sugar bomb. um it's It's just how it's been bred.
00:05:21
Speaker
So right now we're at the ah more ancient grains, yeah the
Nutritional Analysis of Grains and Seeds
00:05:26
Speaker
seeds. Yep. But not nut seeds? Are we including those here? Nuts yeah do not count at all. um And then, yeah, basically, yeah, certain nut seeds don't count at all too. like So like a sunflower seed and those sorts of seeds, those don't count here at all either.
00:05:40
Speaker
So we're talking basically the grainy seeds, meaning quinoa, which is actually a seed, but it's really much more of a grain. um And anything you would probably find as the major kind of starch in a meal, because again, it's starchy.
00:05:55
Speaker
So that's kind of like the middle of the bad groups. And then let's go slightly better in the bad group. don't want to be mean here whatever. And in fact, really, it's just one more stop, I would say, ah before we hit the great stuff, which is, again,
00:06:08
Speaker
Eat as many pumpkins and squash. They don't count against you at all. There's just great things to aim for. But the last, but the we'll call it the best of the worst, is the tubers. And that is where the sweet potato and potato come in. So that's why i do think you can be pretty healthy on a paleo diet in general, as long as you don't just kind of use and abuse those rules and be like, oh, well, I'm just going to eat nothing but sweet potatoes and figs because that they're okay on my diet. No, that's not how that works. yeah You're still amping your sugar way too high.
00:06:37
Speaker
But if you are going to cheat, sweet potatoes and potatoes have an enormous amount of potassium, which grains and pastas, none of the none of those have that benefit.
Benefits of High-Potassium Diets
00:06:46
Speaker
And so I think most people are too low on potassium for lots of reasons.
00:06:50
Speaker
um And some of the benefits that they're missing on a low potassium diet are their heart doesn't function as well. um They tend towards greater anxiety, lots of other components. But basically, if you're if you're interested in, if you know some Chinese herbs or you just you're interested in them, think of um high potassium as basically like the calming liver stuff. So the longus, the muris, these sorts of things, they're a natural way to calm down the system.
00:07:17
Speaker
um They clear some heart fire and everything like that. And they just help your body function much better. They also help you not hold on to too much water. So a big component of why I think vegetables are so important, going back to that wonderful category, is I am not a proponent of low-sodium diets at all. I don't think they're useful. i don't think they're helpful.
00:07:35
Speaker
I'm a big fan of high-potassium diets. And the big gist there is sodium holds onto water, it makes you pee less. And that's why Western medicine doesn't like it, because it's gonna raise your blood sugar and some other stuff.
00:07:49
Speaker
I'm sorry, blood pressure. Blood pressure, yeah. Thank you. um But potassium does the exact opposite, and it's a diuretic. And so you don't have to eat low sodium if you eat high potassium.
00:08:00
Speaker
But if you think about this from a historical context, If you were a doc in the 50s and they kind of were figuring this out, is it easier for you to tell people to not salt food or to eat more vegetables?
00:08:11
Speaker
And I'm pretty sure they all thought, if they thought through this at all, they were like, well, no one's goingnna eat our vegetable quota. So let's go ahead and tell them to stop using salt. But the big reason why I'm against it is if you eat a very low sodium diet, you're low energy, your muscles don't fire as much.
00:08:27
Speaker
Because if any of you have studied what an action potential is that requires, that's like the nerve impulse to to make things move and activate muscles. That's all an influx of sodium.
00:08:38
Speaker
um And you need that sodium burst to activ activate your your nervous system. But our i mean our standard American diet intake of sodium is still like skyrocket high.
00:08:50
Speaker
That's true. You could cut it in a half and you'd still be like enough sodium to function. 100%. Cool. All right. yeah Because I think... Yeah.
00:09:01
Speaker
It's just so sky high and it's in so much food everywhere. If I eat out... at any point and if it's not ah health conscious place if it's just a run of the middle place I'll usually be like what are they doing yeah and it's not even good salt too it'll just be like the NACL industrial assault or something. And i'm like, this has to be less useful in my body than natural occurring salt, Hawaiian salt or Himalayan or whatever. 100. Cause they don't have all the other minerals in there.
00:09:29
Speaker
Yeah. Right. Right. You're so right. And that's exactly true. So I say that basically eating out maybe once a month, maybe. Right, right. Maybe twice a month if you count.
00:09:40
Speaker
We have a really delicious food truck. Shout out to Falafayette in Lafayette, Colorado. Ooh. Yeah, it's real. Adam, the guy who runs it, his hummus is straight up inspirational. I'm not even joking.
00:09:53
Speaker
like I ate his hummus and I was like, I didn't know it could be like this. Like, I feel like I know hummus. I make hummus. You know, I had to i had some on my Chinese side of the family, one of my aunts, she married a Jordanian.
00:10:05
Speaker
She taught me how to make hummus. She learned it from her husband, who is from Jordan. I feel like they've got pretty reasonable hummus, you know? like so I feel like I got it pretty close to the source. Then I had Iranian hummus in college from like, because we were at this in the scholarship-y thing i was in.
00:10:21
Speaker
And one of the kiddos had... um her Her mom was Iranian. and And oh my God, I was like, why is your hummus so much better? So then I was like, okay, it could be like that. And then I had Adam's hummus. And I was like, I think my mind just like literally shifted. i didn't know it could be like like that. It was like the silkiest, smoothest, tahini forward.
00:10:42
Speaker
Oh my God, it's just so good. Nice. Yeah. So
Impact of Fatty Foods on the Body
00:10:46
Speaker
quick question here. Yeah. What happens if you feel awful after a falafel? Yeah. Actually, you bring up a book good point. I don't eat falafel anymore, but I do eat hummus.
00:10:56
Speaker
So even though falafelette is the best food truck name I've ever heard my life, I don't really eat fried food most of the time. and if you feel – that's actually a great point. We'll just bring it up because if you feel bad after eating fried food, including falafel or just really rich, oily foods like cheeses and oily fried things, it's ah basically because your liver and gallbladder can't handle it.
00:11:19
Speaker
So that's a really good practitioner tip, but also a generic muggle tip, which is like, oh, I can't process this much fat. it's It's not because you don't need that fat. It's probably because your liver gallbladder doesn't know how to process that much fat, which means you're not releasing enough bile to process it.
00:11:37
Speaker
So how do you train the body to release the bile? Oh, goodness. Well, thank goodness you asked this question because we knew it was coming. um This is where you can turn food into medicine.
00:11:47
Speaker
And yeah, food can always be medicine. But you know people say that and somewhat generically. And I'm like, well, yeah. But what's the last time you fixed even like a digestive disorder, right?
00:11:58
Speaker
With like, let's say Crohn's. How many times have you eaten your Crohn's into healthy, like gut? I mean, that's a toffee. Unless you're putting long land on your food.
00:12:11
Speaker
It counts as food if it's grounded to anything powdery. We'll train your body to create and release bile. Correct. So basically, yeah this is the rehab liver diet, which is all the other things that we're saying because keep that happening. Inflammation still a pain in the butt for that.
00:12:27
Speaker
But the biggest trick here is cruciferous vegetables and something called choline. And so the trick here is how do I, um, how do I get my liver to enzymatically function better? Uh, I, that was the summary. Let me go to the specifics now.
00:12:45
Speaker
I'd recommend as a foundation of what we see as a liver is not a sponge. Everybody thinks sponge. I don't know why people think sponge. Maybe it's because the liver looks funny if you've ever eaten liver, but it's not a sponge. It's not soaking anything up.
00:12:58
Speaker
It's not storing any toxins. It's not a sponge. It's a chemical changing factory. And what it is, is a bunch of, let's say a bunch of little rooms and in those rooms are little enzyme worker people.
00:13:10
Speaker
And their job is to see what's coming in and be like, eh, we don't want that in the bloodstream. We're gonna change that to this chemical now. We see the sugar, maybe we don't want the sugar. We see the lactose, maybe we don't want that lactose. We see the alcohol and we definitely don't want that alcohol.
00:13:24
Speaker
So it sees the alcohol and it's like, ah, we gotta get this thing out of the body pronto. This is poison. Your liver knows it's poison. But your liver doesn't store alcohol. People think that's what alcohol damage is on the liver.
00:13:36
Speaker
It's because your liver sees the alcohol and knows it's straight up poison. And it has to turn it from an alcohol into an aldehyde. And if you don't like chemistry, just avoid the words that I just said. But the point is, is what they're saying is, we don't like alcohol. Let's turn this into something that pees out faster.
00:13:52
Speaker
And aldehydes pee out really fast. And so your body's like, oh, great. Well, now we're just going to, the the kidney is going to do the next half of this, which is they're going to pee it out for us. We didn't absorb anything. We just chemically changed this with an enzyme.
00:14:05
Speaker
So the liver is a ginormous enzyme factory that employs all these enzymes. And so what we want to do to rehab a liver is get that working again. And the best thing to do it, this is actually almost better than herbs.
00:14:18
Speaker
It works phenomenal if you combine it with herbs, but it works. In this case, I think food almost becomes herbal in medicine, um like in strength, cruciferous vegetables. Cruciferous vegetables, which is a ginormous category. if you're not familiar with it, just Google that bad boy.
00:14:33
Speaker
But it's got all the yummy greens starting from cabbages to bok choys to broccolis to cauliflowers um to chards to kales to arugulas. ah So many good veggies are in this category that we eat in and in every grocery store.
Improving Digestion of Fats and Vegetables
00:14:49
Speaker
The cruciferous vegetables literally change the enzyme function of your liver and they help rehab it back to what it should be. Whereas all the liver damage comes a lot from shifting those enzymes to what they shouldn't be.
00:15:03
Speaker
We're turning our liver into an alcohol get ridder, and what we should be is ah food processor or something else, right? But we shifted all those because of damaging things that we we're putting in our body, and now we need to shift them back.
00:15:16
Speaker
And so the best thing to do is just cruciferous vegetables. I recommend when we're talking about cruciferous, do they have to be raw or cooked is is a common question. They all help. They really do all help. If you want to really rehab your liver, though, you do want a little bit of raw vegetables.
00:15:30
Speaker
And it doesn't have to be much, let's say 10%. And then pick one that's easier to digest. I know um for all our Chinese practitioners, Chinese medicine practitioners here, you'll be like, wait a second, they told me never eat raw vegetables.
00:15:43
Speaker
That's not true. First of all, that's not true, but let's we'll we'll do another episode on that if we really want to. But the gist here is pick the ones that move themselves. And the easiest way to know that is the flavor is pungent, spicy, or Akron.
00:15:57
Speaker
And so arugula is one of my faves. Yeah. I'm not going to a kale salad all the time. I'll eat a raw arugula whenever you give it to me. Less is that what that curly kale is is pretty okay raw.
00:16:08
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Is that a lacinto? lacinato or whatever it is? They just do like the little like lemon, oil, whatever, on like a curly kale, and it's pretty tolerable.
00:16:19
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I will eat it. just like to eat it every day because that can weaken each blade. yeah Yeah, Well, and so just a quick shout out to the... to the people saying don't eat raw vegetables.
00:16:31
Speaker
Most of us aren't subsistence farmers who live out in inclement weather. Totally. Day in day out. So if that is your case, probably cook all your veggies because you'll want something easy to digest in warming. but That's so true.
00:16:46
Speaker
And if you know you're spleen deficient, if you guys know, if the listeners know what that means, then you have to gauge it accordingly. The more deficient you are. The less you can handle, but almost every spleen can handle some arugula.
00:16:59
Speaker
So when I was thinking about this, the fats and oils for these people, too hard to digest, right? It's like two too big of a molecule for them to break down without the bile. yeah Or you could just think of it as too much fat coming in, not enough bile to help, not not enough bile to break it down.
00:17:15
Speaker
Right, right. So we're struggling to break stuff down and then we're giving them the dark leafy greens, which are also as like a category harder to break down.
00:17:27
Speaker
Not as hard as, you know what mean? Cause a lot of these you cook before because you just ate them raw. Correct. Too hard to break it down. Is there a bit in this, like we're training on like a low stress thing for the body to like switch over?
00:17:41
Speaker
Yes. And I would say the biggest difference here is the target organ that's having the challenge. So when we say not enough bile coming out or not enough bile at the right time, by the way, so there is ah this this component of how do we get the signaling right, that it releases the bile when we want it to release the bile.
00:18:00
Speaker
And so ah that's a liver issue. But when it's eating the dark leafy green, and how can we said too much raw vegetable or too hard to digest? At that point, we're no longer talking about our liver. We're talking about our spleen.
00:18:13
Speaker
So now the challenge has shifted to a spleen, which you bring up a really great point, which is what if you want to rehab a liver and don't have good spleen function? That is a bit of a pickle because now you can't eat the green vegetables that we are necessary to rehab your liver in larger quantities.
00:18:29
Speaker
right And so there's tricks around that. And the tricks are... one One good trick that is really easily available is juicing.
Role of Choline in Liver Health
00:18:41
Speaker
Now, we just said juicing is bad because it takes away the fiber, but don't forget the fiber is what's challenging for a lot of spleens to process. That doesn't mean you don't want some fiber, but if you've, and this is very importantly, I'm talking about vegetable juices that are not root vegetable juices.
00:18:59
Speaker
So if you juice kale, Literally anyone can hit process that. Like a baby could process that. A cancer patient can process that. And you get so many nutrients out of it.
00:19:10
Speaker
So if you juice the things that you can't eat raw, it's actually a really cool workaround that lets a spleen absorb it almost immediately and not really harm a spleen and get to the point that we want, which is to help the liver function better.
00:19:27
Speaker
Nice. Didn't you just add ginger to that to help with the the raw, cool nature? Heck yeah. So if yeah, if you if if you had a bunch of kale, um like a whole bunch of kale, and then like, let's say one to two inches of, even one inch is fine. It'll be nice and spicy, but one inch of ginger, I'm talking like an inch of like the little finger projection guys.
00:19:46
Speaker
um Heck yeah. That'd be super duper great. And the second trick is if you're not going to juice it, you can you can cook it. And that is the same thing. It's breaking it down. And that's the ancient way of doing it.
00:19:57
Speaker
But again, if you're looking for some enzymatic changes, I'd recommend some um some raw, in this case, juice. did I do think not everybody needs juicing though. So a lot of people are like, oh well, why why don't we just juice all the time then?
00:20:11
Speaker
Well, you no longer need the help, then it's you know get the fiber in there because that's good for other things too. And the fiber that we're talking about, ah insoluble or soluble?
00:20:22
Speaker
Great point. Mostly um insoluble. Right. Okay. Because insoluble is going to be food for the microbiome? Correct. It's going to make its way all the way through. Yeah. Okay.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah. So basically think the veggie ones are like the husks of things. its yus Yeah. Seeds. Psyllium husk is a really common one. Super useful. Yeah.
00:20:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah. do you want to recap the rehab? Yeah. Well, so we actually, we have one half of, so we got one half of it, which is the get the liver to enzymatically work better. And that's the cruciferous vegetables. And then that second thing that we mentioned was choline.
00:20:58
Speaker
And choline is just this interesting chemical that we need for lots of things like acetylcholine in our body. um We also need it to help build bile, which is, again, really key. And so choline is found in a ton of foods. You don't have to go buy it.
00:21:13
Speaker
You can if you want like a supplement. But again, I just basically try not to ever use supplements like artificially produced ones. So just get it from a food. And if you're not vegan, it's really easy because it's egg yolks.
00:21:26
Speaker
um And that has to be runny. And if it is runny, ah meaning it could be purely liquid, it could be like cooked where it's still a runny yolk, then you get three key benefits.
00:21:37
Speaker
And that's fat soluble vitamins, which who doesn't want more vitamins. Number two, lecithin. And that's really important for moving cholesterol around your body, which we can talk to in a cholesterol episode because Asher touched on this.
00:21:49
Speaker
what Western medicine thought they knew about cholesterol, what they think they know about it, and what we consider about it is vastly, it's just ever-changing landscape. And so we can talk about that more. And then the third really important thing is choline. You get a booty ton of choline.
00:22:03
Speaker
And so that's think of that as like fuel for rebuilding a liver and building up its cool like key elements like bile. So basically, a runny yolk and vegetables is how to rehab your liver.
00:22:15
Speaker
If you do that every day, it really, really is helpful. runny yolk and dark greens dark leafy greens wow sweet i know what i'm putting in my next soup we'll do some of those eggs that are boiled with it still running on the inside. Oh yeah. Is that a six minute egg or whatever they call it?
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So jammy would still work for those foodies out there. Jammy egg. I'm, I'm, ah I'm a little bit more of a fan of a, a, like a closer to like a soft boiled or the poached ones. Oh my God. Like poached. Yeah.
00:22:47
Speaker
Dude, I have, I have figured out how, how to poach just pure egg whites though. Wow. It's super easy. It's part of the reason I figured it out is because it's easier and poaching is hard. Yeah. Yeah, i was going to say, I feel like poaching eggs little bit harder. That's what we've done, the like the five-minute egg or whatever. Yeah, this is super easy. So the way I've been eating my eggs for eight or nine years now, yeah, it is eight or nine years. That's been a long time since started this, is I crack them into a bowl, however I'm going to do. I usually do four eggs per meal if I'm going to eat eggs.
00:23:18
Speaker
um But you don't have to do that. If you want to get these choline benefits that we're talking about, a single egg a day is still amazing. um So however you want to do
Egg Yolks: Health Benefits and Usage
00:23:26
Speaker
that. And if you don't want to eat eggs, if you're a vegan or something, I just looked this up for one of my vegan patients.
00:23:31
Speaker
um She does, there are ways to do it. So you can do like lima beans and broccoli and um navy beans. So there are vegetarian sources of choline. It's just, I mean, if you can eat the super mega dose of one egg yolk, it's just the bomb.
00:23:46
Speaker
So what I do is I crack all the eggs I'm going to eat in a bowl. And then I wash my hands real good because salmonella and a lot of other things would just be on the outside of the shell, not the inside of the shell.
00:23:58
Speaker
And then once I've got those clean hands, then I go in and I dig in and I pull the, um each year like, you egg up at a time and I let the whites strip between my fingers and just pull off the white as well as those little dangly white bits so that the clearish egg white and then also the white dangly things called the Corian and some other stuff and then you just have a pure egg yolk you just set it in a bowl um and I set it to the side and then I cook my whites however I want to cook them they could poaching them that could be something else and then I just make a sauce out of the yolks I never even
00:24:30
Speaker
I don't bother cooking them for having even, they don't ever even see the heat. Nice. I think it's easier. i don't have to worry about overcooking shit. And it's, people are like, well you'll get salmonella. No, you won't.
00:24:44
Speaker
One in a hundred thousand eggs has salmonella. Here's a good rule. If your egg hisses when you open it don't eat that egg. Yeah.
00:24:53
Speaker
This is like there's a dragon like coming out. Don't eat that. Yeah, no. and yeah You know, get high quality eggs. That's that's a no brainer, right? So find farm farm fresh eggs or something.
00:25:04
Speaker
Keep them refrigerated. i know that sounds funny, but some places don't refrigerate their eggs. And then you've got, but you know, they're totally fine. I've been doing it for nine years. Now, of course, you know, people should do whatever they're comfortable with, but I can tell you from my own experience, I've been eating four eggs per time, at which is like probably averages out to about once every day, or maybe every other day, multiply that by eight years. i have eaten a whole lot of egg yolks. Um,
00:25:29
Speaker
And they're great. And so the easiest way to make- And not salmonella once. Never had the salmonella. No, not a single time. And the way that I like to make a sauce out of it is just add some salt, some flavoring, which usually ends up being a little garlic powder or something.
00:25:44
Speaker
And very importantly, some acid. And that can just be white vinegar. You can do lemon juice, whatever. And I call it it like a lazy man's hollandaise sauce or something. It's a great little sauce. Why very importantly on the acid?
00:25:56
Speaker
Oh, ah well, number of reasons. One is it makes it so much more palatable. um Okay. Like it actually makes it a sauce. Yeah, yolks are delicious on their own.
00:26:07
Speaker
ah Number two is i think it makes it kind of cuts the cloyingness of them. Oh, sure. So, yeah, that would be the next one. it says you Because you're doing it raw.
00:26:18
Speaker
Correct. And it's just all this yin. but That's right. You're literally sucking up an embryo. Well, i was sucking up an embryo is food. The egg yolk is actually there. Sure, sure, sure.
00:26:29
Speaker
We're stealing embryo food. By the way, how much are eggs on the mainland right now? Well, we just couldn't get them sometimes. That's still the problem. um And now they're like, so if anybody who's in like the Colorado e region, shout out to natural grocers because they have the best eggs. Oh my God.
00:26:48
Speaker
So it's just one of our local grocery stores and they've got, um they they do their eggs in tiers like bronze, silver, and gold level eggs. Yeah. And I've like basically only eaten their bronze ones because I'm like, well, it's like the eggs I get are, of course, they're cage free.
00:27:08
Speaker
They're omega three because they feed them so flax seeds. So that produces more egg omega three, which is brilliant. And it's like run in solar powered barns run by Mennonite farmers.
00:27:20
Speaker
And somehow that's a bronze level egg. And I'm like, wow i don't know what you're doing for your gold level eggs, but I am fine with the bronze here. I'm just going to be a cheap bastard here. And it's like, it was like three ish or maybe it was four bucks a dozen. Now I think it's maybe it's four or maybe went up to five, but it hasn't gone above that. Yeah.
00:27:41
Speaker
Yeah. That's still cheaper than what it was out here before our egg thing happened. wait What is it out there? o maybe it's like seven eight now for a dozen at the store post avian flu yeah post avian flu and before it was like five six and are these like really yummy good quality ones too no this is just whatever crap it gets shipped out here no freaking way no wonder you because you have you have some hens chickens yeah we get like five eggs a day right now oh that's great
00:28:16
Speaker
See, that is the stuff. i Even in certain parts, like in Wheat Ridge and here in Colorado, you can have chickens. You can have it in lots of places, even Lafayette, but you have to be like 30 feet from everyone else's doorstep or there's like certain rules.
00:28:29
Speaker
Is that for just having a rooster or is that having any? I think it's any of them. but Yeah. We had to get rid of our rooster because our neighbors didn't like them. ah We didn't have to. We could have made us, but we were like, okay.
00:28:43
Speaker
Just be friendly. yeah Yeah. And there's roosters. You hear roosters all over the place out here because we have, we have wild chickens just running around. Yeah. So I was like off of the chickens, off that rooster. Um, yeah. What did we do with that one? We gave that one away cause someone wanted it.
00:29:02
Speaker
So that was nice. We got a nice, good home. Oh, nice. So you's still alive. Yeah, for for the time being. and tell you Because he was he was he was just a one-crower in the morning. That's okay.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yeah, if people have had roosters before, you know they they come in ah varying amounts of annoyance
Healthy Carbohydrate Alternatives
00:29:24
Speaker
audibly. They also come in different kind of personalities with, are they going to attack you when you go into the coop kind of thing. So this one was friendly and and was pretty quiet. So was pretty easy to find someone who wanted them.
00:29:36
Speaker
That's sweet. Yeah. Yeah. um Sweet. So I actually wanted to wrap back to because we had this idea going on earlier of the carbs that we got away from and their scaliness.
00:29:51
Speaker
Oh, yes. We did the bad, real bad monosaccharides, grain, sugar, small things. Yep. Then we did a little bit better was ancient grains or that's right seeds.
00:30:06
Speaker
And then we had
00:30:09
Speaker
what borderline good was starches. Yeah. The best bad, the best bad. There you go. And so how much like, I don't know, like if, if you wanted to eat a sweet potato, yeah like do you eat like a quarter of a sweet potato and call it good? Like I didn't like blow out my, my spleen or I didn't blow out my glycemic index.
00:30:32
Speaker
That's a great point. Um, ah like here's a good example. Like I, so I just don't eat them right at home. But if I'm traveling, I don't have that luxury. So like we just went to Santa Fe and Albuquerque a couple weeks ago.
00:30:45
Speaker
And we were in this place and they had like a like a sweet potato hash that was like sweet potato with like different kinds of greens and like a tomatillo salsa. And I forget what it was, some vegetarian protein, I think, on it.
00:31:00
Speaker
It was great. You know, that didn't, that didn't feel like it set me back. I didn't feel any slump after that. um And that probably had, I'm going to guess like a third max of a sweet potato in there.
00:31:13
Speaker
So a third of a roasted sweet potato, unless they're small, maybe. So like, you know, the standard kind of sweet potatoes you get in that. I don't think it was more than a third of that, maybe two fifths. Anyway, I think that's enough. That's like for per meal, that probably won't set you back if you're not doing it every day.
00:31:28
Speaker
Right. Okay. So you can do a little bit of these things. Just yeah um don't go too crazy. Yeah. All right. But at home, it's like, dude, butternut or kabocha squash cook just as fast.
00:31:40
Speaker
So that's what I'm going to be cooking because that's that's just on the good side, you know? No, and and and way tastier too. Yeah. Okay. So now what, what are the good carbs that right I should be eating that Steven eats all the time?
00:31:55
Speaker
So the squash pumpkin ones are really great. um and then here we can also think about like two big categories of carbs that I think are really, really useful. So remember when we we did two spectrums, just to keep everybody's mentally ah mental images clear here, we did the spectrum of the nonos, which is really the sugars and the starches.
00:32:14
Speaker
And they they were the two ends of the spectrum, meaning the mono or disaccharides, and then the big ones, the polysaccharides. The one in the middle, though, was called oligosaccharides. And we said that was beans. And then we've got all the good carbs that are, you know, they do have some of like whatever her sugars and starches in them, but so low, it doesn't matter. And that's the, um, the squashes and the pumpkins and all those bad boys.
00:32:37
Speaker
Um, I do put a couple others in there. So if I was going to say what are like the top five carbs I eat that aren't beans, cause we'll get to beans in just a second. and It's squashes and pumpkins. We'll put that in one category.
00:32:48
Speaker
Um, One quick thing about that is aim for the orange ones because the orange ones are the ones that tend to build blood better. So squashes and carbs, if you want to build blood, if you're aiming for a diuretic function though, aim for the light fluffy ones, which is like the zucchinis and the yellow squashes, because those ones help clear dampness by promoting urination.
00:33:08
Speaker
So both sides of that spectrum. Mm-hmm. How strong for clearing dampness? Like what level of damp clearing are you expecting to get out of zucchini? I would say um a quarter to a fifth of an herb strength.
00:33:23
Speaker
So not nothing. nothing. We're about the same strength as an azuki bean or a mung bean. Ooh, gotta love me an azuki bean. Yeah. Which is funny because it does both then, right? So then that gets us also into the oligosaccharide category of too.
00:33:38
Speaker
But yeah, so the ah pumpkins and squashes are in one big category. I forget, the the ah chemical chemically, they did identify one chemical in pie pumpkin that's good for building blood. I forget what it was called. it but So that's key. Just make sure you pair it with a source of iron, like Italian parsley.
00:33:55
Speaker
So that pumpkin parsley combo is really great. Then the second grouping of um carbs that we'll sometimes eat are rutabagas. And rutabagas are, they're not perfect.
00:34:06
Speaker
but they're so much better than a potato. um And it's interesting that in a rutabaga, it has so very little starch and of the kind of quote unquote bad carbs that they have, it's actually just a little bit of natural sugars in them.
00:34:20
Speaker
So it's not perfect. It's not a squash, but it is really fun and it's so satisfying to eat. So, you know, every other week or every a couple times a month, maybe we'll have some rutabagas. You can cook them however you want. They cook just like a potato. They really just taste better.
00:34:35
Speaker
So just peel them and then, you know, mash them, whatever, or you can make some great stuff. ah Next one, celery root. And this basically counts as one of the good ones. um Sometimes people call it celery-ac,
00:34:48
Speaker
Huh. I've never come across it. I think it's, I mean, it's literally the root of the celery plant. And without a doubt, 100%, the ugliest root vegetable you've ever seen in your life.
00:35:00
Speaker
Like, it's like the butt of the the the whole row of root vegetables up there. So look for the gnarliest, nobbliest one, and that's the celery root. And it's the fanciest one. It's super delicious.
00:35:12
Speaker
for um this little food For foodies out there, look up Chef John Food Wishes. He's got a channel on YouTube. And look for his celery root puree. Oh, my goodness.
00:35:23
Speaker
It's just phenomenal. It's like the fanciest thing you've ever done, but it's so good. So I just count that as one of the good carbs. It takes a little more effort just because it's so gnarly. you got to use a knife to peel instead of like a vegetable peeler.
00:35:36
Speaker
Sure. Okay. So that would be in there. ah I'm trying to think that's pretty much all the carbs that I kind of think of. and you know yeah trying to say.
00:35:48
Speaker
then the beans, yeah. Then the beans. So we might as well just toss the beans in there now. And so beans are that middle category called oligosaccharides. And there's a really easy way to think about this. So a lot of people are like, well, you're not doing keto if you eat beans. And beans have a tons of carbs. And again, I tell them, well, what carb? Which is oligosaccharides.
00:36:06
Speaker
And the easiest way to know why beans are healthy for us is that they're good for diabetics. If diabetics ate more beans, they'd have less diabetes. And so do that.
00:36:18
Speaker
even I know we're not all diabetic, hopefully. And so eat what diabetics should eat to help prevent diabetes, right? Which is these oligosaccharides. And so some people will also take oligosaccharide powder. Now I've seen that.
00:36:31
Speaker
People take it they're like, dude, just eat beans. You don't have to... Same thing with like triglycerides. What is it? Medium chain triglycerides, MCTs. lot of people will buy that powder and stuff. Just eat coconut stuff. Coconut oil. Jesus. Yeah. It's just, it comes from coconuts. Just eat the co source. Right.
00:36:49
Speaker
Right. And you probably get other stuff too in there. Totally. It's like, why are you? We have that very nutritionist, separatist microscope on.
00:37:02
Speaker
It's so true, right? How come people won't just eat the coconut milk and then they want to buy it in a i like a bag that someone's labeled that this is like healthier for you? like no but No. Because they you want to buy your health.
00:37:15
Speaker
It's like this virtue signaling. I spent money on my health today. Right. And it's almost quantitative. I spent this much money, so I have this much more health. Yeah. And if I just ate beans that are cheap, can't, I'm going back to that cost 99 cents. You're like, well, this not going to fix my problem.
00:37:33
Speaker
Exactly. Exactly. so What is it about the the beans where the the sugars from the carbs aren't acting the same way on the body as they would otherwise? i love that you asked this question. And this is why some people are promoting oligosaccharides in the form of powders.
00:37:51
Speaker
They're basically a prebiotic. And what that means is these oligosaccharides, which is a chain of, it is carbohydrates. It makes its way, but just like fiber would, it makes its way ah through our digestion, through our small intestines.
00:38:04
Speaker
down to our colon, which means it wasn't absorbed through the barrier or like the the membrane. And so it didn't increase blood sugar or it did minimally. Right. And so what basically anything that's going to make it past your small intestine no longer gets absorbed into your body.
00:38:21
Speaker
Now it goes into your colon where it can fuel the biome that's in there. Cause in a healthy person, most of our microbiome is in our colon and our large intestine. If it goes up into the small intestine, that's a disease called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that we mentioned. It's where the bacteria is it A, too plentiful, and B, in the wrong spot.
00:38:41
Speaker
so Once it gets all the way down there, it feeds those guys. And how do we know? First of all, glycemically. So we know our blood sugar doesn't skyrocket um the way it would with other carbohydrates. And number two is we get a little farty sometimes because we're feeding the microbiome that then is like, yeah, we finally get to eat. And so they produce, they're a little gassy stuff too.
00:39:02
Speaker
Right, right. But it doesn't mean you should have really intense gas with beans. um If that's the case, you might not be you might not have enough or the right microbiome to process Yeah, might be changing over too.
00:39:14
Speaker
I feel like a lot of times there's, if you change your diet, there's a die-off that happens in your microbiome. And that can be uncomfortable to experience and also can be gassy.
00:39:25
Speaker
Correct. Correct. You can experience it firsthand or secondhand. Yeah, it's an experience for everybody. But it is real. It's like if you see people like, oh, I can't handle lentils.
00:39:37
Speaker
I'm like, well, try them first, right? try Try stuff that's like ground up, easier to process lentil stuff and try it a lower dose and then ease your way into the quantity. And you'll probably build up the function, the microbiome, the enzyme function, all that stuff to be able to process them.
00:39:52
Speaker
Same thing with, you know, there's some things that we're just like, whoa, I cannot handle that. And it could be like, i just can't eat broccoli. Broccoli just tears me up. Well, maybe that's because you literally are missing that enzyme. So maybe that's not the vegetable for you.
00:40:06
Speaker
But most of us can build up the tolerance and a really good way of processing those, all the beans and stuff like that. Right. And then our two two favorite, which you mentioned, were mung beans and azuki beans. So just over here, what unique kind of ah TCM function do these two have that maybe the other beans don't have as much?
Beans and Their Health Benefits
00:40:28
Speaker
Totally. So these guys are both diuretics and the mung bean is the green one, the azuki is the little red one. So we call a little red bean in Chinese. um trueia do And then the mung bean, we call it green bean in Chinese.
00:40:41
Speaker
So we've got the green ones and the red ones, and they're both diuretics. So what that means is a Chinese medicine diuretic is um a little different than the Western medicine diuretic. Because we're not trying to pee more.
00:40:54
Speaker
We're trying to load more into our pee. And when we say load more, we're saying load inflammatory stuff or metabolic waste and stuff. So they're both great.
00:41:05
Speaker
And the main difference is one is slightly cooling and the one is slightly warming. And so in the summertime, we do the cooling one, which is the green one, the mung bean. And the winter one time, we do the slightly warming one, which is the azuki bean.
00:41:17
Speaker
Does azuki bean also generate more fluids than the mung bean? That's a great question. i would say yes, but that's more experiential than it is from what I've been taught.
00:41:30
Speaker
um Like, so a good example is I would say more, yeah, definitely more than not. The red bean paste is in like in desserts and stuff like that.
00:41:41
Speaker
And you can do the mung bean paste. It's pretty good. It comes out yellowish when they make that one. Oh, okay. i didn't know they did mung bean paste. Yeah. Like inside sesame balls and stuff. It's mostly the adzuki, but sometimes they use mung.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That one has too much sugar in it, but it's, it is, you can make other delicious things without adding the sugar. Yeah. Nice. Great. Yeah.
00:42:04
Speaker
Or add monk fruit. So that's another thing is people like, well, so how do you, like I said, i you know, I'd say at least like one out of four weeks we're eating chocolate cake for breakfast and stuff.
00:42:17
Speaker
And it's super easy. It's like eight ingredients. It's, I got it from like a keto mug cake recipe. I'll put it on the episode if you guys, if we want it. So you guys can get it.
00:42:28
Speaker
But part of the reason it's such a good recipe is it's from a keto mug cake. And I didn't even know mug cakes existed until I came back to America. And I guess I'll say this for the other 2% of people who don't know what this is.
00:42:39
Speaker
You just mix it up in a mug and microwave it. And I was like, that exists? i don't love I don't like to microwave, but I was like, whoa, I didn't even know that that existed. And so I just transformed it into a baking recipe because I like ovens better.
00:42:54
Speaker
And so, and so um but it's super duper easy. And, but this gets to a really good point, which is, okay, if we're not going to use sugar, what can we
Alternative Sweeteners and Their Impact
00:43:03
Speaker
use? And I'd recommend the two best ones are monk fruit powder, which you can find.
00:43:10
Speaker
But most of the ones you find in the grocery store have a bunch of erythritol, which I don't actually think is that big of a deal. It is zero on the glycemic. The problem with any of the alls, and this is the xylitols, the erythritols, all the alls, sorbitol, is they're sugar alcohols.
00:43:25
Speaker
That's why they ended it all alcohol. But because there's sugar alcohol, there's zero glycemic index. But what they come from is basically, erythritol is basically the the sugar that's found in ripening fruit or maybe even overripe fruit.
00:43:41
Speaker
So imagine- It's like what a banana is pushing out. Right. Or like a really ripe apple, like probably a little too ripe. but And imagine what happens if you eat two of those.
00:43:52
Speaker
He'd be a gassy mess, right? And so the biggest thing with all the alls is it makes people rid pretty gassy most of the time. So I don't think there's a big issue with it, but I prefer not to recommend people get super gassy.
00:44:04
Speaker
And there's, you know, we haven't eaten them for super long enough, so we could check that out more. And so instead, I'd go recommend people do the monk fruit pure powder, which you can find online. I get mine off website called nuts.com, but now it's probably not going to have any more stock anymore.
00:44:20
Speaker
Just remember, pure monk fruit powder is like 200 times or 250 times stronger than sugar. Yeah, it's like crazy strong. Yeah. Like a teaspoon is a whole cake.
00:44:33
Speaker
Actually, this movement this recipe I was talking about, the mug cake turned into ah like a shortbread recipe is just like one teaspoon of that. So it lasts a long time when you get a little bag of that.
00:44:44
Speaker
Anyway, that's a great one. And I like that one the best because it's an entirely separate category of chemical. It's called a mogricide instead of ah a sugar alcohol or something. So it's not even the same category. It doesn't make people bloating at all.
00:44:57
Speaker
um And it comes from monk fruit, which is called lohanguo, and that clears lung inflammation. So hell yeah, if there's any residuals from that, you're just clearing a little lung inflammation um because it's yeah that's ah an herb we use.
00:45:10
Speaker
Sweet. And then if you're stubbing out for your cake, you're stubbing out the grain flour. Correct. And you're putting in, I'm assuming, a nut flour, like coconut or almond or... Exactly. In fact, both.
00:45:21
Speaker
So my favorite is usually a combo of those two. So if you're allergic to nuts, you'd have to work around this a little differently. But I usually like it's roughly like a three-ish or four to one, four parts of almond flour to one part coconut usually. i forget the exact ratio, but most of my dessert-y recipes are going to be somewhere close to there, like a four to one, maybe a five to one.
00:45:43
Speaker
The basic gist is you want the almond flour to keep it like lighter and give it like the mass. And don't forget almonds are super, you know, they're just basically a perfect balance between fat and protein. So heck yeah.
00:45:55
Speaker
And then the coconut flour is basically pure fiber. So we already mentioned how good fiber is, but if you do too much coconut flour in a recipe, it'll turn into like a brick. Yeah. And so if you don't do anything, it won't absorb the fluids right. And so then it's like crumbly.
00:46:11
Speaker
So the coconut flour basically acts as a binder here. um You just don't want it to make it heavy and bricky. Nice. It's replacing the long glucose chain from the flour.
00:46:23
Speaker
That's exactly right. The gluten and the glucose chain. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And then the other sweetener I so i recommend people use is Stevia. I know there's mixed opinions on it and some people don't love the taste of it, but I think it's great. I was even reading some research about how it might resensitize some insulin receptors, which and if it does in that case, then that would actually be not only neutral, but like double, like helpful for diabetes. Yeah.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So like, you know, people will do like, there's Zevia, the Stevia sweetened drinks. Yeah. That's a great thing to get people on instead of doing like, um, Cokes and sodas and stuff.
00:47:01
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my God. Just, just sugar water. Oh my. And the amount people. Yes. Like it's, I don't even think a literal can of sugar would be the same amount.
00:47:13
Speaker
It's an enormous amount because it's so concentrated in the liquid. It's insane. Yeah. It's like a if you were to pour out that amount of sugar on the table and just be like, drink that yeah in the next 20 minutes. Oh, yeah.
00:47:25
Speaker
They'd be like, no, I'm not. That's gross. You're like, that's what you're doing. Yeah, exactly. Same thing with noodles. Dude, in China, i remember this one Qigong teacher, of he came to our our campus. He was good at Qigong too.
00:47:37
Speaker
Very nicely rounded, ah little rotund. um Well, good belly breathing then. Good belly breathing. Yeah. But then and we found out the real reason why is one of my friends went to lunch with him and he ate like two ginormous bowls of noodles for lunch.
00:47:53
Speaker
Yeah. And like, yeah, if you like, you know, if you're going to eat a carb you're going to eat a noodle, eat like the hand pulled ones in China, but that's an enormous amount of
Carbohydrates and Health Misconceptions
00:48:04
Speaker
carbs. And you look at that and you just turn it immediately to sugar.
00:48:07
Speaker
no one's going to eat two giant bowls of sugar, like you said, for lunch. Right. But how come it's fine if it's a noodle form and like, Change the way we think. You know, I know I've had trouble with this with certain people, like im especially the older folks that I've been working with. They're like, oh, yeah, is this like that no carb nonsense? And I'm like, look, you asked me for the health advice, right? I'm telling you that the normal way is not working for you. Yeah.
00:48:33
Speaker
Maybe we need to paint some more gray into your facial hair. That might help. But it does feel weird. And it's usually like people who are seniors that I have to not lecture, but nicely kind of like point out that their diet is the same as when they were 20 and that they're no longer 20 and it's not working. And it feels strange coming from 30 odd something year old.
00:48:56
Speaker
Apparently, according to my wife, I look 40. So maybe I'm good. Well, I am 40. So we'll be 40 buds. Yeah. um No, it's it's so real, right? And I think, you know, everybody gets stuck in their habits, but I'm like, I don't know what it just, yeah, there's still unknowns. There's so many unknowns, like we were saying in medicine, but here we're talking more about nutrition science.
00:49:21
Speaker
And, but the amount of science that is built up, the good, reliable, you know, data against carbs is just, in my point, in my opinion, is now irrefutable.
00:49:32
Speaker
Like there is just no, Like I heard this from Chinese professors and for any of you guys know about Chinese via stereotype or of been toina to China, they eat a lot of rice. And so when a Chinese person tells you like, yeah, know I'm not supposed to eat the rice. I'm like, all right, you know, as long as you know,
00:49:50
Speaker
You go for it. Yeah, yeah. Because this is just – I don't know if people knew this. I looked this up when I was there, so I bet it's shifted a little bit. But this was like a five- or seven-year-old stat. The number of diabetics per capita in China was more than in America.
00:50:06
Speaker
Wow. And so people are like, oh, Asians are good. They're like so thin. Yeah, until they hit diabetes. um At that point, I forget when – this was like eight years ago. I looked it up. America was at 11% of our whole population was diabetic, which is enormous.
00:50:21
Speaker
And China was 13%. 13% of their whole population, which when you count a billion and a half people, that is an enormous amount of diabetics in that country.
00:50:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's stunning. So I know it's, it's so funny because people like, Oh, but how could rice be bad? It's not what we're supposed to be eating. Got change your, your mental state.
00:50:45
Speaker
Just because it feels normal to you does not make it normal for your body. Yeah. And then just ah bring him back to the same thing I've been bringing up the whole time is the rice that you're eating today is not the rice that your ancestors were eating that you're considering normal. So it's not, it's not apples to apples.
00:51:02
Speaker
Oh, snap. It's not grains to grains. And you brought another great point, which is we're not subsistence farmers who have dry, cracked tongues. Sure. right If you show up to me in my clinic and you have the driest, crackiest tongue in the world, I will recommend you eat some carbs. Yeah.
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah. Or if you're just like the ranchers or people who are active all day, it's like if you're active 10 to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, like you can probably handle
Lifestyle Impact on Digestion
00:51:28
Speaker
carbs. therere Their digestive systems are, it's really interesting to see that in our modern age and have a comparison of what, if you're active, like I said, 10 to 12 hours a day. Yeah.
00:51:41
Speaker
kind of what your baseline digestive level is and how you're responding to herbs or dietary changes versus when you're sedentary for 10 14 hours a day and maybe active for like one to two or something.
00:51:53
Speaker
So true, dude. What that looks like. It's nuts. Yeah, you bring up a really good one because I think this is going to be hard for people to tackle um from a Western perspective, which is like how soon after and how much quantity of exercise do I have to do in order to be able to eat my carbs?
00:52:12
Speaker
So I've heard people like, well, there's some study. of It was like if you do like 100 toe lifts or heel lifts, like you know when you kind of bounce your heels off the ground.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. you do like a hundred of those after eating carby meal, it'll like counteract it or something. And I'm sure it does to some degree, but the trick here is how much exercise and how soon after eating would you have to do it to counteract the inflammation?
00:52:43
Speaker
And you bring up a really good point, which is, I mean, like you could figure that out, but that actually feels a little bit yeah difficult for a lot of people to really implement in a lifestyle. I think it makes a lot more sense from the way we think of it, which is like what you mentioned, which is that carbs basically generate too much fluids from a Chinese medicine perspective.
00:53:03
Speaker
And if they're generating fluids that you can no longer you don't have the ability to circulate and process, you create dampness. And that's why everybody in China and America and so many countries are full of dampness.
00:53:15
Speaker
And the confusion is is they keep being told to eat grains like in a Chinese school because... Kanji is the one way forward. Yeah, four dry, cracked tongues. That's exactly right. They just didn't tell you that it doesn't tonify a spleen's function. It tonifies a spleen's fluid.
00:53:34
Speaker
And that's, you know, if you already have too much fluids, you're going to just generate more dampness. Right, which is then going to injure your spleen function. Correct. Because it's like wading through a swamp.
00:53:45
Speaker
That's right. Too much yin, the yang can no longer function. That's exactly right.
Herbal Benefits and Clinical Applications
00:53:49
Speaker
So people really need to, and you know, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, I think we should go back through our books, our resources.
00:53:55
Speaker
And anytime we see the word benefit, we should like triple highlight that and be like, benefit what? Right? Like they're like, oh, this herb benefits the throat.
00:54:06
Speaker
Just cross that out because that gives you no clinical application of it. But if it benefits the throat's descending function, oh, well, I mean, let's fix all the plum pit cheese in the world, you know?
00:54:18
Speaker
Right, right. No, it's very reminiscent, too, I think, of some of the worst parts of our medicine in the worst parts of Western medicine where the diagnosis will just be what it is and doesn't tell you how to, like, fix it or what's what's actually going wrong.
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I don't I had one the other day, and it was they gave me this long, complicated Western diagnosis, and then we kind of teased it out, right, all the Latin, and then it was like, oh, that didn't tell me anything. It just told me, I mean, they came in and told me what their symptoms were. yeah They told me this long Western diagnosis, which was just a Latin version of that.
00:54:54
Speaker
Same thing. Nailed it. In our way of thinking, ah the useful stuff is ah almost points you towards the answer or like the diagnosis of something not descending means I should descend that thing.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yeah. Pretty simple. you're You're so right, right? like it's It's funny because I think we're set up to fail. Like I think a lot of the textbooks and the teaching methods were almost set up to fail because of the confusion that's inherent in those. But like you said, it's like if they just said that this thing helps you descend your stomach, well, then all the stomach upsurging stuff, I'm going to use that thing.
Learning Acupuncture Effectively
00:55:36
Speaker
i mean, it almost becomes too obvious, you know, like it feels like a cheat code. And you're like, well, it should feel like a cheat code if it's clear. easy to apply, right? don't Don't worry. It'll get complicated in the clinic room.
00:55:50
Speaker
And then you're like, well, which way do I want to descend the stomach? i Do I want to do it moisteningly? want to it drying? Do want warming? Do want to do it cooling? right Do I want to do it vertically? Do I want to do it horizontally? Do I need to the liver? Yeah. ah So there's there's plenty of complicated things in there. Again, so grateful i got you for herbs and didn't struggle in any anyone else's tutelage.
00:56:14
Speaker
yeah The struggle is just the herbs then, right? Hopefully. Because herbs are hard, but like we shouldn't make a harder. No, not at all. But in for for the practitioners, i mean that's kind of what it is, is that you have to figure out the why yeah of some maybe not as clear ah indication from a book.
00:56:35
Speaker
Well, you brought that up too. and I think you mentioned that as kind of one of the struggles you had when you were at CSTCM, is like you'd ask questions and the teachers would get pissed at you. Yeah, those were... ah If teachers got pissed at me, they they weren't... don't know if this sounds fucked up. They weren't good teachers.
00:56:54
Speaker
Because that's like the thing. If I ask why and they were a good teacher and they didn't have an answer, they'd be like, good question. Yeah. And if they didn't have... And maybe if they didn't have the confidence in themselves or anything else, me asking that question seems flippant or like I'm attacking them or their knowledge. And and they didn't like that.
00:57:13
Speaker
So distinction there. But but for sure, i mean I think a lot of just the way that the tests are oriented to... ah is is just about the superficial indication and not about the, like, why does this point, because I only did acupuncture in school, why did this point do this thing for but this person?
00:57:33
Speaker
um Totally. We have an episode about that, right? Like the difference between functions and indications for acupuncture points. i don't know if we have an episode on it, but I'm sure we've ranted. Ah, the ranty rants.
00:57:48
Speaker
yeah Because it's just another world. It's like, I'll memorize a function any day of the week because it applies to everything in that group. But you want to memorize indications for every one of them?
00:58:00
Speaker
Like that's yeah just asking for the hard way, right? Right, well, and then they would, you know, it's only like the ah hot points are the ones that they're really gonna focus on and then... The hot points, what's that? Is that like the most commonly used ones?
00:58:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, Got it. That was my name for that. ah your Your top picks. but Nice. But I think it's much easier, honestly, it's much easier, I think, to go slower, be less good on tests, and just build up the functional basis because when you're in clinic, that's the one that's gonna be useful anyways.
00:58:32
Speaker
yeah And don't worry about getting an A. Just pass whatever classes you got to pass. um And if you do better every year, than then you're on the right track. I think you're so right on, man.
00:58:42
Speaker
Because I do think so many people, and you're probably right, the A students especially, it's like they're so, they're great being in school. And how come they they know that they like are really scared about going out after school because they didn't develop the functional component?
00:59:00
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't realize that was happening until maybe like my second year or something. i remember like, because I was talking with other students and and then I realized how they were studying and kind of what their focus was on. And i was like, oh, like you you made more work for yourself. Like, don't want to like burst your bubble and be a dick about it. But in that way that they were always looking for the answer to the test instead of like, how do I think about this problem?
00:59:32
Speaker
and starting there and then slowly building up. um So, but that's that's per teacher, that's per student, that's all like a big, you know, our art education system, we always like to harp on it because it's not it's not what any of us would like it to be. But at the same time, i don't think ah it's our responsibility to to really take it to another level anyways.
00:59:56
Speaker
Yeah, the student's responsibility. Yeah, and I think about it like it's much easier for me to go to CSTCM and pick up my Chocho book and like learn a bit about Chinese medicine now than would be to go to fly to China, learn Chinese,
01:00:13
Speaker
find someone who wants to take on highly American student under their tutelage. Right. But if I would have done it that way, right. If that was the only option, uh, the, the inherent difficulty of that would have probably turned out a higher quality product.
01:00:30
Speaker
But yeah, you bring up a great point, which is exactly, um, the feasibility, all that stuff. Right. And also like,
01:00:41
Speaker
You know, people ah sometimes they'll ask me too. They're like, oh, well, you went to school in China. You must just have like had it made. i'm like, there was a lot of problems there too, man. A lot of problems. The trick, like i think just like you're saying is you kind of have to look what's happening around you and know, you know, you don't, you don't want have the benefit of, you know, having 10 years of practitioner training.
01:01:03
Speaker
ship underneath your belt yet, but you can be like, I don't feel comfortable applying this. I don't know enough about this component. I know I need more practice in this. We all have some sense of that.
01:01:14
Speaker
um Even if we're doing it with beginner's eyes and then fill that in, you know? So I, I, I mean, I remind people that like, I had to be in clinic with my advisor three times a week, which was great.
01:01:25
Speaker
And that's more than on some people, um some of the other programs and stuff. And I went to, clinic at least six times a week with other doctors or that I found useful. And I knew i didn't have, I, know, I was working on a time clock there.
01:01:39
Speaker
I didn't know it was going to be an 11 year time clock, but I knew I was like, I got limited time here. Uh, and I, I don't know, i think it's partly cause I was excited to learn it, but you know, that's a really fundamental thing. And like, that's a phrase in martial arts too. They say like practice as if you're about to lose it.
01:01:56
Speaker
Oh, no way. Yeah. Yeah. That is, it's real. Yeah, it really is. So it's like, if you're like, well, I'm tired this week, but I could go spend time in the clinic learning from this great master.
01:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think I should do that. I think if if I had a wish for our education system without overhauling it completely, yeah it would be that our schools attracted good teachers, which did which they do or they can.
01:02:26
Speaker
yeah And then we got to follow them in clinic more because I feel like that was a thing of repetition and how a disease pops up, same disease in multiple different like presentations yeah um that just...
01:02:39
Speaker
kind of would have brought me to another level ah out the gate. Yeah, I totally hear it, man. And it is a great way to see, like, because so um some people reasonably say, like, well, I don't have that perspective. I'm a first year student.
01:02:52
Speaker
Well, go to the clinic and you'll get more perspective. So it is like an almost immediate antidote. It's like fiber or fat counteracting the inflammation. yeah Right, right. And you see it like 20 times in, you know, ah two, three month span and you're going be like, i don't need to think about this anymore. I just, i I've seen it.
01:03:10
Speaker
It's real to me. It doesn doesn't take up memory space. It's a reality that I live with. And I think that's another bit too. like you're memorizing so much stuff, which is you know, just kind of the nature of the beast, but being able to live and experience it brings it to light in a different way and brings it into your, i don't know,
01:03:29
Speaker
field of view brain something in a different way yeah yeah it becomes yeah second nature it's true cool well that's what we'll leave it off for this week um come back next week and we will have part two on dietary stuff so yeah uh i know it's a lot of information but don't forget know like if you eat well it's like 40 of what you can do for your health hell yeah Alright, let's see from the side of the mountains.