What To Eat, When To Eat, and 8 Foods To Avoid

Daniela Giangiorgi

Hi, Laura. Nice to see you all.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yep, I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s introduce you to our audience. You are a mindset empowerment health coach, who is also a Pilates instructor with a muscle activation technique certification, and you have a profound health story yourself. At age 41, you were diagnosed with breast cancer, interrupting the breastfeeding of your one-year-old baby boy, and I love that you’re here because you understand deeply the power of cellular healing and why I stand for restoring mitochondria function and gut health, and you’re a big part of my programs and my business, so I’m really glad that you’re here to support our viewers today, so welcome, and thank you.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Thank you so much, Laura. And yes, I do, for better or for worse, I do really inherently know what you’re talking about and I live it and I breathe it every day, and I’m so thankful that I met you because, not only did I have the cancer going on, but I had a few other things with my energy, with my mood, with anxiety, and things that I felt shame about, I truly did, and you honed in on it. You said, “This has to do with your gut.” And I trusted you. I knew your level of integrity. I knew your work ethic, and I said, “Let’s go for it,” and it was a game changer for me. I got my energy back. I was able to sleep. I recognized myself in the mirror and I like to say that my kids got their mom back, and so for me, that was a priceless journey, and it’s really, truly so exciting to use that experience to pay it forward and help others heal with whatever’s going on in their journey.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Thank you, thank you for sharing your experience, and I’m glad we’re here to facilitate this talk together because we talk a lot about food with our clients. You coach them as well, and food is something we have to do every single day. We’re gonna eat and we gotta do it multiple times a day, so if you’re gonna heal your body, it’s a really important piece.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, Laura, I know that you’ve been a nurse practitioner for, I’d say 20 years and you’ve specialized in preventative and functional medicine. You’ve had this opportunity to work really closely, and you’ve also studied with a long list of the most respected, functional, natural health oriented doctors and experts today. I mean, you’ve been blessed and they have been blessed to work with you, and you find yourself now in a point in your life and in your career, and you’ve built Bio -Radiant Health, and through this, you’re really helping high performing people like you and me and our viewers, and you’re helping them reclaim their energy. You’re helping them with their brain stamina. You’re helping them with their productivity, so many really critical things. And through all that, you’ve become this trusted source, this trusted resource for people who want to build back their health so that their bodies literally can keep up right with their ambition. So I like to say that you’re this go-to source for gut health, for energy health, and for brain health. And in your programs, you set guidelines for food and you teach us that there are actually really only a few foods that people should absolutely remove from their diets, but, for the most part, you don’t get caught up in this minutia of very strict diet plans like veganism or carnivore, for example. So having said that, can you share with us, what should we be eating to support our cellular health?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So that’s funny because food is such a polarizing conversation. It’s almost as polarizing as politics and religion. Truly it is, because there’s this big conversation around vegetarianism, veganism, carnivore, paleo, like, what exactly should you be eating there? The cookbook and diet industry is one of the biggest industries in health and wellness. There are multiple new health and eating plan books coming out every single month, every single year. It’s kind of hard to keep up with, and of course I remember the crazy Atkins craze in the nineties. Yeah, I mean, there’s just so many different ways to eat out there. We just came off of a huge keto craze. I think that’s kind of winding down a little bit, but it’s still popular. Yeah, and I really encourage my patients to eat how they feel best, so if you feel better eating minimal meat and lots of seafood, great. If you thrive on paleo with a high level of animal protein, fantastic. If keto is working for you and your energy levels are high, and your hair isn’t falling out, and your brain is clear, then go for it. I mean, if you prefer to be more vegetarian style and get your protein from beans, legumes, and grains, okay. Let’s do it. A lot of times vegetarians are also eating cheese and dairy products and eggs, and that’s fantastic. Now in terms of veganism, this is one that’s tough. There have been no completely vegan cultures in human history, so none known in human history,

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s fascinating. no indigenous, it is fascinating, and what’s more fascinating is in the long history of human existence, veganism is kind of a new type of eating. In fact, the term was coined in 1944, so very interesting. And so, that said, many successful societies have eaten a mostly plant based diet, including some of the healthiest and longest living populations in the Blue Zones around the world, and then there’s religions like Buddhism and Hinduism who have also incorporated vegetarian ideas for thousands of years, but I will say that most of these cultures have also incorporated animal foods, including cheese, milk, honey, eggs. They might not eat flesh, but they eat other animal foods, and that’s important to note because there are a level of nutrients that we get from animal foods that we don’t get as readily from plant foods, and I mean, people will argue about that. People are polarized about it. People will debate about it, and I’m not here to share a debate, but I am here to share with you what I’ve learned in my 20 years in medicine. So I worked in a very interesting space. I worked in a bone disease clinic, specifically osteoporosis, and something to note, in addition to my functional medicine and preventive medicine, I’m also a certified clinical densitometrist, which means I read bone density. I’m certified to do that. And I worked in this bone clinic for 15 years at least. I used to lecture at osteoporosis conferences around the country, and I know my way around osteoporosis medicine and early on in my osteoporosis career, what I noted was there was a particular group of people that had a very low bone mineral density. And for anyone who knows how to measure that, you measure it with a DEXA with a T-score. 

So a T-score of -2.5 is osteoporosis, but I was seeing T-scores of around -4 or -4.4, -4.5 in 52-year-old women, and it was a head scratcher for me, and you usually don’t see that profound bone loss unless you have some other secondary health problem going on like cancer treatments, like chemotherapy treatments, or severe malnutrition, or celiac disease, or chronic steroid use, or just chronic immobility. So people who can’t walk and they can’t bear weight on their skeleton, they will lose bone, so people who are paraplegics will have bone densities that low, so you get my drift. It shouldn’t be happening in a 52-year-old woman, and so I started wondering and scratching my head, “What’s going on here?” And then I started questioning people more about what they were eating, and I don’t even remember the exact aha moment when I started asking about veganism. Something must have triggered me to ask that. I must have read something or an article or something, so then I started asking all my, and I saw it more in women than men, but I have seen men in this same scenario, and mostly it’s because 80% of osteoporosis does occur in women, so the overwhelming majority of my patients were women, which is probably why I saw it more, but I would venture to say, it’s just as common in men who are vegans. 

So I started asking them about what they eat and for people who were true vegans, not people who just were doing it as a fad, like, “Oh yeah, I decided not to eat any animal products six months ago.” I’m not talking about that group. I’m talking about people who have spent years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, not eating animal products in any capacity, so that includes eggs, dairy, honey, like anything that comes from an animal, and that was the common denominator. That was the common link that I found in my patients. So I’m not here to say it’s wrong or demonize or anything, but I’m here to tell you that I have seen something and noticed something in the patient population that I worked with thousands and thousands of patients over 15 years in that clinic, and that is the pattern that I saw. And I also find in my own functional medicine practice, that it is very difficult to get people who are vegan to a level of functioning and energy and healing that they desire, so I do believe animal products hold a golden key for us. Our bones are, by the way, mostly made of calcium and collagen and protein. Protein is a huge portion, and there’s just something we get from animal proteins that is vital. So I wanna pull out, I mean, crazy, right, Daniela, I’ll pause there for a second, see if you anything to add.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You know, I mean, I’ve actually seen just even with the people that I know, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen bone density issues, even just with people I know that were vegan and I absolutely can hear and see what you’re saying, and I mean, it is an important part, and I think when people talk about toxicity and food, they talk about animals and there’s really very little discussion about animal consumption being healthy and being like healing

Daniela Giangiorgi

Nutritious. and I think a lot of it has to do with what kind of eggs are we eating? What kind of meat, is it grass fed? How is this cow being raised? And I think if we can get really good quality meat and protein, now I think, you have the ability to heal with a diet that contains animal protein.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I definitely personally feel much better eating animal products. I’ve tried to not eat meat for a few days and I just felt terrible. I need animal protein.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I’m the same. It’s very much a part of my important, healthy eating, so I wanna point out a few cultures around the world that eat mainly meat. It’s very interesting because you know, we’ve heard a lot from the Western allopathic medicine world, that beef is the root of all evil and it’s the problem or meat is the problem or saturated fat from meat, and I will venture out, and this is a discussion for a whole nother time, but there are some political reasons behind this. There are lobbyists behind this. There is pharmaceuticals behind this. I mean there’s a lot. It’s a lot. It’s not just as simple as meat is causing the problem, and also cultures that eat, in American culture, where you’re eating a high level of beef, what else are you doing that is potentially hurting you? Processed grains and sugar and preservatives, and I mean, there’s a lot more to it than just the meat, so what I wanna share is that there are cultures around the world that eat mainly meat. So Siberian indigenous diet is very heavy on meat and fish. They’re actually the main source of their calories, and then they are supplemented by plant derived foods whenever possible, so things like herbs and berries and edible roots, and tree sap, and even some varieties of moss, which is really fascinating.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is fascinating. So crazy, right? If you look at the traditional Eskimo or Inuit diet, it varies with the seasons, so during the winter months they eat seals and whales and other sea mammals and they’re hunted and eaten cooked, raw, or dried, and then in summer and fall months, the major food source is actually caribou and small game and fish and berries, so, I mean, this is a group of people that eats very little vegetables and yet they’ve been thriving and amazing for thousands of years, so the reason I’m pointing this out is not to polarize this discussion, but to show that both of these diets demonstrate the miraculous strengths and adaptability of our bodies. So here’s two groups of people that eat primarily animal protein, and they thrive and they’re healthy and they’re adaptable. So my advice is to keep your eating routine simple, eat real, unprocessed food like indigenous cultures, and you can’t go wrong. Now, on the flip side of the coin, if we look at the Blue Zones around the world, which are known to be the current healthiest populations in the world where people are living into their nineties, they eat real food, unprocessed, heavy in plants, whole grains, legumes, vegetables, lots of vegetables, and fruit with some meat and fish, but animal is not the main part of their diet. I should say animal meat, animal flesh is not the main part of their diet, but they do have it. But here’s the thing about the Blue Zones where you cannot just extrapolate and say, “Oh, I wanna eat the way they eat and I’m gonna live to be 90. It has to be the food.” Because here’s the thing about the Blue Zones, it’s not just the food that they’re eating that is creating longevity. They’re also very active. They rest regularly. 

They are not workaholics like the Western culture and they have lower stress levels, so we talk about a lot in my talks about the stress bucket and the stress being a toxin for the body. And here’s the thing, they’re deeply connected with their communities, deep, deep connection. And one of those Blue Zones is actually right here in the United States. It’s the Loma Linda Seventh Day Adventist community. and what do they have? Deep connection with their community, deep rooted faith and belief and connection, which is so vital. Yes, they’re vegetarian, but there’s other things going on, and so they’re right here in this American culture where I will say, and shock people, that vegetarian diets are often very unhealthy in developed worlds because you’re eating a lot of processed things and those processed things are terrible, and yet, even though the vegetarians in this country, and perhaps some of these Seventh Day Adventists, cause I doubt every Seventh Day Adventist living in Southern California is eating an ancestral diet. I’m pretty sure that there’s some processed food in there cause they have Costco down the street and a Trader Joe’s, right? I mean, let’s get real here. But what are they doing right? A whole bunch of other things. So yes, food is important and there’s a whole bunch of other important things as well, but the guidelines for eating that I do personally follow, personally, me in my household, and that I encourage my clients to follow and I will say, “Do what I’m doing because I’m 50 years old this year and something is clearly going right.”

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I know. So what I do is I eat organic produce whenever possible. I eat lots of greens and vegetables and herbs and fruits and nuts and seeds and legumes and I do eat whole grains. I do enjoy high quality meats, grass fed, antibiotic and hormone free, wild caught and organic, and we get our meat delivered to us from Butcher Box, which is a great source. I also buy wild caught fish, organic and wild caught, free range, I should say, free range, wild caught fish from Costco. It’s a great place to get a good price on your high quality fish, and I eat food that’s minimally processed, meaning I’m not eating many processed grains like cereal and pasta, for example. I don’t eat food that came in a box or already prepared at a grocery store, meaning stuff that’s ready to go, ready to eat, and I don’t eat food prepared by the grocery store because mainly they have seed oils in them like canola, sunflower, and safflower. If you for example, Trader Joe’s is a great example for those of you living in the United States, most of their prepared salads and salad dressings and three bean salad and their legume this and these things that seem really healthy, if you read the fine print, they have sugar in them, and they have oftentimes safflower and sunflower and canola oil, which is really inflammatory, so I make it myself. If I’m gonna have a legume salad, I buy the legumes and I put in my own olive oil and my own vinegar and my own herbs and whip it up. That’s how I roll. So all those things that I just mentioned are inflammatory, so the other thing is eat at home most of the time, so you have control over the quality of your food because a restaurant is in the business of making money and they do put, I mean, my brother’s a professional chef. I know all the hacks and tricks they do in restaurants. They want you to come back and eat more. They want you to come back and spend, so they’re gonna make their foods have this experience with the food where your brain is triggered to want more, to crave it. Like you can think of your favorite restaurant. I can think of one. When I was a kid, Olive Garden, oh my God. I wanted those breadsticks and that salad with the Parmesan cheese and that salad dressing. Do you know how toxic Olive Garden salad dressing is? You can buy it.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Extremely. Oh my God, it’s full of sugar and inflammatory oils and tons of preservatives and flavoring, and flavoring is just code word for chemicals. If you wanna know like all about flavoring and natural flavoring and natural scent or natural fragrance, that too, watch the video I did with Brian Vaszily on this summit, it’s eyeopening. I mean, so they want you to come back and eat more, so you crave it and you want it, so restaurants are in the business of making you come back to spend more money, so remember that. They don’t really have your best interest at heart.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

No, it’s not their number one?

Daniela Giangiorgi

No, and their cookware is generally toxic, so that’s a whole nother discussion we could have about how you prepare your food at home in stainless steel or cast iron. Chefs don’t cook in cast iron pans. They can’t flip ’em. They cook in aluminum pans. Aluminum causes Alzheimer’s, everybody. I mean, this is, so eat most of your food at home. And I know people are saying, “But I’m busy and I’m on the go and it’s hard.” Then, you know what? It just takes some planning and you can do this. I know you can do it. Get an instant pot, sit down as a family, plan what you’re gonna do, and make some meals that you can throw in the freezer that you can eat for a couple days. I mean, it’s not that hard. So the other thing I wanna share about is organ meats and funny, we were talking about this right before we came on, so right before we started filming this, I was saying, “Oh, hold on, Daniela. I gotta take my morning supplements.” And you said, “What are you taking?” And I said, “One of the things I’m taking here is organ meat.” So I take freeze dried organ meat. It has liver, kidneys, heart, different bovine organs, and this is very, very, very nutritious. I don’t wanna eat organs. I don’t like eating heart, liver, and kidneys. It grosses me out. It’s always grossed me out. I’m a total like American in that regard. I think most Americans are kinda . But I like, I have no problem, it’s not revolting to me to take freeze dried organs. In fact, if organ meat was hidden in what I’m eating, like if we were more of a pâté kind of a culture, which we really aren’t, but pâtés are delicious. If it was prepared like that, I would eat it, right? But basically when you’re eating organ meats, you’re giving your mitochondria a concentrated boost of nutrients. I mean, indigenous populations that hunt their food, what do they do, Daniela? They eat the liver.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

All of it. They eat the heart. They eat every part, because they know how nutritious it is. When you’re in the middle of winter, and you can barely find any food, and you actually bring down a caribou, you are going to eat that liver because it’s gonna keep you going until the next meal because it is so nutritious. So yeah, I mean, there’s a little bit about food. I mean, I know probably people weren’t expecting that I was gonna go this direction on a talk about food. I promise we’ll get into what you shouldn’t eat. I’ll tell you those eight things, but.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Absolutely, absolutely, but it’s fascinating, and it’s all so true. And I think in today’s chicken breast, steak culture, we do bypass so much of those organs, so how do we get them in? A lot of people won’t even eat pâté, so these types of supplements are certainly super supportive.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, I sell freeze dried organs on my store. so it’s called Organ Synergy.

Daniela Giangiorgi

There you go. It’s called Organ Synergy.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You have it right there? It’s actually here, because I’ve been doing a lot of intermittent fasting, which we’re gonna be talking about, and I don’t take this. I don’t wanna break my fast because this is food, and so I have it on my desk so that I remember to do it later in the day, because it will break my fast if I take this. Yeah, fascinating, right? Yeah, it’s called Organ Synergy by Designs for Health, and you can buy this online. You can find it on Amazon everywhere, and I have it on my store where you can get really good pricing on it, but yeah, everybody, I certainly recommend organs.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Can you just say, what’s the URL to the store in case anyone wants?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, just go to Laurafrontiero.com and you can go to the shop there, but this, like I said, you can find it on Amazon too, and so Organ Synergy by Designs for Health, New Zealand sourced, grass fed and finished bovine organs, so sourcing matters. We don’t eat them from the United States because our cattle aren’t as healthy as they are from other countries where they don’t have GMOs and glyphosate and tighter regulations on, yeah.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Nice, okay, so you just talked about intermittent fasting, which brings me up to, it’s a beautiful segue, as if you planned it out, which brings me up to my next question, When should we be eating? I mean, you know, you hear all this talk about this fasting and it adds another element to diet and eating, so is there a time of day or maybe even perhaps a way of eating that works better for our bodies to heal?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, there is. So on this summit, we have a couple of really fascinating and amazing talks on intermittent fasting, so I wanna make sure you catch Cynthia Thurlow’s talk and Gin Stephens talk. They’re intermittent fasting experts. They both have best selling books. They’re amazing, but I’m gonna cover it. I’m gonna give you an overview here in this talk. So intermittent fasting is actually a really amazing way to support your mitochondria if they’re damaged, which most of us, unless we’re running functional protocols on ourselves, most of us have some damaged mitochondria and even myself, doing as many healthy things as I do, they can get damaged from time to time, depending on what I’m exposed to. So for example, I was just outta town for a week, staying in a hotel and I was eating the food there, which we just got done talking about how the food is prepared. I guarantee they weren’t cooking my vegetables in olive oil. They were using canola oil, so I was eating every meal for a week away from my own kitchen, and so I had some mitochondria damage just from that trip, so it happens to all of us, but when we’re fasting, damaged mitochondria are purged through a process called autophagy and the process allows mitochondria to remove damaged debris and accumulated reactive oxygen and nitrogen species which, there’s lots of talks about this on this summit, and I even talk about it in another one of my talks here, so catch all my talks on the summit, cause I’m unpacking a lot of this stuff, but there’s also something called unfolded or biologically inactive proteins that get cleaned out. 

So the protein structure kind of gets damaged and unfolded and the amino acids aren’t folded together the way they should be, and it doesn’t help us when these are hanging around, so you wanna clean ’em up. So autophagy is kind of like going through and dusting the cobwebs and vacuuming the floor and getting rid of everything that shouldn’t be there. Now fasting reduces the oxidative stress byproducts and increases oxygen efficiency while maintaining that ATP energy production, so if you didn’t see my talk about physical energy, invisible energy in the mitochondria, watch that because I talk about this ATP production in great detail, that’s very easy to understand. Now in terms of intermittent fasting, this is also a fantastic way to lose weight, so I’m gonna tell you my own story around intermittent fasting and how resistant I was. So people will often say, “I’m not a good intermittent faster. I can’t do it. When I wake up, I have to eat first thing in the morning.” If you feel that way, you probably have blood sugar dysregulation. And so jumping into a really long fasting window with intermittent fasting will not work well for you. You have to build it up. So intermittent fasting or kind of timed eating means that you have periods of time during the day where you’re not eating food at all. And as my friend, Summer Peterson always said, “not even a single blueberry.” She’s also an intermittent fasting expert. I think you can find her stuff. “The Sexy Diet”, I think is her book.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I think so, yeah.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

So she would say you break your fast even if you eat a single blueberry. So your fasting window should be holding off, when you wake up in the morning, hold as long as you can, and then start your eating window and then end it. So let’s say you end your eating window at six o’clock at night. At six o’clock at night, you shut the kitchen down, you walk out of there, and you do not go back in there, period. You don’t go back in, because if you even have a bite of anything, you’ve broken your fasting windows. You need something to eat, drink some herbal tea, have some water, do something that doesn’t include calories, not even a single blueberry. So for me, my own personal story, I did have blood sugar dysregulation for a long time in my life. Even though I am thin, my hemoglobin A1C was always running in the prediabetes range, which always like flipped out my doctors and nurse practitioners, because it’s like, “Oh my gosh, you’re gonna get diabetes, but you don’t look like a diabetic, like you have diabetes.” Yeah, I’m really fit, but it was blood sugar dysregulation. So what I had to do was I had to ease myself into it. So I was one of those people that had to eat like 8:00, 9:00 AM in the morning, or I would just crash, so you would just extend it 30 minutes, extend it an hour, extend, and extend another and slowly build the muscle, and so now my intermittent fasting window, I don’t eat until around 12:30, 1:00, and then I shut down eating around 6:00 or 7:00.

Daniela Giangiorgi

So you don’t eat sometimes till the early afternoon.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s right, my first meal of the day. So breakfast for me is around noon. So breakfast, you’ve heard that concept of breakfast should be your best meal of the day.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yeah, we’re dispelling a bunch of stuff here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, breakfast means break fast, so when you break your fast, it should be the healthiest meal of the day. This is not the time to eat a croissant or a yogurt and granola or oatmeal and people are going, “What? But oatmeal’s heart healthy.” It’s straight carbs. It’s straight sugar. It causes insulin dysregulation, and it does not help your cells or your mitochondria, so when you break your fast, break your fast with protein, fat, greens. It’s not uncommon for me to break fast with last night’s dinner. So I tend to eat.

Daniela Giangiorgi

You told me that before. I love that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, I eat meat and vegetables or if I’m doing eggs, then I do it with greens and meat or something as well, and I throw in avocado and so make it something that is really gonna be beneficial to your cells, to your blood sugar levels. And you will break your fast if you have coffee with anything in it, so black coffee does not break your fast, but if you put creamer in it or butter, if you think about people who like to blend butter in their coffee, the whole Bulletproof coffee craze, that’s what we would call a dirty fast. It’s not clean fasting. Gin Stephens talks about that on her talk on this summit. So it’s a myth that putting fat in your coffee doesn’t break your fast. Fat is fuel. You will automatically come out of your fasting state and your mitochondria will start making ATP energy with that fat, so yeah.

Daniela Giangiorgi

So, okay, I feel like there’s a couple takeaways here. One, breakfast we really associate with the morning. We can disassociate the word breakfast away from time and we can really break it down to the words break and then fast, and so that’s one thing and it can happen, whatever’s right for you and the experience you’re at and how strong you are in that, you could take it, push back from the morning towards the afternoon to extend that fasting period. Is that correct?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Right.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Okay, great.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Got it.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And then, I also feel like a lot of people hear intermittent fasting. In fact, I was talking to someone they’re like, “Oh no, I don’t believe in that,” because they just hear the word fasting, and I think they imagine not eating for days, but this isn’t what you’re saying at all.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

No, so once you grow that muscle, you can try one 24 hour fast and then two day fast, three day fast, and longer.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s for more advanced level, correct?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That’s super advanced. It’s super advanced. Anybody can do intermittent fasting. And I will say that of all the different ways that we can eat, there is a lot of data and research on intermittent fasting being very, very beneficial for longevity, cellular regeneration, antiaging, all of it. I mean, intermittent fasting is possibly one of the healthiest things we can do, and if you think about back to talking about indigenous populations, which we’re doing on this talk, indigenous populations normally went through periods of fasting because food wasn’t always around. And so one of the things that we’ve done really wrong in our culture is constantly feeding our children, so when I was a kid of the seventies, there were no snacks. There were three meals a day and there were no snacks. And that means that our body, our digestive system had an opportunity to rest in between food digesting periods, and actually, not eating is one of the healthiest things you can do, and then when you’re eating all day, you’re never resting your digestive tract and it’s constantly on point digesting, digesting, digesting, and if you’re eating right before you go to bed, now you’re digesting at bed. So feeding our children’s snacks and carrying snacks with us everywhere is probably contributing to the decline in health of our children today, and we have some good talks in pediatrics on this summit as well, so find those.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Oh, good.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

But this is the first time in history that our children are probably not going to live as long as us, and the way that we feed them is really vital, so if you can get back to feeding your kids three meals a day, and it might be hard at first. There might be a lot of fighting and kicking and screaming, but if they must have something to eat, then you have like one or two things that they can have that are really, really healthy for them, so you get rid of the processed stuff.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s great. That’s great. Yeah, and when you talk about intermittent fasting, I mean the whole purpose is to have that break from digestion so that you can increase healing during sleep, correct?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes. Yes. That’s your regenerate and repair restorative sleep time. During sleep, your body is working. So in another talk, when I talked about invisible and physical energy, when you’re sleeping that invisible energy is going strong, all these things are happening in your body that you’re not aware of, and it’s repairing, the whole construction crew is coming out, fixing things up, putting on a new coat of paint inside, fixing the holes in the wall. I mean, your gut is being repaired, everything. All the little micro damaging things that occur to us throughout the day are being repaired.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And then in turn, if we snack whatever, even have a banana half an hour before we go to bed.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s gonna take away from that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, even warm milk. That, drink warm milk before bed’s so you’ll sleep better.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Well, yes, so true. Okay, so speaking of milk, are there specific foods that you find especially supportive to cellular mitochondrial health and energy production?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah. There’s a lot of foods that are really particularly good for mitochondria. I just wanna give a mention to the ketogenic diet as we talk about this. I’m not gonna go deep into ketogenic diet because we have speakers on the summit covering the topic, but the keto diet is a higher fat, lower carb plan that uses ketones instead of glucose for energy. It makes your body use ketones instead of glucose for energy, and what you need to know about this is you’re avoiding carbohydrates and starches that cause blood sugar levels to spike, and that includes cereals, breads, rice, pasta, most fruit, starchy vegetables, like potatoes, carrots, corn, most beans, legumes, so keto is not for the weak. I mean, this is a serious type of diet and it can make some people feel lousy, especially if you have a sludgy bile in your gallbladder. If keto makes you feel sick, you probably need some liver gallbladder drainage or support there, so just make sure you’re talking to a practitioner and let them know, “When I tried keto, I felt terrible.” They should know how to support you with that. But the reason I’m bringing this up is because you can use keto like a mitochondria reset, so you can do a keto diet as a mitochondria reset, and it actually can slow the progression of mitochondrial disease, and it’s a well known and used diet type in cancer treatments. 

So ketones create more metabolic energy. So eating this way actually increases metabolic efficiency because ketones take fewer steps to enter the Krebs cycle, the TCA cycle, and I did a great talk on this on the summit where I talk about physical energy, invisible energy and how ATP is produced, so make sure you listen to that talk, but basically this ATP energy is so efficient, you create less metabolic waste on a keto diet, so it’s like burning a high octane fuel in your car instead of regular unleaded, which results in better performance in you, better performance in your car. If you are exhaust in emissions, I’ll let you guess in your body. If you are exhaust in emissions, I mean, you just do better. So keto aside, when you’re eating a typical health diet, the key to a mitochondria healing is eating organic, unprocessed food and a diversity of plants. So I’ll say that again. You asked, what is good for mitochondria? Organic, unprocessed food and a diversity of plants, like, write diversity down and underline it, because that is critical. You want a diet that’s rich in brightly colored fruits and vegetables because they contain phytonutrients, and those phytonutrients act as antioxidants to ward off free radical damage. 

And I’m not gonna get deep into what free radical damage is here, cause we got lots of talks about that on the summit. I keep saying that, I mean, like this is everything you ever wanted to know about mitochondria is right here, and we got talks about that, but just know that those phytonutrients are critical. And the problem is the Western diet is rich in fat and sugar and processed grains and convenience foods, and it’s not very diverse in plants. The overwhelming majority of people are eating the same plants over and over again. They’re eating potatoes and carrots and corn and green beans maybe, and that’s it. So, you might be interested to know that people from areas of the world where there’s more variety of plants, they have a more diverse gut microbiome. They have more diversity and fewer problems with autoimmune disease. They have fewer problems with heart disease, cancer, weight regain, hormone imbalances, digestive issues, and that’s because their mitochondria are healthy. So basically you wanna go for all those healthy foods that I explained when I said, “This is how I eat” earlier on in this talk. That is a mitochondria healthy diet.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s great. And I play this game with myself, so to speak, when I go to the grocery store and I’m in the aisle with all the vegetables and stuff, I walk by and I say, “Okay, what haven’t I eaten? Oh, dandelion root.” And I think right there, “Oh, I can saute them.” Okay, boom, in the cart. “I haven’t eaten this. Last time I had carrots. I’m not buying carrots this time or I’m buying the rainbow carrots instead of just the orange carrots.” Like almost gamify it to make it a little exciting because it can be fun. It can be, and then there’s so many things you can discover.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Absolutely, it can, and bring your family into the discussion when you’re planning your meals for the week and have your kids. This is the way you get your kids to eat. You have them.

Daniela Giangiorgi

I’m working on that one, Laura.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

You have them pick out food with you at the store and you talk about it and you look it up online and, “This is an artichoke. Isn’t this a funny, prickly thing? Feel it.”

Daniela Giangiorgi

Farmer’s market, yeah, could be fun.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

My claim to fame is my daughter’s favorite vegetable. when we were kids was brussels sprouts. I know many adults who won’t even eat brussels sprouts and her favorite, and to this day, if I’m making brussels sprouts, she’s hovering over me, grabbing them, eating them

Daniela Giangiorgi

That is so cool. before dinner’s even on the table.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is the claim to fame.

Daniela Giangiorgi

That’s my claim to fame.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Stop right there, mic drop, so speaking of, now you’ve given me brussels sprouts and we’ve talked about some of these things, what are eight foods that we should absolutely avoid? And you mentioned these eight foods.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Yes, yes. Some of these foods you should avoid forever, and some of these foods you should avoid short term. So when you’re in the short term healing, if you do not have energy, if you know your gut microbiome is suffering, if you know, you’ve got chronic inflammation in your body, then you just need to avoid all eight of these things, even the ones that you might be able to bring back for a time. So the eight foods are gluten, soy, dairy, corn, peanuts, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and seed oils. Now, in that group, artificial sweeteners and seed oils should never be in your diet. Those should be completely removed from our food source. There’s never a place for those. Sugar is very inflammatory and feeds bad bacteria in our gut. It’s nearly impossible to never eat sugar again. And I would never wanna say, you can never have a Christmas dessert again, or you can never enjoy cake on your birthday,

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Of course not. or you can never go out to dinner and enjoy a artisanal dessert, but sugar shouldn’t be a staple in your every day. So that is one, and when you’re in the early phases of healing, it should be removed. Peanuts, peanuts are a very moldy crop. They have a lot of mycotoxins and I test people all the time for mold and we find mycotoxins. Peanuts are also highly reactive. A lot of people have food intolerance to peanuts and don’t know it, and then we also see these crazy peanut allergies. Now an allergy and an intolerance in food are two different things. One is an immediate allergic reaction. One is a delayed immune response. The delayed immune response in people is very common and they don’t know it, so when you do food testing on people, peanuts often show up, and I know people are like, “But I love my peanuts”. And trust me, I love mine too. We live in San Diego. If we go to a Padre game, I’m eating a bag of peanuts, like I cannot go to a Padre game and not eat a bag of peanut. I cannot go watch American baseball and not eat a bag of peanuts, but that’ll be my like two times a year. Right? Okay, corn, another just really highly chemically treated crop, highly inflammatory. A lot of people can’t even digest corn. My mom, for example, when she eats corn, she’s in doubled over abdominal pain the next day. And so corn is a tough one.

Daniela Giangiorgi

So even organic, Laura?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, even organic is hard for a lot of people to digest, but if you are gonna eat corn, definitely eat it organic, cause it’s a high GMO crop. Dairy is one of those super inflammatory. I’m talking cow dairy. Most people will do okay with goat dairy or sheep dairy. I eat goat cheese and sheep cheese. Cutting out cow dairy for me was one of the biggest things I ever did in my health. I dropped 10 pounds in six weeks. The inflammation went down. My digestive system just completely reversed how it was feeling. It was amazing, but I did it kicking and screaming. I love my fancy cheese. I love my cream in my coffee. I love sour cream. I love cottage of cheese and I love milk and I just wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t do it and wouldn’t do it for years, and finally, I just did it, and I’ll tell you, my body feels so much better. I’ll never go back to that level of dairy consumption. Now I’ve done so much work on my gut that I actually can tolerate dairy a lot better, and I probably could eat it a lot more than I do, but when I do eat it, it’s okay. It’s okay. Soy is a high GMO crop. It is highly inflammatory. Soy is also problem because it can be estrogen disruptive. So fermented soy is a different ballgame, so soy sauce, pure tamari is okay and fermented miso soup, but the processed soy in tofu and the processed soy that’s in protein powders and in lots of vegan and vegetarian foods is very bad for us. 

And then gluten, so there’s the big gluten bread, pasta, cereal. Gluten is something that should probably be removed in the early stages of gut restoring. I would recommend that you do a Gluten Zoomer, excuse me, a Food Zoomer test with Vibrant America. They have the Gluten Zoomer, which looks at gluten at the peptide level. Once you’ve done a full gut restoring protocol and then do a food test, and I talked about this on day one of the summit. I talked about gut health in my talk, so watch that because we talk about the importance of doing food intolerance testing later on, not right away in your protocol, but later on, if you do a gluten sensitivity test and you’re still sensitive after lots of gut repairing, chances are you’re still gonna be sensitive most of your life. If it’s that Gluten Zoomer by Vibrant America, it’s a very specific and sensitive test. In fact, it’s so specific and sensitive that, if you are positive on that, if it does show up positive for a likelihood of Celiac Disease, it’s very likely you have, very likely if you had a confirmatory test, which is a intestinal biopsy, it would be positive, so some people can bring gluten back. I do eat gluten now. I did avoid it for a time when I was healing, but I’m very picky about my gluten, so it has to be from ancient wheat, so ancient grains, and it has to be fermented, so only in a sourdough version and minimal at that.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Minimal.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, so we have lots of talks on here about people talking about gluten, but basically those are your eight foods to avoid.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Okay, can you just repeat them one more time? We have gluten, soy, dairy.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yep, so that’s gluten, soy, dairy, corn, peanuts, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and seed oils.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And the seed oils and the artificial sweeteners, those are never, right?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Never ever, yeah

Daniela Giangiorgi

And then the other things are, depending on your body, and regulation, or moments of exception.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, and corn is tough. I mean, so, yeah. I like, one of my vices is chips and salsa. I love tortilla chips and salsa.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Guilty.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I know and most tortilla.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And a little guac, oh God.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I know. And most tortilla chips are fried in vegetable oils, seed oils, canola oil.

Daniela Giangiorgi

So true. 

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, and so you gotta find one that’s made with avocado oil and even then, I mean, it’s a treat, right. It’s not a daily thing.

Daniela Giangiorgi

It is a treat.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, corn is in everything. Corn is rampant in our food source.

Daniela Giangiorgi

And there’s so much, I mean, when you really strip these things down, you start getting real savvy about what brands are okay, and which ones just aren’t and, sadly enough, there’s very few good clean brands out there. Okay, so let me ask you this. So aside from this amazing summit that you’ve put together and I’m so glad that, as we’ve had these discussions, you’ve said, “And, if you want to hear more about this, go to hear this guy.” I think that’s great because people are gonna wanna learn more about whatever applies to them. But aside from this summit, you have this gem of a live 28 day journey that’s coming up, and this is basically to help our viewers, viewers such as you, become energetic and focused people. And can you just share a little bit more about this 28 journey, this supportive journey, for people to tap into how to implement this into their lifestyle?

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yes, now this guided journey includes two live group coaching calls per week with me over 28 days, and that means you have six touch points with me as you implement the strategies that I’ll teach during the course. And during that time, during our three weeks together, I’ll coach you on what steps to take, so you can wake up each day feeling powerful and purposeful and energetic, and that’s the most important thing that I always hear from my audience and from my clients, but that’s how they wanna feel when they get up. And I’m gonna help you have sustained focus when you’re working on important tasks. I work with a lot of high performing people that are up to big things in the world, and they want their brains to be on point. I’m gonna help you keep up with your family mentally and physically. So on the weekends, you can do stuff with them and enjoy it. You’re gonna know what foods to eat and which to avoid. And this lecture right here, you got a lot of it, but I also be sharing even more information with you in this journey with me. But this is so you can maintain maximum energy levels. You’ll know what products to keep in your home so that you can contribute to your long term success, and you’ll locate those sneaky toxins in your home that are zapping your energy and that you need to get rid of. 

That’s a whole nother discussion and a whole nother topic, and we’re gonna help people build a personalized plan to get the right amount of sleep that they need because sleep is so vital, and so many people either have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, so I’m actually bringing in an expert to help with this. It’s gonna be really fun, and you’re gonna have a clear understanding also on what supplements will support your energy and how long you should take them, because most people viewing probably have a cupboard full of half used supplement bottles that they gave up on cause they weren’t working. We call it your supplement graveyard. I’m gonna invite you to clear out your supplement graveyard. But if you live in the United States, the program will also include optional curated supplement protocols to speed up the process for you, and these supplements, right away will have you feeling energetic and purposeful. You get such good, fast results from it. And so I’ve put together the best products on the market to give you fast results and simultaneously set the foundation for long term healing of your inflammation, your leaky gut, your chronic symptoms, your mitochondria. Everything I do is with the purpose of permanent results, not temporary hacks, so we want you to feel permanently good, not just when you’re done with this 28 days, but we want you to feel good 10 years from now, 20 years from now, and enjoy your life all the way through. So you can go to easyenergyreset.com to learn more and get access, easyenergyreset.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Awesome, easyenergyreset.com. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you’re talking about a lifestyle, because I think when people think of these things as a program, I really like to reframe that and think of it as a training for a new lifestyle and for you to share how to move forward with the supplements on the longer term, that’s huge. That’s huge.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah, it’s good stuff. Thank you so much for helping me facilitate this conversation about food, Daniela. This is a hot topic, so hopefully my goal was to have you feel good about the way that you eat and to understand that the foundation of healthy eating is really about unprocessed eating and eating food the way it comes from the earth, whatever you choose that to be.

Daniela Giangiorgi

Excellent, I love it. Thank you, Laura. Thank you everyone.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

All right, take good care everyone. Bye now.