Your Kitchen’s Healing Power For Type 2 Diabetes

Introduction to James Barry and Food as Medicine 0:00

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Beverly Yates, ND is my distinct honor and pleasure to interview James Barry James is a professional chef who has a wonderful background and his expertise in cuisine and the healing power of food is something that you're all going to want to listen and pay close attention to. And I know for many people food is near and dear to our heart. But when we're talking about reversing type of diabetes, prediabetes, and different kinds of blood sugar related issues and struggles, you know that nutrition is the center of what we've got to pay attention to, Making food tasty and healthy can be done and you need to know what you're doing and why.

So in this case, let me introduce our guest for this episode. James Barry has 17 plus years in the culinary field, and he started as a private chef cooking for celebrities names, you know, like Tom Cruise and George Clooney, Sean Puffy Combs, Barbra Streisand and more. He also has a published cookbook author and has coauthored to author the recipes in multiple books. He's been busy, including Dr. Younger's New York Times bestselling book Clean 7 And most recently, he launched his own first functional food product, Pluck, P L U C K. An Oregon based seasoning.

Again, we're looking to make food flavorful along with nutrient dense. That's the goal of it all. It's the first of its kind. It's an amazingly easy and delicious way for people to get organ meats into their diet. Nutrient density is what we're all about, especially for blood sugar control. So, James, welcome to our summit. Hello, Dr. Beverly. Nice to talk with you. Yeah, I'm so looking forward to our talk here. You know, your your title for the Healing Power of Food, How your Home Kitchen Can Reverse type 2 Diabetes.

Right. This is something people can use wherever they are in the world. Absolutely. The honest truth is there is it is impossible to get healthy eating out. The only way to be healthy is for you to control the ingredients of the meals you cook. And you can only do that in your own kitchen or, you know, a companion kitchen where you're not going to do that. Eating out. I guarantee it. And there's a good reason. And there's a good reason. You know, when we eat and I just Yeah, well, I'll just I'll just call it out.

You know, there's a very good reason. It's not conspiracy theory. The reality is when you eat out, that is a business. Their job is to make money. And so when you are trying to make money, whether it's ultra processed product you find on the grocery store or whether it's eating out in the restaurant, they are looking to lower increase how much they can make off their products. So they use cheaper ingredients. It's a fact and it's a sad fact that they don't necessarily have your best health in mind, but they are a business.

We need to remember that we we can control our diets and our and our well-being, but we're the ones that have to control it.

Why Home Cooking Beats Eating Out 3:00

Absolutely. I could not agree with you more about the importance of that and making sure that we understand what we're eating, why we're eating, know, how is our blood sugar reaction. You know, like if we feel foggy and spacey, like that's not good, right? But if we eat at home, chances are we can figure out much more easily what agrees with us. I say you can love, you can eat the food you love if it loves you back. And that's determined by your blood sugar Response. Yeah. And you just you just called it.

I mean, one of the things that I think is really important along this journey of health is to get back to just recognizing, well, what is going on in my body. Like really like many of us struggle just looking at ourselves in the mirror. And that is an important part of acknowledging how is food affecting me. You have to acknowledge like, am I, am I waking up with that, you know, kind of groggy, foggy headed feeling on my body? Is my body aching? Do I feel bloated all the time when I look in the mirror?

These are all these are all red flags, you know, smoke. And these are the things that are indicators that whatever we're doing is not working. And so I always advise people to really just just take a breath and relook at themselves and identify, are you thriving because you should be. Human body is miraculous and we should all be thriving. But yet most of us and I would say the majority of us are really below the like, we're below thriving. We're really less than and it's in it's not because we don't have the capacity to thrive, it's just because that's our normal.

We don't realize that we're not thriving. We've been living with that chronic disease so long. Oh, yeah. You know, you're right. People come to accept and think of things as normal or typical. And there's a difference, right? Like what you're saying as people have come to accept feeling unwell as typical and they've redefined it as normal. And now we need to be really clear that being healthy and alive and vibrant is what's normal. And we want people to distinguish if they aren't feeling well, that that's become typical for them.

But we're moving towards what's actually normal. Absolutely. And food from for you know, my focus and you're of course, going to be hearing lots of different people on this summit. But my focus is really on the food. And ultimately I focus on the trend that never changes, which is real whole food. All right. So with that in mind, what are the staples that everyone should have in their kitchen? Absolutely. So. So when you know, it's kind of funny, first of all, because we need to eat. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves.

We think we need to love cooking. And I've been in this business long enough to realize that a lot of people do not like cooking. So that's the first thing, is you got to kind of reframe what it is you're doing when you're eating for a lot of people, just your. And so from that perspective, I really try to teach people to not put so much pressure on themselves that they have to be upbeat, that they have to feel fantastic when they are cooking. If you don't enjoy it, then let's use that to our advantage and figure out how we can simplify the actual cooking and make it as enjoyable as possible.

Maybe you're listening to your favorite podcast, maybe you're listening to music and anything to kind of get you in that in that really positive state while you're cooking, whether you like it or not. And from there, it's really it's, it's really like cooking can be as simple as you want it to be. So. So, for example, I've been in the process of moving and I'm moving from the West Coast to the East Coast. And so I've had to pack my kitchen up all my tools and, you know, watch tools that I have that were the essential ones.

It was a knife, a cutting board and a pot. Yes, Really, It you would think it would be so much more complicated than that. But it really isn't a knife, a cutting board and then some kind of device to cook it. And that's really it. We make it a lot harder than it needs to be. But ultimately, you're going to base what you're using on, you know, you're using your kitchen by what you're eating. And I typically now, I typically advise people to have some kind of protein

Simple Kitchen Staples and Meal Formulas 7:00

and I gravitate toward animal protein and then some fat and then some vegetables. Those three to me are the necessities. And when you think about it, if you're overwhelmed by recipes, for example, which a lot of people are, you don't have to even focus on that. You can focus on a formula. So you think about it from that perspective is okay that you know that animal protein might be the size of your palm, the fat. You just need enough to to coat whatever it is you're cooking. So if you're cooking in a pan, you need enough to coat the bottom of that pan so that basically the animal protein or or the vegetables or anything that you're putting in there doesn't stick to that pan. And that's plenty.

And then the vegetables are really however many you want. I mean, some people say a cup, two cups. It's really whatever is is fits your needs and your requirements. But you'll find that just that alone is you just focus on, okay, does my dish have protein, Does it have fat and does it have some kind of vegetable? And if you need you know, if you add something, then you would want to focus on adding some kind of resistant starch. And then a resistant starch would look like something that is not a potato, that's not a rice, you know, that is not some kind of grain, but it's more stuff like celeriac or you could do like parsnips, you could do sweet potatoes.

I mean, it really varies depending on, you know, your your diet, your your what kind of affects your body the most. So you can find that. But the key is just follow that formula and you can change it up. You don't have to feel like you're going bland with your diet. You can change it up by based on the protein, you can change up the fat. I always have next to my stove, I have some kind of lard or tallow, which is tallow is beef fat. Lard is pork fat. I also use coconut oil. I use Ghee. Ghee is clarified butter.

Very, very good. It's been used for five over 5000 years in India. It's very powerful cooking fat and has a high smoke point. And those are really the main the main ones I use when I'm cooking. And then if I'm not there, if I'm, you know, making a dressing or something like that, I would use olive oil. Extra virgin olive oil is my is my go to there and I can even give everyone a formula for making their own dressings in, you know, couple of minutes to minute dressing. Shall we. Shall I share. That. Yeah, that would be great.

I know people would love that. Everyone loves recipes. Go ahead. Please. So this is the formula and why it's so important as is once again, a lot of these ultra processed dressings that you find on the grocery store. They're using very poor oils. They're using very poor ingredients. So once again, making your own is where you're going to find that health, that that ultimate health meter. So what you do is you basically do a 3 to 1 ratio. So you have three parts oil and one part acid. And the acid might be some kind of vinegar, it might be lemon juice, could be lime juice.

But basically, whatever the vessel you're using and measuring, that could be, let's say a tablespoon. You're doing three tablespoons of oil and one tablespoon of vinegar. Put that in a mason jar, shake it up, and you then have a dressing that will taste good. Now you can add to that dressing, you can add salt, pepper, you can add herbs, other seasonings, and that will just change the flavor. You can even add a little Dijon mustard. You can really get more fancy. But the base base ratio is 3 to 1.

That's a great, great way to explain it. Thank you for making that so clear, is that sometimes people travel, maybe they stay in another person's home or they're in a place where they can actually cook. And if they don't know these kinds of relationships and formulas, it can feel a little daunting to care for yourself on the road. But this is something that's doable. So a 3 to 1 ratio, that's great. So three parts of this, one part of that, That's wonderful. Thank you for that insight. I love it when guests like yourself give us these these nuggets.

This is just diamond right here. Okay. So of these foods that we should avoid and the foods that we should be eating, you were talking a little bit about really the slower burning complex carbohydrates, the resistant starches to emphasize that and de-emphasize grains. What would you suggest for people for insider tips, since you are such an amazing professional chef around preparing the resistant starches, you know, the root vegetables, the more complex little burning stuff like beans and legumes and, you know, chickpeas, lentils, that sort of thing.

Yeah. So so couple of things. When you are thinking about cooking for yourself, really identify what are the textures that you gravitate towards. So a lot of people love creamy a lot of people love crunchy. So and then let's be honest, a lot of us in the US also love sweet, you know, So one of the ways to bring out the natural sweetness of food is to roast it. So you might toss it into some kind of fat and then you stick in your oven, you roast it, and that roasting brings out the kind of natural sugars in the product.

And they're they're just kind of on the and it brings out the natural starches and it crisp up and it's soft on the inside. And you can do that. I mean, you could do that with Jerusalem artichokes. You could do that with parsnips and you'll be blown away at how amazingly good these products are. And then you can start moving away from some of these white potatoes or things like that that many people are eating. I also recommend, if you like, creamy. So when you like creamy products, you're going to want to steam or even boil some of them like So for cauliflower, if you want to make a mash instead of eating mashed potatoes, you can use cauliflower.

And one of the ways to make that that give that kind of like nice, pillowy texture that you get from mashed potatoes is just to steam or boil that cauliflower for a little bit, get it so it's soft and then blend it and blend it with the. But you can still use the fat like a lot of people tend to think,

Cooking Techniques for Better Texture and Flavor 13:00

Oh, well, I'm dieting, I can't eat fat. It's like, No, no, the fat is actually what slows down that sugar rush in your body. It's the fat is what we need. And anyone that is on the verge of type 2 diabetes or or has it, you should be getting your good fat. That is so so key. So I say just remove that the starchy potatoes and use that cauliflower or even sell your act as one and just add that butter to it and you'll see it will have the buttery texture that the mashed potatoes have and it will have the creaminess and that kind of pillowy softness.

That flavor is slightly different, but you'll see it's a really great swap and you'll you'll feed your soul by getting the texture that it is you're looking for. A texture is a lot more important to satiating this than we realize. That's absolutely true. I think it is underappreciated, and I think that's one of the reasons why people struggle when they try to make healthy changes, because they're there. And we'll talk about palate later, but our food preferences in our tongue and our ring, we are so much a creatures of habit and this makes a difference.

So if we want to be successful, we can't completely ignore the things that we enjoy that give us pleasure, right? Absolutely. Like one of the things I saw a lot as a chef when I when I first started was I would ask people, you know, what is what is a food you didn't like as a child or something like that. And inevitably it was like brussel sprouts, you know, people say, Oh, yeah, brussel sprouts. They were so gross. And then I'd ask, well, how was it prepared and who prepared it? So sometimes we have emotional issues with the person that prepared it.

So that's one one thing you got to look at if you're avoiding foods, is what are the emotions tied to who prepared it, What time in your life It was prepared, that kind of thing. But in this case, the people would boil it, they would boil those those Brussels sprouts until they were really like that, just kind of gross looking green, and then they would serve them just boiled with a little bit of salt, not no fat, nothing, nothing to add any flavor to it. So not only was it overcooked and mushy, it had no flavor.

So of course you didn't like it. But I guarantee if you want to taste an amazing Brussels sprouts, take those Brussels sprouts, cut them in half, toss them in some fat. I love it in lard, for example, toss it in some bacon fat or something like that, and then roast it at like 395 in the oven on a single layer on a pan, and they'll become crispy like chips and they'll have nice, crispy edges. And you will, you will experience a Brussels sprout like you've never experienced before. It is so delicious.

Even kids love them. You know, that tells you how good they are. So and you can then once it's prepared, you can then even toss it in a dressing or something like that to give it more flavor. We need to remember flavor in our genetics, in our kind of our prehistoric body flavor is associated with nutrition. So we typically in nature, if something has flavor, we our bodies think that it's also nutritious when we buy these ultra processed foods from that the markets are natural, innate and all, you know, this this kind of innate food knowledge is thrown out the window because these these these foods in the grocery stores have extreme flavor, but they don't have the nutrition.

So our bodies keep wanting more. Just keep eating it because you'll get satiated, you'll get it, and then suddenly you finish the whole bag and there's no you're not satiated at all because there was no nutrition. It was just empty calories. So when you can recreate it in your own kitchen, you know you're going to get that good nutrition because you're using real food. But then make sure you give good flavor as well, because that good flavor is going to inspire you to eat more. So that way you're not one of the things we see a lot, and I think everyone can identify with this is you eat your eat your dinner.

You're like, okay, this is the meal I'm supposed to eat because I'm on this diet and you eat your small plate and you're like, I'm still hungry. I should probably have a snack or I should maybe, you know, go get that ice cream or whatever it is. But my whole point is eat your meal so that you're not hungry later. Eat enough of that meal so that you are satiated and don't need that snack later on. And that goes for every meal. I'm a very pro meal person and not not pro snacks. I think we are very we become a very snack society and I think it's causing a lot of harm.

I agree with you. I think for adults to rely on snacks, I just don't understand it for kids. I do understand that. But that's a different metabolic part of your life, right. But for fully formed adults, I think we have gone to the snack thing and these bizarre non flavors, highly processed foods. I could not agree with you more about this. It's so important. Nutrient density, real food and making sure you feel satiated when you eat foods that are relying on bizarre chemicals. That's not going to leave you feeling full.

And like you just said, so, well, we then will be primed to overeat. Remember, be a big food companies. Their model is to sell you more of what that stuff is, right? Like when we were kids, you remember how we had a bag of chips? It was a small amount. It was like a serving size for basically a child's palm. It was maybe 8 to 10 chips, I don't think was more than that. Now I watch. The back of the bag. Are you a nerd? I suspect you are into details like I am. Did you ever read the back of the bag?

It said potatoes, oil and salt. That's all it said or it said corn oil and salt. That was it. Now you look at the back of the back of these bags, there's like 17 ingredients. Their patterns are huge and people can't stop eating. This whole thing has got crazy. Well, and that and that is argument towards, you know, that all the pressure can't be put on us because it's bigger than just us. And and I know a lot of people have so much shame, so much shame around what they are choosing to eat and what they are putting in their diet.

And I'm just I'm a big advocate of like, yes, we do need to take control of it. We are adults. We need to own our, you know, be accountable for our decisions and the system is against us. They have created a laboratory of foods that are that are designed to create addiction. They have created ultra, ultra intense flavors that inspire us to want more. When you go to look at the front of the packaging, which is really more of a marketing ploy, you're you're you're told like, oh, this has extra virgin olive oil or this has this, that or that, and you're made to feel like this is such an amazing product.

And if you don't turn that package around and look at what the ingredients are, then you are going to be full. Because most of those products, there's no regulations on the front of the package. None. They don't. They could put whatever they want. The back is more regulated. It's not even as regulated as we should have it, but it is a little bit more regulated. And whatever's in that product, they do have to they do have to show in the ingredients. Now, they do still hide a lot of things, and that's why it's once again better to make your own food than to buy something that's already pre-made.

And one of the one of the things I advise is I say when you go to the grocery store, look for things that are ingredients versus that have ingredients. I got you. Yeah. Yeah. Really key. I just learned something that I was really disturbed about around organic food, around glyphosate. Maybe you already know this. I don't know. But so a lot of people this is just an example of that. There are a lot of things in the industry that don't have to be disclosed. It's not regulated, it's not something required require just like when you buy cleaning products, there's no ingredients listed on those cleaning products.

They don't have to. So one of the things around glyphosate and packaged food and organic foods is so one of the the fail safes most of us have had this whole time is, oh, well, if it's organic, that means it's non-GMO because they can't technically have a genetically modified organism.

Organ Meats, Nutrient Density, and Easy Ways to Start 21:00

If it's organic and if it's non-GMO, then that means it's usually glyphosate free as well because it's not needing glyphosate to grow. Well, that part may be true, but the part that is also true that's not disclosed is that they're using glyphosate in the crops. Once they had these organic crops to dry them off. So that goes with their loans, legumes and beans. They're using glyphosate to dry the crop so then it can be harvested out and they don't have to disclose that. So it could be organic and still have life sit on it.

So there's just that's not to make people feel discouraged, but it is to emphasize that the more you can eat from this is one of the reasons why I do like eating animal products is because I can go to that farm, I can see the animal, I can see how they're raised. I can talk to the farm, particularly if I'm buying at a farmer's market. I can immediately learn, are they using genetically modified products or is that great? Is the grass 100%, you know, wild grasses, things like that, and you know of that.

Animals eating that grass, then they are going to be able to assimilate those nutrients in a way that we never could. We can't eat that much grass and get the nutrients from, but the animal can. So when you can identify that that animal is being treated well, eating well, properly raised, then you can also you can usually rely that those nutrients you're getting from that and on products are going to be really clean. And sadly, it's not as clear cut these days on just because they're legume or are being is organic.

That means it's healthy. It doesn't it doesn't equate all the time. You know, this world has gotten just or I feel just so complex in the strangest ways like you can imagine. Right. If you talk to your grandparents or your great grandparents, I'm thinking specifically of my great grandmother right now. And if I had said to my great grandma, I'm hey, great grandma, I'm I'm going to have grass fed beef, she would have laughed so hard and said to me, Child is wrong with you, because of course cows eat grass.

You didn't need to say grass fed beef. What? Like what? What are we doing? Well, it's like saying functional food weight isn't awful, but it's not. It's not anymore. It really isn't. There's so much food that is just empty calories. And and, you know, this this Dr. Bill Shindler, who wrote the book Eat Like a Human, he's an archeologist, studies how humans eat. He mentions this. He has this quote and he says, you know, the human species is the only species in the entire world that looks to someone else to tell them what to eat.

Well. You know, and that's that's really humbling. Right? So it's it's very I really feel like we have gone in the wrong direction. We've lost our innate knowledge of what we personally need. We have entered into a food system that is really like looking at yield instead of health. And what we I think the how we can bring back that power is, first of all, vote with your dollar. So buy food, buy real food, don't buy these ultra packaged foods. Secondly, I think the more you can get back to that innate like eating your food like a lot of us get kind of caught up on swallowing our nutrients because we're taking all those supplements.

Right? One of the issues I have with that is because when I just use salt as an example, when I put salt in your tongue, your body communicates immediately to you more or less immediate. There's no delay. And usually you can't get past three licks of that salt and you're done, right. Well, if I give you a salt tablet, you swallow that salt tablet 20 minutes later, 15, 20 minutes later, you feel bloated. Why am I blew it? I got too much salt. So one is guesswork. One is fight is not in tune with your own body's knowledge of what it needs.

And the other is working with, you know, your natural, biological digestive process. So I'm always a big fan of, you know, eat real food, chew it. You know, a lot of us swallow it whole because it's such a rush to take the time to chew it. Sit, sit down. When you're eating, take take a moment, take a breath so you're not in this fight or flight. Kind of like anxiety as you're eat. And this is this is actually so important is how we I could feed you the best food in the world. But if you're not digesting it, it does not matter.

So you need to be in that parasympathetic state when you're eating to support the digestion of that food. Eat slowly, you know, put your fork down in between those bites and let that food nourish your body. Let that food that you beautifully created, that you took the time to create, let it naturally nourish your body and feel how it makes you feel. If you rush that process, then that's when we get into situations of where we're eating the whole pint of ice cream and we're not in tune with that.

Or how does that make my body actually feel? Because usually we're numbing ourselves right? So a lot of times we just need to eat slower so that we can actually give our body time to communicate to itself. Absolutely. You know, I've often noticed sometimes when people struggle with cravings and they struggle with overeating, that they often also are eating at a very hurried pace. And sometimes that has its roots, maybe in childhood or school years where maybe there wasn't enough food growing up or absolutely growth.

Right. That's a trigger. I think you make a great point about making sure you literally set the stage so that your body can digest and fully absorb and assimilate all the wonderful food that you're eating. So that's why I love prayer, actually. Right before food and it doesn't even have to be religious. Could just be like a gratitude any any kind of gratitude, a prayer for you because it gets you to stop, take a breath and just look at your food and have some gratitude towards that. You're eating what you're eating and just just reverence for what you're doing in it right away.

It is that even if you take a minute to do that, that slows you down. It immediately brings you in a different state when it when you're here and you're in a grateful kind of energetic, the energy of gratefulness, you immediately kind of like ground down into a whole new state. Yeah, yeah. The wisdom of the age is right around the world. People do these things. There's there's a reason that. Yeah, absolutely. So please share with us what your thoughts are about this. What is the helpful role that organ meats can play and how do we best incorporate them into our diet?

Absolutely. So I have, as I mentioned, around eating animal based products. I have I do tend to gravitate towards that, but different than I think how people talk about. I really focus on the whole animal. And it's really important to me that we for for many reasons. I mean, first of all, besides, you know, organ meats being an excellent source of quality protein, they have an abundance of vitamins and minerals like vitamin A, all of the B vitamins, which support actual sleep as well. So getting these nutrients in your diet do more than just kind of satiate you.

They're helping every biological process of your of your body. They also have vitamins C, D, E, and K, and for those that don't know K two is that it's like that new treat that was previously known as Activator X because it actually activates bone development. So it supports you in your bone development. It's got essential minerals like iron, calcium, copper, magnesium, potassium, selenium, zinc, it's got folate. And anyone that kind of maybe recently is trying to get pregnant or recently has gotten pregnant has taken a prenatal.

You may be noticing that everything I'm mentioning is what science tells you. Oh, these are the vitamins and minerals you need to create life. So isn't that interesting that everything we need to create life are in organ meats and yet we are not eating them. It's something like 93% of Americans are nutrient deficient. And, you know, we're not calorie deficient. So this has nothing to do with how much food we're eating. It has to do with what we're choosing to eat. And so when I look at organ meats, so automates for me solves a few things.

It solves a nutrient deficiency that we're all experiencing in modern living. This is what happens with modern living stress, depleted soils, our our current conventional agricultural systems. I mean, there's so many reasons why our food is not as nutrient dense as it once was. So we just have to accept that that is true. So if you're nutrient deficient and you need to focus on foods that are nutrient dense and organ meats, our hands down the most nutrient dense food on the planet, you can compare them against anything salmon, kale, blueberries, you name whatever you think is nutrient dense and and beef liver alone will blow it out of the water.

So that's really key. But we're not eating them for three main reasons. One is we think they taste icky. The other is we are we've lost sourcing. We don't know where to get them. And then the third is we've lost that culinary knowledge of how to cook it. So ultimately what I try to do is not only as a chef, but also what I try to do with my product. Pluck is to solve that. I want to make getting these nutrient dense foods as easy and delicious as possible, because if you're not eating them, it won't.

Then it does. I could talk to I'm blue in the face. It doesn't matter. Exactly. It may sound jacked. You have to ingest it. You got to eat it. And if we're eating things that we've cooked at home and we've cooked it our own way, like this morning before I got this call, actually, I should say it started last night. It was in my head yesterday morning as I was traveling, I finally got back home from the East Coast to the West Coast. Then last night I hustled out to the store and I bought the ingredients, my child on prep, because I knew I have a busy day to day, starting with our recording.

Right. And just to make this real for our listeners, you know, I had put together the elements for a mere pop bass, fancy way to say the bass for chickens do. So that's going to be carrots, onion, celery and other things. Separately, I had chopped up some collard greens, some dino kale for a separate greens dish are making. And right now things are simmering along, doing their merry cooking in the crockpot. So looking for that nutrient density. So just so people know for myself or James, for other people who are experts here on our summit, we do it ourselves.

We don't just say other people should do it. We do it. Absolutely. Now you're you're mentioning something that I really love talking about, just to step away from organ meats for a second. It is is one of the most underused tools towards moving your health. Is menu planning meal planning. It hands down will revolutionize how you your health because basically what happens is we all get in these scenarios where we didn't plan our day well and that's when you and then you spent your whole day working hard, making lots of decisions.

And then you get decision fatigue. And at the end of the day, oh, shoot, what are we going to eat? And what happens? We make very poor choices at that moment because we can't make any more decisions. You're over hungry at this point. So now you are going to make the most immediate, immediate gratifying meal which is ordering out there. That's usually what you do. So the more you can meal plan and there are simple ways that a meal plan like you could get a subscription to one of those kind of Bon Appetit magazines, you could just grab any cookbook from your book at your kitchen bookshelf, grab that and just skim through it and find the recipes where the pictures look.

They look enticing like this. Go by your I, you know, eat with your eyes what looks good. Okay, this looks good. But that's going to be Monday night.

Meal Planning, Leftovers, and Simplicity 33:00

This is going to be Tuesday. This is going to be Thursday. Oh, wait a second. And this is what you did so beautifully is oh, wait a second. Thursday, I'm working all day. So that day I don't really have time to cook. So you know what day that's going to be. It's going to be slow cooker or instant pot day, because then as you did, you can throw everything in that pot in the morning, put it on a timer, you know, set it to time and then it's done. When your day is ready, you know, when you're ready to eat.

So when you meal plan, you don't just haphazardly start putting together recipes. You look at your you look at your calendar for the week and you match the meal plan to your calendar towards what you will have the time and the effort to make that day. And if it's slow cooking all week, great. And here's another tip is make sure when you're making those meals double or triple those meals because we don't have to we don't have to eat a different thing every single day. That is a that is a glorified way of eating.

Most people, they make like you're making a whole chicken, for example, depending on how people how many people in your house or let's just say there's two, right? Well, that meal could last you 3 to 4 days right there, because the first day you eat it from the roasted chicken, the next day for lunch, you're having maybe leftovers. You take some of that chicken, you add it to a salad. The third that night, it becomes chicken soup. You know, I mean, there's so many things you could do with just that, that roast.

And then when you're all done with the chicken meat, you take the bones and you make a broth out of it. You know, I mean, there's so many things you could do. And and they're very simple moves, but the key is what works for your lifestyle. So don't work against your lifestyle. Work for your your lifestyle and make it as easy for yourself as possible. If you have a really hard day, don't create, don't choose like a really complicated recipe. You know, follow the formula. I said earlier, is there protein?

Is there fat? Is there is there vegetable? Throw it all together in a sauce pan and saute it and you are done. Exactly. Exactly. You know, you said that so Well, say it again about the need for simplicity. Please repeat, because people take notes. This is real. This is making ourselves so stressed out. This should be simple. Absolutely. Keep it simple. Meal plan based on your your calendar, meal plan based on your day. Keep it as simple as possible on those days where you need it to be as simple as possible and follow the formula.

What what do I what I am? What am I going to eat that day? I need some protein, I need some fat, I need some vegetables, and then make more than you actually need. So then that way you have leftovers the next day. So that is all you need to do. And you can throw those those those items in saute pan, saute it till it's cooked and you are done. Maybe put a little salt pepper on it and you are done like don't overcomplicate it, particularly on those days when you're just tired. Let's face it, we all work so hard.

Modern, modern life means we have to work very hard. And one of the things to our advantage is when you're cooking from home, you control the ingredients, but that also means you control how complicated the meal is. Keep it simple and just nourish yourself. Nourish yourself on every level. The simplicity, stress, free level, and then also on the real food hall food level as well. So, so important. All right. So here's another question for you. What steps can a listener take to immediately improve their health?

Oh, well, right away, the meal planning right away. Now, here is one that I'm sure you're going to hear a lot from people during this summit, which is sleep. So sleep is imperative. It's imperative. And I really have to stress this, actually, we've got good sleep when I don't sleep well, I make extremely poor food decisions. So right away, just getting better sleep is going to support your food choices. And then from there, the other pieces are drinking more water, something you're going to probably hear a lot as well during this summit is that people are more dehydrated than they realized.

A lot of times when we are craving sugar, actually all we need to do is just drink some water and then you will no longer feel that craving a use water and use walking as your buffer between those cravings. So if you're finding that you're obsessing over a specific food during this process, go for a walk, literally take a glass of water, and then go for a walk. Get out of that kitchen, get out of that that location that's inspiring you to feel this. This craving. Go for a little walk and then see if when you come back, if you're still finding, you know, needing meeting that craving food or that craveable food, whatever it is, I promise you you probably will not as long as you've done those two things.

Remove your self from the environment and drink some water. So those are the immediate things. And then the other I would say is start incorporating organ meats. You'll you'll find that when you start to get those nutrient dense foods in your diet, you actually feel better. And when you feel better, you treat other people better. So it's it's one small step towards actually improving not only your quality of life, but life in general. You know, the world, it's it's it's it's a it's a it's a little part of making the world a better place. And and I know I'm talking a lot here, but I'll even share just a couple of steps if we have time.

How to ease into automates that. Okay so you can keep it very simple. So the most the kind of the the gateway to getting arguments, the easiest way is with plex's plex easing is is freeze dried powder organs. There's five of them. It's liver, heart, kidney, spleen and pancreas. And I combined it with spices and herbs and it's as simple as salt and pepper in your food. So that is like literally the easiest way to get those five organs in your diet. You're getting microdosing frequently. Cumulative effect.

Now, that also will help to shape your palate and get you more conditioned towards the flavors of arguments, which is really nice. But then the next step I would do is buy some chicken hearts. Now, chicken hearts themselves, they're very small, so they won't they won't feel that overwhelming. And what you can do with them is chop them up just like you would a mushroom. So that way they don't even look like a heart because we need to remove any kind of stimulus that's going to get you to kind of feel icky around this.

Right? So we want to not only change what it looks like, but then the other key piece about Chicken Hearts is that it actually is very mild tasting. It doesn't taste strong at all. And it takes on the flavor of whatever you add it to. So you could chop up one chicken heart real small, add it to like ground meat and now. No, no, no. You could add it to spaghetti sauce. No one will know. Just treat it. Treat the ratio where the amount of the organ meat, the chicken parts is much lower than the amount of the muscle meat.

Palate Training and Expanding Food Preferences 40:00

So keep it small. I usually treat the chicken hearts just like I would mushrooms, for example. Like if I was putting mushrooms into a spaghetti sauce, I wouldn't use 20 mushrooms I might use to slice them up and I'd add them the sauce. Just a little texture, right? That's what I would do with the chicken hearts as well. Just to 2 to 4. Chop them up, put them in. So chicken hearts are really good. Now, when you're ready to kind of like move towards a bigger organ, like a beef liver, what you can do is buy a beef liver.

They usually come frozen, but keep it frozen because one of the things that kind of overwhelms people is when you have a defrosted beef liver, you're like, What do I do with all this liver? It's so overwhelming because you're not going to eat all of it in one sitting. It's too much. So what I recommend is you keep it frozen and then grate it. So every time you have ground meat, just great, a little bit of that beef liver into that ground meat. Just once again, maybe a tablespoon, maybe two tablespoons, not too much, just a little bit grated into that ground meat.

Put it back in the freezer, It stays frozen. You don't get overwhelmed. And now you're getting those nutrients from an extremely nutrient dense food and you don't taste it. It doesn't taste doesn't change the texture and it doesn't change the flavor very, very easy. And then from there, you can start to graduate to other things. You can cook tongue, for example. A tongue is an amazing nutrient dense, very tasty part of a cow. It is overwhelming because it has this skin on the outside. It's very thick and people at first see that and they go, Oh, but what's underneath?

If you just boil it for an hour and a half, what's underneath is this very delicate, very stringy muscle. And it doesn't look like what you just cooked at all. You peel back that skin and you pull out that muscle, you can put it under the broiler and crisp it up, and then it will look like carnitas. It will look just like, you know, like cold pork or something like that. But it's what's really cool about it is is like I said, it's more nutritious than muscle meat. It's more flavorful. And here's the really important one, because everyone's always complaining, you know, health is so expensive, right?

Buying grass fed, so expensive. Well, guess what? When you buy the organic meats from that 100% grass fed cow, same cow that you see the rib eye and the butcher, that's $24, same cow. But the cost is more like $4 a pound or $6 a pound. So you now are buying the same quality meat as that person is paying $25 a pound. You're paying you're getting the same quality of meat, but you're just getting different cuts of that animal. And it's extremely it's way better for your pocketbook, way better for your health.

And honestly, it does taste really good when you learn to, you know, kind of mess with those ratios. So, you know, it's not dominant and you'll find it actually adds really great flavor to food. Thanks for that insight about. This, you know, as you're speaking, I'm just thinking so much of how I was raised and how my grandparents, you know, and my grandma, great grandma, I'm cooked. My grandfather, my grandma, mom and mom did most of the cooking. And this is how I was raised, you know, with a wide variety of foods, cuisines from around the world.

It included organ meats. And I think that what's old is new Again, you know, in doing this. So thank you for these great reminders. And for some folks, if you're listening, if this is new, you can incorporate this. This is completely doable. And it can also be budget friendly because, you know, again, I think we make things sometimes artificially complicated and expensive, which is a bad combo. It needs to be simple and something people can afford to do, and that's efficient in terms of time, right?

So thank you for making that clear. So, James, as we go to wrap our session here today, I'm really enjoying this conversation. I would love it if we could touch upon something you mentioned a little earlier. You're talking about people's palate and this issue of palatability, i.e., how tasty and satisfying food is. And a lot of times you've already said people are oriented towards things that are sweet or salty, things like that. They might be feeling kind of hangry, and if they're hangry, they didn't do the meal planning.

Now they're going to make poor choices for food. So how does palate and palatability really make the difference for us in making those healthy food choices? Yeah, well, I think we'll all identify with this scenario. And so I grew up eating Skippy peanut butter, for example. So Skippy, if you ever had that peanut butter, is extremely but you wouldn't know it if that's the only peanut butter you've ever eaten, which was the case when I was growing up. Once I then tried peanut butter that didn't have sugar in it.

It tasted really bland and gross. Just like if you grew up, if you've grown up eating, you know, sugary drinks, juices, and you don't drink a lot of water when you go to drink that water, it tastes it tastes so plain and kind of gross, Right. So in those instances, our palate, which is as I mentioned earlier, our our American palate is really skewed towards salty and sweet. That's really what we are skewed towards. And so when those are that's all we're getting in our diet, then we gravitate more and more.

We almost crave sweet and salty foods because that is where that's kind of the color of our palate that we've we've kind of continue to feed. So the other two or three really that we're not really entertaining, which we really want to rethink, is that bitter taste our end? The fifth one is do umami. Those are all unique tastes. And so when you are skewed towards salty sweet, the way to start to incorporate your your palate to become more adventurous, to be more open to these other foods that might be actually more nutrient dense.

Right. Because salty and sweet is not usually nutrient dense. It's usually the other foods that are a little bit more nutrient dense. So so one of the ways to do that is to start incorporating the bitter in the sour. And how would you do that? Well, if you've ever heard of cultured vegetables, it's a great way to get that sour into your diet. Pickles are another way you can use some bitter greens.

Cultured Foods and Closing Thoughts 46:00

Like, for example, during the winter, a lot of the greens, the salad greens that we see when we're at the markets are bitter. So that's a good time to start incorporating some of those bitter flavors. Umami. Umami is found in organ meats as you start to incorporate pluck or other organ meat products into your diet,you're going to get that in umami. That's also mushrooms have umami, tomatoes have them. So there's lots of products out there that have umami. And when you add these pieces to your palate, to your diet, it makes not only it kind of brightens your palate.

So basically, by bringing in these other flavors, food in general tastes better and it starts to take a picky eater and make them more adventurous. It's it's amazing. Amazingly simple. So you kind of a lot of people might be hearing this going, what like you're telling me I can change how I eat just by focusing on foods that have different flavors? It really does work. And I have gotten countless testimonies from parents where they all they did differently was they started using pluck in their children's diets.

And these are kids that are spectrum that have issues like that, have issues around adventurous eating. They're very picky eaters. All they did was add that to umami from Pluck, and now their kids are open to eating other foods. So it really does work. And if you are finding that you are craving foods that are very sweet and salty, adding those bitter sour and mommy foods will serve well, basically start to move you away from just craving salty and sweet. All right. Great, great, great ideas. Great insights and, you know, an homage to all of our ancestors who did cook this way.

They didn't have fast food and it was a simpler time. There were certainly huge issues from the past that we don't want to bring forward. But now we need to revisit the good things from the past so that we can be healthy going forward. Absolutely. All right, James, thank you so much for your insights and your time and your wisdom that you're sharing so that all of us can benefit from the food we eat and we can prepare it in a way that will sustain us and help us with our blood sugar concerns, inflammation and all the things we want to do, feed that gut microbiome, all of the things we really have to pay attention to now because we're not getting a free ride anymore.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's really the more you can focus on how you're preparing and like I said, using cultured products is really helpful. I'm a big fan of cultured vegetables. That's basically probiotic. You know, it's probiotic foods where the food is already starting to get broken down. It's easier to digest and it's actually removes a lot of the sugars that are in naturally in the food. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, right? The food has already digested that part for us, leaving us something that's even better and keeps us out of trouble.

All right. As you listen to these wonderful sessions from our experts, please be sure to share them with others that you know that care about their health. We're really trying to make a difference here. Diabetes is unfortunately, a growing phenomenon around the world, and we want to make a difference and reverse that trend in a good way. So, James, thank you so much for joining us here on the Reversing Type 2 Diabetes Summit. Thank you for having me, Dr. Beverly.