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Caryn delights in discussing her newest way of making almond yogurt and making buckwheat flour from groats to use in crepes. After interviewing Damien Mander she returns to review the findings of Dr. Dale Bredesen’s groundbreaking research to turn around cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s and Dementia using diet and lifestyle.
Transcription:
Caryn Hartglass: Hello everybody! Happy day. I’m Caryn Hartglass and you’re listening to It’s All About Food. Thank you for joining me today.
I am very excited! Why am I excited? Because I have a guest coming in who is a phenomenal human being and has a wonderful story to share, and we’ll be hearing from him soon. I have invited him into the studio, Damien Mander, the founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation and he’ll be coming into the studio. We’re very lucky to have him live here in New York. He’s been doing a number of events here and he lives in South Africa so he’s come a long way to share a very important message. More about that very soon.
So while we’re here together, you know from time to time I like to focus on breathing, and sometimes I like to think about something I’m grateful for. And I wanted to tell you right now what I’m grateful for in this moment. It’s the little things in life sometimes that matter. So I was heading in today to the Progressive Radio Network studio in Manhattan and I was coming out of the subway and I grabbed the handrail, the bar, along the stairway, and my hand slipped into some fresh bird poop. [laughter] Very unpleasant! And I’m sure it was pigeon poop because we have a large pigeon population here. Pigeons are really smart! But I’m not sure they know where their poop may be falling, but maybe indeed they do, who knows. But what am I grateful for? Not to get a handful of pigeon poop, obviously, but you know from time to time in restaurants they give away these moist hand towels and I’m never really in the mood to use them, but I don’t like to waste anything and I’ve been conveniently storing some in my wallet. And I was very grateful to pull one out and clean myself and the handrail, for any other unfortunate people who may have been sliding their hand up the handrail as I did. So, thankful for moist towelettes when we need them. Otherwise I think they’re a rather silly invention, but they do come in handy in times like these, right?
Okay well this show is called It’s All About Food and I promote a healthy vegan diet. In case you’re new to this program or in case you forgot, I’ve been a vegan for almost 30 years and will be celebrating my 30th anniversary sometime next year in 2018. Gosh, we’re almost near 2020! Doesn’t that seem like so far away in the future? It does to me but it’s only three years away.
I want to talk about food because even though there’s a lot of bad things going on on the planet today and we’ll be covering them and we’ll be covering some of them shortly with my guest, I think it’s important to focus on the good, focus on the joy and there’s two big reasons for that. One is, it feels a lot better, it makes our journey on this planet a lot better, when we look for what’s good rather than focusing on what’s bad. It just feels so much better. And the second thing is, I think we can be much more effective advocates for change if we look for joy in our own lives. It can be very demoralizing when we’re focusing on the horrors that are going on because they’re everywhere, everywhere we look. The horrors that happen to humans, horrors that happen to the environment, and horrors that happen to all living species on this planet. It’s an interesting place, our home planet Earth, isn’t it?
Okay so while I’m focusing on the good things, I like to talk about delicious food. So I hope you’ve had a good meal recently because I may make you hungry. This week I made almond yogurt, and I’ve talked about it sometimes on the program but I really want to encourage you to try making it, it’s really easy and I can’t believe how fantastic it is. And I’ve recently changed my recipe because I used to make my yogurt from a non-dairy milk and probiotics or plain yogurt that I had either purchased or made, and added in a few raw nuts, soaked raw nuts to give it a little more richness and thicken it up. But now I’m making my yogurt with just nuts and water, no intermediary product, just soaked nuts and it’s fantastic. I mean it’s fantastic, I can’t tell you how fantastic it is.
I’ve only had it for a week and I’ve made four jars and it’s just made my life so fantastic. And we’re going to be talking a little later about some groundbreaking study that’s been going on for a few years with a plan or a protocol to reverse Alzheimer’s. Have you heard about this? I’m going to tell you about this in a little while. But one piece of the protocol is to consume probiotics and prebiotics. And I believe from the health practitioners that I respect like Dr. Joel Fuhrman, if we’re eating a healthy diet we don’t really have to concern ourselves with consuming probiotics because our gut should be loaded with good probiotics, but we want to feed our good probiotics with healthy prebiotics, and beans are a great way to feed our probiotics because they are considered prebiotics–food for probiotics–which ultimately keep our gut healthy. But yogurt has always been considered a great way to get probiotics. And whether you know you have a healthy gut or not, this almond yogurt is such a fantastic way to consume probiotics and get the benefit of healthy nuts. Healthy soaked nuts, because soaking your nuts is important and it helps make the nut more digestible and more nutritious. So making the almond yogurt. Now I’m kind of nutty the way I do it, I soak my nuts overnight and then since they’re raw, I individually peel off the skins from each nut. And this is like a Zen practice, it takes time and most people don’t want to deal with this, and you can get blanched almonds and it’ll be fine but I like to start with the raw nut. I like to start with the raw nut and the yogurt is just fantastic. And we’ve been using it not just as a yogurt, which I like very much to have on my cereal. This is currently my new favorite cereal: rolled oats, cacao nibs, raisins, flax seeds, and almond yogurt. Fantastic! But it’s also a wonderful sour cream. So we recently celebrated Cinco de Mayo with our tacos, and with all the other good things that were on it, there was this fantastic almond yogurt. Can you tell I am so excited? So the recipe’s up on https://responsibleeatingandliving.com. And I’m fortunate, I have a dehydrator option in my oven so I can set my oven at 110 degrees. But anyone can make yogurt without fancy tools. You just keep it in a draft-free location, cozy, some people like to put their jars in a warm bath in a ceramic pot that they keep at a very low temperature so that it’s holding at 110 degrees but you can just keep it on the counter as long as it’s cozy and it’ll become yogurt in no time at all.
Another few things I wanted to talk about in terms of celebrating with delicious food, I was excited about the recent French election where Emmanuel Macron was voted president over Marine Le Pen and actually I sighed a bit of relief when that happened. There are no ideal candidates but I am glad of the direction that France is going at the moment and hopefully they will have some good fortune in the next few years and do good things for their country and for the planet. To celebrate, I like to make French food. So that evening of the election when the election results came in, it was Sunday, I whipped up a bunch of my version of French crepes, French vegan gluten-free crepes. Fantastic. Now I have a number of different buckwheat crepe recipes at https://responsibleeatingandliving.com and some are lighter and simpler, and some are heavier, and some are heavier and richer, and some are lighter and richer. This recipe is perfect and it has a richness, and I’m going to tell you why. So this recipe is made with buckwheat flour and garbanzo bean flour. And I find that the garbanzo bean flour makes the buckwheat flour more easy to manage, since we’re not using eggs in this recipe. The garbanzo bean flour adds a little bit of stability, instead of having a crepe that doesn’t hold up and rips. Mixing the two, the buckwheat has a very strong flavor so it easily overwhelms the flavor of the garbanzo bean flour and you have the flavor of a buckwheat crepe.
Now one thing I’ve been wanting to do for I don’t know how long, and I remember someone on this program that I interviewed and unfortunately I can’t remember who it was, was talking about making your own flours from grains or pseudo-grains, and I’ve kept this in the back of my mind, that you could take millet, the raw millet grain and buckwheat, the buckwheat groat, and put it in a high-powered blender and you get flour. Well I’ve done it with millet and it’s fantastic. And I didn’t have buckwheat flour but I had raw groats and I ground up the buckwheat groats and made flour. And what I like about this is, we’re always talking about the importance of eating whole, minimally processed foods, well here you know how whole and minimally processed your flours can be if you’re starting with the whole grain, the whole groat, and grinding it right there. Fantastic. And the fragrance, the aroma is fantastic and fresh. So I was excited that I finally followed through on that food discovery and ultimately made these fantastic French crepes.
I want to tell you one more secret ingredient in this recipe and that is soy lecithin. Now some people are afraid of soy, some people are afraid of processed soy. Organic soy foods like tempeh, tofu, soymilk, edamame, these have all been shown and proven to be part of a healthy diet. I like to use soy lecithin occasionally in baked products and they are fantastic in this particular crepe recipe, giving them a richness. And one of the things you know that I love to do, promoting healthy delicious food, is people can know that they can live a vegan diet and not be deprived of anything. We can have it all and feel really good about who we are and what we’re doing.
I’m Caryn Hartglass and I’m back with for little while to talk about food. And let’s just breathe a moment because that was amazing, listening to that man’s story. And I’m kind of choked up, how about you? wow! Okay so I really hope that you check out the International Anti-Poaching Foundation and I loved how he called the poachers “criminals.” It’s amazing, humanity, what we can do, isn’t it? We can choose to do good and we can choose to do horrible things. but it’s so inspiring when we discover people who are doing amazing, amazing things, out there in the bush, protecting those beautiful animals, elephants and rhinoceros, and all of the species that are related to whether these particular animals thrive or not.
Okay, I need to breathe here, don’t you. And please, if you have any comments or questions you can send me an email at info@realmeals.org. So I told you before that I was going to talk about some interesting findings regarding Alzheimer’s and dementia, and I will do that now. I’m unwinding from a week of the Food Revolution Network annual summit, the 6th annual summit that just ended on Sunday, and it was fantastic, if you heard any of it or all of it I’m sure you enjoyed it. I know I did. It’s a big commitment to listen 3 hours a day for 9 days, well for 8 days and then an hour and a half the last day. Intense amount of information. And that’s why the Food Revolution offers an empowerment package where you can listen to the entire program at your leisure when you have a chance. And if you haven’t had a chance to listen to the program and you can get the empowerment package, I recommend it because I listened to every interview and they were all fantastic. And for me, I’m plugged into this all the time so most of the information about food and the power of plant foods is not very enlightening for me. And I don’t want to sound smug about it but I’m focused on this all the time, but when I do hear something new that I haven’t heard, wow, I jump onto it.
And I was surprised that I hadn’t heard this because the information actually started to come out in 2014 and it’s only been gaining more support. But Dr. Dale Bredesen has come up with a protocol and he’s had tremendous success with Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. And he has shown that he can turn around cognitive decline. And nobody’s been able to do this. We have some drugs out there that are supposed to slow the decline in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and we don’t even know if they work. But to actually turn things around–and I’m not surprised to hear what the protocol actually is, and I’m going to go over them briefly during the rest of this program, because things that help one part of the body help another part of the body. And there’s a lot of analogies between heart disease and the plaque that accumulates in our arteries and ultimately affects the performance of our heart, and getting blood flow and oxygen to the heart. The same kind of scenario affects the brain. Plaque on the brain makes it difficult for the brain to function the way that it does, so many different complex ways that it does, we can’t even imagine, begin to understand.
So yeah the solution according to Dr. Dale Bredesen is–things that we’ve been talking about on this program for years and other alternative health advocates and plant-based diet advocates have been talking about. So I’m going to go through this list and if you’re interested, you know someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia you might want to get out a pen and write some of these down. If you want to you can write me at info@realmeals.org and I’ll send you information about it because I think this is really really important.
Number one Dr. Bredesen sees the disease process as an imbalance rather than toxicity. So the first thing that he recommends is a diet that eliminates processed foods and unhealthy ingredients, and foods that boost the immune system like fruits, vegetables, and healthy fish. Now I’m not an advocate for eating fish. This is something by Dr. Dale Bredesen. But still, if people would eliminate processed foods and unhealthy ingredients and eat more fruits and vegetables and eat some fish, we’d be in a lot better situation than we are today, with people eating fast food and foods from factory farms.
Okay the next piece is stress reduction with meditation, yoga, music, and other methods that help individuals reduce stress. So if you know someone who has issues with dementia and Alzheimer’s and is able to listen to your advice or you’re able to help them try some new things, meditation and yoga–and it can be very simple yoga, it doesn’t have to be pretzel-twisting, contorting your body into some crazy position–just some simple stretches and moving the body and massaging the internal organs with some simple twists and things can really be beneficial.
The next thing is 8 hours of sleep. Sleep is a really luxurious commodity these days because many people are not getting enough sleep and good quality sleep and it is so essential to health and can actually help you turn around cognitive decline. 8 hours of sleep. And there are ways to improve your sleep, making sure you’re in a dark room with blackout curtains and making sure the last few hours that you’re awake you’re doing relaxing things, you’re not consuming caffeine towards the late hours of the evening so you’re allowing your body to naturally relax so you can get into a sleep. And that stress reduction also will help you sleep better because if you’re constantly worried about things then you’re not going to be able to get good sleep so all of these different things help each other.
30 minutes of exercise 4 to 6 times a week. 30 minutes of exercise 4 to 6 times a week is an important piece of this protocol to turn around cognitive decline.
Very good oral hygiene. I love this one. And there’s lots of talk, lots of studies, lots of research about the importance of oral hygiene these days and how the hygiene or the health of our mouth can be indicative of other health issues throughout the body. Good oral hygiene. Something I mentioned on this program years ago: brushing your teeth for 3 minutes. That may seem like a long time. Count to 180, 1 2 3 4, to yourself while you’re brushing your teeth. You’ll be surprised at how spectacularly clean your teeth feel, rather than brushing them for like 20 seconds or 30 seconds, 3 full minutes. Try it, you’ll be surprised. Very good oral hygiene is part of this.
Improvement of gut health with probiotics and prebiotics. And I was talking earlier about making that almond yogurt. This is a great way to keep your gut healthy with good probiotics.
Fasting for 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. That means if you eat at 6 o’clock you shouldn’t eat until 6 in the morning. Or, if you go to bed late like I do and you eat at 11 PM, my breakfast isn’t until 11 or 12 o’clock the next day. 12 hours between dinner and breakfast.
3 hours or more between dinner and bedtime to keep insulin levels healthy. Okay? 3 hours or more between dinner and bedtime. So if you’re eating at 8 you go to bed at 11. If you’re eating at 11, uh-oh, you can’t go to bed until 2 in the morning. Something like that. That’s the program! And he has been able to turn around–in the first study he did 9 out of 10 patients and that wasn’t very many but
9 out of 10 patients saw improvement and he’s been doing this over the years and still seeing tremendous improvement. So this is something that is important and should be pursued vigorously in my opinion.
All right, we’re out of time! This was great! I’m really excited about future guests on this program. Next week my friend and colleague Dr. Milton Mills will be on the program, he’s a fantastic medical doctor, he works in the ER and I know we’re going to have a lively and passionate discussion, not only about food but about many things. And my friend Del Sroufe, wonderful cookbook author, will be back in a couple of weeks. So we have a lot to look forward to on It’s All About Food. Thanks for joining me today. Remember, find me at https://responsibleeatingandliving.com/, email me at info@realmeals.org, and have a very delicious week.
Transcribed by Hayley Hinsberger, 6/6/2017