A lot of people like to talk about multivitamins and how they're an insurance policy.
And it's always confused me as a doctor.
Do you really think there's an insurance policy for not eating well or not exercising or moving
your body or not living in a compassionate and peaceful way?
There's no insurance policy for that.
When you don't eat well you get sick.
And that's one of the reasons that I really promote a food first philosophy that certainly
if people have a deficiency, for example, if you have an illness like pernicious anemia
where your body doesn't allow you to absorb B12, of course you have to take a B12 supplement.
Or if you're severely iron deficient, take an iron supplement.
But over the long term what we really want to see is that people are getting their nutrients
from food.
So some of the reasons for this aren't about nutrition, they're about community, that when
you're engaged when your food and your food supply, when, for example, you go to a farmers
market or if you have kids if you take them to a farm and teach them about where our food
comes from that really creates a different philosophy or a different mindset about nutrition
and about how we nourish ourselves.
Certainly you can live on a multivitamin and sipping on some coconut oil, but that to me
doesn't create a great meal.
And that's really where I think about my favorite healthy delivery system, it's the dinner table
where as people sit around there's a lot more going on than just the food.
My family we're talking and we're processing the day and we're trying something new.
Even just engaging with your food the creative process of cooking, you take some of these
wonderful food I just sort of picked up at the deli and I thought well we can just whip
up a little quick salad, add in lots of fats and proteins with these nuts and seeds, s
little leafy green with the watercress.
I've never made a salad that has those ingredients but it's a creative and fun process in a way
to engage.
I think that's a big difference the idea of starting your day taking a set of pills that
someone has prescribed for you or that we have thought about as that's what makes you
healthy as opposed to really seeking out the top food sources.
And food is really the foundation of your health.
There's also some differences in terms of absorption.
There's some molecules, for example, that just aren't in multivitamins or aren't in
as good of a form I would say.
Things like a vitamin E. In the natural world there are eight forms of vitamin E, in supplements
there's one form.
In all these foods that I love to talk about the leafy greens and lemons and red peppers
there are a host of what's called Fido nutrients or plant-based nutrients.
And these are really the miracle molecules of why plant-based diet are just so incredibly
good for our health because they're signaling molecules.
They literally travel from the end of our fork into our DNA and change how our genes
get expressed and they turn on genes that keep us healthy.
So that's another way that supplements and real food differ as you get these Fido nutrients.
I like the idea that food becomes a way of nourishing the self in a way that a supplement
really can't.
There are a lot of beliefs in supplements but really you can get all of the nutrients
that you find in supplements in whole good nourishing organic foods.
Another important perspective when we think about brain health is it allows us to look
at certain food trends in certain ways that you can take something that people think of
as healthy like juicing or a smoothie.
If you look at a smoothie for a lot of people it's often a lot of tropical fruits and maybe
some low-fat milk or yogurt and really it's a lot of simple sugars.
And we want people to have a more robust meal with her smoothie.
So all the smoothies in Eat Complete have seeds or nuts in them because I'm trying to
increase the fat content in a smoothie and increase of the protein content.
Now fat has been a bad word for way too long.
I hope that everyone now is considering fat as something that's really healthy.
One reason is your brain is mainly made of fat and your brain is amazing.
Human brains are amazing so fats are very, very important to brain function.
And also it's important in terms of staying full that when we eat fats and proteins and
complex carbohydrates our bodies just stay full longer so you're eating fewer calories
and that helps move you towards an optimal weight.
So really eating for brain health helps you look at something like a smoothie and say
I want to get as much of the whole food as possible.
It's why the smoothies in our house I don't usually juice ever in our house, we just throw
the whole food in there whether it's kale, blueberries, some kaffir, a little fermented
dairy product, some almonds, for example, and blend it up where I'm really, again, trying
to deliver a lot of nutrition in a small dose.
The other thing I like about smoothies is often times I'm working with patients who
are depressed and they don't have a lot of appetite so it's a little bit of a paradox,
we know they need to eat much better in terms of really to restore their full health.
So they don't have a big appetite so something like a smoothie with, again, lots of nuts
and seeds and some healthy fats really can help them because it goes down easy and it's
in a small, small amount.
There are a number of myths that I think are also really important to dispel about eating
for your health.
One is the myth that it costs too much.
I grew up in a food desert in Crawford County Indiana, very rural Indiana and a food desert
is a place that there isn't fresh food and there aren't grocery stores.
And what's very interesting about where I grew up is there are a lot of farms.
So you'd wonder how is there a food desert?
And we see what's happening really over the last ten years in America is a change in how
we get our food.
Increasingly we're having food delivered to us.
Increasingly we're having farms, like right here in New York City one of my favorite farms
is on a rooftop across the river, huge farm; feeds hundreds of families called Brooklyn
Grange Farm.
So in terms of access we really see things shifting where there are great policies in
the many states now where food stamps are two for one in a farmers market.
So there's this redistribution of how we think about food and food dollars, but access can
be a huge issue so how do you find access?
There are lots of great resources to help you find local farms in your area.
A CSA or community supported agriculture is a way that for a few hundred dollars you can
get a big box of produce every single week.
And so there's all kinds of little tips and hacks in terms of how you can get this food
into your diet without spending a lot of money.
Eat Complete is a plant-based book.
Plants cost less money than things like meat and even a lot of processed foods.
So when I think about how to describe what is a healthy food to people I talk about the
rule of kale.
That kale has been a phenomenon and even there's a little bit of kale backlash now, but really
the point is that kale teaches us a lesson.
There's three lessons.
The rules of kale are we want to look for foods that are nutrient dense, more nutrients
per calorie.
The difference between a kale salad is a bevy of nutrition and good feeling and something
like a soda or a marshmallow, just sugar no nutrients for your brain.
We want everybody to be nutrient dense food.
The second rule kale is about culinary versatility, that you can do a lot with it.
I mean you might not think so.
Back in the day kale was just in the salad bar at Pizza Hut.
It's like the third circle of hell for kale, but culinary versatility is that you can use
kale in a lot of different things.
You can drop it in your smoothie; you've just increased the nutrient density of that smoothie.
You can make a kale pesto or a kale soup or a kale salad and put a nice piece of salmon
or wild shrimp on top of it.
You can make a kalejito even.
You can use it and all kinds of ways creatively.
And then the third is accessibility.
Kale grows everywhere.
It's $2 to $3 dollars for a big bunch of organic kale.
You can make a giant batch of kale chips.
You can feed a family of four for probably a week on a few dollars of kale.
And so that's really I think where the accessibility issue hits home for me is that we forget to
teach people about proper nutrition and about our relationship with the food supply and
we don't learn these basic culinary skills.
I'm not a great chef.
I have a chef's knife and my cutting board and some olive oil and that's the base of
almost all of my dishes and a cast-iron skillet.
Simply combining good wholesome foods together it ends up being just absolutely delicious
and incredibly nutritious.
And that's the goal and I think we have to really understand that for a lot of people
the barrier is money and time.
And one of my favorite little tips is around dried beans and lentils.
So dried beans here in Manhattan $2.29 a pound for the small red bean.
The small red bean has more Fido nutrients or antioxidants per gram that any other food,
even more than blueberries.
So an example of really, really low cost point very, very nutritious food.
And then time.
And part of my focus in Eat Complete was trying to find very, very simple quick recipes for
people to employ in their every day life.
Because as a clinician I really am on the front line of seeing the difference of sort
of telling people what to eat and helping them really change their behavior.
I meet with a lot of eaters where it's very clear to me they know exactly what they should
be eating, but how you actualize that, how you manifest that in your every day life is
the challenge.
And that's where dispelling these myths like it takes forever.
I cooked breakfast for my kids and my wife this morning in five or ten minutes.
It's simple, oatmeal with some almond butter scooped on top of it.
If I want to get fancy maybe I'll put a little lemon zest on there, a little cinnamon, maybe
drop in some fruit; simple, simple whole foods.
A real easy test of your food is look at your plate and everything should have one ingredient.
You're looking at brussels sprouts maybe with a little bacon in there or you're looking
at wild salmon with a garlic scape pesto, all things that you recognize and know as
opposed to reading gradients on the back of a package where those foods are generally
created for the shelf; they're not really created for your health.