"Dr. Greger in the Kitchen: My New Favorite Dessert"
This is Dr. Greger in the kitchen, where I take the science and put it into practice.
Today I'm going to share with you my new favorite dessert, matcha ice cream.
Matcha is powdered green tea leaves.
What's so great about green tea?
It's consumption is association with lower rates of heart attacks, strokes,
and premature death, proven in randomized controlled trials to prevent
precancerous colon polyps from developing, and precancerous prostate lesions
from turning into full-blown cancer,
and so anti-viral there's an FDA approved green tea compound ointment
used to reverse warts caused by the HPV virus.
That's why in my daily dozen checklist,
it is one of the healthiest beverages, along with water and hibiscus tea.
Matcha is probably the healthiest way to drink green tea
since you're drinking it as a whole food, whereas normally you just make
a hot water green tea extract, right, and throw away the leaves.
That's like boiling some collard greens and throwing away the greens
and just drinking the cooking water.
Think what proportion of nutrition you'd be throwing away.
The same thing with tea leaves.
Matcha allows you to drink tea whole.
That way you get all the nutrition,
but also all of the potential contaminants.
You know, China was late on the ban on leaded gasoline,
resulting in higher than average lead levels
in the soil on Chinese tea plantations.
It gets taken up by the plant, but does not tend to leach out into the water
when you just make tea the regular way.
But if you eat the tea, like matcha,
or if you throw tea leaves in a smoothie or something,
I would recommend making sure your tea is sourced from Japan, rather than China.
and I have a video about the tolerable upper daily dose for kids, pregnant women,
other adults, depending on brewing method and source country.
All right, now this stuff I have here is from Japan, so that's not a problem.
The problem, however, with any matcha tea is the taste.
Matcha has a strong grassy, earthy, mossy flavor.
So I figured why not put it into ice cream?
It could be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.
Of course traditional ice cream has way more than a spoonful of sugar,
not to mention the saturated butterfat,
and the dairy proteins can actually interfere
with some of the beneficial effects of the green tea compounds.
So how about making a healthy matcha ice cream comprised entirely of whole foods,
just two whole foods to be exact.
Take two frozen super ripe bananas
and put them in a food processor or blender,
along side with a half teaspoon of the matcha tea.
And now more if you can stand it, but it's pretty strong stuff
so why don't we start there, and blend it up.
Blended frozen bananas take on this perfect rich creamy ice cream texture.
Now the more, the riper, the better.
You want lots of little brown spots on there.
Look at that beautiful green color here.
All right, I'm going to add a little, maybe a little mint garnish here.
The matcha actually makes the blended bananas taste better somehow.
So we're talking just two whole plant foods — one a dark green leafy —
makes a gourmet decadent-tasting dessert.
The more you eat, the healthier you are.
That's the way desserts should be.
If you want more recipes like this,
incorporating some of the healthiest foods on the planet,
check out my new cookbook,
the How Not to Die Cookbook, now available for pre-order.
I think the ice cream recipe in the book actually uses strawberries, almond butter,
and vanilla extract instead of the matcha, but delicious either way.
The cookbook will be out this December right in time for the holidays;
makes a great new year, new you kind of gift.
All the proceeds I receive from the sales of my books,
DVDs, speaking engagements all goes to charity.
I just want you to be healthier.