What are healthy ways to cook and meal prep?

Truly healthy meals consist of whole (unprocessed) foods. The nutrients found in whole foods provide your body with all that it needs to maintain healthy body function and repair itself from illness and injury. How you prepare these foods also has an impact on your body’s response. For example, deep frying vegetables in processed hydrogenated oil is not going to produce a healthy meal. 

Start simple: Cook basic meals made from healthy ingredients. Plan your meals around healthy options that are going to realistically fit into your lifestyle and allow you to consistently make good choices. There are many ways to modify recipes to remove bad ingredients and leave in nutrients, while maintaining the same good taste. 

Change your mindset: Healthy eating is not about going on a short term diet to drop a few pounds. The idea is to change your relationship with food and how you eat. 

Plan ahead: Set yourself up to succeed from the beginning to make healthy choices and not fall into a situation where you are choosing from only bad foods. Make sure you have meals planned out that include healthy options. Start bringing your lunch to work, cook dinner at home. Choose healthy options when you are eating out. Bring your own dressing for salads Formulating a plan ahead of time will help you avoid bad decisions when you are hungry.

What are some healthy ways to modify recipes?

Choose olive oil for cold cooking and coconut oil for hot cooking. Avoid seed oils such as corn oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, and others.  

Use almond flour in place of wheat based flour. Cauliflower can be cooked and mashed or riced for a potato substitute. Sweet potatoes are healthier than white potatoes. Spaghetti squash is a good substitute for pasta.  

What if I don’t have time, resources, or willingness to cook?

Start simple with the resources you have. It may not lead to the most extravagant meals in the beginning, but the health benefits are worth it.  Substitute frozen vegetables for canned foods. Empty your pantry and fill your refrigerator and freezer.

Consider meal delivery options, but be careful to do your research.

For those who are experienced in the kitchen, finding healthy recipes and modifying current ones will allow you to cook amazing meals that keep you healthy. 

What are some good resources for finding healthy meal options?

This is not an exhaustive list, but includes resources that we have found helpful in discovering healthy recipes:

Recipes:

For Beginners:

• LearntoCook.com

• Cooking for Beginners | Food.com

For Diabetics:

• Diabetic Recipes | AllRecipes

Other Recipes:

• AllRecipes.com

• Healthy Eating | Food Network

• Paleo Recipes | Ultimate Paleo Guide

Other Helpful Resources:

• 25 Skills Every Cook Should Know | BBC GoodFood

• Vegan Diets: Practical Advice for Athletes & Exercisers | NIH

• EatReal.org

• Nutrition Coalition

What foods should I eat and what should I avoid?

At the CureCenter, we receive a lot of questions about diets, nutrition, and cooking. Therefore, we have put together some general advice and resources to help you improve your diet. We are happy to guide you through what you should be eating and what to avoid.

What types of foods should I eat?

• Vegetables: Try to eat as many different kinds of vegetables as possible (including sweet potatoes). A wide variety of plants provide essential and diverse nutrients. white potatoes and bread are starches, not vegetables.
  

• Fruits: While fruit is good for you and provides essential antioxidants, it also contains sugar. Therefore, it’s important to limit the amount of fruit ingested on a daily basis. It is also good practice to try and eat a wide variety of fruits that offer different benefits.   Instead of “fruits and vegetables” think “vegetables, vegetables, vegetables, some fruit mostly berries.”  Bananas and grapes have too much sugar; avoid them.
  

• Meat & Fish: Protein is an important part of your diet and should not be overlooked or abused. The protein you receive from meat should primarily come from poultry and limited amounts of red meat. Fish, especially oily fish like salmon and sardines, are great sources of omega 3 fatty acids.

  When purchasing meat and fish, try to buy organic or wild caught, and not farm raised, if possible. Farm raised fish are fed grain, making them as unhealthy as corn fed beef.  Eggs are also a great source of protein and good dietary cholesterol.

  If you are on a strictly plant based diet, make sure that you are supplementing for the protein and nutrients you won't be getting from meat, like B12.  Starches are a problem for vegans.  We see a lot of prediabetic potato and bread eating vegans. 
  

• Good Fats: Make sure that you are consuming good fats that come from olive oil, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados. Saturated fats, when consumed without high amounts of sugar in conjunction, do not increase the risk of heart disease or make you fat. That’s sugar’s role! 

When should I eat?

We call it “window feeding.” It is otherwise known as intermittent fasting or time restricted feeding. 

Eat within as small a window of time every day as possible. Eight hours from your first food intake to your last is a good maximum window. Move the window around if possible: delay your first meal some days, then eat your last meal early other days.  

Combined with a low sugar, low carb, whole food, plant-based goal, this lowers your overall insulin levels. Insulin elevation (hyperinsulinemia) is pro inflammatory, which drives atherosclerosis and other chronic disease. 

Why does this work? We are genetically best adapted to our remote ancestor hunter-gatherer pattern of alternating fasting and feasting. We don’t thrive in our current “graze on sugary, processed food every waking hour of the day” culture.   

Insulin resistance was a feature of our software. Now it is a bug. In order to make it a feature, emulate the hunter gatherer eating pattern.  

It also has emotional and spiritual benefits. To paraphrase Dr. Jason Fung, the only thing that Jesus, Abraham, Mohamed, Confucius, The Buddha, and every other religious movement leader agree upon is that fasting is good for us.  

What types of foods should I avoid?

ASX10: Avoid Sweets, Starches, Snacks, Seed Oils.

Also Avoid Sitting, Salt, Smoking, Stress, Sleep deprivation (and Sex is a good thing for your health🙂)

• Sweets/Added sugar: Refined sugar is the biggest contributor to inflammation and insulin resistance in our diets. Increases in the amount of sugar most Americans consume on a daily basis has gotten to absurd and dangerous levels. Sugar is causing the obesity, diabetes, and chronic disease epidemic that can easily be avoided with dietary changes. Added, refined sugar is found most commonly in processed foods, including artificial sweeteners which can still cause an insulin response and sugar cravings.
  

• Starch/Refined carbohydrates: These types of carbohydrates can be found in highly processed breads, sweets, white potatoes, and processed snacks. The refined carbs break down into sugar and spike your insulin, making them dangerous to your overall health. Foods with high levels of refined carbs are stripped of many of their nutrients and contain a wide variety of chemicals used to increase their shelf life.
  

• Sugary drinks: Do not drink beverages that have added sugar and acids. Soda, sports drinks, energy drinks, sweetened tea, and coffee drinks all have large amounts of added sugar - both real and artificial. These drinks lead to insulin resistance, inflammation, obesity and tooth decay. Diet drinks are not better for you. They can raise insulin levels even without the calories. Low insulin levels are essential to avoiding chronic diseases such as diabetes.
  

• Snacks/Processed Foods: Avoid them. It is either “junk” or “food” but it can’t be both. Stick to eating whole, unprocessed foods, not snack foods. Added sugar and preservatives make these products “addictive” and lead to long term health problems. Essential nutrients are taken out when these foods are being processed. Eat real food. Period.

• Seed Oils: Corn, sunflower, soybean and other vegetable oils are inflammatory. Use olive oil for cold applications. Use coconut, avocado and nut oils for hot cooking.

Do diets work?

There are numerous books and programs out there promoting diets. These diets may promise to transform your body in a given timeframe, melt away fat, or promote other tactics that sound appealing and offer unusually rapid and effective results. The problem is that dieting is a temporary habit change which forces you to follow a system without teaching you how to improve your relationship to food. 

Learn how good food fits into a healthier lifestyle that works for you.

Other Toxins:

While recent attention has been paid to microplastics, agricultural chemicals, dyes and other environmental toxins, it is difficult to detect them and modify your life enough on a daily basis long term. SUGAR is the most unnecessary avoidable ubiquitous inflammatory environmental toxin. Instead of worrying whether your Fruit Loops has a petroleum based red dye, avoid the dye and the sugar and other highly processed junk by eating eggs and meat, not Fruit Loops, for breakfast. I suspect the sugar lobby is promoting the attention on these other toxins to divert attention from its role in chronic disease.

How can I use CureCoach.App to measure my nutrition?

CureCoach.App is our digital platform that supports our coaching effort to Cure Chronic Disease. When completing the Lifestyle Diet module, your answers provide you with tokens that are either green, yellow or red when viewing the summary page. 

The answer options are “Rarely,” “Sometimes,” and “Frequently.” Never should be reported as “rarely.” For example, rare use of sugar and frequent consumption of vegetables gets you a green token. Frequent consumption of sugar and rare use of vegetables provoke red tokens. For those choices that are less clearly good or bad, you get a yellow token. Your goal over time is to increase the number of green tokens and decrease the number of red tokens by changing the choices and answers to these questions. 

CureCoach.App can be accessed on your computer, tablet, or smartphone by clicking here.