As promised in the last newsletter I am giving you my personal approach to meeting the ideals of an optimal diet.  Recall from last time that the ideal diet includes 3-5 cups of non-starchy vegetables three times per day along with 2-4 ounces of a clean full fat protein (meat, fish, poultry, seeds, nuts), and a serving of a baked goodie made from flax, coconut, or nut flour.  Sauces and flavorings are made from spices, herbs, and mono-saturated or saturated fats (coconut, avocado, olive, butter, lard, cocoa butter).  Our goal was to include 40 grams of fiber each day.

The simplest version of this lifestyle eating plan is the big salad.  To make this really work the first thing you need is a big salad bowl for each person to eat from.  Ellen and I use the big oriental soup bowls that you find at oriental restaurants when you order a big dinner size serving of soup.  These are readily available in oriental markets.  My brother on the hand prefers a big wooden bowl - one you might normally use to serve a whole family.  

We just fill the bowl up with many different kinds of lettuce, cabbage, steamed vegetables, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, fermented/pickled vegetables, olives, and sliced almonds.  On top of this we put several ounces of whatever meat we have cooked up - bison burgers, chicken, fish, shrimp, etc...  Then over top of everything goes the dressing.  I like a flavored vinegar with some avocado oil, tomato sauce, garlic, black pepper, and marsala seasoning (but any tasty herbs and spices will do).  I make my dressings up fresh mostly because it tastes better, plus I get to avoid a bunch of chemicals I usually have never heard of.

In the winter months these same bowls get used for our other staple - bone broth vegetable and meat soups.  I have written previous newsletters on how to make bone broth (bones + water cooked for 24 hours).  The nice thing about soups is that you can make a ton of it up in advance and eat it all week long.  Usually we steam up a huge amount of vegetables, puree most of it up in our blender saving a bit in larger form to add back to the soup for texture.  While it is blending we add a good natural soup base flavor and lots of spices.  When finished it gets added to a couple cups of the bone soup stock gelatin that has been melted in a soup pan.  We usually like to adjust the flavor with fish sauce, or some added fat like duck fat.  If we want "creamy" soup we add a can of coconut milk.

The vegetable puree is one of the secrets to consuming large amount of vegetables that I want to pass along.  Now a true confessions moment: I don't actually like vegetables.  To me most vegetables taste bitter.  So the trick for me is to figure out how to make those healthy green things edible.  Those of you that actually find vegetables delightful have a much easier time with creating a healthy diet.  I see the enjoyment our massage therapist Susan McDonald has with her big plates of fresh vegetables at the office.  She brings a veritable rainbow of plant parts for lunch and eats them straight.  Susie, my front office is always telling me how wonderful her green drinks are (gag).  Today she was trying to convince me that kale would be a great addition to my breakfast smoothie.  Nutritionally she is absolutely right.  Taste wise I just can't get it down the hatch.

Well, my way around the taste dilemma is to mix the vegetables with other flavors well enough that you hide the vegetable flavor.  Making a vegetable puree is a simple way to do this.  I will steam up a full head of cauliflower, throw it in the Vita Mix with a little vinegar, fish sauce, ghee, garlic salt, a touch of Dr Dave sugar, and some hot sauce and blend the heck out of it.  What I end up with looks like and feels like mashed potatoes and tastes great.  I can eat a whole head of cauliflower for dinner in this way.  The same trick works with any combination of steamed vegetables you want to throw into the blender.  Pick out your favorite spice and herb combinations and away you go.  You can go for a Mexican spicy flavor, or a Middle Eastern savory, or an Indian curry, or a Thai sweet/spicy flavor.  Your imagination is your only limit.

Another excellent resource are vegan no-grain cookbooks and Paleo cookbooks that focus on using vegetables to make dishes.  You can find things like zucchini lasagna with nut cheese and vegetable spaghetti made with spiral cut vegetables.  Personally I will adapt the vegan recipes by adding a little meat to them since I am not vegan; not a lot of meat, just a little.

The last hot food key cooking tip is the joy of flavor development with sauté and stir-fry cooking.  When you stir-fry or sauté you can just keep adding flavors and spices and sauces until you like the end result.  Ellen usually starts with a generous dollop of fat in the pan and throws in vegetables one at a time, starting with the veggies that take the longest time to cook first.  I will usually have some sort of meat either freshly cooked on the barbecue or slow cooked in the crock pot to add to the pan as the last item.  Then we get to play with the flavor.  Personally I like a balance of flavors - a little sour, sweet, savory, and spicy, but that is just me.   

Another key to my eating style is to find alternate high fiber foods like chia seed and coconut and flax.  These are much more concentrated plant foods that are very high in fiber as well as nutrients.  The simplest way I use these is in my morning smoothie.  I will take 4 cups of almond, flax, or coconut milk and add a couple tablespoons of chia seed, a table spoon of ground psyllium seed, some organic cocoa powder, a teaspoon of my Supersweet powder, vanilla, glycerin, and protein powder (Clearvite or egg white).  Blended up this becomes my high fiber, high protein, full fat breakfast and late morning snack.  Technically this is liquefied plant for breakfast (except when I use egg white).  It just does not taste anything like plants.  If I really want to boost the fiber I add some ground flax or some unsweetened coconut flakes.

A serious "must have" for this lifestyle is glass containers with airtight seals to store cut up and steamed vegetables in.  I use the square glass containers found at Costco.  The plastic lids are no problem as they never touch the food.  Without some way to store vegetables for a week, I would never have the time to eat this way.  Ellen and I use a good portion of Sunday getting our food prepared for the week.  That way all week long all we need to do is pull out vegetables and meats in various combinations for lunches and dinners as needed and just heat them.

Last of all are the baked goodies.  There is no use of grains in this eating style, but we have gotten very accustomed to bread in our diet.  So I had to invent an alternative to fill this need.  Most all the gluten free breads on the market are still made with grains, just different grains.  The one Paleo bread I found tasted literally like cardboard.  So I created the Dr Dave Miracle Bread.  It is a basic bread/muffin/cake mix to which you add flavor packets to make various delightful treats.  The base ingredients are almond flour and egg white so it is seriously nutritious.  Just the mix itself makes a nice white bread, or pancakes, or biscuits by adjusting the amount of water you add to the mix.  Many patients have created their own unique recipes from the base bread mix by adding their own ingredients like pumpkin bread and blueberry muffins.

The baked goodies really make the lifestyle enjoyable for me.  Just vegetables and meat are good, but goodie treats make it all great.  

Now to the deal breaker for most of my patients: you have to learn to cook.  There is no source out there for these kinds of foods cooked for you.  I envision some day chains of Paleo style food restaurants, but they do not exist yet.  Healthy eating for the restaurant world is still driven by the health guidelines put out by the FDA, the Heart Association, the Diabetes Association, and similar disease oriented authority figures that have been telling us exactly the wrong advice for the last 50 years.  They have created the modern degenerative disease explosion with their bad advice.  Unfortunately, restaurants are still believing them, so when they create a "healthy" menu item, it is anything but healthy.  So simply put, to be healthy you have to cook your own food.  There is no way around it.  Do I still eat out?  Occasionally I do, but not very often any more.  Steak and vegetable would be ok, but I don't particularly like steak.  Usually Vietnamese or Thai works for me... and the baby back ribs at Chili's!  

As I described in a previous newsletter, our addiction to convenience is killing us.  Convenience foods are death and disease promoting foods.  Even something as convenient as grabbing a piece of fruit to snack on is deadly if indulged in too often.  Years ago I created a fatty liver in myself by doing exactly that.  Too many pieces of fruit a day acts just like alcohol to the liver.  Fortunately I have been able to reverse the damage because I changed what I was doing before cirrhosis set in.

So there you have it, what I eat.  As I said before, not everybody needs to avoid starches, but I do.  I do believe that a food lifestyle of eating 80% vegetable matter and 20% protein foods is the best general mix for health.  I also believe that the majority of our energy/calorie needs are best met by healthy fats.  Just as important as eating is taking a rest from eating on a regular basis - either daily by having an 18-hour time period each day when you do not eat or by intermittent fasting.  For instance a one day a week fast or the occasional week long Green Fast to clean out our livers.  Previous newsletters have focused on this subject.

Hopefully this article will give a few of you the spark to try out this new way to eat.  Food is and always has been our most powerful medicine and unfortunately our most common poison.  We need to make the choice as to which it will be for us.

Yours in health,


David

Tuesdays and Fridays

Take care,

David            

Does red meat really cause heart disease?

A much publicized recent study suggested eating red meat caused heart disease because it contained a protein called L-carnitine that certain gut bacteria found in some people turned into a chemical called TMAO.  TMAO is thought to encourage the formation of plaque in our arteries.  What the study conveniently failed to point out is that the level of TMAO in the meat eaters was no higher than their control group.  Even more disturbing is their failure to point out that it is already known that many vegetables produce even more TMAO and that the worst offender for TMAO production is fish.  It sounds suspiciously like someone is pushing an anti-red meat agenda here.  What the study should have focused on is the specific gut bacteria responsible for TMAO production and how to change our gut bacteria balance to decrease or eliminate these unhelpful guys.  They did find that vegetarians had none of these bacteria so when they were fed red meat they had no TMAO production.     

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Sugary drinks linked to greater high-calorie food intake 
 

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Intermittent Fasting Healthful

 "Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. "

~ George H. Lonmer

About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

 

Catherine Cummings

 

 

Jin Shin Jitsu

 

 

Lorena Morales

 

 

Massage Practitioner

 

 

 

 

 Is there a sweet that is not poisonous?  Yes!


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