 So, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. I am so excited today because I've got my head chef extraordinaire, Kate Holtzauer, with me today. She is the recipe developer for the Plant Paradox Cookbook. She's also helping me come up with the recipes for my upcoming book, The Plant Paradox Quick and Easy, which is coming out this January. So, Kate, welcome. Thank you. Yeah, I think I just saw you a few minutes ago. I think you might have. I think so. So, we've got a 30-day challenge for people who wanted to try the Plant Paradox, but you know, they've been a little bit nervous about it, but we'll talk more about that later. But today, we're going to talk about how to adapt your holiday recipes to make them more Plant Paradox friendly. And so, I am so excited to have you on. Kate and I have been collaborating now for about over two years, and Kate really has been a lifesaver. Oftentimes, if you see my hands on one of the YouTube videos, I got news for you. It's actually Kate. And Kate and I just have this incredible relationship. So I want people to know you because you obviously are a huge part of the success of the Plant Paradox cookbook and the Plant Paradox Quick and Easy. And oh, by the way, she's developed a bunch of recipes for the upcoming longevity paradox. Yeah, you've had me busy. I have had you busy. So what's your passion? How did you get into this? Well, my passion for cooking started when I was a little kid. I've been cooking with my parents since I was five, six years old. And it was whatever they were making. Or as I got older, my mom was doing most of the cooking my dad was traveling. And she's vegetarian. I like meat. So I figured out how to make dinner. But later, I worked as a pastry chef at some of the best restaurants in LA. I'm trained at the Cordon Bleu. Ooh la la. As one does when eating nothing but flour and butter for years on end, I got really heavy. So I became passionate about creating recipes that tasted good and worked for me. I've lost over 80 pounds, kept it off. Wait a minute. Yeah. I lost 70 pounds. You're telling me you lost 80 pounds? Yep. Oh, shoot. We are going to have a challenge, ladies and gentlemen. And I'll get to that towards the end of the show. But now, okay, all right, 80 pounds. And you and I know how hard it is to do that. Really difficult. But it's not impossible, even if especially this time of the year, it feels like everything is stacked against you. I mean, you've got cookies, pies, giant meals, holiday parties. It's crazy. So that's a good way to get into this. So what do you like having lost all that weight and now keeping it off? What do you like about the Plant Paradox program? I like how it puts vegetables forward. Like I said, I love to eat meat. But for both ethical reasons and health reasons, I've been focusing personally on making meat the side and vegetables, the main part of my meal. And I think the Plant Paradox program is a really good reminder that things can be delicious, they can be filling, and they don't have to be a steak on a plate. They don't? No, they can be. As long as it's a grass-fed steak and you're not eating that much of it, but they don't have to be. Yeah, that's a really good point. So through the years, you and I have worked closer and closer and closer together. So give me a typical, what's a week like? How do you come up with these recipes? How does all this come about? Show me the magic of the Gundry MD kitchen. Well, sometimes it starts with you emailing me some crazy idea and going, hey, Kate, this looks good. Let's try to make it compliant. And I get in the kitchen, I go through our ingredients, go through what's in the recipe I can't use and figure out how to replicate flavors, textures, and the way it would cook with stuff that I can use. And often it's a couple things that are really gross before I come up with the good version and then I improve the good version once or twice and you get the great version. Yeah. And it's kind of like a scientific experiment saying, okay, we know, that's what we tried to do with the Plant Paradox Cookbook. We tried to give people kind of the foods that they love, but now we wanted to have the foods love them back. And your genius is that you can give people the mouth feel they're accustomed to, the flavors they're accustomed to, and it's actually going to improve their health. Right. There's no reason you can't eat mac and cheese or a slice of cake as long as you do it the right way. Yeah. I mean, that's what's so fun. Yeah. And it's also fun. I know we like to entertain friends and Penny, who is actually not a cook. I'm the cook in the family, Penny's my wife. She now has taken over because the Plant Paradox Cookbook and loves to amaze friends with, you know, like an olive oil cake and, you know, for dessert and they go, Oh, that's so good. It's really good, really good. You did a great job on that. That's a perfect example of, I said, you know, cake, you got to have an olive oil cake because, you know, olive oil has got to be in everything. And you know, how are we going to make this work and you did it. Well, if you remember, that one wasn't just me. That was one of the contest winners, but I went through her recipe, converted it from Metric because we're publishing in America, made a few tweaks to make it really full proof and it was a great collaboration all around. And you've actually taken the cover design of the Plant Paradox Cookbook, which was a great cauliflower pizza recipe from one of my patients and a great restaurateur from Burba. And you made it work for the home kitchen. Right. Not every chef recipe is something anyone can do just because you might not have the equipment or you might not have the knife skills. So what I do with recipes is I take them, I work on them and then I hand them to my husband who is great at following instructions but not naturally great in the kitchen. And if he feels like he can make them, I feel like anyone can make them. Love you, no offense. What's the craziest request I've ever sent you? Oh, weekly? Which one, huh? Which one? The 10 recipes? Hi, Kate. I need 10 new recipes this week. Was pretty crazy. That really was. That was a mad rush to the finish, but we got it done. I'd like cake and ice cream without flour or dairy. Yeah. Also. Yeah, those were fun. Fun but challenging. Definitely a challenge. And a lot of, when we end up replicating junky foods with healthy ingredients because you don't just want it to be kind of right. You want it to be addictive and delicious just like a mac and cheese or a stuffing. But you want it to work. Yeah, you want, again, the whole objective is to get what people are used to, to get them mouthfeel, the taste, everything, the look and not have it kill them. And it can be done. It can be done. That's the brilliance of the plant paradox cookbook. And I think people are going to see that in the plant paradox quick and easy. I think so too. It makes what we've already set out in the cookbook even simpler. And it's great for families. It's great for really busy people, which is exciting, because we've all got 5 million things going on and having less work at the end of the day is fantastic. Exactly. Okay, so it is the holiday season. It sure is. And what are some of the easy swaps that people can do to survive this season and still eat the plant paradox way? Well, one of my favorites is swap potatoes for cauliflower. Any way you prepare potatoes, you can prepare cauliflower, roasted, mashed, even fried. And you get the same starchy feel, the same flavor, but without the lectins. And another favorite. Anything you could do with beans, you could do with broccoli. You're exactly right. And I think the traditional green bean casserole with a can of mushroom soup and onions that are french fried on top of it may be one of the most lethal holiday foods there is. And everybody goes for it because, oh, there's my serving of vegetables. It's healthy. But why not take some broccoli with some caramelized onions on top of it, maybe even a little coconut cream if you want that creamy texture. And you've got a similar dish, but something that's not going to kill you. Yeah. And it'll actually improve your health. Yeah. That's what we're trying to do. Not kill you, but make you better. So how about turkey and gravy? I mean, we've got to have turkey and gravy. What are we going to do? Well, we roast the turkey. If you check out Dr. Gundry's YouTube channel, not only can he roast the turkey, he can carve a turkey and he'll even show you how. I'm a surgeon after all. He's a surgeon. Yeah. Gravy is a little trickier. Traditional gravy is thickened with flour, but it doesn't have to be. I find heavy cream or even coconut cream thickens up a gravy nicely if you just cook it over the stove. Okay. Yeah. So that's a great swap out. Yeah. Ditch the flour, make it a little richer and more delicious, actually. And everybody's got to have their apple pie or their pumpkin pie. Any swap outs here? Sweet potato pie. Oh. Just make it with electing free crust. There's one in the cookbook. There it is. You can also just mix together unsweetened shredded coconut and a little grass-fed butter or coconut oil and pat it into the crust like a graham cracker crust. It sounds pretty easy. Yeah. Now, Dairy, a lot of people are worried about Dairy. As you know, I'm very worried about KCNA1. We're starting, we actually now have a test looking at whether people react to KCNA1 and we're not surprised that a lot of people do. So what do we do about Dairy? Well, this one's been personal for me. I'm not great with Dairy myself. So even before you and I teamed up, I've been doing a lot of work avoiding Dairy in my life, except sometimes ice cream. But if you're worried about KCNA1, you can do A2 milk. You can do heavy cream as the KCNA1 isn't in the cream. You can also use coconut cream or unsweetened almond milk, coconut milk. There are really a lot of possibilities that make even swaps that aren't problematic. Cranberry sauce. What do we do with all the sugar in cranberry sauce? Well, a few options. You could use swerve or monk fruit sweetener or one of the other Stevia, gundry approved sweetener. Stevia tastes a little metallic with the cranberries, I agree. How about just like sugar, one of my favorites? It's mostly inulin with a little bit of orange essence in it. And orange is really beautiful with cranberries. It's a little harder to find in a lot of supermarkets, but I find you can find it on Amazon. You can find swerve at just about any Whole Foods. So for people who are wanting to shop and store, it is an option. Yeah, and actually Whole Foods has agave-based inulin. It's a powder and it's perfectly safe, inulin, as you know, and I know, feeds good gut bugs. It's actually some of the gut bugs' most favorite fuel. They also have agave-inulin syrup now, which if you're wanting a really quick cooked or even a raw cranberry sauce, is a way to go. And since you brought up agave, agave syrup, not agave-inulin syrup, is very different. We talked about some recipes. As you know, one of my favorite recipes from the Plant Paradox Cookbook is the millet stuffing. And everybody's got to have stuffing. Absolutely. Stuffing is delicious. And we've got a YouTube video on how to do that, right? We do. Yeah. It's pretty simple. You take your basic stuffing ingredients, ditch the bread, and use cooked millet instead. I mean, most of the things in stuffing, celery, carrots, onions, whole other verbs, really fine on the plan. You could even use some pasture-raised sausage if you're able to find it, if that's your style, or a whole lot of mushrooms, like I do in my stuffing. We've got vegetarians in the family. And done. Yeah. I put a lot of mushrooms in ours. But there are actually pretty easy to find sausages from pasture-raised animals online. I'll give one shout-out. I have no relationship with them. Belcampo Meats. Oh, I love them. They are a wonderful organization that's a base of Mount Shasta. Everything they do is pastured. And they do have some sausages that are great, and they ship overnight, frozen, and they're actually... You're here in the LA area. They're in Santa Monica and downtown. Yeah. And they have locations in San Francisco and the Bay Area as well. But they do ship their sausages and their ground beef frozen, and that's a great way to get it. It is. Turkey. We talked about that. We got the gravy figured out. Okay, nobody's going to pay $100 or $200 for a true pasture-raised turkey. Probably. Probably. And they're hard to find even if you've got them on it. So what do we do? Well, we look for the best we can find, and we accept that if we're eating turkey like this once a year, it's not the end of the world. We go for a kosher bird, because those are available at just about every major supermarket. Or if a heritage bird that's not pasture-raised is available, go for that. There's a lot of options out there, especially if you're shopping at the Whole Foods or some of the higher-end grocery stores. But even my local Ralph's, which is part of a chain that's nationwide, has kosher birds. Yeah. So not the Butterball, huh? Not the Butterball. Butterball is injected with saline, which doesn't sound appetizing because it isn't. It's not flavorful. It's raised on almost all corn feed. And it's also injected with some interesting vegetable oils, which shouldn't be in there as well. Right. If they're their own fat, they don't need help. That's exactly right. Full disclosure, the Butterball turkey is my wife's favorite turkey. It has been banned from our house for over 25 years, but she's still every year says, can't I have a Butterball turkey? Well, you can get a similar flavor by really brining your own or even injecting it with your own homemade brine the way they do with their very synthetic brine. So we get a heritage organic turkey, and we brine it ourselves. But there are brine turkeys, Mary's makes a brine turkey now. So and most kosher turkeys are brined. All kosher turkeys are brined. So there you go. It's part of the law. All right. So don't sweat. It's only one day. And enjoy yourself. Or two days. A lot of people do it at Christmas holidays as well. Breads. Come on. You've got to have bread over the holidays. Well, there's a great lectin-free bread recipe in the cookbook. It was really hard to come up with, but it's delicious. I know. You really worked hard on that one. Yeah. We went through like 10 different flowers before settling on a good combination. Now, when you say flowers, are these flowers that the average person can go to Whole Foods or another kind of health food store and find? Yes. Make it a point when I'm developing a recipe to make sure things are available in every major metro area and available on Amazon and available at most Wal-Mart's nationwide. Because that way I know that no matter where someone is in the country, they can work within your diet. Yeah. Again, that was the whole idea behind the cookbook and also the plant paradox quick and easy. It's one thing to live on the west coast or the east coast in a major city, but I grew up in the Midwest in the South. I grew up in the Midwest. You grew up in the Midwest. That's correct. Those are really the people that matter. Quite frankly, when I visit my hometowns, they unfortunately are some people who need this the most. We've got to bring a good way to eat healthy to all Americans, not just us who have Whole Foods on every corner. True. The rest of the country, you matter too. Exactly. All right, sweet potato pie, how do we make it? We bake our sweet potatoes, not yams. If you're more of a pumpkin pie person, you season it with pumpkin spice. If not, cinnamon and lemon juice and lemon zest work, and there's a little more classic for sweet potato. You use a gundry approved sweetener, whether it's swerve, you're just like sugar, you're monk fruit, and thicken it with eggs or a little coconut flour and whisk in, I think I use about half a cup of coconut cream. I think you do. It gives it a really nice creamy texture, and the coconut actually tastes really nice with sweet potatoes. It's simple as that. If you're using eggs, you bake it. If not, you just chill it. In fact, there's actually a lot of Caribbean dishes that combine coconut and sweet potatoes. Indian food as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good flavor combination. It is. One of the things that's great about working with you is you and I are all about flavors. We don't want people eating twigs and bark. It's all about enhancing the flavor. Yeah, if people were stuck on a twigs and bark diet, they'd get bored, and they wouldn't stick with it. That's exactly right. So it's about making it for the people to actually crave. Yeah. All right, so what the heck is this delicious looking casserole which looks like something that should be on the table for the holidays? What have you come up with? It definitely should be on the table for the holidays. Like you said, everyone loves their green bean casserole. So I took the basics of that, creamy veggies, crispy topping, and I did a spinach and kale casserole with curried coconut milk inside it to really boost the flavor, topped it with a lot of high quality Parmesan cheese, and baked it. It's not going to be the prettiest girl dance, but it's going to be the most delicious. Ah, okay. So if you want to go ahead and try it. I do. Is this my spoon? This is your spoon. All right. Go. Dig in. Since I put the cheese on it, I'm going to avoid it for dairy reasons, but there's broccoli. There's broccoli. There's kale. There's onions. Tiny bit of spinach. It works with all spinach if that's easier for people to... Oh my God. Thank you very much. That will conclude Dr. Dunby's podcast on the moving. You can take that home with you. I'm taking it home. All right. Can eat it on the commute. Just set it in the driver's seat next to you. Set it in the driver's seat. No, that's great. No. This is exactly what we're talking about. How to get in all these great things that are going to make people better. They're not going to leave the table going, oh, I can't believe I ate that stuff. Why did I do that? I feel so miserable. Yeah. You're sitting down with your loved ones. You may as well show them how much you love them. Well, you might as well make them make you miserable rather than the food. Your family's different than mine. That's a joke. That's a joke. Love you guys. All right. So what do you say to your family or friends who don't eat this way if you're hosting the dinner? Oh, I just cook it and I don't tell them. No one's going to know unless you go, oh, I did these crazy things. They're just going, oh, this is a really good meal. It's different than what we usually have, but it's great. Or you tell them after. Yeah, I think that's what we usually do. We tell them afterwards, what? Once we had some friends over and I put lemon flavored cod liver oil mixed half and half with olive oil for the salad dressing. That's a choice. And they said, oh, man, this is the best salad dressing. Great. We have the recipe. What's in it? And I go, cod liver oil. What? Well, don't they know Caesar salads made with anchovies? It's not super different. That's exactly right. So they didn't know that they were actually having a really healthy salad. You could probably make a great Caesar dressing with cod liver oil. Yeah, let's try it. OK, work on that, OK? I'll get right on that after the holidays. Now, what do you do? Here's the biggest problem of the holidays. You're invited over for a party or for dinner and your friends don't see this way. What do you do? Well, if it's a potluck, I say bring one thing that you find especially satisfying and delicious. Share it, but give yourself a big old helping of that. And then pick and choose. Always go for the turkey if you eat meat because it's not the worst thing on the table, even if it's the butter ball. And beyond that, pick and choose. And if it's a fully hosted dinner where you're expected to show up, load up on the salad or if there's a veggie you can eat, or even the sweet potato casserole with the marshmallows scraped off, and just have a little bit of everything else. Like we said earlier, it's one day. It's not ideal, but it's not going to kill you. And you don't want to be rude if someone's having a really nice party and you're invited. Yeah. And what we do is we'll have a couple of handful of nuts before we have those parties. Oh, that's smart. Which really helps us not eat as much or not sit there and go, I don't really want to eat that stuff. Just a fill up on the cheese plate, just skip the crackers. Exactly right. Cheese can be eaten without crackers. It can. All right. So you and I have been down these roads of weight loss. What do you tell people who think this is just too hard to do? Be patient. It feels really hard if you think of it as this one big thing you have to do all at once. Do you think I have these little tiny micro goals? It's not so bad because then the setback is just a tiny setback, not the end of the world. And you get to check a lot of things off your to-do list rather than one big thing that you feel like is never going to happen. The other thing that was interesting to me, and I've taught all my patients through the years, many times there are these almost psychological stop points. For me, 200 pounds was this amazing barrier. And I see it with a lot of my patients. They get to 200 pounds, they get down to 198, and then all of a sudden they're up at 204. And they go, what the heck? And they'll go again. It took me probably, I don't know, a couple of months to get off 200. My next barrier was 180. The same thing was like, what do I have to do? And looking back, these are actually places to take a pause and say, okay, let's not sweat it. I'm going to tread water. Turns out we have set points in our body that said, oh, you're starving to death and I'm going to do everything I can do to stop you from starving. And did you ever have that happen to you? I definitely did. One of the biggest things I did for myself was go, you know what? It's fine. You've come this far. It's already remarkable. Give it a minute. I actually would let myself eat a little more. And sometimes I found that just upping the calories I took in a day would re-jumpstart it. It was like me giving my body permission to keep going. About a year ago, I was lecturing in Phoenix and there is a blogger by the name of Kiefer. And Kiefer was really one of the original ketogenic dieters. And I've told this story before. He introduced himself to me and told me a story. He was almost constantly in ketosis. And a big exercise fanatic. And one night, apparently, as he tells it, he just couldn't take it any longer. And he ate a dozen donuts and several pieces of cake. And he went to bed. Oh my gosh. Am I going to pay for this? Well, the next morning he woke up and he was actually three pounds lighter. And he said, what the heck? And what had happened was that he was actually insulin resistant being in ketosis for so long. And this blast of carbs actually got fat to burn better than he did. So he actually cycles. And we talked about this earlier today with Dr. D, who also cycles on and off. So yeah, I think a lot of times just changing it up for a few days will make a big difference. But the important thing that you and I both know is don't sweat it. Don't sweat it. Be patient and celebrate little victories because it's hard. Yeah. And I said in my first book, weight off fast will never last. Weight off slow, you're good to go. Anything else about weight loss? There was a study that I was involved in years ago looking at people who maintain weight loss for a very long time. And one of the things they found is that you don't need to exercise to lose weight, but you need to exercise to keep weight off. Is that part of your philosophy or do you have a program? Oh, I have quite an exercise program. I exercise basically every day. I run. I do aerial silks. I do trapeze. And I do a lot of body weight exercises, both in my house and on the beach, because the sand adds a balance element that really forces core stabilization. So you're actually hanging up there doing crazy stuff? Hanging up, sitting down, doing crazy stuff. It keeps life interesting. All right. I don't get bored. I think we talked about this. The biggest challenge to developing recipes for the plant paradox? Just what I said already, I guess. Kate, I need this tomorrow. It's not as hard now as it was in the beginning, but learning how to substitute nicely. So finding a way to make flour work in bread, which is different than making flour work in a cake, which is different than using it as a thickener, and realizing that while coconut flour works for some things, it doesn't work for everything, and just learning how to work within the parameters. A challenge at first is fairly easy now, but I think I know your diet possibly better than you know your diet. I probably do. And I'm sure one of the challenges, I'm bombarding you with three emails a day with a crazy recipe I found. I said, hey, this looks really interesting. We just need to change this and this. Yeah, I get emails from you. It's like, this looks good, but it has flour, and butter, and eggs, and real sugar. And I just said, it does look good. Just the way it is. Yeah, I want to eat it just the way it is. All right. Again, it's been great having you all, particularly around the holidays. Happy to be here. Does this mind don't anybody touch it? Okay, we always have an audience question. So, Susan Lowy wrote in on Twitter, Dr. Gundry, what do you think about all the discussions surrounding celery juice, first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach for various health conditions? Well, so celery is actually pretty good for you in a lot of ways. It's got a lot of electrolytes. It's got a lot of magnesium. Quite frankly, I think when you're having celery juice, you're throwing the best part of celery away, which is the fiber. And you've heard me say this over and over and over again. If you're going to use a juicer, juice, whatever you're juicing, throw the juice away and eat the pulp. What I'd rather you do is get a Vitamix or a Ninja or a Magic Bullet or a Blendtec and put the celery in and grind it up. You'll be far better off long term than juicing the celery. You're really throwing away the good parts of the celery and not getting a whole benefit from it. And I think Kate, you'd agree with me. Oh, I just eat it. I just eat it. Dip it in almond butter sometimes. It's pretty good. I use it dip in guacamole and just remember, true guacamole does not have any tomatoes. That's some American myth. Okay, so like I said, this has been one of my most exciting days for my podcast to have Kate here, even though I spent a lot of time with her. I want everybody to get to know Kate. Yeah, we hang out. Yeah, we do. So thank you again for joining us. We'll add the recipes we mentioned to show notes. And Kate, where can people find you and your recipes? Well, if you don't already have the Plant Paradox cookbook, that's a great start. Also, check out the Plant Paradox quick and easy coming out in January. And the Longevity Paradox, how to die young at a ripe old age coming out in March. And I might add that Barnes & Noble is going to have a special edition of the Longevity Paradox. Yep, you know those 10 recipes? You know those 10 recipes? The addition of Barnes & Noble will have 10 additional recipes that nobody else is going to have. And it's all thanks to you, Kate. So speaking of books, the 30-day challenge for the Plant Paradox quick and easy, we're going to launch in January, probably January 15th. It's going to go one month till February 14th. Mm, Valentine's Day. It's going to be a 30-day challenge. People can try out our recipes. You can sign up for the challenge. And there's going to be some interesting prizes for the winners of the 30-day challenge. So stay tuned. We'll keep you informed as we approach the launch date. So it's going to be fun. So, again, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks everybody for watching. I am Dr. Gundry, and I'm always looking out for you.