 It's that time of the year again, the holidays, and oh how I love this season, but oh how it can wreak havoc on our gut buddies with all those lectin-loaded comfort foods like mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, stuffing, rolls, green bean casserole. The list goes on and on of those favorite holiday dishes that are sadly lectin bombs, leaving you feeling blah instead of holly jolly afterwards. So I decided to share this oldie but a goodie episode with you again about healthy holiday swaps that are easy and taste delicious too. I'm joined by Kate, my co-creator and chef behind the recipes in my paradox books. We're going to discuss some great festive recipes and clever ideas on how to make holiday foods you love that love you back. Enjoy. 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. Yeah. 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. 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. 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. But gravy's 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 swamper. Put 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. Just make it with a lectin-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 casein A1. We're starting, we actually now have a test looking at whether people react to casein A1 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 I scream. But if you're worried about casein A1, you can do A2 milk. You can do heavy cream as the casein 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. That 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. 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, feeds good gut bugs. It's actually some of the gut bugs' most favorite fuel. They also have agave inulin syrup now. Yeah, they do. 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. 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, a whole lot of herbs, perfectly fine on the plant. 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. Turkey. We talked about that. We got the gravy figured out. OK, nobody's going to pay $100 or $200 for a true pastured heritage turkey, probably. Probably. And they're hard to find even if you've got the money. They are. 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 is 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. Turkeys have plenty of 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. 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. Yeah. So we get a heritage organic turkey. And we brine it ourselves. But there are brine turkeys. Marys makes a brine turkey now. They do. So and most kosher turkeys are brined. All kosher turkeys are brined. So there you go. It's part of the laws for them. 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, we've got to have bread over the holidays. Well, there is 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. I 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 Walmart's nationwide. Because that way I know that no matter where someone is in the country, they can work within your diet. Yeah, and 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. And you grew up in the Midwest, that's correct. And 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. All right, sweet potato pie. How do we make it? We bake our sweet potatoes, not yams. And 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 gungery 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. Simple as that. If you're using eggs, you bake it. If not, you just chill it. And in fact, there's actually a lot of Caribbean dishes that combine coconut and sweet potato. Yeah, Indian food as well. Yeah, absolutely. So it's a good flavor combination. It is. And one of the things that's great about working with you is you and I are all about flavors. And 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. So it's about making it for the people to actually crave. 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 if you want to go ahead and try it. I do. Is this my spoon? This is your spoon, and go dig in. Since I put the cheese on it, I'm going to avoid it for dairy reasons. And 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. You can take that home with you. I'm taking it home. All right. Can eat it on your commute. Just set it in the driver's seat next to you. I'll put it in the driver's seat. Yeah, that's great. 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. 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, 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 codler 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, and we have the recipe. What's in it? And I go, codler oil, and the, 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 codler oil. Yeah, let's try it. OK, work on that, OK? I'll get right on that after the holiday. Now, what do you do? Here's the biggest problem in 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. Can also fill up on the cheese plate, just skip the crackers. Exactly right, yeah. 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. If you think I have these little tiny micro goals, it's not so bad. Because then the setback's 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 in 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. And the same thing is like, what do I have to do? And I, looking back, these are actually places to take a pause and say, okay, let's not sweat it. I'm gonna tread water. Turns out we have set points in our body that said, oh, you're starving to death and I'm gonna do everything I can do to stop you from starving. And did you ever have that happen to you? I definitely did. And 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 in a day would re-jumpstart it. It was like me giving my body permission to keep going. I mean, years ago I was lecturing in Phoenix and there was 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 his story. He was almost constantly in ketosis. And a big exercise, a fanatic. And one night, apparently, as he tells that he just couldn't take it any longer and he ate a dozen donuts and several pieces of cake. And he went to bed. He says, oh my gosh, am I gonna 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 so, 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, excuse me, 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, the 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 all the crazy stuff? Hanging up, sitting down, doing crazy stuff. 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 more of, 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 doesn't work for everything and just learning how to work within the parameters was 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, 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. All right, say it again. It's been great having you on particularly around the holidays. Happy to be here. This is mine, don't anybody touch it. Okay, we always have an audience question. So Susan Lowey 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. Just eat it. Dip it in almond butter sometimes. It's pretty good. I use it to dip in guacamole. And just remember, true guacamole does not have any tomatoes. That's some American myth. OK, 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. So again, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Now it's time for the audience question. Theresa Malone writes on Instagram, are you planning on writing another cookbook? Well, stay tuned, because unlocking the keto code is going to drop in March 2022. And we've got all new recipes that are really fun. We're going out on a limb doing some fun stuff that you've never tried before. And the point of all this is we're going to make keto delicious and not hard to do. And you'll be shocked with how easy and lack of fat there is in a lot of these recipes. Surprise. Now it's time for the review of the week from T-F-E-R-N-T on Apple Podcast. One of the best health and nutrition podcasts. Dr. Gundry's content is second to none. I've been listening for several years and have learned so much. I have a long history of a chronic inflammatory illness that I'm mostly recovered from. However, I am vulnerable to relapses and Dr. Gundry's content is extremely helpful. Get Robert Slovak back on. I want to learn more about water. Well, thanks very much, T-F-E-R-N-T. This is why we do this. This is why we become one of the top rated health podcasts in the nation and it's for people like you that are listening and benefiting that we keep doing this. Because as you know, I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you. Well, that's all we have time for for now. I hope you enjoyed this holiday cooking episode and just a reminder, I'm so grateful hearing from you. Please leave a review or a question on Apple Podcasts, wishing you and all of you a wonderful and healthy holiday season because I'm Dr. G and looking out for you this year and in years to come. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.