 The five healthiest vegetables that may actually help with weight loss. Okay, like your mom, I'm here to tell you to eat your greens, but not all are created equal. So number one, first piece of advice, do not. I repeat, do not look at the nutritional analysis to determine which is healthy. It absolutely drives me crazy to see nutritionists tell you to look at the label and determine whether there's nutrition in what you're going to buy. And I'll get to that in just a second. It has nothing to do with the health benefit of what you're buying. What you're looking for is drum roll please, polyphenols, the more bitter, the more better, and the amount of prebiotic soluble fiber. And quite frankly, you're probably not going to find any of that on a nutritional label because up until the last few years, no one realized that the reason you're told to eat the rainbow has to do with the polyphenol content of these foods and it's not on the nutritional label. So just throw that label away. Now here's my top favorite leafy greens in no particular order with the highest amount of nutrients that your good gut bugs actually care about and if they care about it, you should care about it. So number one, fennel. You've probably seen this in the grocery store. It's actually a cousin of the carrot family and all parts of fennel are actually usable. Fennel has a slightly licorice taste that I think is fantastic. How can you prepare it? Whatever you want, first of all, the most traditional way is to take the fennel bulb, cut off the bottom of it, and then slice it thin. It's great on its own, but I prefer to put it in a salad with other things that are going to have. You can also chop up the stems the same way, but you can also cook or roast the fennel. Grilling fennel, cut it in half and grill it is one of the taste treats of all time. Don't ignore this in your grocery store. It's usually very reasonable. It is loaded with fiber that your gut buddies like. Now number two, a brassica family, and we're going to talk about a few brassica vegetables, cabbage. Cabbage used to be one of the go-to foods during the winter for most Americans because it was a storageable vegetable. A coleslaw is made out of cabbage. German coleslaw is made out of cabbage. It's a traditional vegetable. It became popular because it's storageable, but cabbage is more than that. The darker the cabbage, the more polyphenols it has, and cabbage is one of the easiest foods to prepare. You can slice it and eat it raw in salads. You can cook it. You can make it into sauerkraut. You can ferment it. It's easy to get into your diet. And again, the more colorful, the better. Okay, now these guys are frequently confused with cabbages or lettuces. This whole family are part of the chicory family. This is radicchio. There's a cousin called Treviso that's longer. This is Belgian endive. It comes in multiple colors. It almost looks like a tulip, readily available. This is frise, a little harder to find. Now why am I showing you this? Particularly in Italy and France, I have yet to have a salad that doesn't have radicchio or frise or endive mixed in the salad. Why? These are inulin-containing vegetables. And inulin, as you've read in my books, is probably the best prebiotic fiber for our gut bacteria, for healthy gut bacteria. In fact, one of the most traditional Italian salads uses radicchio, Belgian endive, and arugula, which is another cruciferous vegetable. And that salad is called tricolore, for obvious reasons. Tricolore salad with olive oil, probably, if you wanted to choose the healthiest salad, tricolore salad is the way to go. I always have these forms of vegetables in my refrigerator, and I try to eat them almost every day. And again, I've never had a salad in Italy or France that doesn't have these vegetables in them. Chickery, luckily, is becoming more and more common in our grocery stores. So look for it, a Belgian endive, Trader Joe's has it, radicchio is on all grocery stores, arugula is on almost all grocery stores. Now arugula, if you look on the internet, nutritionists will tell you that arugula has no nutritional value. Oh, contrary, arugula has so many amazing polyphenols, and the value of cruciferous vegetables in preventing cancer is over the moon. So yes, there's no calories in it, yes, there's no protein in it. That's not what you're looking for. And even if that was true, this is a way of getting olive oil into your mouth. And after all, as you know, the only purpose of food is to get olive oil in your mouth. Now these are vastly preferable to other lettuces. Plain old lettuce, this is actually a leaf lettuce, is there to get olive oil into your mouth. Now, iceberg lettuce has no nutritional value, but before we throw it away, let's realize that iceberg is a way to get olive oil into your mouth. So if all you can afford is a head of iceberg lettuce, get the iceberg lettuce and use it as a way of getting olive oil into your mouth. And like I said before, if you're trying to choose between organic and conventional, if something you're going to eat is leaves and you're not going to peel it, you're much better off paying the money for organic. If you're going to peel it, then you really don't have to worry about organic because you're going to throw the pesticides aside. Kale. So kale is a love it or leave it proposition. There are multiple forms of kale, kale salad recipes in the plant paradox. It is very nutritious. It does have some levels of cadmium that it picks up from the soil and some levels of arsenic, although the arsenic in kale is organic arsenic, not inorganic arsenic, and inorganic arsenic is the mischief maker. So add kale to your salads, an important word of note, particularly if you're going to buy Tuscan kale, make sure when you're making a salad that you go to the trouble of taking the stem off because the stem is really woody and you won't have a lot of fun, but it's fun to peel it off and then just break up the kale and put it in your salad. Otherwise, kale is great roasted or cooked and that way you'll break up that problem. A word of warning, whenever you're adding, particularly dark green vegetables to your diet, do it slowly. And let me tell you an infamous story with my wife, Penny and I, years ago we brought a Nutribullet to make smoothies and kale was all the rage and I was a fan of kale. We had it in our salads. She said, wow, if kale is good, then a kale smoothie will be great. So she took a bunch of kale and made a kale smoothie and I downed it on the way out the door to work. And within two hours, I had the most intense abdominal cramps ever and the kale smoothie ended up in the toilet. Why? Well, it turns out that all plants, particularly bitter plants, are trying to warn you with their bitterness that you shouldn't eat them. They'd like to protect themselves. It turns out those compounds are not in the lectins, but there are other forms of plant defense systems that are actually really good for you, which are in the cruciferous vegetables. But if you break them down into single molecules and then in just a large amount of them raw, they are going to be a very nice irritant to your GI tract. In fact, I've found through the years that if I have patients with leaky gut or IBS that I don't want them to come near dark green leafy vegetables, you can cook them to their basically mush and make them soups and then they'll be safe for you. But please, if you've got leaky gut, if you've got IBS, go slowly at the very least or just keep those out of your diet for now. Now, another underutilized resource is a lot of people are buying turnips and beets at the farmer's market and a lot of farmer's markets will say, hey, you want me to just chop off the leaves and you take those and you go, yes, please. Well, this is actually where the benefit is. I'd much rather you chop off the beet, throw that away and eat the greens, saute them, chop them up. They are absolutely delicious. What are you going to do with the beets? You're going to actually slice them raw, pour olive oil over them, put some feta cheese like the Italians do and eat a beet root carpaccio. That's fantastic. But please, resist the urge to cook them. The more you cook the beet root, the more sugar it releases. The other important part is don't waste parts of the plant. You may be buying something for the bulb. Use the greens in a soup. Use the greens in a stir fry. You'll get more for your money than you ever expected. Now, one last thing about cruciferous vegetables. It's true, cruciferous vegetables are really good for you and they should be a part of your diet. But cruciferous vegetables are known as a thyroid suppressor. And I see a number of my patients, well-meaning, who add kale to every meal, who have cabbage and arugula at every meal, have broccoli, have cauliflower, have cauliflower rice, have cauliflower pizzas. And I gradually but surely see their thyroid function deteriorating. And when we back them off on their cruciferous vegetables, it returns to normal. So if you're going to go hog wild on cruciferous vegetables, do me a favor, get a TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone level at baseline, give it a few months and get it again. If it's going up, you've reached your limit of cruciferous vegetables and you need to back off. That's it. Some really, really healthy vegetables that have nothing to do with the nutritional analysis. Please don't listen to your dietitian on the internet who says arugula has no nutritional value. That is harming you more than you know. Make sure to check out the next one here.