Make Peace with Food Part 1 with Sam Blumenthal

Episode #62

Shopping the Rainbow with Dr. Reed Miloy

A couple of years ago I decided to go whole-food vegan and I worked with a weight loss coach. One of the things he taught me was how to shop and eat the rainbow, and this week, I am thrilled to share my conversation with him about it. I’m welcoming Dr. Reed Miloy back to the show so you can see how two doctors shop the rainbow in the produce section, and how to build a beautiful, healthy Holiday spread.

Dr. Reed Miloy is a doctor of internal medicine and a life and wellness coach. If you’re in the habit of drinking fruit smoothies and eating wholegrain breads under the impression that they’re a healthy snack, Reed’s perspective on health and eating the rainbow is exactly what you need to hear right now.

Tune in this week to discover what it means to shop and eat the rainbow. Dr. Reed Miloy is sharing the five types of food we need to focus on for optimizing our health, showing us how to make the best possible food choices, and we’re bringing you recipes that encompass all of the health advice we’re discussing today.

WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER

5 types of food that contribute the most to your overall health.
A scientific breakdown of how these foods benefit our bodies.
What you need to be aware of when consuming fruit.
Some of the best seeds, and why there are no bad seeds.
The hidden problem with wholegrain bread.
How to make healthy choices this Holiday season.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW

Dr. Reed Miloy: Website | Coaching Website | Instagram | Twitter | Email
Ep #37: Weight Loss and Wellness with Dr. Reed Miloy (Part 1)
Ep #38: Weight Loss and Wellness with Dr. Reed Miloy (Part 2)
Ep #58: Mother Knows Best with Lisa Bullion
Take a look at my Recipe Blog!

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Miloy: Whole grain bread, whole grain cereal. People think that's good. Well, it's poison because when people think about whole grains I think about whole grain bread. Unfortunately, human body physiology does not do well with bread.

Dr. Crockett: Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast. I'm your host Dr. Susan Crockett. You are listening to episode number 62, Eating the Rainbow. Join me in welcoming back my very special guest Dr. David Reed Miloy as we show you how to doctors, me and him, shop the rainbow in the produce section and build a beautiful healthful holiday crudites board. Enjoy.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

Dr. Crockett: I want to welcome you back to our kitchen with my very special guest who's a repeat guest. Welcome back. Dr. David Reed Miloy.

Dr. Miloy: Thank you for having me, Dr. Crockett.

Dr. Crockett: Just quick little background, Reed and I met because he was my weight loss coach when I went whole food vegan about two years ago. I always qualify that with mostly. But today we've got a really great show because one of the things he taught me was how to shop and eat the rainbow. So we started off this segment at Central Market on Broadway in San Antonio. We shopped the rainbow.

Dr. Miloy: Yes.

Dr. Crockett: Then we brought it all here for you guys. We're going to talk a little bit about nutrition and eating the rainbow today. We're going to make a vegan poppy seed dressing for our salad. I'm going to show you how to do a charcuterie board. Reed is going to start us off by talking about the advice.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about the rainbow, but we want to put that in the larger context of what is the healthiest way to eat? I like to say eat the Fab Five, and what the heck is that? Veggies, fruits, whole grains, seeds, and nuts. I just want to go through each one of those categories briefly so we kind of understand not only what did those categories mean, what's in there, but what are the best choices in those categories.

So let's start with veggies. As you can see, we have a lot of cruciferous vegetables. What are cruciferous vegetables? Well, it's things like broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale.

Dr. Crockett: There's the cabbage.

Dr. Miloy: On and on. There's watercress. There's a whole ton of cruciferous vegetables out there. Cruciferous vegetables are important because they have a compound, a class of compounds in them, called isothiocyanates. And isothiocyanates.

Dr. Crockett: Isothiocyanate.

Dr. Miloy: Isothiocyanate.

Dr. Crockett: Say it with us.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, say it all together real fast five times in a row. Wen we chew or cut a cruciferous vegetable, the plant releases an enzyme called myrosinase. Myrosinase converts the isothiocyanate into a magical chemical compound called sulforaphane.

Dr. Crockett: Which we're going to have a whole talk on.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, we'll talk a little talk about sulforaphane, but sulforaphane is our friend. Does a whole host of beneficial things. Most of the research for sulforaphane came out of John Hopkins initially. Sulforaphane is very important chemical compound, reduces our risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and so forth and reducing inflammation in the body. That whole, yeah.

Dr. Crockett: Which is the whole key to everything, right.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, we've really come a long way here in the last 20 years. The word is now out on the street. Most of my patients at least are coming in, and they know that inflammation is bad. So how do we keep it down? We eat these foods.

Dr. Crockett: Tell us about the fruits.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, so cruciferous vegetables, that's category one. Number two is going to be fruits. Now not all fruits are the same. When we talk about fruits, we want to hone in on the berries. Okay, so blueberries, blackberries, elderberry, cherries. I mean berries and dark colored fruits are the healthiest to eat. Now, a lot of folks out there have weight issues, and they're concerned about eating too much fruit because there is sugar in fruit. It's important to not liquefy your fruits.

Dr. Crockett: You know, this is one of those things that I talked to my diabetic and insulin resistant patient. I have a lot, as you may imagine, well, those of you that don't know me, I'm a GYN robotic surgeon. But I have a lot of patients that we talk about in the office their weight problems, and a lot of them are perimenopausal.

This is a particularly interesting thing to me because perimenopausal women, we have a lot of trouble with weight gain, especially midsection weight gain, which is the unhealthy kind, that increases our risk of heart disease as we age.

In fact, menopausal women catch up with men's cardiovascular risk when they transition. So this is important. So we talk about when we eat fruits, there are a couple of things that I recommend. One is, like you say don't liquefy it. The smoothie thing just crushes all the fiber up and liquifies it.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I can tell you a personal story. Years ago, I bought my staff a blender, and I wanted them to have smoothies every day. So I bought them all that stuff to go in there. Then they started going crazy with a fruit. About a month went by, and they'll gained five pounds. So I had to take the blender away from them.

Dr. Crockett: You can just drink it so fast. So juices.

Dr. Miloy: It's how fast sugar comes into the body is what matters. We want to avoid the line of evil. So I tell my patients look, this is the line of evil. What you want to do is you want nice, gentle rolling hills of sugar, blood sugar, and insulin levels. But when we liquefy our fruit or we eat a processed carb or we eat something with too much, you get this quick spike. Right behind that the pancreas, which is monitoring your blood sugar, secretes a large bolus of insulin. When that goes above the line of evil, you've now got too much insulin out in the bloodstream. It's going to hang out for six hours or so.

Dr. Crockett: And it shoves all that sugar right into fat.

Dr. Miloy: And it's going to tell the body to convert that into fat immediately. Then it's going to make you hungry a couple hours later because now your blood sugar's crashed because you got too much insulin.

Dr. Crockett: The other thing I find that is helpful is that personally, I only eat fruits in the morning because I can metabolize them. I'm up and running. Often I'll intermittent fast so I don't actually start eating until about 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock. But my point is I don't do fruits at five or six o'clock at night because then my metabolism is slowing down and getting ready for bed. I won't be using the sugar for energy.

Dr. Miloy: Absolutely. A good rule of thumb is just if you want to have fruit, have a serving of berries, all right, that's a serving. What fits in the palm of the hand, not here, palm in the hand, and have one in the morning and maybe one in the afternoon or evening. That way you're spreading it out. Like you said, have it for activity.

Dr. Crockett: Yep, use it.

Dr. Miloy: You can apply that basically to anything so let's say you misbehave, have a piece of cake. We're all going to do that. We're all going to go out afterwards, like within 15/20 minutes, go for a walk. Go for a brisk walk for about 20 minutes, and it will do wonders.

Dr. Crockett: Just sprint it off. Okay, so that's fruits and veggies. How about?

Dr. Miloy: Whole grains.

Dr. Crockett: Five nuts, five, eight, eight, five, three.

Dr. Miloy: Oh yeah, we’ll get to that in a second.

Dr. Crockett: Grains or nuts?

Dr. Miloy: Get me to get me out of order here. I'm just a mess.

Dr. Crockett: Okay, don’t do that.

Dr. Miloy: So we've got veggies, cruciferous vegetables, fruits, we're focused on berries. Now the berries, just one side note, is that anthocyanins are the compounds in berries. Like look at our blueberries here. You’ve got all of this dark color. If it stains your hands and your clothes and all of that stuff, that's good. You want it in your body. Those anthocyanins are super potent antioxidants.

Dr. Crockett: Love that.

Dr. Miloy: It's decreasing inflammation, protecting your DNA. A study was actually done on blueberries where they gave people a serving of blueberries and said go out and go do your routine exercise. For a lot of people, that was just like a 30 minute walk.

Then afterwards, they drew their inflammatory markers. So you had a control group and treatment group. The people eating blueberries had like a 50 plus percent reduction in their inflammatory markers under exercise. So yeah, it's absolutely. So it's the anthocyanins. That's the compounds in the berries.

Whole grains. Now people get confused by whole grains, and the big food industry really does a tremendous disservice to people because they put whole grain bread, whole grain cereal, and people think that's good. Well, it's poison. Because when people think about whole grains, I think about whole grain bread.

Unfortunately, human body physiology does not do well with bread. Now we all love our bread. We all grew up with bread, but I'm just the messenger. The science says bread is, and we could see this about all processed carbs for that matter, act like sugar. When I'm talking to patients I'm saying hey sugars, processed carbs, put them in the same category. So the whole grains that we want to get into our body are going to be things like wild rice, brown rice.

We got good examples of that. Oats. Okay, that's another one. Here we've got brown rice, which is great. We want to get these whole grains into our bodies, but it's a whole host of things out there that are whole grains. So brown rice, wild rice, oats, barley. I mean, yeah, have at it. You want to try to get as much of that into your body as possible. That is not hard to do, right? It's really simple if you think about it.

So fourth category is seeds. Seeds is anything that you can take with your finger, push it into the ground, add water, and it sprouts, okay. So I like to keep it simple, right? So that means that's all of your legumes.

Dr. Crockett: Like peanuts.

Dr. Miloy: That would be in the nuts. That's our fifth category, but it would be things like all of your beans. Any seed. I like to say there are no bad seeds. I mean, plants have been making seeds for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. We have been on that evolutionary path with them. Those plants depend on animals, mammals to eat them, and to spread those seeds. So there's a synergistic story there between seeds
and humans.

Dr. Crockett: So we've got flax seed, chia seed. We're doing hemp seed today, but that includes like pumpkin seeds.

Dr. Miloy: Hemp. Yeah, there are no bad seeds. I use a ton of pumpkin seeds. Of course, we can all get those at the grocery store now. Seeds are a great source of protein. Yep. Lignin. Lignans have decreased cancer risk, cardiovascular risk, but ground flaxseed is something I encourage people to use a lot in their diet.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah.

Dr. Miloy: You can get ground flaxseed just from about anywhere and store them in these containers. Put them on your oats, put them on your salads and so forth. The reason for that is ground flaxseed, chia seeds are just loaded with omega threes. Omega threes are important because of their potent anti-inflammatory effects, and we want to get inflammation down. As we're getting older, or inflammation is creeping up.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, tell me about it.

Dr. Miloy: So the road narrows there, right? We know that inflammation promotes cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and so, pain, yeah. It's no fun. Unfortunately, for most people, this is a silent process, and they can't feel it. We feel our arthritis. We don't feel the inflammation. When you go to see your doc, if you haven't had high sensitivity CRP levels drawn, you need to be asking for that study. Your doc says well your insurance won't pay for it, pay an extra few bucks to find out.

Dr. Crockett: To find out.

Dr. Yeah, it's 20 bucks, 25 bucks. It’s a very important thing. That's something that you want well below 1.0. So yeah, all seeds are good. Not all beans are the equal. All right, so being down here in Texas, we eat a lot of what?

Dr. Crockett: Pinto beans.

Dr. Miloy: Pinto beans, black beans. So black beans are what we talk about the rainbow. Well, black’s not in the rainbow, but it's the dark colors that protect us. So we have more antioxidants in the black beans than say a lima bean. All right, so black beans, it goes black beans, red beans, and then on down the list. Now if you want to trump the beans, you go with lentils. Lentils have even more antioxidants than the beans do.

Dr. Crockett: Love lentils.

Dr. Miloy: But you can't go wrong. Yeah, there are no bad seeds. All right, that's the moral of that story. So that's category number four. Then number five, of course, is. We have almonds in here, and we have pistachios. So when we talk about nuts, there's a whole variety of nuts out there and people get a little bit confused on what is the type of nut they want to eat to get the most health benefit.

When it comes to this category, it's the pistachios. Why do we love pistachios? Because they're loaded with antioxidants. We know that pistachios promote cardiovascular health. I was talking to you guys at the grocery store earlier. There was a study done, and they gave men just a serving of pistachios daily and erectile dysfunction substantially.

Dr. Crockett: I mean yeah, it improves nitrous oxide and vasodilation.

Dr. Miloy: Absolutely. Promotes nitrous oxide production. Then after that, in a distant second comes walnuts, pecans, those are about the same. Maybe walnuts a little bit more than pecans, but they've got what? Got the omega threes again. Alpha linoleic acid, which most people can convert ALA over into the most important forms of omega threes which is EPA and DHA.

Now there are a lot of different genetic polymorphisms out there and not everybody can convert alpha linolenic acid over into EPA/DHA efficiently. So I like to tell my patients to supplement with omega threes EPA and DHA, and we can get into that later.

But yeah, I mean, the nuts is what it's all about. You just want to you want to get those four primary nuts and then cashews and other things, maybe less, but the tropical nuts. I see people using a ton of coconut oil and Brazil nuts, those are loaded with saturated fats and that that is going to elevate LDL and apo B in our blood, and that is atherogenic. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: So just to summarize the Fab Five, we've got our veggies, cruciferous veggies in particular.

Dr. Miloy: Well, all veggies are good, but cruciferous mainly.

Dr. Crockett: Then our dark berries, our fruits, our whole grains, seeds, and nuts.

Dr. Miloy: You got it.

Dr. Crockett: All right, cool.

Dr. Crockett: You got it. So we're going to start this segment by making a vegan whole food plant based poppy salad dressing because the veggies are great, but sometimes it's nice to put a little extra on it. The ingredients that we're using for this salad dressing have some added health benefits. So I'm going to start prepping, and Dr. Miloy is going to tell you all about these ingredients. So this, I did not make from scratch. Sometimes I do, but this is a whole food plant based vegan mayonnaise.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I get to be vanna here. There's a lot of brands out there. This is a brand that I've used over the years so I'm glad to see you have it as well, Follow Your Heart. Now, one of the things that is just imperative guys is reading labels. When you start reading labels, you become a reading label expert, and you'll get so good at it. You'll be able to just look at a product and pretty much tell what's in there before picking up the label.

You need to be able to know some key things. What's the saturated fat? Is there cholesterol in there? What's the sodium content and all these things, right? So sugar. Sugar is a big one, and sugar gets added to a lot of products. So if we look at this veganaise, and by the way, Dr. Crockett, compare the taste of this to just traditional mayonnaise.

Dr. Crockett: It's delicious. I can't tell the difference. It’s incredible, which is why I bought this instead of making it aside from the fact that I was just a little out of time and busy. So the other thing I look for when I'm buying jarred stuff like this is how many things I can't pronounce, all the preservatives and crap. Sorry, stuff.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Crap’s all right. We could say there's a lot of unhealthy stuff added to our food. But for example, when we think about mayonnaise, we think about fat, right? We know that there are trans fats. I think the world has kind of figured out that hey, trans fats are bad. They're being phased out. A lot of the food products don't even have trans fats.

But what is a healthy fat and what's an unhealthy fat? So it's the saturated fats that we want to keep low in our diet, and as low as possible. The reason for that is saturated fats increase oxidation, atherogenesis, and contribute to cardiovascular disease. So we want the monounsaturated the polyunsaturated fats.

So we look at this product, there is a total of nine grams of fat per serving. Okay, so fat’s not bad. It's just what kind of fat? If you look at the saturated fat, it's only half a gram. So very low in saturated fat. Half a gram of saturated fat’s really not going to move the needle. It's not going to be a big deal. How much sodium? 75 milligrams. Where do we want to keep our sodium? Below 2300 milligrams per day.

Dr. Crockett: So we put a cup of that in our blender. The next thing I'm going to add is a quarter cup, no, a third of a cup of unsweetened almond milk.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I mean, that's really key. So a lot of Americans are still drinking milk. Yeah, we all grew up on it. I grew up in East Texas, and it was all southern fried everything. There's really a fundamental, I mean, this is a segue into fundamental principles. I think when we talk about nutrition, we need to ask ourselves who are we? We are bipedal apes. We're bipedal great apes. We've got essentially about 94/95% same DNA as a chimp and 90 plus percent same DNA as gorillas and orangutangs. What are they eating? They're eating.

Dr. Crockett: Vegetables.

Dr. Miloy: A whole food, plant based diet. Chimps will quarter up a monkey. It’s pretty gruesome.

Dr. Crockett: Thank you for that visualization.

Dr. Miloy: They do. But generally speaking, they're like 99 plus percent plant based. We want to eat in accordance to that. Because you look at our dentition, you look at our GI tracts, they're very similar. You look at the reams and reams of data out there is that being whole food plant based is the healthiest way to go. This is the only diet that reverses cardiovascular disease, which has been shown to reverse cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Crockett: Which is astonishing. So when we can substitute things that taste good and work the same in our cooking, like the almond milk that we put in this, then you don't miss the flavor. What it's doing in your body is so much healthier. So now I'm just juicing a couple of lemons.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah. So why do you stay away from cow's milk? Number one, saturated fat. Number two, they add sugar to it. Okay, and so they add sugar to my cow's milk they added to the cow's milk. Sugar is highly addictive. We want to avoid that now. I can just tell you folks that for 25 years, I've been encouraging my patients to get off cow's milk and consume a soy, almond, oat milk with no sugar added, and they balk up front.

The reason they balk is because the sugar addiction and also a compound called casein, C-A-S-E-I-N.

Dr. Crockett: It’s in cheese also.

Dr. Miloy: Which is found in all mammals mother's milk, and we make cheese. We hyper concentrate casein. The casein is a protein that when ingested, like everything, goes to the liver first and gets metabolized into casomorphin.

Dr. Crockett: Which is like morphine.

Dr. Miloy: It's an opiate. It binds to the opiate receptors in the brain.

Dr. Crockett: In our cheese. Can you believe that People? When you first told me that I was so disappointed. I was devastated when you told me that.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, well I was too when I found out and then I found out hey look, I don't wake up craving cheese or wanting cheese. I never do. It's an addiction. It's the true opiate crisis.

Dr. Crockett: That’s true. Except when I say I'm whole food plant based, I gotta admit to you. I still put the feta on my salad.

Dr. Miloy: A little feta.

Dr. Crockett: A little parmesan.

Dr. Miloy: Well, if you're going to do a cheese, a hard cheese or a little Parmesan really is not going to have a huge negative impact, right. But it's that casein, and that's nature's way of getting that infant, newborn, addicted to mother's milk because rule one in nature is the baby has to feed, right? If it doesn't, it's going to perish.

Rule two is baby must be weaned. About 12,000 years ago, we learned how to domesticate cows, goats, and sheep, and we learned how to make cheese. So this is an unnatural thing, and our body just doesn't handle a very well.

Dr. Crockett: So this is a very natural thing. The next ingredient is a quarter cup of your flavored vinegar. So you can use your apple cider vinegar if you want. But we're using our friend’s beet and honey shrub shot from Other Mother. You can see their shows on our channel if you haven't watched the Other Mother vinegar shows we have. Our New Year's show is mocktails with them. I made non-alcoholic cocktails for years. That's our new year shoot. So anyway, I'm using a quarter cup of the beet and honey in here. Then we're going to do poppy seeds. So there's your seeds.

Dr. Miloy: There's your seeds.

Dr. Crockett: This is two teaspoons of poppy seeds going in here. Then the last one is some dried onions.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, onions. I mean onions are credibly healthy for us. They have anti-cancerous properties to them.

Dr. Crockett: I'm going to shake this up. We're going to put it in the blender. Okay, so we simply put this in our blender. I happen to have a Vitamix, but you can put it in any of them. This is just a nice salad dressing.

Dr. Miloy: That's incredible.

Dr. Crockett: It's great, right? All right, so this is going to sit here our board.

Dr. Miloy: Really delicious. Joking. You can see, no, I made a good face. That is incredible, Dr. Crockett. So just in your cruciferous vegetables, a lot of people want to eat broccoli, or they want to eat more kale, and they struggle with that. The reason is because you have to tame your broccoli or tame your kale. That is going to tame it beautifully. You can just eat a raw.

Dr. Crockett: It takes the bitterness out of it, right?

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Crockett: So this is our kale for our board. We're making a veggie board today. So we have two different kinds of kale that we picked up at the store.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, we did. We got, once again, we've got color here. We've mixed it up. Not just your traditional green kale, but purple kale. The more variety of these colors that you can get into your diet, the more synergistically they work. One plus one equals four, not two. When we talk about green leafy, particularly kale, once again, great source of getting sulforaphane into the body. I would also say something that gets really under, shall we say, promoted or talked about when it comes to nutrition is lutein.

Dr. Crockett: What's that?

Dr. Miloy: L-U-T-E-I-N. Lutein is the primary antioxidant that is used by the brain. So the brain is chewing up 20% of our calorie burn per day. It is incredibly metabolically active. That means that wherever there is a lot of metabolism taking place in the body, there's oxidative stress. So we want to be consuming as much green leafies possible, but particularly kale. Spinach is another good one. Dark lettuces. A lot of lutein in those products.

There was a study done. It was a brilliant study in which they measured the lutein levels in the optic nerve. So the optic nerve can be seen by looking through the eye, dilating the pupil, you can see it. If you shoot a beam of light at a particular wavelength, it can actually measure the amount of lutein in the optic nerve. Because the optic nerve is an extension of the brain, that's a direct measurement of lutein in the brain.

Dr. Crockett: In the brain? That's fascinating.

Dr. Miloy: What they found in this study was the people with the lowest quintile scores had more cognitive deficits, and those in the highest had the least amount or had the best cognitive functioning. So that doesn't surprise us.

Dr. Crockett: So do you mean like cognitive function like when we talk about dementia or aging?

Dr. Miloy: Dementia, Alzheimer's the whole bit. So once again, we want to protect our cells and our DNA from oxidative stress. Just being alive, there's oxidative stress taking place throughout the whole body. Our bodies do have mechanisms built into them to do that. But of course, as we age, they don't work as well. So as we get older, we want to support our cells, our DNA by consuming as many of these antioxidants as possible. Different antioxidants concentrate into different parts of the body.

Okay, so for example, let's take these tomatoes here. There's some people who say it's nightshade and everything else, don't eat it. There's some people who have reflux disease and are very sensitive to tomatoes, or their joints flare up, but generally most people can consume tomatoes. Tomatoes are a great source of lycopene or bell peppers. Red bell peppers have a lot of lycopene.

Lycopene. When it's red, it's probably lycopene. Lycopene, for men, is really beneficial because it concentrates inside the prostate gland. You can just look at PSA levels and prostate cancer. There's a direct correlation between how much lycopene is consumed and the risk for the prostate cancer.

Dr. Crockett: That's crazy.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: So I'm slicing some rainbow carrots. I decided I didn't like my kale on there. So I love that carrots come in different colors.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I mean look, it's not just an orange carrot, but it's all these other different colors. You can say the same for potatoes, the little potatoes out there. There's purple potatoes. I don't know if we have any of those here today, but purple potatoes are your friend. Are they over here somewhere?

Dr. Crockett: No, I think I put them all in the soup.

Dr. Miloy: Okay, so they’re in the soup already, but the more color, the more antioxidants. So it's just a simple rule of thumb. Eat the color. Eat the colors of the rainbow, eat the darkest plant based products out there to get the most benefit.

Dr. Crockett: So the carrots that we have, do they taste differently when they're different colors?

Dr. Miloy: I think they do a little bit.

Dr. Crockett: Do the purple ones still have all the carotene that the orange ones have?

Dr. Miloy: But when the dip is as good as yours, I don't think anybody cares.

Dr. Crockett: Nobody cares. Thank you.

Dr. Miloy: I mean, that's a crazy good. Yeah, the secret’s in the sauce they say and so yeah, getting that one out to your viewers is.

Dr. Crockett: It’s kind of fun. So a lot of times when we make party platters, we're talking about more like charcuterie boards that have a lot of meats and cheeses on them. I like putting a lot of fruit on mine too. This was one that I came across. We decided to do this episode on the veggies and focus on cruciferous veggies. So I thought oh, wouldn't it be fun just to highlight a board that is mostly veggies.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, we've all heard about beta carotene. Beta carotene is found, of course, in carrots. Beta carotene concentrates in the retina and in the skin. Years ago, I read a study this back in the 90s in which they looked at beta carotene consumption and skin cancer risk. The more beta carotene you're eating, the less skin cancer risk you have. Then, of course, really good for the retina. Lutein concentrates in the retina as well along with zeaxanthin. So.

Dr. Crockett: Zeaxanthin, that’s a good one.

Dr. Miloy: Zeaxanthin, it gives vegetables their yellow color, like corn. So if you look at corn, it just loaded was zeaxanthin. Once again, that's protecting your retina, protecting you against macular degeneration. Or if you do have macular degeneration, you want to slow down the progression of that disease by getting as much lutein and zeaxanthin into your diet as possible.

Dr. Crockett: So we're laying a base of some green beans on next with some sugar snap peas, which these are so pretty. Let me show you guys. I love how they look on the inside. Maybe I should pop them open. Don’t they look great with their little peas in there?

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, I mean, think about it. I mean, these plants have been evolving for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years, and the whole species is riding on that seed. The seeds have been vetted over that entire time. In these seeds are excellent sources of protein, antioxidants, healthy fats, lignans, and other things that prevent cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia. So we want to definitely get the seeds into our body. The more variety the better.

Dr. Crockett: So this is a little hummus. We hollowed out our red cabbages, and we're just going to put our hummus here. So we prepared some yummy dip. So one of the fun things about making boards for your guests is all the different flavors, right? So we have our salad dressing that we just made. This is a roasted red beet hummus that I made earlier.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, this is incredible. I've never seen this. Leave to Dr. Crocker to expand my horizons. So tell us what went into this.

Dr. Crockett: So I took a beat this morning, and I cut it up and roasted it with a little olive oil and sea salt and black pepper for about an hour. Then we stuck it in a blender with some chickpeas and a little bit of garlic. I think it had a little apple cider vinegar in it too. I think I used some of that beet in it, and just ran it through the blender. You can add spice to it if you want, like a little cayenne pepper or something. I'm not a fan of spice so I didn't do that.

Then we have a basil pesto, which is also vegan. It doesn't have any dairy in it. I made a vegan ranch dressing dip. So I keep that powdered in one of my OXO containers, and you can make a dressing or a dip out of it. Then we have our traditional hummus.

So this makes a nice generous platter. Then we just want to throw more color on it, right? So let's do a little bit of tomatoes. Then when your guests come over, you can also have your traditional other types of boards with you laid out. You don't have to have just a veggie platter, but when they get to the veggie platter, there's a lot of different flavor for them to enjoy and try and experiment with. I think that's part of the fun of getting together and trying new foods.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah. It really is. We talk a lot about sugar and how addictive it is and processed carbs. The bread, chips, crackers, tortillas, cakes, muffins, and all those things. But I think what we don't talk enough about is the fat tooth that America has.

Dr. Crockett: The fat tooth.

Dr. Miloy: So the fat tooth is real. We like fat because in the fat resides flavors. It's just a question of choosing the healthy fats, like Dr. Crockett has laid out here. So the hummus, your poppy seed dressing. I mean, all of this is going to tame any of the better flavors inside these cruciferous vegetables and anything actually laid out here and make them taste delicious.

So the other thing that we like is we like crunchiness. That's why we like our chips. So finding a healthy chip is a bit of a challenge. There are a few out there, but what's even better than that is getting that crunchy experience from these cruciferous vegetables and other vegetables that are laid out here.

Dr. Crockett: So I went to the store today to find purple cauliflower. They were out of it. We found our green cauliflower, white cauliflower, and some orange. So I'm going to add a little bit of color here.

Dr. Miloy: We talk about what are, we talk a lot about inflammation in the body, but I think things that we need to talk about also are number one is cardiovascular disease. That's a number one killer. So what causes that? Well, obesity causes it. High blood pressure comes along with that. High cholesterol, type two diabetes, etc.

When you look at these types of foods, the Fab Five, particularly veggies and fruits, consuming more of those even if you didn't lose any weight, within two months your systolic blood pressure, your top number on your blood pressure would drop anywhere from about seven to 11 plus points.

Now when you eat more of these foods, you're going to lose weight. Okay, if you're not eating the garbage, and you're eating this stuff, your weight’s going to start coming down. So as your weight comes down, your blood pressure is going to come down. Of course your inflammation is going to come down. Then the other thing about all of these plant based foods, veggies, fruits, whole grains, seeds, and nuts is there’s zero cholesterol. All right.

Dr. Crockett: Because cholesterol only comes from.

Dr. Miloy: From animal products. Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: I knew you'd know the answer to that.

Dr. Miloy: We just got to easy does it. Everybody's risk for cholesterol is different. I'm not saying don't eat any animal products at all. But frankly, I think the more you move towards a whole food plant based diet, the better off you're going to be. There are some caveats. I mean, if you're going to be a vegan, you do need to pay attention to your B12 intake.

Because back in the day before we kind of developed the agrarian society and settled down, we were hunter gatherers. We would pull on this stuff out of the ground. Potatoes, everything, roots, tubers. We would eat dirt. That's where the B12 lives all over the planet. B12 is ubiquitous in the soil and minerals as well. So our food’s almost too clean. But one of the things I do encourage people that are going to go vegan is do have your homocysteine levels checked. Okay. Ask your doc to run a homocysteine level.

Dr. Crockett: So true story. I'm a MTHFR person.

Dr. Miloy: There you go.

Dr. Crockett: So I pay attention to my homocysteine level. I keep it under 10.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: Most of the time.

Dr. Miloy: So keep it under 10. If you have a homocysteine level of 14, that doubles your risk of dementia.

Dr. Crockett: I just hurt all the time when that happens. I could feel it in my joints.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah. So make sure we're getting a good multivitamin with B12 in it. Okay.

Dr. Crockett: I think we're just about done here. I got some. we're going to decorate with a little bit of rosemary just for to be pretty. I added some peppers. We were talking in the grocery store about the red ones being especially, I mean, good for us?

Dr. Miloy: The red peppers have the highest concentration of antioxidants, we're talking about bell peppers, but I mean, all of these foods are delicious. I mean, when you're faced with a choice of eating a fruit or any plant based product over sugar or processed carbs, you want to be consuming these whole food plant based things.

You want them in your house. You want to make it easy for you to eat and access. If you can see it, you're going to eat it. We'll kind of get into my breakfast, my healthy breakfast later on, but the key thing is to have these foods available and to enjoy them.

Dr. Crockett: Well, you're the one that taught me about the containers and to put them on the counter.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah.

Dr. Crockett: And to fill them with the Fab Five. So I started doing that. Then do you remember when I first did that I showed you, and you were like oh, that's so beautiful. But I didn't tell you that.

Dr. Miloy: You had bacon bits or something in that one container. Yeah she stuck it in a bag. She had like, I don't know, 25 containers. It was incredible. Yeah, it blew me away. But yeah, real simple concept. In sight, in mind, in body. Yeah, it's a real simple sequence.

Dr. Crockett: I think we got it done. I think this is it.

Dr. Miloy: That is incredible.

Dr. Crockett: Doesn't it look beautiful?

Dr. Miloy: It is absolutely amazing. Anybody would enjoy something on this tray.

Dr. Crockett: For your next celebration, consider this. We've got spring and Easter coming up. I love the purple color of the beats. One thing we didn't mention is that due to popular demand, I am starting a recipe blog. You can go to DrCrockett.com and find this and other recipes there. That is just to help support you in your wellness journey.

We love bringing you these conversations about what we talk about with our patients that has nothing to do with surgery. In fact, like Dr. Miloy mentioned, these are the ways that you prevent coming to me for surgery. I taught, particularly, I have a large population of endometriosis and fibroids, and all that is hyperestrogenism and inflammation. So we're constantly talking about cutting out the red meats.

Then when I bring up whole food plant based, I always get that kind of hesitation. So we want to give you examples of how it is fun and easy and delicious and beautiful. I hope you enjoy what we brought to you today.

Dr. Miloy: We love talking nutrition. You know the other thing for all you people that feel like I can't do this because there's a lot of, I think people look at this and think yeah, this sounds great. But like I'm a meathead or I'm addicted to carbs. Understand that your taste buds are the dumbest part of your body.

Dr. Crockett: Oh, that's funny.

Dr. Miloy: I mean, they really are. Yeah, when you start to eat this way, within two weeks everything shifts. It's just incredibly dramatic. So.

Dr. Crockett: You don't have to go all or none. Mostly you can shift. I know you're like the go all in, but I'm a little different. I'm like 80% do this, and you can still have your once a month eat your steak if you want to.

Dr. Miloy: Right. I used to explain to my patients so here's the standard American diet, aka SAD, right standard American diet. Here's a whole food plant based diet. This is backed by reams of data. I think this is the healthiest way to eat. Then this is the Texan diet over here. But I mean, let's say you come to here.

Dr. Crockett: Yeah, still feel a whole lot better.

Dr. Miloy: That is a massive improvement. The key is it to focus on making plant based foods the foundation, decreasing the amount of meat and dairy, and the most important thing is to get the sugar and the carbs out, the processed carbs. The carbs found in these whole foods are healthy. They don't count. Okay, it's getting away from the Frankenfood, and that’s the stuff made in the lab.

If you can't find it nature, you don't want to be eating that, or at least you want to eat less. That is going to move the needle more than anything. So you don't have to be a vegan. You don't have to be some over the top person. But if you are inclined to go there, do go all the way. But if you say go two thirds, I mean that's massive. I mean that is massive. I mean it's huge.

Dr. Crockett: All right, so, once again, let's tell people where they can find you. It’s Dr. Reed Miloy.

Dr. Miloy: You can find my practice website at optimumhealthdoc.com. You can reach me at drmiloy@gmail.com and then you can find me also at my coaching website, which is Reed Miloy.

Dr. Crockett: Awesome. Great job.

Dr. Miloy: Yep.

Dr. Crockett: Thanks for coming.

Dr. Miloy: Yeah, my pleasure.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

ght help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.

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