No-spike brownies, kvass instead of kombucha, and constructing your way to health

 🥑 Good Food - The BEST no-spike brownies

This week’s good food is one of my favorite metabolically healthy desserts EVER: easy, low-spike chocolate brownies. I love this recipe because it has no refined sugar and no refined grains, and contains healthy fats (almond butter, pasture raised eggs, organic coconut oil!), protein, and antioxidants. It’s incredible. Note: I often use organic tahini instead of almond butter (mostly because it seems to be way cheaper these days), and it works perfectly.

Chocolate has a bad rep of being unhealthy - but what actually makes it so is all the added sugar.

Pure cocoa has very little sugar and tons of fiber and antioxidants, which are 2 of the 5 key elements I believe are important for metabolically healthy meals.

The key to including chocolate as a part of a healthy, antioxidant-rich diet is to use pure, organic cocoa in low-sugar recipes (I love Navitas Organics Cacao) or buy organic dark chocolate that is 88% cocoa or greater (I like Alter-Eco Super Blackout). As someone who regularly craved milk chocolate in the past (much more sugar!), I can personally attest to the fact that if you slowly move towards darker chocolates and get off the glucose rollercoaster (12 strategies for stabilizing glucose, here), you will start to crave the less sweet versions.

Here are some of the key ingredients of the recipe:

• 🍫 Cocoa: contains iron, magnesium, and anti-inflammatory polyphenols which “feed” the microbiome.

• 🍬 Allulose: a very low-calorie natural sweetener that not only doesn’t cause big spikes in blood sugar or insulin but may actually reduce post-meal glucose and insulin levels when eaten with sugar (I use Rx Sugar). From everything I’ve seen in the research, allulose is one of the healthiest non-nutritive sweeteners, with no known negative health impacts at reasonable amounts (I also like 100% organic monk fruit extract). Note: using non-nutritive sweeteners can still make you CRAVE sweet things, so still use sparingly.

• 🤎 Cinnamon: can lower blood sugar due to a molecule called methyl hydroxychalcone, and also has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

• 🥜 Pecans: associated with reduced cardiovascular disease risk and improved metabolic health, and – FUN FACT – pecans have more antioxidants than almost any other nut! 

You can find the full recipe and video for my easy, low spike brownies on my website, here.

If you make it (recipe here), I’d love to see! Tag me on Instagram @drcaseyskitchen.

🔄 Good Swap - Kvass for Kombucha

One of the most popular probiotic-rich beverages today is kombucha and, no wonder… the leading brands are so filled with sugar they are basically like soda. This is “health-washing” at its best.

As an alternative to kombucha, try kvass.

Kvass is a fabulous probiotic-filled drink alternative I recently discovered that has much less sugars than the leading kombucha brands. So, what is kvass and how is it different from kombucha?

• 🔍 Base ingredients: Kombucha is generally made by fermenting sweetened black or green tea with a SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast - aka a fun slimy blob of microbes 😁), while kvass is made by just fermenting vegetables like beets or carrots. In kombucha, the carbohydrate source of the bacteria is sugar, and in kvass, it is the natural carbohydrates from beets or carrots. 

• 😋 Flavor: Kombucha tends to have a vinegary, sour flavor due to the acetic acid created during fermentation, while kvass has a milder, more subtle tart and sweet flavor generally.

• 🫧 Carbonation: Many kombuchas go through a secondary fermentation process to make them naturally carbonated, while kvass can be naturally carbonated as well but is often not as bubbly or effervescent as kombucha.

A kvass brand that I love is Biotic Ferments (no financial relationship, just love ‘em!). My favorite flavors are classic beet (ingredients = organic beets, salt, water, bacteria!) and lime electrolyte (organic carrots, salt, lime juice, water, bacteria!). So clean and delicious. Definitely helping make Dry January a lot easier as I really look forward to kvass! (PS: Anyone else doing Dry January? Two of the podcasts that were so motivating to me for drinking less were this one by Rich Roll with guest Ruari Fairbairns (so impactful!), and this one by Andrew Huberman.)

🧠 Good Thought - Health is a construction project 👷‍♀️🚧 

As we’re starting the new year, it’s common to make New Year’s resolutions around being healthy and it can be easy to fall into an all-or-nothing mentality.

Here’s a way to refocus your energy away from restrictive negative self-talk and guilt towards one of awe, self-compassion, and constructive thoughts around food choices: 

💡 Remember that when we eat, we are literally constructing the next version of our body, so it is beneficial to focus more on what you include in your diet to build your body, rather than narrowly focusing on what you restrict. Fill your countertops and fridge with colorful, real, nutrient-rich foods – ideally from the farmer’s market, where the food will be closest to its source, and therefore have maximal nutrients... Display and plate your food in a way that you enjoy, admire the shapes and colors of the food, MARVEL at it and feel grateful for it!… because these foods are actually becoming the next molecular version of YOU over the next few days. Love and appreciate your food as part of your self-love practice.

🧬 We eat an average of 3-4 pounds of food per day. That is 3-4 pounds of physical building blocks and chemical instructions that our cells and genes are “reading” to know what to do. Good molecular instructions lead to health and structural integrity; flawed or incomplete instructions lead to disease and suffering.

You can’t fool your body: either it’s getting what it needs to be structurally sound and functional, or it's not.

If it’s not getting what it needs, it will act out (symptoms). Three examples of this: 

1. Brussels sprouts: Isothiocyanates are molecules that come from cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli or Brussels sprouts. They activate the NRF2 transcription factor, which activates the genes that act as a first-line antioxidant defense against oxidative stress. Too much oxidative stress is linked to migraines, dementia, Parkinson’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, COPD, asthma, premature aging, NAFLD, many more diseases.

2. Turmeric: The NF-κB pathway controls inflammation. Turmeric root contains curcumin, which decreases the expression of NF-κB—one way turmeric acts as an anti-inflammatory. Too much unchecked inflammation is linked to autoimmune disease, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegeneration, cancer, dementia, inflammatory bowel disease, arthritis, and so much more. 

3. Brazil nuts: Selenoproteins are critical for our immune cells and antioxidant production, and our body needs selenium to produce them. The body grabs selenium that is floating around and it becomes part of the constructed selenoproteins. You can get selenium from sources such as brazil nuts, seafood, and organ meats. Not enough selenium can “speak” to you via thyroid disease, reduced immune function, increased cancer risk, and more. 

🥦 Focus on putting AS MUCH positive “info” in as possible: aka, organic minimally processed real food that includes omega-3s, probiotics, fiber, micronutrients/antioxidants, and healthy protein. We construct our way to health more than we restrict our way to health.

😋 When you focus on putting the most amount of good stuff in your body, you naturally want less and less of the stuff you’ve been “trying” to restrict. The “restriction” sort of takes care of itself when you give the body exactly what it needs. (PS: I LOVE the way this concept is talked about in the book The End of Craving, which makes the case for cravings being a sign of the body NOT getting what it needs.) Stop cravings by loading the body with real, unprocessed food.

Read more on my thoughts about how to stop feeling guilty about food on my website, here.

👀 In Case You Missed It

My wonderful friends at WeNatal put together a FREE pre-pregnancy workshop to help everyone understand the importance of trimester zero: before conception. I am a guest panelist and cannot wait.

Some topics that we’ll be covering during the workshop:

• 🧪 Essential lab tests for female & male fertility

• 🩸 Blood sugar & preconception connection

• 🥗 Diet and lifestyle for pre-pregnancy optimization

• 🩺 What questions to ask your OBGYN

The workshop is tomorrow, January 24th, at 11am PST. You can find more information about the workshop and sign up through the registration link, here.

📚️ Also, I formally announced my book on Instagram on Friday with a very personal video. You can see it here.

🎙️ Lastly, I recorded an amazing podcast with the fabulous Glucose Goddess — Jessie Inchauspé — yesterday for A Whole New Level! Subscribe to the Levels Youtube channel so you don’t miss the episode (dropping mid-March). It’s filled with glucose stabilizing strategies and goes DEEP on Jessie’s journey of becoming Glucose Goddess.

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