Nurse Anesthetist Nick teamed up with Chef Cat and Nurse Bridgette from A 2 Z Living Well Solutions for this informative series on eating healthy without sacrificing taste. Diet is an important part of pain and mental health management. Depression, anxiety, and neuropathic pain are worsened by inflammation. Inflammatory, processed foods are a clear culprit. Once we can clear the fog from stimulants, opioids, and sedatives that work so well in the short term and so poorly over time, we can better listen to our bodies and take charge of our own health. Transcript below.
Watch the second half of this episode here.
Bridgette:
Hi. Welcome to Ascend Health. I’m Bridget Zaborowski RN-BSN.
Cat:
And I’m Chef Kat Alaimo and we are co founders of A 2 Z Living Well solutions. We are so blessed and thankful. Nick Angelis of Ascend Health has given us the opportunity to bring to you today a smoothie and this smoothie is perfect in time for health a healthy start to your spring. Okay, so we’re in northeast Ohio. Doesn’t matter. Snow, sunshine. All you need is a smile when you make your smoothie that’s going to help lift your spirits up. And we’re going to jump right into how to make it.
Bridgette:
Okay, great. Well, Chef Cat. Yes. We’re going to get started with the smoothie, like you said. Yes. And do you want to introduce some ingredients that we have here first? Surely.
Cat:
So the feature of this smoothie is really to point out the safe sugars versus sabotaging sugars as Nurse Bridget will go through kind of the health of what sugars are safe and what sugars are not. I will go through the culinary aspect of what sugars still tastes good. You want something sweet, you want something delicious, nutritious though and we’re going to dive right into that. So the best way I would say to start any smoothie is you need a great strong, powerful blender. Okay, so we got a great blender ready to go here.
Bridgette:
Something that’s going to chop up the ice.
Cat:
Very important, right? So the next step is picking out your favorite fruit. Here we have just some wonderful organic blueberries. They are frozen. And I like using fruit that’s already frozen. Even if it wasn’t, you didn’t buy it frozen from the grocery department. I still freeze it myself just so it kind of adds that sweetness. But the coolness as well that I’m looking for in the smoothie. So I’ve added the ice cubes here. I’m going to go ahead and add two cups of frozen blueberries.
Bridgette:
Now I just want to bring your attention to this this this coloration right here. This is. Right from the blueberry. And this juice here has antioxidants. So each fruit has a different antioxidant profile. And what gives it that different color? So blueberries have this red look, different fruits have different colors to it. So we want to make sure we eat the rainbow. And Chef Cat loves saying not Skittles.
Cat:
Right? Okay. So we are going to get blended. It’s a loud process and stuff. Before I start the blending, I think I’m going to add a couple more ingredients and just show you how to add layer by layer. What kind of items are great in a smoothie here? If you’d like to close up, we have a nut and seed mixture. This is a wonderful way to get some extra protein into your diet, but it’s it avoids the nuts if there’s any allergens. We of course, have some great nuts here as well. Here we have some cinnamon that we will be adding to the smoothie.
Bridgette:
But not cinnamon sticks like this. We’re going to be adding ground, it’ll be ground.
Cat:
And then we have a little bit of vanilla as a very low calorie, nutritious way to add flavor. And we also have a couple different sweeteners here. We have honey, but what we’re going to feature today is actually going to be a molasses. Okay, So this is a really unique sweetener that you wouldn’t think of first thing to put in your smoothie. But as a chef, it’s really important for me while working with a nurse to find alternative healthy ingredients. And that’s what we’re really about With A to Z Living Well Solutions is finding wonderful foods that taste good, easy and great to make for your family. Great to fuel you at work, but I really want you to be to use that food as fuel and so molasses if nurse Bridget you want to talk about why I’m using molasses.
Bridgette:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So molasses is an interesting ingredient. It has a unique flavor. You may know molasses as your, you know, gingerbread cookie flavor profile and it has a very unique flavor. But the key here about this molasses is that it has a ton of iron in it, iron in a form that we can actually absorb and digest easier than those little iron tablets that you may find at the pharmacy. This particular molasses has 36% of your iron recommended daily dose. So you know, women who have low iron counts, low blood counts, that’s going to be something that you’re going to want to take in. It also has other minerals included in there. So Chef Cat, I noticed that you just added a couple of ingredients. What are you adding now?
Cat:
We added some nuts. I have Brazil nuts. I have almonds, I have cashews. I literally took all of my favorite nuts and I added them in here. We are always of course, observant of allergies, so depending on who our client is and who we’re serving, that may not always be an ingredient in your home, but you could certainly swap those out for those lovely sweet seeds there. So one trick I always am showing people of how can you get in and out of the kitchen faster, right? It’s all about speed and efficiency. So this is pan spray.
Bridgette:
You’re putting pan spray in the smoothie?
Cat:
No. Okay. Not exactly. Tell me I’m using pan spray as a tip to loosen the product from the sides easier. So any time you use honey, you use molasses. What happens? It sticks. It sticks. Right. And it really doesn’t come out nice. So let me just show you here. What this will do. A little pan spray goes a long way. So I’m going to take this molasses now and you’re going to see it’s just going to come clean right out of here. So what I’ve measured isn’t going to be lost in the cup.
Bridgette:
And typically when you’re making your smoothie this size for about two people, you’re going to want to add about two tablespoons of molasses to get that full recommended daily value of your iron. And also when you’re purchasing your molasses, you’re going to want to make sure it’s organic. On Sulfured molasses, correct.
Cat:
And as you can see, that’s pretty clean. We have very little residual leftover. So to me it’s really important to get all the best quality and not lose any bit of my ingredients. Finally here, I’m going to add this is a mixture of heavy whipping cream and a little bit of kefir. Kefir is a what would you call it, like a yogurt.
Bridgette:
It’s like a yogurt thinner, but it still has probiotic compilation to it, just like a yogurt would. However, kefir actually most times doesn’t have any sugar if you just get the plain flavored kefir. Correct.
Cat:
So now’s the fun part. I’ve already added some vanilla, I’ve added some nuts, I’ve added the fruit. We have the ice cubes. It’s about to get loud. Are you ready? Ready. Okay, here we go. And this just combining together is really where the smoothie gets fun and you’re going to see all the colors collaborate. We’re going to turn it up a notch. So I have the start of a wonderful smoothie. There’s a couple ingredients that I like to actually heighten everything up with. And what is it usually?
Bridgette:
Well.
Cat:
Chia seeds. Yes. Yes, yes. So Chia Seeds is a really fun, unique little seed. They are full of omegas.
Bridgette:
Let’s see if we can get a close up on here.
Cat:
It looks like black pepper. That’s the best way to explain it. There’s absolutely no flavor whatsoever. So they’re my go to for moms, for for anybody who is looking to increase their nutritional value, I say add them to eggs, add them to smoothies, add them to whatever you want, really, because what you’re getting is all the nutritional value, right?
Bridgette:
So you’re going to be getting calcium from your chia seeds. You’ll get some omegas from chia seeds. It has different mineral content to it and it’s a really great easy way to just sprinkle on some nutrients. And you can also do a lot of fun recipes with Chia as well. So Kat’s going to blend it up. Adding a little bit of water. Great.
Cat:
And what this water did was just kind of help loosen it up the sides. Obviously, there’s a rage out there. Have you heard of them? Smoothie bowls? Oh, yes. They’re outstanding. They’re really dense. They’re really dense. They’re heavy kind of. But so light because they’re basically fruit with all sorts of toppings. If I were going for a smoothie bowl, I would have probably left this in the very thick state. I’d put that in sort of a nice bowl and then I would add coconut more nuts and seeds, any sort of good stuff. And then I drizzle it with something like Honey Maple sirup if.
Bridgette:
You wanted that extra sweetness. But the molasses really gives a lot of sweetness there too.
Cat:
So the goal of making any smoothie, any ingredients in the kitchen is really about your time, as I mentioned, and the health of it. So for me, I chose the smoothie because we have the iron correct from the molasses, we have the protein from the nuts, we have the protein from the seeds with omegas, with various minerals. Could we talk a little bit about the sweetness because we use molasses, which was kind of untraditional. Do you want to talk a little bit about the different We have xylitol here, honey, and stevia. Sure. Will I pour these up? Absolutely. Just in time.
Bridgette:
So in just a moment, you’ll be seeing our host arrive. But let me talk about this first ingredient here, which is xylitol. So this right here looks very much like sugar, if you could see that. That’s it looks very much like sugar and it acts like sugar, too. However, the glycemic index is lower than sugar, making this a little bit easier on our bodies. Xylitol comes from either birch or it also comes from corn. This particular xylitol comes from birch trees. So next we have our stevia. So this is a drop stevia, which it comes in a liquid form. And this one happens to be flavored chocolate and sealed tight. So I can’t open it. But is this the part where, oh, this is where the man hand comes in? Here we go. Thank you, Nick.
Nick:
That’ll make it even funnier, right?
Bridgette:
Right. This will be the bloopers.
Nick:
That’s sealed.
Cat:
That’s okay.
Nick:
There we go. There it is.
Cat:
Awesome. A little elbow grease.
Nick:
I actually arrived a few minutes ago, but I was like, They’re doing really good and I have nothing to add, so I’ll just watch this for a while. And then I got so I was like.
Bridgette:
Well, you showed up right in time because it looks like we had just poured the first one so you can go ahead and taste that if you like.
Nick:
That is good timing.
Bridgette:
Very good timing.
Cat:
Try that out now. I did something else you could continue on stevia.
Bridgette:
Just real quick on the stevia good. Pass the test. Okay, perfect. Perfect. So stevia is a really great ingredient as well. Stevia is actually a plant. It’s it’s it’s called the sugar Bush no known in Ohio. So this is not a plant. Obviously they took the nutrients and squeezed it up and made a little liquid here. But sugar bushes or stevia bushes grow prolifically in Ohio. You can grow your own sugar right outside your door, take the leaves off the bush, crush them up, put them in your smoothie, and that’ll add some sweetness, completely natural.
Nick:
Oh, wow. I always thought stevia was something exotic from Madagascar or something.
Bridgette:
You know what? Maybe it grows there as well. But yeah, stevia grows great in Ohio. It loves our soil and it’ll grow into a nice little bush. You can actually line your your whole garden with these stevia bushes.
Cat:
Now, one very important thing to keep in mind, stevia, it is a sweetener, natural sweetener. There’s a lot of fake sweeteners out there. So a lot of times when they have all those key codes, zero sugar, this and that, sometimes they’re using artificial sweeteners. What we like to do at Living Well solutions and of course educate the Ascend Health Center viewers is really educate. And so something about stevia is it’s a very strong so a little goes a long way. But again, you’re just getting the essence of a plant in this form here. Right? So I have another TV ready. Smoothie and that is something that we have already made our berry smoothie okay with molasses. I have here, Nick, if you’d like to try.
Nick:
Now do I try or do I get the whole thing?
Cat:
You can get the whole thing. Okay, You get to try this. Here is another one. I want to talk about the ingredients that are really special and unique and would obviously make anybody smile while making a smoothie. So this one. Go ahead. You could double fist it if you like. Sounds like we should try this too. Yeah, I would.
Bridgette:
I would love some smoothie.
Cat:
We need some smoothie.
Bridgette:
Thank you.
Cat:
Okay, so that which you are tasting is a banana and dandelion. Wow. Okay, so that is dandelion is in the form of a obvious prolific weed A lot of people like to call here in Ohio, but it’s really awesome for your health. And nurse Bridget has all the tips on how Dandelion is so great for your health.
Bridgette:
Oh, great. Yeah, Dandelion. So the way you’re drinking the dandelion, it actually comes in this powder right here, which is called Dandy Blend. And basically it’s a blend of dandelion roots with chicory root and it’s roasted and the flavors really come out of the root, but it also gives like a coffee mocha kind of flavor. So when you use dandelion root and chicory root, you can use a have a coffee substitute or you can make yourself a little mocha in your smoothie there. But there’s tons of nutritional value to the dandelions. It’s great for your kidneys. It’s great to purify the blood and traditional Chinese medicine. Dandelion Root is very, very important to their healing actually. Also to our bees. Dandelions are so important to our bees. Really? Yes. Yes. Because. So right now it’s spring. Just about spring and it’s snowing or it’s really cold outside and the ground is frozen again, but the bees are starting to wake up and they need some food. Thank you. Now it’s a party. Now it’s a party. Here we go.
Cat:
We got the taste testers.
Bridgette:
Choose to choose. So the bees are waking up. They need some food. Dandelions are the first flower with the tulips and the daffodils. First flowers coming up. And we need to save those dandelions so we can help our bees eat. And we know that bees are really good for pollinating and we need our pollinators to get the the fruit trees and all that.
Nick:
It’s neat too, because in Greek cuisine, dandelion is very important. So my mom would get a knife and go cut dandelion weeds wherever she could find them. Yes. Sometimes I tell her, You cannot leave this bag and this knife and this rope in my car like no one’s going to believe that. That might look a little silly, Officer. It’s just the dandelions. I got to get the dandelion. But she would, like, risk her life for dandelion greens. Wow. Wow. So I grew up eating dandelions all the time.
Bridgette:
That’s great.
Cat:
It’s prolific in the Italian culture as well. A lot of Italians know the benefits from the old country and they have a lot of tonifying for the liver and stuff. And I think when my grandparents would make Italian wedding soup, for instance, they would always be putting stuff in there. As kids you’re like, Wait, what are you putting in there? It’s like, don’t worry about it, right?
Nick:
So it’s never going to get on the official recipe anyways.
Cat:
Yeah, yeah. So we’ve come to love and know the importance of dandelions and it’s awesome that this is a company out of northeast Ohio that makes this dandy blend. It’s called Dandy Blend. Just to help you guys. It’s really important that you keep it air sealed so there’s no moisture that gets to it because it’s the root. So anytime the root is dried out, it just.
Bridgette:
Well and also they formulate it in such a way that you can blend it cold and it’s not going to get all chunky and powdery and gross. It dissolves pretty quickly. So it’s a perfect blend there. But also just to add to our dandelion discussion, dandelion greens are a nice bitter and we know that we need to have bitters in our in our food because it stimulates our gallbladder, stimulates the liver like you had mentioned, and eating a bitter food with a heavy meal is going to help you digest your meal a lot better, right?
Cat:
Absolutely. Sorry.
Nick:
That I have to add is strange stories, but my late 20s I felt gallbladder pain and my dad had had his gallbladder out at 28, so I was like, Wow, I don’t want surgery. I’m a nurse anesthetist. I have no interest in undergoing what my patients go through every day. Right, Exactly. So I found in that case Swedish bitters. And I just took some every day and eventually I felt better and I never had a problem since. Yeah. Excellent. Because your gallbladder is one of those issues where you totally should try something natural because we all know what the surgical approach is like. We’ll take it out. That’s the end of it, right? So if you can try something else, it’s one where, you know, it’s a great idea to take whatever herbs you need to see if you can get your gallbladder working again.
Bridgette:
Exactly. And the gallbladder is so important because it’s a it’s basically a sack, right? It’s a bladder and it holds digestive enzymes. I had no idea of that from from the liver. That’s news.
Cat:
To me.
Nick:
We’re all learning things today.
Bridgette:
Yeah, we’re all learning. But it’s very important that you have your gallbladder to digest your food properly. And if you don’t have your gallbladder, you got to supplement with digestion enzymes and continue to eat your bitter greens.
Cat:
This is one of the reasons that we started A to Z living well solutions. It really was to exemplify how food is fuel and how it really has purpose in your life. You have the history and the memories of your Greek origins, my Italian origins. But then the food just kind of brings people around the table. That’s okay. The starting point. There’s conversation, there’s gathering, there’s fellowship. But then it’s what quality of food are we eating? Of course, I you know, in an Italian family you grow up on Sunday, it’s mangia, mangia, mangia. But on Monday you got a diet. And and that was really a challenge as a chef growing up is, you know, all this great food. But I’m not allowed to eat at all because it’s not all good for you or there’s moderation and stuff that word. So what I have kind of worked with nurse Bridget with and she’s our pathfinding nurse for a reason because we all got to eat right? We all want to eat some of the foods that you grew up with and you have these memories over, but it’s really about finding good quality food. So just to go back to our sugars, safe sugars sabotages, do you want to talk about one of the sabotages that we kind of sometimes get? Bom bom bom bom.
Bridgette:
Okay. So what this is, is a little juice from whoever, whoever. It’s not to be mentioned X, Y, Z company. And basically it’s it’s a cranberry juice, Right. Which, you know, we know cranberries are good, right? We know juice could be good. Oh, let me have this with my breakfast or lunch. But really, I want to bring your attention to we have to read the ingredients. So even though it says cranberry juice on the front and it looks like cranberry juice, we’re going to flip it over to the back and we’re going to find out what it really is. What is it really? Well, the first ingredient is water. Okay. Water is okay. But the second ingredient. Cream. Sugar. Sugar.
Cat:
Sugar. Think cranberry juice, right? Yes.
Bridgette:
And that would be that would make sense if you’re drinking cranberry juice. But really, this is cranberry cocktail and a lot of cranberry juices that are sold in the stores are actually cocktail, which means it’s a cocktail of water and sugar and other sweeteners to make it palatable because it’s a bitter but it’s a party.
Cat:
But sometimes not all parties are good parties.
Bridgette:
It’s it’s something It’s something. And this this particular cranberry juice actually has 40g of sugar in this little tiny bottle. Now, 40g may not mean too much to you right at the moment, but when I tell you a man his maximum amount of sugar he should have in a day is 38g of sugar. Now all of a sudden this 40g has got to put into perspective, you know, you can have 38 at the max. This is 40, right? So you’ve already maxed yourself out for the entire day. And if you drink this for breakfast, you’re done. Yeah, you’re done. You’re done.
Nick:
And I’d rather portion it out a little bit more wisely than just some boring cranberry juice.
Bridgette:
Yeah, just drinking sugar water with some red dye in there.
Cat:
So if you want to know the best way to get your sweets in. Okay. We’re getting into the summer in northeast Ohio. What’s the best way? I’m sorry. It may not be lining up at the ice cream stands. We all have a place for that and a time. But the best way to get your natural sugars is sweets. And sweets is found in fruit. Fresh fruit? Yep.
Bridgette:
So safest way to eat sweet is with your fruit.
Cat:
So we’re getting into a really awesome time. We live in northeast Ohio. We’re very blessed with the agriculture that’s around here at A to Z living Well solutions. It’s really important that we source locally whenever possible. We support our farmers and one way you could do that is making a trip out of it, a fun day trip out of it. There’s a lot of Berry U-pick farms, so when the berries are picked for your ripening, get in the car, grab some friends. You could go and fill baskets literally baskets wide of the freshest berries that literally grew miles from your house. It’s really wonderful for your immune system. It’s great for your social life. Now, now.
Bridgette:
Chef Cat, I have to ask you. Yes? When I go and pick all these berries and all these fruits, I have so many because I’m so excited. I’m just grabbing all that I can And then I get it all at home and I either eat it all at once or or I have to have everybody over to have some fruit fruit cocktail with me. But what can we do if we pick a lot of fruit and we can’t eat it all at once?
Cat:
I chef is the word. IKF It’s it’s an acronym for individually quality Frozen. Okay, So I’m holding bananas. I’m talking about berries, but we really mean berries, bananas, banana berry. You get your fresh fruit.
Nick:
Botany skills are a little.
Cat:
Wherever you get your fresh fruit In season in abundance, there are opportunities to elongate the shelf life of it. How do you do that? Well, don’t put it on the shelf because you’ll have bugs everywhere. But what I do, for example for bananas, but we’re using berries as an instance here. What I do is I take a sheet tray, I put down parchment paper or wax paper or a silicone mat and I literally piece by piece, I just put them on there. They’re not all bunched up, piled high. It’s it’s individual. That’s where that I comes with the Q and the F, So I individually, I just spread it out. Let’s just say it’s just spread out onto the sheet tray. They’re not touching, so.
Bridgette:
They’re not going to be a frozen clump.
Cat:
Yes, that’s the point of individually quality frozen. So then I put that into the freezer. Okay, I it could be a few hours. You pull that out and they will all be these very individual hard chunks of the berry of the banana. Obviously you would peel that and you would you would then just take it and put them into a bag. You could vacuum seal them. Some people choose canning. That’s another method outside of Iqf. But I always suggest if you’re getting things in abundance, the freezer is a modern invention that we have to our benefit. We can utilize it, but it’s really about not wanting to get something under script out of the freezer, not knowing what it was. A little freezer burn How long ago? Yeah. So that avoids the freezer burn because it’s not just all a huge clump and that’s really important when you’re trying to save money, eat well and live well.
Bridgette:
Speaking of eat well, I am really enjoying this and I just.
Cat:
Well, I think it’s time for us to take our pseudo commercial break anyway. Oh good. So I can so this has been Ascend and A 2 Z and we’ll be right back in just a few seconds.
Bridgette:
Thank you.
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