Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, everybody and welcome. You probably noticed that there are two topics in this class that you wouldn't expect to go together. Cooking and acne. There are two of my favorite topics to talk about, even though I don't love acne, but I'm excited to share with you how they're related and how we can use one to beat the other in a natural, healthy way. I battled acne for 15 years. I was in and out of many dermatologists offices, and I tried all the treatments over the counter prescription home remedies. Nothing ever worked long term, and I never got to the heart of what was causing my acne. When I asked dermatologists about whether certain foods could be contributing to my acne dairy chocolate things I've heard other people say they were always dismissive. Diet DOESn't cause acne. DIET CAn't cure acne. Eventually, after I had an allergic reaction to Anak Ni medication, I was prescribed. I poured myself into researching the cause of acne, and finally I stumbled across it. Food I skeptically started an anti inflammatory diet and noticed an improvement in my skin in just a few days. Over the next two years in the process of learning a new way of eating, I discovered a new passion cooking. My goal for this class is to teach you how food contributes toe acne, the basics of anti inflammatory eating, and then walk you through a recipe that is nutritious, yummy, and you can eat without shame.
2. Acne 101: It's usually thought that acne starts with a clogged pore. Seebohm is the oil that your skin produces. Think of a poor like a tube that runs from the surface of your skin to the deeper layers underneath. And if oil and dead skin cells that don't slough off properly get stuck in there, it creates a clog. But even before the clog, there are things happening in your body, and that is where foods contribution comes in. So when we eat, there's three types of nutrients. Are food gives us proteins, fats and carbs. We're just going to focus on carbs. Carbs air the body's preferred method of energy, and it gets energy by converting carbs to sugar. But the body converts different foods at different rates. Some foods air converted really quickly, and those cause your blood sugar to rise quickly. Now, blood sugar is exactly what it sounds like. The amount of sugar in your bloodstream as opposed to in your cells, which is where we want it to end up. When your blood sugar rises, your body responds by releasing insulin. Insulin is a hormone, and it moves this sugar from your blood stream into yourselves. so it could be used for energy. And then once it's no longer in your bloodstream, your blood sugar goes back down. But the combination of increased blood sugar and increased insulin has a very significant reaction in the body. It causes inflammation. No, this is not the type of inflammation that happens when you get a cut and it turns red and your body is trying to heal it. That's acute inflammation, and that's good inflammation. This is chronic inflammation, and it's sustained for a long period of time, and it causes all kinds of problems in the body. Your body interprets it is stress, and so this type of inflammation leads to acne. Other skin conditions. Like psoriasis, it leads to rheumatoid arthritis. Yeah, causes inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease and inflammation even leads to heart disease and cancer. So while having oily skin might make acne worse, it is not the root cause. Acne is a result of information caused by increased blood, sugars and increased insulin
3. Basics of anti-inflammatory eating: before we go any further, let me assure you that anti inflammatory eating does not mean cutting out carbs. There's good carbs and bad cards, just like there are good proteins and bad proteins and healthy fats and unhealthy fats. The key is learning which carbs are good cards, which is the key to anti inflammatory eating to keep your blood sugar stable. Now, if you're not diabetic, you probably never thought much about blood sugar. Your body just takes care of it, but in order to regulate it, we have to learn which foods are converted to sugar rapidly. How the best way to tell this is to use what's called a glass eye scenic index? You can find these online water equals zero, and table sugar equals 100 all carbs will fall somewhere in between. You generally want to avoid anything above a 50 but even without a glass scenic index, you probably already know that sugary foods cause your blood sugar to rise. You can get a general idea of how much by looking at the nutrition facts labels. You'll notice that on the is the number of carbs and the number of sugars are both high, and if they're the same number, it means that 100% of carbs in that food are from sugar, like in Pepsi. What you may not know is that many foods that are considered healthy are also rapidly converted to sugar, such as fruit juices, dry fruits, young traditional granola. And the biggest surprise might be that even things that aren't sweet can cause your blood sugar to spike like a bagel or breakfast cereal or breads. Remember, your body interprets carbs as sugar so greens act like sugars in body. So carbs include foods that have sugar, or that your body interprets is sugar. Who was that? Spike your blood sugar, the fastest or sugary foods and greens. So the healthiest place to get your carbs, then, is from vegetables. Not only do vegetables not spike your blood sugar nearly as quickly, but they have a lot of other nutrients that are really good for your body. After looking at these lists and thinking, there's no way I can cut on all those things, I thought the same thing in the beginning. You focus a lot on what you can't have, but over time you focus less on that and a whole new world of foods opens up to you. I'm gonna give you two things to help you get started. First. Is this suggested menu outline? Pause the video screen shot and take a picture of it and try it for three days and see how your acne responds for me. I could tell after three days I could tell after one day that my deep, cystic acne wasn't swelling up anymore, but it was diminishing in size and second, I'm gonna walk you through how to make a delicious vanilla granola. So let's get started.
4. Buying ingredients: so I wanted to talk for just a minute about where I buy my ingredients. This granola is made entirely from nuts and seeds, and those things are more expensive than oats and your standard granola ingredients. So I wanted to give you my tips for keeping the price down. If you are buying, that's at a local grocery store. There's gonna be two places you find nuts in the store, the snack nuts. I'll and the baking goods. I'll you want to get your nuts from the baking goods. I'll snack nuts, have a lot of canola oil and partially hydrogen meat and vegetable oil and salt and stuff to add flavour if you're just popping them in your mouth. But those air not healthy fats and you were gonna add all the flavor we need with our coating, so you want to get from the baking goods ill. That's where you'll just find raw nuts and scenes. However, I recommend buying your nuts in bulk, so I've gotten my pecans and walnuts from Sam's Club. I've also gotten them from Costco before. All of my almonds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, cashews and coconut flicks are from natural grocers and they're the Natural grocers brand just packaged in bulk and then sold more cheaply. That's a great way to go. I wish I lived in a town that had a whole foods or Trader Joe's or something along those lines, but I don't. So if you have one of those near you, check him out and especially check out a bolt goods section. If they have one. Sometimes even grocery stores will have a bulk gun sections. Check that out, too. Oh, when we're known about the coconut flakes, you want unsweetened coconut flakes and most packages of coconut flakes. Even in the baking goods, I'll are going to be sweetened. They don't always say across the top sweetened. So if it doesn't say anything, look at the Nutrition Facts label. This one only has two grams of sugar, and if it's sweetened, it will have more like 11 grams of sugar. So you want to find one that's low in sugar for our liquid ingredients. For the honey, I just use regular plain old honey. I don't use raw or unfiltered or anything fancy like that for coconut oil. The best coconut oil you can use is called unrefined. It refers to the way it's processed. It retains the most nutrients when it's processed, the least when its unrefined. But if all you have access to is refined coconut oil, use it for assault. I'm using pink Himalayan sea salt. It doesn't have to be that whatever you have on hand is fine for cinnamon. Make sure you always by your spices in bulk. You're going to get way more for way cheaper. Vanilla is just always expensive, and for my nut butter and using sunflower seed butter, you can use creamy peanut butter, which is probably what most people have or have access to. Peanuts aren't quite as healthy of food as nuts and seeds. Peanuts aren't scenes there. Legumes, fun fact, then grow under the ground instead of on trees. But whatever you use again, make sure that it's low in sugar. This one just has one gram of sugar. A lot of peanut butters, if you're not careful, will have added sugar, and so then it's gonna be more like seven or eight grams of sugar, So look for one that's low in sugar
5. Step 1: Liquid coating: Okay, we're ready to start our granola. I've got the oven pre heating. At 3 50 we're going to make our granola in two stages. We'll start with the coating ingredients on the stove top, and then, while those air heating will prepare our actual granola. Okay, we're going to start making our quoting for a granola by adding three of our ingredients, and we're going to leave to until after they've heated and mixed. So we're going to start by adding our honey, our coconut oil and her sunflower seed butter has gotten a lot of attention recently. There's a reason for that. Coconut oil is a saturated fat. You can tell a saturated fat because it's a solid at room temperature, and so that's like butter and unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature so that be like olive oil. And usually saturated fats are animal derived life butter and lard and tallow and coconut oil is a saturated fat, but its plant derived so it's whole composition of fats is different. It has more medium chain fatty acids instead of long chain fatty acids. If you want to get scientific and you can tell that because coconut oil will melt sooner in your cupboard. Thin butter will and those medium chain fatty acids have possibly even been shown to raise your good cholesterol. Your HDL and normally saturated fats are thought to just raise your bad cholesterol, your LDL. So the fact that it raises your good cholesterol as well is unique. Plus, it's plant derived, so it's got micro nutrients that we probably even know about at this point. But since plants give us so many good fighter chemicals, we suspect Charles Aaron coconut oil as well. So I'm just gonna put things together, Sturm around a little bit and turn it on like a medium low medium heat and let that start cooking. I'm gonna keep happening on that and go start my granola.
6. Step 2: Granola: this could be called superfood granola. Because if you Google a list of superfoods, almost every single list you find is gonna have nuts on it. They have so many good things for you. They have fiber, They're high in protein, They have vitamins like A and B and E. They have minerals like zinc and flood. Um, magnesium and iron and copper. They are high in protein. Basically every buzzword in nutrition that you here that's good for you. Nuts have. They don't all have all of those things, but when you put them all together, you get all the benefits of them. And it's just awesome for you. Um, to make this, I'm going to use a food processor today. That's the quickest way to prepare it. But you can also use just a regular knife and cutting board if you don't have a food processor. Ah, blender probably won't work really great for great up your nuts. Blenders air more for liquid things like making smoothies. But they don't work great for chopping things. So you really you could try it. But food processor is really gonna work best if all you have is a nice and a cutting board Just like throw your nuts on there and shop sort of randomly until you get them the size that you want and your goal size is just like oaths size. So it doesn't have to be real precise when you cut. Just keep going until you kind of have in small pieces. And there you go. Just do that with all your nuts. I'm going to do it in the food processor today, and the key to doing it in the food processor is to start with your largest nuts. So I'm doing my pecans, almonds and walnuts. Then I'm gonna process those for a few seconds. You don't want it to get all the way ground down yet because I'm gonna add my cashews, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds. Those are my smaller nuts, and I don't want them to turn to powder in the process of grinding my big nuts. So those in you don't want to overdo it, So it's good to just do it for a few pulses and then stop a few more pulses and stop and I always check it. L reverse directions a few times usually. Okay, this looks really good. So we wanted, like oats consistency or it's OK. If parts of it are a little bit finer than that, then we're gonna add our liquid coating. You can tell that the ingredients of mixed nicely and they're all uniform consistency, and they might be bubbling just a little bit. That's when you know it's done. You can turn off the heat. I'm going to remove it from the heat, and only after we remove it. Do we want to add the last two ingredients of our quoting, which are our vanilla in our cinnamon. You never want to add vanilla to something when it's really hot, because vanilla is made with alcohol. That's what preserves the vanilla bean. And if you add it to something when it's really hot, it will just evaporate the alcohol and take with it some of the vanilla, and you end up losing a lot of flavor. So it's kind of a waste of your vanilla to do that, so wait until his cool just a tad, and then show your vanilla. And so I'm mixing in my statement, and then I'm gonna mix in my vanilla. I'm gonna add my liquid coating straight to the food processor. If you are doing this by hand, put all your nuts in a bowl and pour the courting over the top just stirred altogether. This smells really good. So the only thing I'm leaving out at this point is the coconut flakes. If you put the coconut flakes in now, they will get pretty toasted during cooking. And there that's totally fine if you like it that way. I prefer to leave my note until when I paused to stir my granola after halfway through baking or till the very end. Okay, I'm gonna polls that a few more times just till it's nice encoded, and that's what it should look like.
7. Step 3: Baking: Lastly, we just have to spread or granola onto two baking sheets. They don't need to be greased. You want there to be, ah, fairly thin layer, but it's okay if it's touching or if it's mounted just a little bit. You probably don't want to use like a nine by 13 pan. It won't bake us evenly if you just pile it all in one pan. So a couple baking sheets is best. You're gonna be adding the coconut later. So you want to leave a little bit of extra room planning for that. And I realized I forgot to add myself. So I'm gonna throw my assault on top here. You could just throw that in the food processor normally or mixing in with your granola. But I forgot to do that, so we'll just do it now. Lastly, you just stick them in the other. I usually put mine side by side on the top and then at the halfway point, rotate and turn them and just set your timer for six minutes. Six minutes is up, so I'm going Teoh, take it out and stir in my coconut, and the coconuts, like I said, can either be stirred in at this point or at the end. But regardless, you still want to get your granola Easter because you'll notice that parts of it get darker than other parts.
8. Beauty is always on the inside: The first time I was ever thankful for my acne was when I realized it was telling me something about what was going on inside my body. You've heard that skin is your largest organ, and it's the only one we can see. So it's a great indicator of your internal health. In the 2.5 years that I've been eating anti inflammatory, I haven't needed to go back and see a dermatologist, and I've been able to stop taking all prescription medications I used to need to take to control my acne. If you're thinking about anti inflammatory eating, I would love to hear from you post a question or a comment in the community section below and after you've tried making today's vanilla granola posted before and after picture in the project section of today's class of what your breakfast used to look like and what it looks like now. And lastly, remember that no matter what your skin looks like, beauty is always on the inside
Kalika Peske, Acne survivor
