3 Foods You Won’t Find in My Kitchen

​Thanksgiving is less than a week away and my kitchen will soon be a hot spot for baking & cooking.

Every year without fail, someone in my family will ask me where I keep the granulated sugar. When I tell them we don’t have any, a look of alarm will appear on their face:

“Whaaat?! How in the world can we make these cookies/muffins/pie/cinnamon rolls/biscuits without sugar?”

Before I answer, let’s back up for a minute.

As a practitioner of Chinese Medicine, I’ve had years of masters-level education on dietary nutrition. In my clinic, I educate patients on how what they eat affects their body, both good and bad. Have you heard the Hippocrates quote, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”? It’s 100% true and the fundamental basis for why you won’t find these 3 foods in my kitchen:

1. Granulated Sugar or Brown Sugar
2. Vegetable oil (canola/rapeseed, corn, soy, vegetable, peanut, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, vegetable shortening, and margarine)
3. Conventional corn products

I would bet you’d find these three foods in at least 95% of America’s kitchens. Without diving too deep into biochemistry or nutritional theory, here’s the down & dirty on each one:

• Sugar: Sugar literally feeds disease & chronic illness in the human body.  Read this blog to understand the tip of the sugar iceberg: http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/01/13/worst-sugar/
• Vegetable Oil: Most vegetable oils are genetically-modified, rancid, over-processed (aka hydrogenated) and nearly impossible for the body to process.
• Conventional Corn: 88% of the corn grown in the US is genetically modified (aka not actually corn anymore). A herbicide commonly used on GMO corn called glyphosate (Monsanto’s Roundup) was linked to Celiac disease in a 2013 published research study. Read the study here.

So what WILL you find in my kitchen to replace these common foods?

• Instead of sugar replacements, I use local raw honey, coconut crystals, or organic grade A maple syrup
• Instead of vegetable oil, I use organic cold-pressed unrefined coconut oil, cold-pressed olive oil, grass-fed organic butter and grass-fed organic ghee
• Corn: I use organic corn sparingly because there is a risk of cross-contamination from GMO crops.

I hope you take the opportunity to banish sugar, vegetable oil, and GMO corn from your kitchen this holiday season! It certainly leads to some interesting conversations!