Live Ask Me Anything #7 - Topics Covered:
- Fruit is Not a Health Food! (06:38) - The Glycemic Index (18:36) - Chocolate is a Super Food! (24:41) - Justin's Favorite Chocolate Brand! (32:47) - Low-Carb Rice Recipe (38:29) - LIVE Q&A! (43:17)- Cauliflower Rice (43:28)
- Top Recommended Vegetables (43:50)
- Coconut Secret Liquid Coconut Aminos (44:56)
- Any Paleo Foods You Shouldn't Eat Together in the same Meal? (50:21)
- When Is Your Next AMA? (53:02)
Listen to the Podcast:
Show Notes and Resources:
- New Clovis Website! Clovis.Store - Pauline "Pita" Macias: - Rose Namajunas: -The Corner Boxing Club: - Still No Free Lunch: Nutrient Levels in U.S. Food Supply Eroded by Pursuit of High Yields by Brian Halweil - The Glycemic Index - Glycemic Load - Taza Chocolate:- Potato Hack: Chris Kresser on Joe Rogan Podcast - Jasmine White Rice - Coconut Secret Coconut Aminos (Justin's Favorite Product!) - Bragg's Liquid Coconut Aminos
- NOTE: Make sure you are buying "liquid coconutaminos" specifically! Bragg's also sells "liquidaminos" which are soy based. DO NOT buy the soy product!
- Is Fruit Sabotaging Your Fat Loss? by Justin Nault - What Are Lectins? AMA #2 with Justin Nault - All AMA Episode with Show Notes and Resources!
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
All right! Facebook, Instagram, what's up, everybody? We're on YouTube, too? We're on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. I'm getting my mind blown by this stuff every single day. Okay.
I'm refreshing my Facebook page to make sure that I can bring up my own Facebook live. What's up, everybody? Okay, cool.
First things first, welcome. This is Facebook, Instagram and YouTube live. Now we're adding platforms every week.
This is Ask Me Anything #7. I am Justin. I am the founder of Clovis. I invented the perfect paleo powder. I have some nutrition credentials that some people care about except for me. I have them, and we're talking, Ask Me Anything. This is where you guys ask me questions about nutrition. You send me questions ahead of time through social media. You do live questions during the Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube feeds. I try to answer the questions the best I can with my minimal knowledge of anything useful.
You guys seem to like it, so we keep doing it. This is number seven. First things first, I'm going to ask that you share this. I'm doing it online right now. I'm clicking the share button on Facebook, at least. Now YouTube and Instagram, obviously a little bit different, but I'm just going to click the share button and click share now and public. Boom! It's going to put it right on your Facebook feed. So mine has been shared on my timeline. That's the Justin Nault timeline or on Clovis, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook.
This is a different time for us. We usually do the Facebook Live: Ask Me Anything on Wednesdays. We were in Denver, Colorado. We had an amazing trip to Denver. So those of you that don't know, through Clovis, I sponsor a fighter and a dear friend named Pauline PITA Macias. PITA stands for Pain In The Ass, and we lived with her basically for the last week. So we learned all the pain in the a** stuff too. Yeah. We're actually live on PITA's page right now. She's cool with that, assuming. Right. Cool.
Shout out to Pauline PITA Macias. We went out to Denver, spent the week with her. We sponsored her. She's a pro, an elite MMA fighter. She's got 20 years in judo. She was with the Olympic training center. She's the valor flights, female champion. I was there when she won that title. It was crazy. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook.
Instagram - @paulinepitamacias
Facebook page - Team Pita
So look up Team Pita, and look up Pita on Instagram. She's awesome. We had a great time. We got to watch her train with Rose Namajunas, who is the lead bantamweight female champion of the UFC. That was pretty awesome. So we had a great time in Denver; long story short, we were travelling. We had to bump the AMA to today, and we wanna experiment with new times as well. So we did reach out to some people who said Thursdays were great and that 8:00 PM central was a good time. So we're kind of been polling and trying to figure out the best way to do all this. Also, speaking in Denver, shout out to the corner boxing club in Boulder. It's run by Carrie and Kiersten, and they were amazing. They let us hang out there. Also, we did a Facebook live that you can check out on the Clovis culture page of judo expert PITA, throwing my a** like six times.
She just did these crazy judo throws on me. My knees still hurt. I'm having trouble walking. I got my a** kicked by a girl. It was awesome. You can watch it for your entertaining purposes, right? Okay. So we're going to get into Facebook Live #7. I think that was enough of an intro. We do try to do the introductions. We fill them out a little bit more lately so that we can just let everyone get into the room. And before we start, sometimes we do questions, and then people come in later and ask the same question. At the beginning here, we're just kind of working out some of these kinks, getting people into the live rooms. We're going to talk a little bit about Clovis and a new website that we have. We can talk about that, and why we did a new website. It was all thanks to you guys and your feedback.
I am surveying the Clovis followers every single week, every single day, finding ways to improve. When I get enough feedback from enough people, that's all the same. I make changes, and that's what's happened with this website. We wanted to give people better control of their subscription services on the website. We literally rebuilt an entirely new website just so you guys can have full control and taking the control out of our hands. You guys are gonna be in charge of your own subscription services and everything. We did that for you. We just want things to be as easy as possible.
Topics for tonight, Ask Me Anything Number 7. We're going to talk about fruit. This fruit debate will not die. Anytime I do an Ask Me Anything and mentioned anything about fruit or the fact that I don't eat fruit. Me telling people that I don't eat fruit is like, you would think that I'm the evilest person on earth with some of the responses I get about fruits. Like people think that because I don't eat fruit, I'm going to drop dead on a sidewalk somewhere. We're going to talk about fruit. I'm explaining to you why I don't eat fruit. Why I don't recommend fruit for really anyone unless you're like an elite athlete who's just crushing yourself every single day. I don't recommend fruit.
We're talking about fruit. I want to talk about chocolate. Chocolate is a superfood. I eat chocolate every single day. Literally every day, I've been eating chocolate every day for years. It's amazing. I'm going to tell you why. We're also going to talk about the rice hack. I did an Ask Me Anything from New Orleans last week, and it was called, Potato Tricks and Party Tips. That was Ask Me Anything number six; we talked about how to make potatoes and low-carb rice.
We're going to talk about that again because the cooking instructions were a little bit complicated. Sometimes I hear about these things, or I've known them from the past - turning rice or potato into resistance starch. I roll through this stuff really quick sometimes because I'm usually just spitballing. When I tried to do this, I actually got step-by-step instructions on making a potato to paleo or low carb or turn it into resistant starch. And how to do the same with white sushi rice. I'm actually going to walk you through, step-by-step, exactly how to do that. So it doesn't get lost in the shuffle of this AMA. We can talk about how to really, really do that. Maximize how to make those food products healthy. We're gonna go over that.
As I said, we're going to go over some stuff about Clovis. I have a lot of notes today because in the fruit department, I really had to write down some numbers, right? I'm not a numbers guy. I'm literally like third-grade math makes my brain hurt, which is difficult as an entrepreneur. I usually have to bring people in to help me with the numbers. I have a lot of numbers here because I am so sick and tired of people telling me fruit is a healthy food. Fruit is not a health food. Fruit is candy. It comes from nature. Not anymore, first of all, it doesn't come from nature anymore. It comes from agriculture. It was created by man, right? The fruit we have now is not the fruit we used to have 50 years ago before these giant agricultural methods meant for high yield, right?
High yield farming has destroyed everything about fruit. It's destroyed a lot of vegetables, meat. We've talked about feedlot cattle, feedlot farming in other AMAs. They're just horrible. All this high yield production is destroying the nutritional values of food. None more so than fruit. Now, this is why fruit is unhealthy. To get you to the point where you're up to speed on exactly why fruit is so detrimental. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how much of a nerd you are. I have to go into a bit of bit of biochemistry here. I have no choice. Here we go.
You have different types of cells:
fat cells
muscle cells
liver cells
Cells all are fed by the same thing, and that is glucose, right? So glucose can make cells grow. Glucose can make muscle cells bigger. It can make fat cells bigger.
It can make liver cells bigger, right? The way that this works is you have different types of sugars. Let's say let's just break it down into two major categories. Let's say glucose and fructose, right? Glucose goes into the bloodstream. Fructose goes in the bloodstream, but it's the only sugar processed exclusively in your liver. Fructose literally means fruit sugar. I spell it out for people by talking about Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola and all these other products are unhealthy because they have high fructose corn syrup. So unless you live under a rock, everybody knows that avoid high fructose corn syrup.
High fructose = increased fruit sugar corn syrup.
Now corn syrup, terrible for you, but high fruit sugar, high fructose also terrible for you. It's literally just high sugar, right? Fructose is sugar.
Fruit sugar = fructose = fruit sugar
The fructose that you find in fruit is molecularly the same and is handled by your body. The same way as fruit toast found in soft drinks, Coca-Cola Sprite, whatever else you find it in, right? What happens is this fructose is processed exclusively in the liver. The fructose never gets to your muscle cells per se, your skeletal muscle cells, your biceps or triceps, right? So you have these athletes pumping down fruit and stuff. I'm going to get jacked with carbohydrates from fruit. It doesn't work that way. Fruit is stored in two different ways, liver and glycogen. In any cell, the storage form of glucose is glycogen.
Glucose = glycogen (same thing in storage form)
The glucose goes into the cells and is stored there. Once it's being held by the body, it's now glycogen, and glycogen can be utilized during exercise. The body can grab that glycogen, spit glucose into the bloodstream and use it to produce ATP, to produce energy, right?
In your muscle cells, glucose isn't necessarily a bad thing. The skeletal, muscular system, I think, has over 400 grams of glycogen. Now your liver can only hold, depending on the individual, somewhere between 60 to a hundred grams of liver glycogen. This is glucose stored in your liver. Liver glycogen is glucose stored in your liver. Now, once you pass that threshold of 60 to 100 grams of liver glycogen, any and all excess sugar that goes into your liver. It is going to be converted into fat and spit out into your bloodstream. Now I'm talking specifically if you've listened to any other AMAs when we talk about cholesterol.
V L D L - Very Low-Density Lipoprotein
The most dangerous form of fat that can be in your body. This is the fat that gets blamed for heart disease, heart attacks, everything.
People think it comes from eating fat in the diet. You could literally eat butter all day and not have a heart attack from that cholesterol. Still, you can have a heart attack from overeating fruit. I repeat, you could eat butter all day, and it won't give you a heart attack. You can have a heart attack from eating too much fruit. Once you have that 60 to 100 grams of liver glycogen stores are full, any and all sugar you get on top of that will get converted to fat. This is why I say fruit makes you fat. I have an article on my website called "Is Fruit Sabotaging Your Fat Loss." The short answer is yes, it is.
I'll give you an example. If you can hold 60 to 100 grams of liver glycogen, right? One banana has 14 grams of fructose, so do the math. One Apple has, I think, 19 grams of fructose. If you start adding this up, if you had an apple and a banana, now you're looking at 40 grams of fructose, and your liver can only hold between 60 to 100. Now, this is also compounding. You don't deplete your liver glycogen everyday, especially if you're sedentary. Meaning that you don't work out a lot, you don't do a lot of high-intensity exercises. High-intensity exercises are the only way to deplete your glycogen because you have to burn glycogen. Suppose you're not doing a lot of high-intensity exercises. In that case, if you're sedentary, you eat a couple of servings of fruit for a couple of days in a row, your liver glycogen is now full. And you are literally going to start gaining fat with the sugar that you eat on top of that.
That's basically the biochemistry on how liver glycogen works and how fruit, fructose gets explicitly converted to fat and get shoved out into your bloodstream. You don't want to be eating fruit. Now, another reason for that is we have nutrition facts and everything. I've talked to you about this before, where textbooks are usually 10 to 15 years behind, more often than not. They're 15 years behind cutting edge research. Nutrition facts can somewhat be the same way. When you say an apple has this much vitamin C or orange has this much vitamin C, right?
Here are some things I want you to think about. Any and all fruit that you're eating right now is genetically modified. I don't care if it says non-GMO. I don't care if you're in the organic non-GMO section. Let me give an example. Bananas as we know them, a yellow banana that you get in the store, peel it up, and take a big bite.
Notice something, you're not crunching on seeds. Are you? Why aren't you crunching on seeds? Because bananas, as we know, are not real bananas. They can't reproduce. If you put them out in nature, they can't reproduce because they don't have seeds. All bananas are plantings. They all come from the plantings. Normal bananas that you would find in the wild, primarily that have found 100, 50 years ago, whatever, they have seeds in them that are so big. It makes it difficult to even eat the flesh of the fruit, and they're far more bitter. The fruit as we know it right now is not real fruit. That's what you have to understand. It's not natural. This is the first time in history. Walk into a grocery store in the middle of December with a foot of snow outside and go, "I'm going to eat that ripe banana. That's totally natural. Oh, it says non-GMO must be natural. It's here in Denver, Colorado in the middle of the winter with a foot of snow outside." That's insane!
Think about that for one second. When you really stop and think about the paleo foundations we talk about, this is why I go back to paleo and everything. I don't care if you don't like the term paleo; I don't care if you don't like the caveman diet, or you don't like the paleo diet, whatever, I don't care how you feel about the word. We're going back to fundamental principles of doing what nature intended us to do. Nature did not intend for us to walk into a grocery store and grab a Kiwi or a mango or a freaking pineapple in the middle of January. It's not natural. This is not natural. This is not how things work, okay? Bananas all across the world. Do you know what our yellow bananas are known as? They're known as dessert bananas.
So now you got this guy, Justin; he's a nutritional therapist from Nashville. Who has a company and keeps telling everybody that fruit is unhealthy and people want to argue with them online. In other parts of the world, they're literally called dessert bananas. It's straight-up sugar, people. It's straight-up sugar. You're poisoning your body with toxic candy. Fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, fruit, people like to use my perfect paleo powder. Man, I love your paleo powder. It's incredible. I add a full banana, a cup of strawberries, and blueberries, and that's my lunch. Okay? That's a quick way to type 2 diabetes. Why are you doing that? Why are you taking my beautiful product and destroying it with your shi* fruit? Quit doing that. I mean, I know that this sounds crazy, but you have to understand this is the facts, right? I put it in my notes here. Let me see. It's called.
Let me see. I can't find it. Nah. Oh, Still No Free Lunch. There's an article called Still No Free Lunch. If you Google this Still No Free Lunch. And it talks about how high yield farming has led all of this to happen. So again, in that, I'm going to give you a couple of figures here. If you were to take an orange from 1950 that was loaded with vitamin A.
A few examples, your grandparents, right? Your grandparents were five years old, eating an orange. They were getting vitamin A. They were getting so much vitamin A. If you took that orange from the fifties and tried to get the same amount of vitamin A today. You'd have to eat 21 oranges, 21 times more vitamin A in this fruit from just about 50 years ago. That's how much genetic modification has destroyed our fruit.
Now again, another thing I wrote here, if you were to eat those 21 oranges, you're looking at 252 grams of fructose. 252 grams of sugar. Your liver can only handle between 60 to 100 grams of liver glycogen, right? It's insane to say that fruit is nutrient-dense. It's just crazy. Now it's just so you know, I'm not just picking on fruit, again. This is why I took notes for this particular AMA because these points are so important. Onions and potatoes once had vitamin A, but now they no longer do. Onions and potatoes that you get in a store don't have vitamin A. Sweet potatoes have, but white potatoes don't. Meat has half the iron it used to have. Half the iron since feedlot farming started about less than 50 years ago, right? Feedlot cattle has been around for less than 50 years—literally, half the iron.
On top of that is broccoli has one-quarter of the calcium it used to have. Literally, one-quarter of the calcium, and that's how bad this has gotten. Vitamin C for apples. Suppose you would have taken an apple from 50 years ago and get the equivalent amount of vitamin C in today's apples. In that case, you'd have to eat 100 apples. We talked about 19 grams of fructose. You're now looking at 1900 grams of fructose to get the vitamin C from apples that you could get in one apple in the 1950s. When we say fruit, you and I, we're not talking about the same thing. That's what you have to understand. You're thinking of fruit as you've been traditionally taught about it by the food pyramid, government and public school teachers telling you the fruits are healthy. Talking about fruit as it used to be.
We're talking about fruit from yesteryear. We're not talking about fruit from today. This is why I get so frustrated. There's some girl out on the internet that only eats bananas. She does a freaking banana diet. Congratulations! You're killing yourself, literally. I mean, it's so crazy to me, and you have to understand that if you're arguing for fruit as a health food, the only reason you do that is that it's sweet and it tastes good, and you want to eat more of it. And you want Justin to tell you it's okay, I'm not going to do that. Fruit is terrible.
Let's talk about another thing. I want to talk about the glycemic index. So I don't know if you guys are familiar with glycemic index; it's how different foods affect the blood sugar levels in your bloodstream, right? The glucose levels in your bloodstream, how they're affected.
A glass of water filled with just straight glucose is a hundred on the glycemic index. The way that it works is they measure these different foods against that 100 number. They give you a glycemic index number. Certain foods can be seemingly similar, like white potato and sweet potato. But a white potato is a high glycemic index food, and a sweet potato is a low glycemic index food. All these things just are affected differently because molecularly, these food items are not the same.
To give you an example about fruits, certain fruits rank higher on the glycemic index than white bread, pasta, rice, and even doughnuts. So you literally have some fruits that are a higher glycemic index than doughnuts. And you still want to tell me, fruit is a health food. Are you sold yet?
Are you sold on this? I want to check and see if we're getting any comments or anything because this should give you plenty of fuel for any debate with anybody regarding fruits and vegetables. Fruits are not a health food. They're dessert. They're toxic. Now, if we were talking about fruits from yesteryear, it may be worth the glycemic index. And the glycemic load, which are two different things. We'll get into that at a different time. The Glycemic index and glycemic load you're getting from the fructose may have been worth it when fructose levels were lower, and vitamin levels were through the roof. These fruits of yesteryear we're talking about with your grandparents or great grandparents or whatever, even your parents' fruit was better than yours is.
Back in the day, it may have made sense. Take a little bit of sugar for this amazing micronutrient panel. Now it's simply not there. I want to be clear about something. There is nothing, no macronutrient, no micronutrients, vitamins and minerals. There is nothing in fruit, zero things in fruit. There is nothing in fruit that you cannot get from vegetables and meat. No, not a single thing. If you never eat fruit again, like Justin. Eat plenty of vegetables and meats. You're going to get everything you could have possibly obtained from the fruit without the glycemic index and glycemic load spike in the potential type 2 diabetes and fat gain. Vegetables and meat, there's nothing in fruit that you need that you can't get from other food items. It's, it's just a crazy argument.
Another thing I did here, and I'll probably post this in the show notes. I hope you guys have been keeping up with the show notes. The new website has all the Facebook Live and all the show notes as well. We're going to keep going through those. What I did just for fun to compare this. I wrote an old ebook back in 2015 or 2016 that some people got; it was a guide to rapid fat loss. If you want an ebook guide for rapid fat loss, we can rework that and put it out with new branding and everything. Give that to you guys too. I compared 100 grams of broccoli and 100 grams of bananas versus the claims of bananas being a healthy food. I did the top five or six markers that I thought people argue for and fruit, right?
Net carbs
Banana 20 grams
Broccoli 4 grams
Now keep in mind, this is a hundred grams by weight; they're identical. These are the two foods with having same grams of weight
Sugar
Banana 12 grams
Broccoli 2 grams
One-sixth of the sugar broccoli versus banana.
Protein
Banana 1 gram
Broccoli 3 grams
Three times the protein in 100 grams of broccoli.
Vitamin C
Banana 14% of your daily value
Broccoli 148% of your daily value
Stop arguing for vitamin C in fruits. It's insane!
Vitamin A
Banana 1%
Broccoli 12%
12 times more vitamin A.
So 10 times more vitamin C, 12 times more vitamin A and one big argument view. BI actually remember this from the movie. I think it was Honey We Shrunk Ourselves way back in the day. This kid has like a blood sugar crash, and the friends come over, and they're like, "He needs potassium." and they take out a banana and shove the banana in his mouth.
And I go, "Oh my God, you knew banana said potassium." That's amazing, right? Do bananas have potassium? Yup! 10% of your daily value. Does broccoli add potassium? Yup. 9% of your daily value. 1% off. Everything else blows it out of the freaking water. So for 1% extra potassium, do you want six times more sugar floating around your bloodstream? It is crazy, people. I could literally have this fruit conversation all day long and spin in circles. And you would not be able to give me a single reason why I should continue to eat the fruit in my diet. I'm not going to, and I hope that you don't either. It's really bad. I mean, you got to stop with the fruit, especially when it comes to things like the perfect paleo powder or any other shake that you might be using.
You might be using a green superfood or something; that's a really good product by itself. Paleo powder has everything you need in it by itself. Don't put sweetened almond milk. Don't put bananas, don't put strawberry, don't put blueberries, stop adding this stuff. You're ruining these products.
These products are designed to help you, right? They have everything that you need. Now, again, I'm not saying you don't have to be like me. You don't have to completely give up fruit if you don't want to. I don't eat fruit. I choose not to. I don't do well with it. I don't feel good about it. I don't like eating incredibly sweet things because it leads to cravings, as carbohydrates lead to cravings. It's the only macronutrient that causes cravings. I limit my sugar intake as much as I can. I limit my fruit, but just be careful, man. I mean, a lot of people are just adding fruit all over the place. If you really track your eating, you might be like, "Oh wow, we're reading a lot of fruit here."
Man, we're almost coming up on 30 minutes. What I want to explain to you is this is for all the mainstream nutrition experts out there. Fruit is toxic and has sugar. Chocolate is a superfood, and eat it every day.
I eat chocolate every single day, literally every single day. People don't realize that the number one source of antioxidants is not fruits and vegetables or anything like that in the American diet. The number one source of antioxidants is coffee and chocolate. I'm gonna explain to you the differences in chocolate. I'm going to teach you how to read chocolate labels. I'm gonna teach you why chocolate is so good for you. I'm gonna teach you why you should eat chocolate. And we're talking specifically about dark chocolate. Now for me, in my recommendations, anything over 85% cacao is considered a superfood. I mean, that's chocolate becomes a health food, right? You have to be careful with this, though, because when I say dark chocolate, people see 55%, 60%, 65%, 70%, it says dark chocolate. They grab it because it's really sweet and sugary and delicious, and they eat it.
Now I'm eating dark chocolate, and they justify it. You know, Justin said, "Dark chocolate is good. I'm eating 70% cacao. This is dark chocolate. I don't care what the package says." It's not dark chocolate in my eyes, unless it's 85% cacao or over.
The other things that we need to talk about are how to read these labels. I have a couple of chocolate bars here. I'm going to go through these in a second and walk you through them. It's going to be listed in a lot of different ways. What I'm looking for is, generally speaking, organic cacao beans. Now there's Cocoa, and there's Cacao. Anytime I can find Cacao, it's better because I just know that brand knows what they're talking about. Especially if you find Hershey's cocoa or like Kroger cocoa in a can. Like these cocoa powders and stuff, they can literally have carcinogens in them like cancer-causing agents.
It's really scary. You don't wanna mess with that stuff. The reason why I like dark chocolate so much is that it's something that you can eat every day. It's something that will help you kill that little sugar craving. Especially in the beginning, if you're doing my fat loss protocol and you're going through the keto flu or the sugar detox or anything. Dark chocolate going to be your best friend because it actually helps decrease appetite, right? So at night I'll have like two, three, four, five, six, whatever, because I'll show you the chocolate that I'm eating in a second. I'm eating this dark chocolate, multiple cubes of it per night, every single night. I love it. It's delicious, and I always backload my carbohydrates, any carbohydrates at nighttime; I know that goes against mainstream nutrition as well, but whatever.
I eat dark chocolate every day. There are these polyphenol antioxidant compounds in chocolate that are different from fruits and vegetables. They're astronomically different, right? TSo they contain something called EGCG. EGCG is the same plant compound. It's a polyphenol antioxidant compound that's found in green tea. All these benefits of green tea that you hear actually exist in dark chocolate as well. I mean, they literally cause brain cells to grow. It can target and kill cancer cells. It enhances your mood, a big-time mood enhancer. I think part of that is that dark chocolate. If you were taking in really, really dark chocolate, the fiber content is really high. It's a prebiotic dietary fiber. I've talked about that before; probiotics are the bacteria in your gut. Prebiotics are the food that feeds that bacteria. Prebiotics are dietary fiber compounds that the human body can't digest, but gut bacteria can.
So dark chocolate is a very, very powerful prebiotic. I mean, you're looking at literally enhanced cognition, enhanced mood, decreased risk of cancer, and you're feeding your gut microbiome. So to prove this point even further, they did a meta-analysis at Cambridge University. They took 4,500 people. I'm trying to remember the exact statistics on this, but they took 4,500 people, and they fed them dark chocolate every single day for eight weeks. So I think they staggered it. Some people get a certain amount of chocolate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The people who ate the most chocolate during this study had a 37% decreased risk of cardiac disease. That's insane! So dark chocolate literally reduces your chance of having a cardiac episode, right? Your cardio health will improve just from eating dark chocolate.
The other thing that dark chocolate does is clinically proven to lower bad cholesterol and raise good cholesterol.
Good cholesterol is HDL,
Bad cholesterol is LDL
They say it's bad. We don't really know that it's bad, but LDL. VLDL we know is bad. LDL is different. VLDL comes from fructose. Don't do that. LDL gets lowered with dark chocolate. HDL goes up. I mean, literally, the benefits of dark chocolate are just fantastic. They're out of this world, but you have to be careful because we're looking at ingredients now. Also, there's a 29% decrease in the risk of stroke in this Cambridge study. And again, 4,500 people eating 45 grams a day. Let me drive that point home real quick because they were eating 45 grams a day for eight weeks. They saw it decreased cardiovascular disease risk, decreased cholesterol, and precisely zero negative side effects.
This is 45 grams of dark chocolate a day for eight weeks with zero adverse side effects, no weight gain, no blood sugar issues. No nothing. Now, this bar I'm about to show you here. This is my favorite brand of chocolate. This entire bar is 35 grams. They took 10 grams more than this. Let's do this. This is probably looked like this. They're eating this much dark chocolate every single day for eight weeks. And the health benefits go through the roof with zero negative side effects. That's crazy, right? We need to rethink this chocolate thing. We need to reconsider this fruit thing. You need to rethink this chocolate thing.
The thing about the antioxidants in dark chocolate is that they have a hormetic antioxidant, which means these are the compounds that literally cause your genes to express any oxidants.
It's really, really interesting, but it's completely different from fruits and vegetables. The polyethylene antioxidant compounds in dark chocolate are astronomically better for you than even ones you would find in vegetables and fruit. Again, the antioxidants that you would find in fruit are so minuscule do next to nothing for you. And you have a giant glycaemic index sugar spike on top of it. It's really just not worth it.
Let's talk about milk chocolate. This is dark chocolate, this contains zero milk, and then you have milk chocolate. To give you an example of the legalities of this. Legally milk chocolate only has to be 10% chocolate. It can be 90%, all sorts of other nonsense. It can be soy, lecithin and milk and sugar. Nonsense. You want to stay away from milk chocolate.
And again, even when you start getting down in the 70, 60%, 55%, 40% Cacao, they still somehow label 40% of Cacao as dark chocolate sometimes, which is just insane. Don't eat that. It's like you're literally just taking in sugar and milk. The crazy thing about sugar and milk, it literally reversed the health benefits of dark chocolate. It makes it no longer suitable for you. They become a moot point. All the prebiotic dietary fiber, the antioxidants, the flavonoids that are in these dark chocolates, milk and sugar, acts as anti-nutrients.
When you're taking in the cacao chocolate. Chocolate comes from cacao beans, right? If you're taking in the Cacao and you're taking it in with milk and sugar, the milk and sugar are going to bind to those flavonoids, antioxidants, dietary fibers so that your body can't access them. They're just going to get excreted from the body. You're not going to be able to use them. Milk and chocolate literally just takes one of the most beneficial compounds on earth and makes it nasty. At that point, you're not getting any of the benefits. You're just getting the blood sugar spikes from the sugar that's added.
Let's talk about how to read ingredients. There is only one brand of chocolate that I'm going to recommend to you, literally one brand. I know the founders of this company; I have hung out with them for the last two years at paleo effects. They're located in Massachusetts, actually not far from where I grew up in Rhode Island. And that is called Taza chocolate. This is an example of Taza chocolate. This is my favorite chocolate on planet earth.
This one particular bar right here. This is called Taza Wicked Dark. I love that it's wicked dark because I grew up in the Northeast. So that's amazing. I'm going to walk you through the ingredients on this and the ingredients on some other brands. Why they're so different? A lot of times, if we look at the first ingredient, so there's really no way for me to put this in the camera, but I'm going to try to read this to you.
Ingredients on this are Taza Chocolate Stone Ground Wicked Dark
95% Cacao.
Now for most of you out there, especially chocolate lovers, if you're going to taste this for the first time. It's going to be so bitter. You're going to eat one cube and be like, "Oh, I can't do this". Especially if you're on my fat loss protocol where we're limiting things like sugars, simple sugars, or fruit. We're living in carbohydrates; your taste buds literally change.
This is really sweet to me. If I have a 70% Cacao bar, I almost have to spit it out. It's so sweet. I'm just like, "Oh my God, this is gross." This is 95% of Cacao. This is super dark. But notice when I read these ingredients, there's no milk. That's super important. Right?
Ingredients: organic cacao beans, organic cane sugar.
That's two ingredients.
I know I said the big, scary word, sugar, that we've been talking about this whole AMA because of the fruit issue. This entire bar has four grams of sugar. The entire bar and is 35 grams of chocolate. Now, good luck eating this whole bar. That's the thing about dark chocolate. Once you start breaking this up, this is Stone Ground Chocolate, so it's really gritty. Once you start breaking it up and eating it, you're going to have two, three cubes and be like, "You know what? I'm satisfied. I'm good." It's going to decrease your appetite, and you're gonna feel really good. You're not going to want to eat anymore.
I don't think I have ever eaten one of these in full seating. I think the most I've ever eaten in a sitting is half a bar. I was working at the computer, not paying attention, just grabbing chocolate or something. Still, it's challenging to eat a whole one of these. Even though there is sugar in it, as the ingredient, there are only four grams in the entire bar.
Let's compare that to a banana. You could eat three of these bars, back to back. You would still take in less sugar than one banana. Less sugar than one banana in three chocolate bars, and the glycemic index spike and the glycemic load would be significantly lower.
The health benefits of this are through the freaking roof. We've talked about it. Decreased risk of cardiovascular disease, decreased risk of stroke, lowered bad cholesterol, increased good cholesterol, enhance cognition, enhance mood benefits, right? That's crazy! You could eat three of these things and have less sugar than a banana. That's why we titled that as Fruit Is Literally Toxic Sugar, and it is a dessert and candy. Dark high-quality chocolate is a superfood. It's a health food; consume it every day.
This is another one that I love. Especially for those of you that are just making the transition, maybe start here. I want to get you over 85% Cacao, but this is Taza chocolate. Again, Taza. This right here is my idea of a dessert. I mean, this is dessert, dessert. It's sweet. It's delicious. This is 80% dark stone, ground chocolate with sea salt and almond. This flavor is just nuts. Now you could probably eat an entire bar of this.
I could if I wasn't careful. This would be a really good introduction if you really like milk chocolate. This will be a good introduction if you like milk chocolate. God forbid if you like white chocolate, don't even get me started on white chocolate. White chocolate legally can be 0% chocolate. You don't have to have any chocolate whatsoever in white chocolate. Now white chocolate usually will have cocoa butter in it. I guess technically, there's like a little bit of cocoa, whatever. Still, it's going to be mostly sugar and milk and chemicals. They're going to be a ton of nasty chemicals in white chocolate because it's not a real thing.
The other thing you want to be careful of is when you read these ingredients. Anytime you're picking chocolate if you're at WholeFoods or Publix or Kroger or whatever. There are good options everywhere. Alter Eco is one that you can get at Kroger. I mean, there's a lot of different ones. None of them. This is really the only product that I stand behind in terms of dark chocolate. If you wanted to eat it every day and you were going with Taza, I'm never going to complain about that. Have it to your heart's delight. Just go ahead and do it, right?
The fewer ingredients, the better. A lot of chocolates, the first ingredient, you'll see like chocolate liquor or cocoa butter or cocoa beans or cocoa nibs or something like that. All these things, organic cacao, which is what's in this, is definitely the holy grail of the number one ingredient when you're reading a chocolate bar label, right? You want the lowest amount of sugar, and you're looking for Cacao beans; that's this bar right here. If you're going with chocolate liquor or cocoa butter or cocoa or something like that, it is okay; it's not going to kill you. Assuming that it's over 85% dark chocolate, right? If you're over 85% cacao dark chocolate, then I'm not too worried about the number one ingredient of where the cocoa is coming from. But if you're down in the seventies, sixties, and like the first ingredient is like chocolate liquor, you've got an issue there. You put that bar down and go find yourself something that's over 85%. You're not always going to find Taza. I get them at Turnip Truck. If you're local in Nashville, both Turnip Trucks have this. I think WholeFoods has them. Again, I get the 95% Wicked Dark. The greatest thing, ever!
Okay. 8:40, we're doing good on time here. Let's talk about the rice hack. When I did the live AMA from Mardi Gras, I mean, one I'd been drinking and wearing togas all week, and sometimes you just forget some stuff or your instruction. Not exactly clear, right? I talked about hacks to make potatoes and rice, either low carb or at least turn the average glucose in there into resistance starts that the body won't break down. You can literally turn these foods into a feast for your gut microbiome. Prebiotics. We talked about dark chocolate. You can take white rice and white potatoes and turn them into mostly prebiotic dietary fiber in the form of resistant starch, but you have to go through a process to do that. That is cooking these items and then cooling them down.
A couple of things I wasn't clear on. You don't have to leave your food sitting on the counter. In fact, I don't recommend that you cook the food and put it in the fridge. Cool it in the fridge will take about an hour to get it to point an hour, maybe more. I mean, I would make an hour the limit. If you cook rice or cook a potato, they get roasted whatever you want to do, boil the rice. And then immediately when you're done cooking it, put it in the fridge, let it cool for an hour. If you can do that multiple times now with rice, you don't want to go, go, go, go. Because you're just going to overcook it to an insane portion where it won't really be enjoyable.
I mean, you could cook it and cook it and cook it if you're really just trying to feed your gut microbiome and don't really care much about the texture or the taste or whatever. You want to cool it in the fridge, and you want it to cool for at least an hour, right? With the potato, you can do it over and over and over. That's the potato hack diet. Go back to Ask Me Anything number 6; we talk about the potato hack where people just eat potatoes. Cook it in this fashion for three days and lose, on average, a pound of fat each day. It's really, really powerful for fat loss because you're just helping your gut microbiome and in an insanely powerful way.
The rice hack. I had a question about the rice hack and how to actually do it. There are a couple of different ways to do it, but I've honed this. I have an actual full recipe here that I think you should use to make this low carb rice. First things first, we're going to base this recipe on one cup of white sushi rice. I recommend Jasmine rice. We talked about Jasmine rice last week; the stickier, the white sushi rice, the better. That's what all those centenarians, the Asians that are healthy long, long into old age, they're all eating white sticky rice, right? Get your hands on white sticky rice. This recipe is based on one cup. For every one cup of rice, you have one and a half cups of water. We're going to add the healthy fat, get unrefined coconut oil, and want three tablespoons per cup of white rice.
If you have three cups of white rice, you're talking nine tablespoons of coconut oil. You take the water, bring the water to a boil, get all of your rice, get all of your coconut oil, put it in the boiling water together. Then you're going to reduce that boil to a simmer, cover the pot and cook it for 20 minutes.
Let's run through that one more time. Again, if you have one cup of rice, you have a one and a half cups of water, and you have three tablespoons of unrefined coconut oil. You take all those ingredients together, boil the water, throw it in the boiling water, reduce the water to a simmer, cover it and cook for 20 minutes. When you're done cooking, immediately take it off the heat and put it in the refrigerator. Let it cool in the refrigerator for at least an hour. What I would recommend is probably the safest way to reheat is to do it in the oven. Put in the oven on like, you know, warm setting or two 50 or 300, whatever you want to, depending on how quickly you want to heat this up and serve it. The other thing that I always recommend is my love of sodium. Get some Redmond Real Salt or some Pink Himalayan salt. There's another amazing product that I use every day. I can't remember the name of the brand, but it's coconut aminos. It's a liquid coconut aminos, and I'll get the name of the brand, Nature's Secret or something like that. That's the one that I use every day. Coconut aminos are insane. They only have one ingredient.
That's organic coconuts, and it's basically like a replacement for soy sauce. If you reheat that rice, take the cold rice out of the fridge, after an hour, reheat that rice. Put some coconut aminos on there, some liquid coconut aminos and some pink Himalayan Sea Salt or some Redmond's real salt. My God, you guys are going to be leaving me comments like "This is the best treat I've ever had." You now are dealing with lower carbohydrate rice. It's not really low carb rice. You reduce some of the carbohydrate content, but you're significantly lowering the glycemic index and the glycemic load. You're really, really lowering that blood sugar spike, and you're feeding your healthy gut bacteria.
Again, another thing I touched on last week, don't do this every day.
Don't be slamming rice every single day. You don't want to do that. So that's it, that's basically the hack for cooking rice. Let's see how we're doing on time here. We've got 15 minutes.
I'm looking at Facebook right now. So we're looking at Facebook and I might need some help with comments here. We're getting Instagram comments; we'll go through these. Let me see here.
Cauliflower rice.
Yeah. Cauliflower rice is wonderful. I would highly recommend cauliflower rice over white rice, but you can make white rice with a low carb. If you want to do that little trick cauliflower rice, boom, boom, boom. Do it! Okay.
What else did we got here?
We have everything on Instagram over there.
What are your top recommended vegetables?
Number one first and foremost, always, always, always, always. I have one family in particular vegetables, and that is green leafy vegetables. So spinach, kale, broccoli, asparagus. Anything like that, that's just really green and leafy and also cruciferous vegetables. Cruciferous is based on the way the plant looks like cauliflower is actually a cruciferous vegetable. So again, cauliflower rice, you can feed that in there too. You can make your own cauliflower rice at home. We can try to find a recipe, maybe put it on the website or something. But cruciferous vegetables are fantastic. It basically means that it has a leaf that literally has one main vein going up and branches out. It almost looks like a crucifix. Cruciferous vegetables, right? So cruciferous vegetables are great and all leafy green vegetables. Now the only thing I will say as we talk about phytates and lectins, sometimes. These plant compounds can damage your gut.
Kale? Cook your kale, stop doing raw kale, stop doing frozen raw kale. Please cook your kale, throw it in the skillet, whatever. So green leafy vegetables, hands down, are the most nutrient-dense vegetables. So that's my pick there.
Coconut secret?
Coconut secret. Thank you, Katie. I appreciate that. Hi Katie. Coconut secret liquid coconut aminos. These things are fantastic. You can get them on Amazon. You get them at WholeFoods. I've checked Kroger and Publix. I have never had luck there, but I also know that Kroger carries Bragg's liquid coconut aminos. Now, in my opinion, coconut secret is far superior. It just tastes better, but the ingredients are almost identical. So Bragg's they're liquid coconut aminos. They're fantastic too. Go ahead and do that. You're going to thank me for those. I put liquid coconut aminos on eggs. I put it up on vegetables and a skillet. I put it on meat. I put it on fish. I put it on sweet potatoes. I put it on rice, put on everything. I'm obsessed. They're a little pricey. And that's where all my money goes.
So whatever, dude, I really like them.
The other thing I want to talk about is really important, and we need to touch on this. We have some serious changes happening with Clovis, some really, really serious changes. Those changes come on the heels of some feedback that I've been getting. As some of you know, because especially people who bought during the 40% off sale that I did on our Facebook live. We have a subscription service, right? In the subscription service, we kept having issues of customers wanting to change their orders or change their shipping address or change their products, adding a product to their subscription, subtracting a product from their subscription. We're really having some issues with functionality. Basically, what we did is built you a brand new website. The number one reason we did that was for the subscription management services.
Now, if you get a subscription through the Clovis website, which is now Clovis. Clovis.store. You can add www if you want to. www.clovis.store, We'll get you there as well.
This is the new Clovis store page, and this is what we're going to be running everything out of. I would just want to show you guys this real quick at the bottom; you're going to see Earn Rewards. This is a new rewards program that we set up for you. This is to help you guys be able to share with your friends, get savings for them. Get savings for yourself. The rewards program is crazy robust. You sign up for an account, and you earn $3 towards your next purchase. It's really crazy.
On your birthday, we're going to send you 10 bucks for free. Tell me your birthday, and I'll send you 10 bucks towards a product, right? We really have a robust reward system here. Now, once you have your account created and you log into that account, any subscription you have, you can do whatever you want. You want three bags every six months, do it. You want three bags, every two weeks. You want four bags every three days, do it. You can change your shipping address. You can change the quantity of your products. You can change the flavor of your products. You can add products to your subscription, subtract products from your subscription, and you don't need me or customer service at all to get that done. That's where this comes from. So it's www.clovis.store. We want to push everything over to clovis.store. We're going to start pushing everything there. As my way of saying thank you and for confusing you and switching up a site. I know that's always a pain in the butt when you're used to something or if you have a subscription with us.
If you have a subscription with us, email me at justin@iamclovis.com, and we're gonna have something special for you just because of your loyalty and for signing up for a subscription. I can't thank you enough. So email me at justin@iamclovis.com, and we'll take those on a case by case basis. Tonight, what we're doing, we're going to make a 24-hour sale. Everything on this page is 20% off. We gave you a coupon code. It's NEWSTORE20. 20% off everything on the entire website, www.iamclovis.com. It's about as easy to remember as it can get. I think it's an awesome URL. I'm super happy with it. So www.iamclovis.com purchase there, 20% off, NEWSTORE20 code. That's the new store that I wanted to tell you about.
How much time did we get left? We've got a couple of minutes. Let's see if we have anything else coming up.
Oh, cool. There's a recipe for cauliflower rice. Thank you, Laura. She posted a recipe for cauliflower rice on the Facebook Live feed. If you go to facebook.com/iamclovis, you can get a free cauliflower rice recipe. That's awesome!
We talked about fruit. We talked about dark chocolate. We talked about the rice hack. I hope the rice hack was clear. Let me know if it was unclear. I'll probably build out that recipe and put it in the show notes. Also, at iamclovis.com, you can click on the blog, and all the Ask Me Anythings are there. If you go shop tonight and you get your 20% off using coupon code, NEWSTORE20. 20% off everything; if you go there and shop tonight, stop by the blog. You'll see all the Ask Me Anything; we have numbers one through six listed there.
We gave you all the resources. If I mentioned something like coconut secret coconut aminos, I would give you a link to that. An exact purchase link where you can get it and get it shipped right to your house. If I talk about Is Fruit Sabotaging Your Fat Loss, an article that I wrote, I will give you a link to that article. I'm going to give you guys show notes and links to everything that I mentioned. If I mentioned a book, if I mentioned a podcast, I mentioned Still No Free Lunch about the high yield crops, just destroying food quality, right? I can give you a link to that. We'll give you links to absolutely everything. Stay up to date on the blog. And again, that's www.iamclovis.com. So bookmark that URL, www.iamclovis.com, whatever you want to do. The coupon code is NEWSTORE20. All right.
Do we have anything on Instagram coming in? How are we looking? Yeah. How about any foods you shouldn't eat together in the same meal?
Any paleo food you shouldn't eat together in the same meal?
Interesting. Generally speaking, I would say no. I'm going to kind of flip that on its head. I mean one, yeah, there are. There are a lot of paleo foods I've talked about lectins. I think it was Ask Me Anything Number 2. I also have minute markers on all the Ask Me Anything. It'll say something like, "oh, at minute two 15, Justin talked about lectins." So you can bounce around. You don't have to watch these whole hour-long videos, but there are some I wouldn't. There are a lot of paleo foods that are loaded with lectins. I'm actually really glad you asked this question because I should probably make a chart.
Anything with seeds, I don't recommend. And that goes for zucchini, certain types of squash, even cucumber by itself, like pickles, are great because they're fermented, but cucumber is not so much. Anything with a seed is technically a fruit. Now I don't think I need to remind you how I feel about fruits, right? Anything with a seed, you're going to want to ignore that. Don't eat that, especially something like zucchini with many seeds and have many lectins in the seeds, including almonds and cashews. These things are considered paleo. They're loaded with lectins. If you eat those with certain things, or if you eat them with a steak or a really nice cut of any kind of meat like salmon or anything, they have these anti-nutrients in them. It's disrupting the absorption of certain things.
So email me, justin@iamclovis.com. I have a list of approved foods.
I've sent it to countless people since I've done this on Facebook Live. That approved foods will remove any of those. Every food on my approved foods list is paleo and will not cause problems. If you only eat off my approved foods list, you're going to be just fine. You can eat all those foods in any combination that you want.
I would just say in terms of paleo foods, if it's a paleo food and it has seeds, don't eat it. Especially don't eat it with something like steak or something where you're going to have an absorption issue with the nutrients in that normally really healthy food. You have other foods that should be in combination, like if you cook a nice ribeye steak. Let's say grass-fed ribeye steak, and you eat that with avocado. That avocado actually increases the bioavailability of the proteins and other molecules in that steak. You literally could digest more protein, eating it with guacamole or with avocado than you would be eating it without that additional food item. That's the difference between bionutrients and anti-nutrients, and you want to stay away from anti-nutrients. Phytates and lectins are the most damaging ones. Anything with the seed, avoid that.
When is your next AMA? Wednesday or Thursday?
You tell me. That's why we're here. You tell me what works best for you. Wednesday, Thursday, Tuesday, Monday, Saturday morning. Probably not. You'll all be hungover. I think I know some of you. Let me know which day works best for you.
This is my one priority. I'm going to do this whenever you tell me to. If I have a hundred of you come and say, "Look, man, you really got to change this thing to Mondays then." Okay. We'll change it to Mondays. As of right now, we can certainly go back to Wednesday if that's best. So we'll take it from here.
Instagram, Facebook, comments, email me at justin@iamclovis.com. Comment on any of our pages anytime you want to. Let me know what works best for you. It's just like the website. If you tell me something's not working right. I'm going to fix it. If this Asks Me Anything, time is not working right. I'm going to fix it.
Just get on all the socials, leave comments, kill two birds with one stone, click the earn rewards program on www.iamclovis.com. Go visit our Facebook page, which gets you a dollar off of your purchase, and just leave me a comment that says, "Hey, do a Facebook live on Friday or do a Facebook live on Tuesday." Or whenever you tell me to do it, I'm going to do it, right? Whatever the most feedback I get is. I'll switch things around for you. But again, a quick way to earn rewards, visit our social, follow us on Instagram. I mean, you can save like over $10. I'm pretty sure within rewards on your first purchase on iamclovis.com.
Again, NEWSTOR20 is a discount code. Okay, cool. Well, that's about it. We're getting close to wrap-up time. We got just a couple minutes left here. You have the link in the comments; you have the NEWSTORE20 coupon code.
Please go check out that new website, place an order for me. Also, right now, just click the love button, the like button, the happy emoji, the laughing guy, the angry face. If you're pissed that you can't eat fruit anymore, don't eat fruit. I'll come back to find you. Don't do it. Okay, good. We're in agreement. Thank you. Fruits are awful. Dark chocolate is fantastic. White rice can be made paleo, and we have a new website.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube live. Ask Me Anything Number 7. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Please leave me some feedback. I want to keep doing this. I love it. Thank you so much. I love you. I will see you next week. Whenever you tell me to be here. Thank you, guys.
