#64: Learning about Nourishing Traditions with Chef, Monica Corrado

Monica is a teaching chef, speaker, author, and consultant who has spent the last 20 years illuminating the connection between real food and vibrant health. Monica has taught people why and how to cook nourishing, traditional food all over the globe.
We first spoke with Monica in episode #23 of the Plan to Eat Podcast, where we discussed the GAPS diet. This time, I got to talk with Monica about Nourishing Traditions! She details the Nourishing Traditions diet, what principles it follows, and how it got started. This episode is full of tips for how to get started and the benefits you might see by following a Nourishing Traditions way of eating. Enjoy!

Find Monica's book: The Complete Cooking Techniques for the GAPS Diet
Use Coupon Code: NEWGAPS2023 

Get 50% off your Plan to Eat subscription from November 29th - December 2nd! More info here: https://app.plantoeat.com/annual-sale

Sign up for a free trial + get 20% off your first annual subscription: plantoeat.com/PTEPOD

Contact us: podcast@plantoeat.com

Connect with Plan to Eat online:
Instagram
Facebook
Pinterest

Transcript

[00:00:00] to the Plan to Eat podcast. Where I interview industry experts about meal planning, food and wellness. To help you answer the question. What's for dinner. 

Roni: Hello, and thank you for joining me today on The Plan to Eat Podcast. I have Monica Corrado back on the podcast today. She was on the podcast a little over a year ago in episode 23. Uh, Riley and I talked to Monica then about the GAPS Diet, which is the gut and psychology syndrome diet.

She's an expert in that. She's also an expert in the Nourishing Traditions way of eating. If you are unfamiliar with Monica, she is a teaching chef, a speaker, an author, a consultant. Uh, she has so much experience in food and creating food that is nourishing and creating it in traditional ways. So if you haven't listened to her previous episode, go back to episode [00:01:00] 23 and listen to that one.

Today our focus is mostly on nourishing traditions. What that style of eating is, what some of the principles of nourishing traditions are. Monica gives a lot of tips and tricks for how to implement some of these things into your life. We talk about time management and time saving when you're learning how to make traditional foods.

So she gives lots of great information and I hope you enjoy. Monica, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast for your second time here.

Monica: Thank you. Thank you so much. Fun. Thanks for having me.

Roni: yeah, so in case anybody hasn't listened to your first episode, why don't you just give us a little intro of who you are and what you do?

Monica: So my name is Monica Carrado. I am a teaching chef first. I'm also a holistic nutritionist. I'm a certified Gaps practitioner, and I am the gaps chef. Which means that Dr. Natasha has me, uh, teaching all the [00:02:00] practitioners and coaches how to cook for the Gaps Diet. I'm on her teaching team, so I'm also an author, a speaker consultant.

I work one-on-one with clients. I do online classes. I do live classes. Most of what I do is to try and get people, Connected to their own bodies, connected to the earth. Connect through food, right? Like how can you be well by getting in the kitchen? How can you be well by cooking your own food? How can you be well by knowing your farmer and knowing where your food comes from?

So that's what I've been doing for a long time, and I love it.

Roni: When Riley and I talked to you last time, we talked a lot about your experience with the GAPS Diet, but you're also a member of the Weston A Price Foundation. Right? Which is kind of why I wanted you on today, is to talk more about Nourishing Traditions.

Monica: sure. Yes. I actually am on the honorary board of the West, a price foundation, [00:03:00] um, honorary board member. That means that, um, I've been with the foundation really since it started, which is a long time ago. Over 20 years. I think we just had our 23rd, uh, international conference of Wise traditions. 

Yes, today we're gonna talk about Nourish traditions. So I love Weston a Price. I hope everybody knows who he was. Probably not. He was a dentist. He was a dentist from Cleveland a long time ago, like thirties, like 1930s. So we're coming on a hundred years or so. Wow. Long time ago. But, uh, he was, he found, he wound up traveling around the world.

For people who don't know in the thirties, like think about that. Folks we're all used to just like jumping on planes and, you know, all sorts of things. But, uh, he traveled around the world, uh, looking for the connection between what people ate and whether or not they were, well, [00:04:00] he did it because he looked at teeth first because he was a dentist.

But back then dentists were really more physicians, medical doctors than they were. Just, there wasn't really just about the teeth, it was about like what's going on with your mouth, with, uh, in relation to the whole rest of your body. So, Weston a Price wrote a book that everyone who wants to be, well, I'm sure that's everyone.

I hope. I don't think there's too many people who wanna be ill. Should read. I suggest it's called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and it's been in print for. I don't know, almost a hundred years. So that's what the basis of the Western a price foundation is. Uh, Sally Fallon now, Sally Fallon Morrell, start founded.

She's the founder. Of the foundation. And it was really put together to, uh, to get people to start thinking about the connection between what they [00:05:00] eat and what happens in their bodies. And so it's really at this point all about education and, uh, food farming and the healing arts. So if people want to learn more about Western a price, you go ahead and get that book, nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which is not a fad.

Folks. The cool thing about Western Price is this is not a fad, it's not a fad diet. There's a lot of diets out there, but this is like the research that was done, of people around the world. How did they stay? Well, What did they eat? And there are really principles that go through. Uh, they're like, they're like themes.

They're like threads. They are the same that go through people, whether they were living in Switzerland or they were living in, they're living up in, what am I thinking of? Like there were Eskimos, like it doesn't matter where they were, were they in the Amazon? Were they [00:06:00] Eskimos? Were they like living in the Pacific Islands, you know, whatever.

Uh, were they, you know, in Europe all the dietary principles are the same. Like, how do you stay? Well, you eat certain foods or, and you eat foods prepared in a certain way. So yes. So go get the book or. And, uh, jump on the, uh, Western a price website, which is West on. Not like the Westin Hotel pledge, right?

Shane, w e s t o n a price.org. And the greatest thing, uh, is that they now have the Wise Traditions podcast. I don't know how many millions of downloads, I don't know, maybe it's not millions, but certainly it's a lot. They've got a lot of downloads. All sorts of health, health topics wonderful to listen to, so people should learn there.

So yes, I've been involved for over 20 years. And I started my teaching. [00:07:00] So I teach what I call Cooking for Wellbeing, but my whole company was built before I even learned about gaps. 'cause gaps wasn't around yet. I taught from Nourishing Traditions the cookbook. By Sally Fallon, that and Mary Enig, the two of them.

They're co-authors. People don't know that. I could talk about that if you want, but yeah, I started teaching from nursing traditions, and that's what I do. I teach people how to make real food. 

Roni: So if somebody hasn't heard of Nourishing Traditions yet, what are some of those? Principle ideas around that style of, uh, eating, food, and preparing food.

Monica: Sure, yes. So, um, so Nourishing Traditions is the cookbook that anybody can pick up. It's everywhere. You know, obviously on Sally's website, on Amazon, blah, blah, blah, bookstores, et cetera. So I. How can I say? It's about cooking, what we call nourishing traditional food. So then you say, well what is that? So a lot all around the [00:08:00] world, what do we do?

We make broths and stocks, bone broth and stocks. We ferment things. So fermentation, lacto fermentation. So, right. We're making sauerkraut. Everybody knows sauerkraut now. Thank God. So, uh, I say that because when I first started teaching, everybody was afraid of ferments because, ah, there are microbes that we're gonna die.

In any case, we've come a long way, baby. So lacto ferments, Which are sauerkraut, kimchi, uh, pickles, um, all those types of things. Uh, so any of your fermented foods of which in Colorado, which we love, is an explosion of right ferments that people make. And you could find 'em in natural grocers and, and, uh, other markets, whole foods of course, but so stocks and broths.

Using bones to make, you know, nourishing uh, stocks. And then cooking from that lacto, fermented foods. And then, cultured dairy. [00:09:00] Cultured dairy. What is that? Yogurt, uh, cultured cream. Uh, Keir or Keefer. People say Keifer. It's k e f i r. We try to roll it ke. Um, so Keir, uh, uh, cultured cream, you know, all those yogurt, so cultured raw dairy, if you can get it.

Which you can because of the Real milk initiative through the Western, a price foundation over the last 20 years or so. But so all of those things, and then when you're working with any kind of seed, which is, uh, a bean, a nut, a grain, right? Uh, or a seed, you soak or sprout or ferment them. So we're talking sourdough bread.

Yeah. Definitely. Why? Because sourdough is a fermentation process that makes that gluten digested, like it's pre-digested before you eat it. So all of these, [00:10:00] uh, cooking techniques, if you will, are meant to, uh, both maximize the, nutrition in the food and also make it bioavailable. Now, I'm not sure that Western Price would've used that word back then, but it, right.

These are predigestion techniques, uh, which makes the food more available to the body, which is what we need and want. So it's really those four areas. And so Nourishing Traditions is a cookbook. People don't have to learn the techniques. I teach the techniques so that. You can go ferment anything once we've, you know, right, like you could ferment anything, or you could buy the cookbook, nourishing Traditions and follow a recipe.

Whatever you love, you know, whatever works for you is really, really good.

Roni: I think that's the great thing about it. It is, it is really flexible like that. Like once you learn this, like these like overall principles, it's really easy to then apply it to other things like. When I learned to make bone broth, I was a little [00:11:00] intimidated at first. I'd never done it before. And, you know, so I very diligently followed the steps and now I feel like I could do it in my sleep.

I do it with absolutely everything, you know, like we, have wild game in our house. I've made, you know, bone broth from wild game bones and stuff. And so, uh, yeah. So it's just a, I think it's really cool in that regard that once you learn the principles, it's really easy to apply it to other areas.

Monica: Yes, that is, that is what I love to do. That is, uh, that is my life at this point, is getting people to know how to do it so that they can ferment anything. They can make bone broth from anything they can make, you know, they can soak, uh, soak their nuts or their grains or their whatever and they can, you know, uh, uh, make anything from them.

They know how to do it. Yeah. So there's the dietary principles and then there are the techniques of how to actually work with the food. Yep.

Roni: Um, can you talk a little bit more about the soaking your grains thing? I feel like that's the one area that [00:12:00] I often feel the most confused about, and maybe other people have never heard of that technique before.

Monica: Sure, sure, sure. So there are, yeah. So there are three techniques that, one of three that you can use for all of your grains, that is to soak them or sprout them or ferment them, right? So, Fermentation, um, has to, people think of grains and they think of flour, and then they think of sourdough, and that's correct.

But you can also ferment any kind of grain, you know, buckwheat, rice, whatever you want. But in terms of soaking, so when we soak grains, um, I'm gonna talk about the whole grains as opposed to flour, which is, you know, ground up grains. Maybe I'll talk about that first. It's easier and more fun. Let's go there first, and then I'll go, I'll backtrack.

So you can, uh, soak, flour for like pancakes or for cake or for muffins or for whatever. And when we soak those, we are, um, [00:13:00] we're soaking usually in cultured dairy. So, for example, just one example is pancakes, right? So people like to make pancakes. I often make pancakes, which are gluten-free pancakes, but they're gluten-free because I use oat flour and buckwheat flour.

So they're buckwheat pancakes, and I take that flour and I, uh, ferment it or I soak it in, yogurt or kefir. Or a combination of them, right? Uh, you soak them for 24 or 48 hours, it's like a batter that's soaking, and then you just make that into a pancake by adding eggs and adding a little bit of salt and adding, you know, uh, maybe some baking soda.

So, Really easy to do is to use those beautiful, um, cultured dairy products to help neutralize the phytic acid. The enzyme inhibitors break down the proteins. That's what we're talking about when we talk about working [00:14:00] with grains. So, um, in terms of using the whole grain, so for example, rice, rice can be either soaked.

Uh, which means you soak it in water and what we call a neutral, I call it a neutralizer, um, which is an acid. So it's either going to be water with lemon juice, water with whey, which you drip from yogurt, water with a little bit of yogurt. Those are all going to be giving you an acid medium, which will help to break down and predigests the rice. I actually have a really cool chart if people wanna know about that. 'cause it gets complicated. I can't just say, well for every single grain you do this. Well, it's kind of that way. But, I have a bean and grain chart, which I should probably send you information about that they can find on my website.

Um, about like how much grain to what kinds. Neutralizers and how much and for how long? And, and it's pretty, and it's all hand illustrated, so it's [00:15:00] easy for people they like to put in the kitchen so they don't have to go look up a recipe. Right. But for rice, we can soak, and then, or uh, we can also cook rice in that fabulous bone broth that you made because cooking in broth for a long period of time.

Also helps to reduce these antinutrients, which a lot of people don't think about, but there's so much goodness to making bone broth. 

Roni: Hmm. 

Monica: I don't talk about bone broth a lot these days 'cause when I'm teaching gaps, 'cause we don't do bone broth in G, we do meat stock. But for everybody else who's not on GAps, bone broth is a great thing to do.

Yeah. So we soak the grains. I mean, another example is oats, like oatmeal, right? Like oatmeal is a great. Great breakfast. It's oats are a nervine, meaning they're calming to the system. They're grounding, they're delicious. Right? But everyone's going out and either getting a packet and microwaving it. Ah,[00:16:00] or they're certainly not soaking 'em.

Why? Because it's not anywhere on the packet. There's nowhere that tells you you should soak your oats. But if you soak oats in water and. A little bit of yogurt or water and a little bit of kafi or water and some lemon juice. If you don't do dairy and you soak it for 12 to 24 to 36 hours, all of a sudden, those oats being pre-digested will not give you a blood sugar spike.

Like you can eat oatmeal in the morning and it can carry you till noon. Whoa. As opposed to, oh my goodness, I just ate a bunch of grains and now my blood sugar, right. Spikes and crashes and I need to eat at 10 o'clock. Right? So oats are a wonderful thing to soak you, really good idea to soak oats. So those are just two examples of, and you know, I could keep going, we could talk about grits, we could talk about lots of, lots of other things if you [00:17:00] wanna.

In terms of, but, but it's really important. I'm, I'm telling like it's, it's so important. We are such a grain heavy culture in the us and unfortunately when quick Breads came along, which was right after, either right before or right after World War ii, but certainly early 19 hundreds, quick breads came along.

What did that mean? That means you didn't have to make a sourdough to get a rise anymore. Right now you could just add a little baking soda or a little baking powder and go bake something. Now, this is a big darn deal because that means that the predigestion technique of sourdough or fermenting the grain prior to baking was lost. And 99%, I don't know. 95%. The vast majority of all baked goods anywhere in a store in America, even in bakeries, [00:18:00] is not digestible because they have not soaked or sprouted or fermented the flour. It doesn't matter if it's organic or not, it doesn't matter if it's artisanal or not, blah, blah, blah. If it hasn't been soaked or sprouted or fermented, then you are doing your body a really big disservice because your body can't use that.

It can't access the nutrients, it can't break it down. It can't digest it. And if we think, I don't know. I think again, the word according to Monica, I don't have any, you know, pub med studies on this for you. But, if we think that this problem of leaky gut and the problem of, uh, allergies to wheat is not connected to that, we're wrong.

Roni: So, If I'm making like a rye bread at home, 'cause I really love rye bread, adding yeast, adding [00:19:00] yeast to my rye bread and letting it do its, you know, rising process. Its proofing process that's not the same as fermentation? Correct.

Monica: No, that's great. That is

exactly what you need to be doing.

Roni: Okay.

Monica: Yes, but I mean better. Yeah. So you're making rib. That's what we want to do. So that is what we're talk, what I'm talking about is, oh. I go and buy a bag of flour, which is probably already rancid, by the way, if you buy it in the store. But let's say we go, no joke, we go off, I buy my organic flour or not, but preferably organic flour.

I buy a bag and then I take out Aunt Matilda's recipe, and then I, right. This is not nourishing traditions, by the way. This is, right. I'm taking out any recipe that is from like 1960 and forward. Right? Maybe 1950, maybe even earlier. But what do I do? Oh, I measure out my flour, and then I throw in my baking soda and I throw in my baking powder.

I mix it up, I pop it [00:20:00] in the oven. That is what we call a quick bread. Why is it quick? Because you're not allowing fermentation to happen for 24 hours, 36 hours, right? That's. That's what we want to happen. We want it to be slow. We want it to be long. We want to allow the yeast to do their work of predigesting, that gluten, that the carbohydrates, the proteins, et cetera for us.

Right. That's what we want to have happen. But the vast majority of baked goods, as I said, we're talking, you know, almost all of them, no joke, are quick breads at this point. And they, they're not doing anything to predigests that grain for you. And I have to tell you, oh boy, this is a big one. Are you ready?

I'm gonna drop this little bomb. No, we'll drop a pearl instead. Grains are the number one hardest thing for the human body to digest. Like people need to hear that grains are the number one [00:21:00] hardest food for the human body to digest. Not a t-bone steak. Like everybody's like, oh, meat. No, no. We've got canines, right?

Like we've got the, and we also have a stomach, one stomach that breaks down protein. We know how to do that. Our body does. Our bodies are not made to break down grains. We're just not so, and that's just a fact of human life. You know, it's not about anything other than the fact of the way we're built. And so one of the things, uh, so it's so important for us to either soak or sprout or ferment our grains prior to eating them.

It's easy to do once you know how to do it. No, like you said. You're making your bone broth, woo hoo. Now you get the bones, you throw 'em in the pot with love, you put in the water. Right? You know what you're doing. It's just the same. You just learn how to do it. It becomes second nature. And I'm telling you, [00:22:00] people's, uh, digestion, your digestion is so much better.

Your energy is so much better and oh, by the way, we don't have to worry about things. Like, it's hard for me to say we don't have to worry about leaky gut, but certainly not working with your grains contributes. Yeah.

Roni: So I imagine that a lot of people who get started with Nourishing Traditions, maybe they buy Sally Fallon's book and they read through it and they just think, this seems like I don't have time for all of these things. How do you help overcome that obstacle?

Monica: Great. I love these questions. Great question. Um, and actually what's really funny is that's a lot of what I do for people, right? So is help them like, figure out how do I do this? So one of the things that I like to, uh, there's two ways to go at it. One is to, schedule it in. Like, oh my goodness. Do you like we [00:23:00] schedule our hair appointments, right?

We schedule, when we're taking the car in, we schedule the dentist, we schedule these, these things. We do not make time in our schedule for cooking. We don't. So we've gotta kind of, right. So if we did, we would have a lot less stress. So for example, fermentation, you could, and I suggest people do this, we're in summer farmer's markets. Hit the farmer's market now, have a fermentation party and ferment a bunch of stuff and put it up, right? And then you have it like do it once a quarter. You don't have to ferment every day. Fermentation is so great. You do it, you schedule it and, and then you've got what you need for the next three months.

Ype, right? You can make fermented ketchup and pull it outta your fridge. There it is. You can make sauerkraut, you can make kimchi, you can make pickles. Woo-hoo. You can make all [00:24:00] sorts of ferments. So I really suggest that people, you know, Get the kids involved. It's easy to do. Get your neighbors involved, make it a family affair, make it a mom's night.

I don't care. Just have some fun around the table fermenting and do that once a quarter. And then in terms of bone broth, you know, I really, you know, making soup is one of the fastest meals you can make when you, when you right if, if you've got a freezer full of broth. Right. So you can either make lots of bone broth once a month or once a quarter, or you can make it as you cook, right?

Like so. So there you go. In terms of bone broth. Oh, I roasted a chicken. Oh, we ate the chicken. Oh, I threw the bones in, in the freezer. Great. Oh, I roasted another chicken. Oh, I threw the bones in the freezer. After a while, you can make, you just make it as part of what you do. Oh, I've got bones. I'm gonna put the bones up, I'm gonna put them in a crockpot and I'm not gonna worry about it for the next eight to 12 hours.

Done. [00:25:00] So, you know, scheduling really important, just making time and then using crockpots, I'm all about that. Incredible. Yeah, same thing with cultured dairy. If you're making your own beautiful cultured dairy, we are so blessed to have access to raw milk and raw cream in the bulk of the states in the US now.

Thanks to the Real Milk Initiative. So Or, and if you can't get access, we have access to good organic, right? Pasteurized in the store. So those things, again, you make yogurt once a week, you get a yogurt, make it, how long does it take to make yogurt? It takes you about maybe six minutes of time, and it takes the maker 24 hours.

Right. So it's, some of it's about just men, like in mindset, sort of like people think, oh my God, making yogurt is so hard. Well, that's not true. Or making yogurt takes so long. No, it really doesn't. It takes [00:26:00] you almost no time at all. It lets you let the cultures do the work over time. Whether you've got a yogurt maker and you can turn it on for 24 hours, or you've got a wide mouth, stainless steel thermos, you know, you put the cultures in, you heat the milk, you put the cultures in, you stir it around, you cap it, you leave it on the counter.

Oh, tomorrow I've got yogurt. So it really is sort of just getting used to it, you know, uh, getting used to the idea of, I'm gonna make my own yogurt instead of spending, you know, Six, $8 at this point. God help us, uh, write a quart of good for good yogurt at the, at the store, which is not that potent in terms of microbes, frankly might be a quarter as potent as what you could make in terms of your own right digestibility.

So yeah, I would say that those are my best tips. The other tip is pick one thing and [00:27:00] if I were to suggest. The one thing that everyone should be doing, if you did nothing else, if everyone did nothing else, ferment something and eat it every day. Like, if you do nothing else, and I, I'm, I'm hoping that everyone is like sourcing clean foods, right?

Like, we wanna do that for sure. Taking out all the processed foods from our, from our diet. We wanna do that too. We wanna cut the sugar, all those things, right? But if you want to learn, like pick one technique that you want from the nourishing tradition or from my book, frankly, um, and, you know, ferment and have fermented foods every day, that would keep or.

Learn how to make kefir, which is so easy. And keep yourself well with these live foods.

Roni: And so the argument against just simply buying sauerkraut or kefi in the grocery store is that when you make it at home, there's the amount of microbes and like, you know, [00:28:00] healthy bacteria and there's much greater Right.

Monica: yes. 

Roni: Okay. 

Monica: And also, yes, so absolutely. Um, The potency, the amount of microbes in homemade, cultured homemade yogurt, homemade sauerkraut, et cetera, is gonna be far higher. Um, and that's great. It also turns out to be a lot cheaper. I mean, quite frankly, do I wanna pay eight bucks for a quart of sauerkraut, which is not that potent when I can buy one cabbage for $2 and 49 cents and make my own quart? How long does it take me to make sauerkraut? About 10 minutes. And then I just put it in the jar and let time, do the rest of the work. So yeah, it's, we are thankful that we can find these things in the store because we couldn't find. These ferments in the store for a long time and now they're everywhere.

Thank you to Weston Price and to people who, you know, have been raising the flag of let's get real food in, in the grocery store. Um, we're thankful that [00:29:00] for they are there, but it's always better to make your own. But if you're gonna say to me, if someone says to me, you know what? I just don't have time, then buy it. Great. Just eat more. Eat more than you would if you made it yourself. Right. I'd rather have them have something than nothing. And if it's gonna be Buy it. Buy it. But get it in. Get those, get those microbially active, potent foods into your diet. Everyone's gotta do it. If they want to be well in this, you know, in our current well at all.

So there's kombucha you can buy now, you could never buy kombucha 10, 20 years ago there was no kombucha, right? So there's kombucha, there's kefir or water keefer, which they call other things. There, you know, there are, there's. All sorts of fermented foods out there. Yes. Make sure to keep them in your diet.

Everybody should be eating them every day because the point is this, folks, you have to eat them every day in order to [00:30:00] actually start getting your, um, your, uh, digestive system or your flora, just your flora, uh, transition to beneficial,

Roni: I feel like I wanna ask a question here about, about Flora, because I'm just imagining that there could be people who are listening who have, maybe they don't know very much about gut bacteria and your flora. So talk, talk a little more about that.

Monica: I would love to. So, flora, we all think about flowers, right? Flora and fauna. We're talking about microbial flora here and Yeah, we want to make sure that, I'll start in a different place. Scientists have found that humans are more made up by microbes more than cells. We have more microbes, which we call flora microbes, uh, in our body than cells in our body.

What? Okay, so if [00:31:00] that's true, which it is, then we wanna be eating foods that have beneficial flora in them. They have beneficial microbes, beneficial bacteria, beneficial yeast. I use the word beneficial versus the word pathogenic, which everybody I think has heard of pathogens. Everybody's, oh, pathogens. Oh my God.

Microbes gonna kill us. So if you want to stay well, and we do. If we want to stay well, if we want to avoid colds and flus and viruses and all of that, and yes, I am speaking clearly about those things, then we need to be eating and drinking foods that have the beneficial microbes in them. They will help us stay well through cold and flu season through anything else that's out there.

And Dr. Natasha Campbell McBride, who wrote The Gaps Diet. Some people know about it, some don't. Gut and psychology [00:32:00] syndrome heals autism and many other things. Um, in any case, she has said that if people, if everyone were to drink a cup of Kefi every day, One cup, that's eight ounces of Keir Keefer, K E F I r, milk Keefer.

This is not the one you buy in a store. This is the one you make yourself because it has to be potent, um, that you would not have to worry about viruses. And yeah, so if you wanna stay well, you learn how to make Keir, which is easy, easy, easy. So much easier than yogurt. And I already told you how easy yogurt was, very easy to make, and you drink it every day. So again, back to the flora thing. Flora is another word for microbes. It's another word for, you know, beneficial microbes versus pathogenic microbes. And we really wanna make sure that, that the beneficial microbes are winning, if you will. Now, I wanna [00:33:00] say one more thing because you started it. So here we go. The vast majority of Americans, uh, are eating far too much sugar. In the form of carbohydrate. In the carbohydrate and sugar are the same, but I'm not saying everybody's eating white sugar, although they are, but sugar is pasta bread. All these things that we're not. Fermented. Sprouted, right? Soaked. They're eating pasta and pizza and uh, muffins and cakes and cookies and bagels and crackers.

I mean, hello. These are all carbohydrates, sandwiches. I mean, heck, I was brought up on Wonder Bread. I was not only mom, but right. Sandwiches. We all ate sandwiches, right? Wonder Bread and Bologna. Oscar Meyer. But, um, all of these things, bread, pasta, all those things, rice, corn, you name it, they all feed pathogenic microbes. [00:34:00] What? Yes, they feed pathogenic yeast, which a lot of people have heard the word candida. I have a candida overgrowth. I have a candida imbalance. I have candida. What does that mean? That means that for whatever period of time you were eating far too many carbohydrates and you were feeding pathogenic yeast, they have overgrown in your body. What do you do first? You starve 'em. Take out all those carbs, all that sugar, all that processed food. That G A R B A G E Garba, you take it all out and you start adding in things like Keir or you do the Gap diet, but that's another story for another time or another podcast. So yeah, it's a big darn deal everybody.

It's a big darn deal. And again, you know, white sugar, you know, some [00:35:00] people heard about the white sugar plague, you know, so now we just eat carbs instead. Right. So a lot of us are not sitting there eating a candy bar every day, but we are. If you look at your own diet, I just, I really encourage people to look at what they've been eating all day.

Like what did they eat today? Did they start with like a bowl of cereal? Ah, oh my God. Let's I even go there. Pure sugar, not soaked. Sprouted, fermented, extruded. There's no nothing. Cardboard box will give you more, more nutrition than the cereal inside it. I did say that. Okay, so what are they eating? Or they're eating a bagel, or they're eating a muffin, or they're eating, you know, waffles or they're eating toast, you know?

And then, and then they had whatever they had in the middle of the day and then they had their lunch, which was, oh, pasta or whatever. But the point is, we're eating far too many carbs and we're feeding pathogens when we do. Especially if we're eating those carbs with that have not been soaked, sprouted, or fermented ta.[00:36:00] 

Oh, we're going full circle. Full circle here. And that are not covered with fabulous amounts of good fat butter, ghee, tallow, lard. I know I'm opening lots of cans of worms here. It's okay. Good, good. Right. Cream sauce, things like that.

Roni: So, as far as I understand the gut bacteria is that it's still a really, um, like the science on it is still real progressing really rapidly. Like we don't know scientists overall, right? Like, don't have as much understanding as they want to about. Our gut bacteria and what it's actually, you know, does for the rest of our body and all of those kinds of things.

Like certainly there's um, I guess I could call it ancient wisdom, older wisdom of like, well, of course we needed these things to promote overall health for our body, but scientists, modern scientists are still trying to figure out all of those [00:37:00] connections with data.

Monica: So we still know that there are pathogens and beneficial bacteria or beneficial microbes. We also know that. There's some microbes that are gonna help you out and actually like, digest your food for you, make vitamins you need, make other nutrients that you need.

I mean, they're amazing what they do in your body, right? And we know that some of them are going to make you sick. So there's two kind of just like, we can divide 'em that way, but you are correct. Uh, most of the scientific community has, uh, focused on bacteria. Most of their work is on bacteria like. I don't know.

I'm gonna pull 80%, but whatever. I may be wrong. Maybe it's 60. But the vast majority of work that's been done has been on bacteria. And then there's some work that's done on that's been done on fungi like. Candida. Candida is actually a certain strain of [00:38:00] fungus that's called candida albicans. Well, they're, there's something like over a hundred different types of strains of candida folks.

So like they're looking at one and they're saying, this is the problem, like this one little thing. Right? Well, not really, that's not really the problem. I mean, it is a problem, but it's just one little tiny piece. The vast majority of scientific work has been in the realm of bacteria.

The next has been a little bit in the fungi and yeast. Right. But you know, the field is so big that, and what's going on in our bodies is like, yeah, they really have not been looking outside of those lenses. For the most part. I mean, we also have worms and flukes and amoeba and all sorts of other things going on in there.

And certainly, you know, the jig is up or, or the betts are off or what, something like, really viruses aren't even alive folks. They're dead [00:39:00] genetic material. That's what they are. They're not even, that's why, you know, we don't really, uh, we, we really could. Concentrate on, let's get, uh, the bacteria and the fungi right, the bacteria and the yeast of kefi in our body, and let's do it every day.

Let's get something in every day. So, you're right, they're still, they're just, they're scratching the surface. What we do know, And the way that Dr. Natasha teaches about microbes and about them is that we need, we need them. We need them. If we didn't have them, we'd be dead. So if we didn't actually have them in our bodies, we wouldn't be alive.

Um, there is no such thing as a sterile gut, or you would be dead, like literally. But also to think about microbes, think about our bodies in terms of the macrocosm, our body. Is the earth to the microbes like, like [00:40:00] humans are on the earth, right? Like we live on the earth and we, we have plants and we have, you know, animals and we have different, uh, elements and all sorts of things.

Well, the mic, we are the earth for the microbes in us. And so therefore, there are communities of microbes throughout our bodies. Even Zach Bush will talk about this. Uh, he talks about comm and so does Dr. Natasha. They talk about. Communities of microbes and that there are superhighways between linking those communities, right?

So we've got communities of microbes in our sinuses. We know that because we get sinus infections or we get right, we get congested. We got, we've got communities of microbes in our sinuses, in our ears, in our eyes, in our groin, in our right, in our stomachs, in our large intestines, small intestine between our toes.

There are microbes everywhere. And, uh, you know, the point is that we want to keep them in balance. [00:41:00] We want them in balance. We don't want anybody overgrowing that when they overgrow we have a problem. I. Right, and there are reasons that they overgrow, so there's a lot of great information. If people want to read Dr.

Natasha's book, the blue book called The Gut and Physiology Syndrome, it's blue. It's, it's actually the fourth book she's written, but it talks a lot more about this whole thing and about microbes and their role in the body and amorphism and all sorts of things.

Roni: Okay. So I wanna pivot a little bit now 'cause I don't wanna take up too much of your time, but one thing that I wanted to make sure we mentioned is that you, you are an author. You mentioned that at the beginning, and you have a book that is the complete cooking techniques for the Gaps diet that recently came out with the second edition.

So why don't you say a little bit about what's new and updated in this new

Monica: Sure. Sure. Well, the, thank you. Thank you. Yes. So the first thing I wanna say to everyone is that, uh, what is in this [00:42:00] book, if you're doing the Gaps Diet, it is definitely helpful. If you're not doing the Gaps Diet, no problem. Because all of the types of cooking that we just talked about are covered in that book.

Gaps or no gaps. You will learn how to make yogurt. You'll learn how to make your own, or you'll learn how to make broths and stocks and ferment things, and it's all right there. So it's not just don't be, uh, swayed by the gaps in the, in the title. It's good for everyone, anyone who wants to learn how to cook with real food.

So the second edition is so cool. Because we have added more things, of course. First of all, it's got a spiral so that it, I can actually lay down on your, on your counter when you're cooking, which is fabulous and fun. Um, it's a hardcover, believe it or not. Um, it has all sorts of charts and an index in the back so you can find things easily.

we've also done conversions for the international community from Fahrenheit to Celsius because we have a lot of people [00:43:00] around the world who are. Wanting to cook this way, which is so exciting to me. The other cool thing, which I think, I don't know if I told you or not, is that it's now available in French and Italian.

What, and next year it'll be available in German and Spanish. So, I know that's so exciting. So those things are really exciting to me that now we have French speakers and Italian speakers that can also learn how to do these things so that they can cook, cook real food, be well, feel better. All sorts of good things make their own sauerkraut

Roni: So if anybody wants to pick up the book, where can they get it at?

Monica: They should jump on my website, simply being well.com. Right there. They can just find it under publications. Um, they can also go to my publisher if they want to, uh, Seline River Press, which is SS E L E N E, Seline River Press. They're my publisher and they have all of [00:44:00] them, you know, you can find everything there.

Second edition, French, Italian, whatever. And my blog, I have two blogs, one with them, one with me. 

Roni: Excellent. I'll link to it in the show notes too, so that anybody can just click on the link really easily.

Monica: Excellent. And they can get, uh, I should tell you, did I tell you about the coupon?

Roni: No.

Monica: Yeah. So the coupon, if anybody wants to save money on this new edition, uh, is new gaps, all in caps. So it's N E W G A P SS 2023.

Roni: Okay. I'll include that in there too.

Monica: Yes, please.

Roni: Did we miss anything? Did you wanna include anything else in today's

Monica: Oh, I don't know. You know, I could talk forever. I love this. I'm so happy to be here. And I really just encourage everyone take one step because it can be overwhelming. Maybe they can just, Make sauerkraut once or maybe they can start sourcing, you know, real eggs somewhere, [00:45:00] you know, start somewhere.

The body is incredibly resilient and, and it can be very easy. Very easy. Food is the foundation. That's what I know.

Roni: Well, I appreciate you being here with me today and sharing all of your knowledge

Monica: thank you. Always a pleasure. Petit, we say right.

Roni: Thanks for listening to this episode with Monica Corrado, you can find a link to her book as well as the coupon that she mentioned in the episode. Show notes for the podcast. And if you'd like to support the plan teat podcast, give us a rating and review over on apple podcasts and Spotify. Thanks again for listening