The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly King, and welcome to the mother's market podcast, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, eating healthy is a must to keep your body working to its potential, and it's sometimes hard to find the time to cook, so listen close and find out how to make a healthy meal and connect with your loved ones, plus later will tell you what's going on around town. And what's new at mother's market? But first up, Megan row is a registered dietitian with a background in nutritional education, a Megan has worked with a variety of populations in school, outpatient and wellness settings, she also acts as an adjunct professor for Cal Poly Pomona teaching undergraduate nutrition courses. Megan has a passion for teaching in her clients how to create meals that they love within the parameters of their dietary needs in order to help them reach optimal wellness. She currently works at St. Jude Wellness Center where she runs the weight loss program, coaches clients with dietary restrictions, leads healthy grocery store tours and teaches a course on inflammatory eating entitled The nutrition prescription, and we welcome her to the mother's market podcast. How are you?

I'm good, thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. Why don't you fill our audience in a little bit on your mission and your work before we get to the show's topic... Yeah, my overall mission is just to get people eating and cooking real food, that's it, 'cause we can always adapt to diet to be specifically for your needs depending on what your health conditions are, but if you're not eating real food to begin with, then you're behind... So that's why I should just get you excited and not have people overwhelmed about eating and cooking, I love that I really... I've told you, I think the last time I talked to... I'm not a big fan of cookie. I like to bake. But I need to learn how to do that.

Right, but no, it's good. And I love that you do these grocery store tours too, because not everybody knows all the tricks of the trade and when you're teaching where everything is, so I think you've really got a good neck there, but today we are talking about real food and cooking the effect on our physical and mental health. And so can you tell me a little bit about what you actually mean by, what is real flu?

Real Food is just as close as to the original source as possible, so when you look at a food, can you tell me where it came from, and if so, it's probably not super processed, but if you're kinda like, Oh, like a sausage. I don't really know what animal came from or what part... That's a pretty process food, if it's something along the lines of a chemo and something where you don't even know, you couldn't even name me probably the ingredient, then that's ultra process to that action not... There's actually three different categories now is real food, processed food, and the cultural process rodeos, you are... Okay, this is good. Is there really a difference in how our bodies use real food versus ultra or processed food? There actually is, and it's been theorized for a long time, it kind of makes sense, if you think of our body as the adult analogy of a car, if you're putting the wrong types of fuel in there, it's not just gas, it's water or apple juice, that car is not gonna run as well, we're supposed to run on certain types of fuel, so the more process to food is, the less we're able to digest those foods, but now there's actually research behind that, and it was like early 2000s, they did some studies on rats where they gave them raw meat and robot toes, and then they gave them cooked me and Coach potatoes, and they actually did digest the raw food even better than the cooked simply because they were less process in the body, had their bodies had to work to digest them 'cause their bodies are machines, so then they replicated that with humans and they had people eat whole grain homemade bread with real cheese versus basically Wonder Bread and craft singles, so still two forms of process food, but one being processed, one being ultra processed, and they ended up digesting twice as much burning, twice as much energy with the real food meal... Wow, so that we're seeing... You're actually burning... Your body wants to work, it wants to digest... And again, with the car analogy, if your car is sitting in the driveway and not being used, it's going to start breaking down, so we're supposed to break down our food and digest it and ultra-processed foods, that work is done for us.

So are you saying that based on everything, it seems like we need to be eating raw foods, not necessarily, and that's actually my first thought when I read that rat study was, Oh, so we can't even cook things, but that's not quite it. It's more of breaking that food down in a way where it's super processed, that's the problem, 'cause if you take tomatoes, for an example, even if you cook the tomato, yes, you're processing it a little bit and maybe you're not having to digest that cook tomato quite as much as the raw, but now you're releasing all these great things like I coping by cooking it, so you get a lot of good benefits in cooking and... And Rob, but it's where we start completely shifting that food in the chemical way in to process, were then that's the digestive problem.

Okay, and that's true. I think anything like you took it out of, you wanna keep it in there, vitamin, how can you ensure a healthy gut and then properly digest our food?

Yeah, so that... That's the main goal, is making sure that our machine, our car is functioning appropriately, so we can actually digest these foods, so it's kind of a two-part question. One being, making sure we have a healthy gut, and that is eating real food, if you are supplying real foods to your body, you'll have all these raw enzymes and live things that are going in there, kind of like you have little worker bees in there, those are our probiotics, we wanna eat lots of foods that have those live enzymes and then in fermented foods, so that we have lots of probiotics, but the other piece is making sure that we have appropriate digestion, and then we have to make sure that we're instigating all the phases of ingestion, of which there are three. So this is where you come in here, I know that sounds... And we hear about probiotics and everything, so take me through... We're at lunch time right now, so a salad, what would... There's no really probiotics on a set, or what would that look like it unless you're having some sour crowd or something, then there's not gonna be actual live probiotics on that salad, but there's a ton of prebiotics and probiotics are the instigators that feed the probiotics. So if prebiotics are basically fiber, so every single item in that row salad is going to provide food to the bacteria in your gut, so you're helping them to thrive even though you're not actually eating a probiotic at the time, so when you work... When you work with your clients, and I'm sure there are all types and ages and everything else, what is... And it's probably a tough question to ask you, What is your perfect client, but do they come to you for all reasons, weight loss or getting healthy or... Yeah, they do, they come from across the spectrum, so we get just basic weight loss, but I also, oddly enough, I get a lot of clients who are fairly healthy, but they wanna be more proactive in being healthier or maybe their parent just diagnosed with something or they're sibling, and so they really wanna find out, Hey, I know that eating junk food is not good for me, but this is what I'm doing now, and even though I'm healthy, I want to shift that, so I'm getting more and more clientele probably in this past year of Let me help me cook, let me figure out how to start digesting food, and that's something huge too, that has been a lot on our minds too, the older we get and... I've talked about a lot on the show. My mom has Alzheimer's, my father passed from Parti cancer, and I feel like, Oh my gosh, okay, I should be eating really healthy right now... Yeah, and sugar is horrible for us, I know this, and my brothers and I talk a lot about it, that we should just get it out of our diet, but the road to this... What does that road map look like?

It... And it's starting to cook, it's starting to just experiment with foods in your kitchen, and maybe that means adding sugar to the foods you're cooking, and when you mention the grocery tour is... I always point out the yogurt because you can have there's honey yogurt and then there's playing yogurt, and the heneage usually has about six to seven teaspoons of honey added in, you could just add a teaspoon of honey yourself at home and it would probably taste just as good and be a honey yogurt, so it's not that we can never add these things that give flavor, but it's adding it yourself and learning how to do that in the kitchen, and also looking at the ingredients and knowing what those tricks are the... Right, exactly. Yeah, and just teaching us for that, what would your advice be for somebody that like myself that doesn't necessarily love cooking, but that I wanna learn to... Like a recipe to start off and say, Okay, what's a good go-to recipe, but I also have a family, and they're probably like... Yeah, I'm a meat and potatoes. My husband's a meeting a potato kind of a guy, but I wanna make sure I... To make everybody happy. Is there a recipe that you can... Yeah, there's so many bigamy favorite example. That's just so easy is a coconut chicken over a slow...

'cause you can literally go to the store and buy a bag of pre-chop saw that's made of cabbage and carrots, and you don't even have to do any cooking, and before you go to work in the morning, you soak that in some rice vinegar, and so I saw.

So you let that sit. It kinda gets soft, it infuses all those flavors, and also before you go to work, you put your chicken breasts and coconut milk in the cockpit and let it simmer all day long, and then you get home and you put that yummy creamy chicken on top of the slot and your dinner is done well, you really have to do much actual cooking, that's the kind of stuff I love, you have the cooking prep going on and you're having real food and you come home and it already smells like a human fleeing away all day.

You nail that, you nail the whole big topic that I wanna talk about, which was phases of digestion, so we actually have three different phases of digestion, and most people know the last two without even knowing that you know it, and that's a mechanical and chemical... So the mechanical phase is chewing, you're breaking it down, your peristalsis, which is the kind of churning of the stomach and then the chemicals, all the enzymes, and once things get into your stomach in the acid, but no one really thinks about the first phase and that's the sepal phase, and that's your sensory phase, so that is all of the digestive processes that's happening really before you actually eat, and my best example of this is citrus, and if you were to close your eyes and imagine that I handed you an orange and then smell that orange, and imagine peeling that orange and maybe sports in your eye and then you're starting to buy into that orange and all the juices, and as I'm telling you this, are you starting to validate a little bit in, I Love the orange, and maybe even having a little bit of a Tucker that to feel that back you... Yeah, that's happening for me. describing it to you, there's not even an orange in this room right now, that's all psychological, which is something else we'll talk about too, is the mental state of digestion, but just just imagining the sensory component is part of digesting food and making sure that all that digestion we talked about earlier, is actually happening... So actually, as it turns out, 50% to 70% of our digestive enzymes are produced in this first Cephalic Phase, so if we bypass that by not cooking and not being in tune one-on-one with our foods and having to see the food and touch the food and smell, the food, we're really getting in the way of our digestive process, which can... Leads to disease. Oh, wow.

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, so I just... That's a huge reason why I'm a big proponent of cooking, because if you just think of Satan, garlic and onion, and I love that too. It's too... I mean, I know when I do, and the family comes home and they're like, Oh, what's for dinner? And it is, and it excites the palette.

Exactly, that's all you have to do. And suddenly people come running... My husband will run down the stairs... What are you making? It's just Donegal, right?

So if you take that away and you do things like going through a drive-through, you had no part of that preparation process, in fact, if you did, you probably wouldn't wanna... Super interesting, I don't wanna know what I eat and then it served to you and it's wrapped up in paper and it doesn't actually look super appetizing, if you were to be honest with yourself... If you were to come to my house for a dinner party and I serve you something wrapped in paper, I'm never going back to the girls, also very good, so all of that connection is really important, so when we go through the drive-through, we basically get rid of half of a digestive process, so we wanna be in the kitchen just connecting to the food and being there and touching and smelling and smelling and being a part of that.

Yeah.

What about any pastors that are good for us or anything that... Or...

Yeah, actually, what's really cool now is you can get Lenfest, so chick pasta, pasta at a mommy post black bean pasta, you can get all these process that basically they dehydrate the bean or the legume, and then they may turn that into flower and then that makes pasta so now you get three times as much fiber, two to three times as much protein in your pasta as you did from the whole wheat, really?

Now, that's a really nourishing pasta and they just... They all taste a little different, I find that the maypole are better for Asian food dishes like Sur-fries and Chip posterior, so they're better for tomatoes, so it takes a little play and they do cook fast, so if you do do it at home, it's like four minutes or they turn to mush. But that's a fun one.

Oh, that's a... And you put some recipes on you, you have a... Do you have social media?

Yes, so tell me a little bit about that 'cause I'm gonna be a lease. Talking your Osgood-Ness. Get off myself.

Not yet, no, I love it. I love when people are interacting on it, so I'm on Instagram at RD Megan, so for registered dietitian, Megan, Megan, and I just post food. And it started, I started doing this maybe two or three years ago just to show people what I was eating because that's always... People's question is, Oh, you're a dietitian. What do you eat?

So I just started posting my dinner, and then that sort of turned into, Oh, I post by breakfast in my space, and then I started food experimenting, all that's on that page is food ideas, and it's not... I wouldn't say it's your typical Instagram Food page, they're not gorgeous pictures with these complicated recipes, it's pretty much... There's a quick shot of what I had for dinner before I ate it, or sometimes half ways were eating it because I forgot. And I always put a little bit about what was involved in that process. And it's fun, but it's real, and that's what I love about it, and you are a dietitian and you're living how you work, and you work how you live, and you look at you, you're gorgeous. And so I love the fact that it's real.

So that's great, we get a view into your world... Absolutely, yeah, I'll be checking that out.

So we're gonna take a quick break, so there's a lot more... This is so interesting. Again, our interviews with registered dietitian, Megan row, and we're talking about how real food and cooking affect our physical and mental health. We'll be right back.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show. And we wanna remind you that if you've missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, mother's market dot com, click the link for radio and listen to the past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now back to our interview with registered dietician, Megan row, and we're talking about how real food and cooking affect our physical and mental health, and so making... We were just talking about the phases of digestion and how important that is, so clearly cooking is an important piece of digestion, but also I heard you mention calm and emotional states multiple times, so how do our emotions play a role in this digestive process? Yeah, so it's really interesting because the whole Cephalic Phase I just talked about is actually can't be triggered unless we're in what we call rest and digest mode, so there's... I'm sure you've heard the analogies of running away from a tiger and it gets you all stressed out and your cortisol goes high, that that ability to get really stressed out is we get that way with anything, so even though we're not running away from a tiger, if we have a deadline, if we are the phones ringing and the kids are yelling, that's a stressor, and when that... When we're in that state of stress, we will not go into Cephalic Phase or at least not as much, so even if you do have onions and garlic cooking and you love the smell, if you're really stressed out, you're not connecting mindfully to that food, so you won't produce nearly as much of those enzymes, so we need to get to a state of calm happiness when we are cooking and when we are preparing the food, when we are eating the food, and that can go the other way too. In that cooking, I create, if it becomes a really calm and wonderful and peaceful and happy time that can get you to a state of less anxiety, so that you are able to digest better.

So an example of that is when, if you were someone who maybe had donuts with your dad every Sunday, now fast forward 30 years and we're adults, and now I'm stressed out and Oh my gosh, I'm always craving and donut... That just makes me feel better. Well, if we can have that same positive memory association around cooking and preparing food and being in the kitchen, then you start to almost crave that... That's in fact, I was just gonna ask you about that because I remember when I was... My first boyfriend, I didn't tell you, I tell you I... For the big Italian family, there were always people around and every Sunday they had family members around, and it was the big vat of pasta, but it was a family event, and I just remember happiness, laughing, and it was an event and cooking, it was always... Everybody around the kitchen, and I just, I loved that. That was a good memory. And I would love to recreate that, just everybody gathered around the kitchen anyway, so that you kind of... You just kind of touched about that the emotions of coke, there can be so much positive emotion, and I think if you aren't used to cooking, then it's only a stressful emotion, like, Oh my gosh, I have to cook something now, you have to make related it can be really stressful, but if you just envelop the fun of that and include other people, like you said, the big family event... I have an Italian friend too, and it's the same thing, it's just fun. Even if you have no idea what you're doing, we were making nice with that family, what time, and I was like, I literally have no clue how to make Nokia. I'm watching the grandma and she's speaking to me in Italian, but it was just so fun that there was no stress involved in that, and even if we completely messed up that it would have been fine too. And so I think in your own home is what I talk to clients about is being okay with it potentially not working as well as the power come up with backup plans or okay, if this doesn't taste good, what are you gonna do with it? What software on a later on it, or what's the next plan just so that it's fun and we take the stress away, 'cause the more you're in there and more comfortable you are, the happier it becomes... It's true in making it a family event, and just one other quick little story, we were in Sweden over the past summer, my daughter was in a soccer tournament, and my husband has cousins there, and they were teaching us how to make authentic Swedish Freefall, and I was like, Oh my gosh, we gotta take this back to those dates, but we haven't yet really tried to recreate that, but my backup plan is to go to IKEA and get some matabeleland.

Exactly, so you see the Netflix movie that sugar salt, acid heat nor satiated heat.

She's a chef and she travels around the world, and so for part, next Fox series become very popular, shells as a book, I think it's salt, bad acid heat, and each piece is these important pieces of cooking... And we were watching the Netflix series, my husband and I, and on the very last one, she is learning how to make this dish from her culture, she's Iranian and she's with her mom and that one, and they're kind of bickering, but at the same time, having this really lovely moment, and she's teaching her daughter, who's this professional chef, how to make this dish that she had no idea how to make, and my husband turns to me, he goes, That's what your clients are missing, they're missing that connection with family and being taught to cook by someone who's trustworthy and that they love, and it's... Oh, that's so true. So that's a three good at the watch, and it is... And it's again, connecting with disconnecting a phone or disconnecting from everything and being in a kitchen surrounded by family and emotions of getting back to it. So that's really a good point. There are so many people who don't like cooking, I don't feel comfortable in the kids of it. Do you have tips, some things that we can all do to start cooking in an easy and less intimidating way?

Yeah, so first of all, the single item meals, like I talked about with the law in the chicken, it doesn't have to be those Instagram-worthy master pieces, those are great and they're lovely, but honestly, I think sometimes those are really intimidating as it is, so you're like I can't make that, I've never made that ever in my life and grow up cooking, so start with really simple stuff, start with, Okay, three ingredient meals, use sauces, user condiments, because you can have chicken and broccoli every night, Monday through Friday, and if one time you use pesto, and another time you have a tomato sauce and another time you have a chime, here, it's a very different meal, and that's very... It builds a lot of self-confidence when you can make something taste really good, that was very simple, so I heavily rely on sauces, that's one of the first things I really walk people through and grocery stores, what sauces or even pre-made ones, if you have to start there, which ones are good to look for on a label, and then if you really like that sauce, you can make that just... So rely heavy on the sauces and then rely on things that smell really good, so onion and garlic and olive oil get that going, and then you just toss into canines and have a salad on the side, but you at least have that anticipation of cooking, so that you're kind of ready for it.

My other favorite smell, yummy thing is robot cooking, whether it's a veggie broth or a bone broth, if that's going to your cock for 24 hours, you wake up wanting to eat, you wake up not wanting to go to McDonald's, you want a cup of broth, so that's a great one. And then simmered apples, so you can... Yeah, see, I don't how to describe it. And you just... It's so yummy, having cinnamon nutmeg and some apples either in the oven or on the stove, and it's just... That's dessert automatically, it smells so good that you can't help but love it, so those are kind of my top three make things smell really, really great, lean on the sauces and then get to pre-talked if you need to, if you don't have to hold. make from scratch, everything. Just put the things together in your kitchen, so don't be afraid of buying the pre-chopped vegetables and the cane beans that are not the ultra processed food, but just the somewhat process food that makes it a little bit easier to handle and that that can be really really good for a non-cook, while you say that, are there any things like in the can means any ingredients that we should be looking out for you, that's a good question, and you should be looking for just the food.

Okay, so anything that's canned or boxed, what is that thing supposed to be, if it's supposed to be a can of chick peas, it should just say chick peas on the ingredients may be salt. I'm okay with that too. Usually, Cassatt is gonna be and things for a preservative, but it shouldn't have this list of other stuff... Not butters. That's a big one. Like if you're looking at Almonte and you think, If I were to make this at home, what is it supposed to be... It's supposed to be screamed up almonds, so if I look in the ingredient list, I should just see almonds, I shouldn't see sugars and different types of oils, there's no need for that. It should just be almonds that more than looking at what to avoid, I look at what should actually be in there, okay, so... Right. Just what it is.

So I hear you have a teaching kitchen at me up there pounding on the date, what do you do there? And you also are in the wellness center, and so how can you help people to start building confidence and skills with that Real Food King?

I'm so excited about the STEM program that we have, I've been pushing for it for a year, so I see Billy have it, and it's really just a small little kitchen within our wellness center, but we have above mirror, so you can sit in the back and still see what I'm doing, and the whole idea is it's a demo kitchen, so we run our classes, they're not as hands-on as they are, sit and watch, but there's always a theme around whatever my class is, so this month we're doing energy-boosting foods, and I usually make three to five recipes depending on how complex they are, and you watch me do them, and then you get to taste them, so you're a part of that cooking process, you're smelling it, you're seeing it, you're hearing it happened, and you're seeing how simple it is, 'cause our classes are only an hour, and I make three to five recipes in an hour and you get to taste them and I'm going slower than you would if you were in your own kitchen 'cause I'm explaining how we're doing things, so... I believe that that is the most impactful for people saying, Wow, that was really easy. That was really delicious. Everyone who comes to my classes will email me later and say, Oh, I've made that this week, and my husband loved it, so that's the idea there. And then we also do one-on-one, so if you were wanting to see me instead of coming to office, we could go in and actually cook together one-on-one in the teaching kitchen, so that's another way we can use it. That's great. Yeah, I love that. And so, yeah, yeah, I might come up and put an apron on and say I would love it.

Yeah. Oh yeah, you need your own little show, but that could be another thing that's going... Going on media. Yeah, ricordi mean... Well, I think this has been fascinating. Is there anything else that you would like to say that I haven't asked you about?

I don't think so, just, I guess practice, get in the kitchen and just do it, and if you have something in mind that you're looking to prepare and you're kind of like, I wanna do a pasta for instance, reach out to people you know that have made other poses or ask your grocery store people or reach out to me, Follow me on Instagram, 'cause usually there's a way to make whatever meal you're looking for in a healthful way, and there's usually an easy way to do it too, and like you were talking about those probiotics and things, is there a certain amount during a course of a day that we should have fruit suggest... That's a really good question. Yeah, it really depends on the person, but I would say baseline, you wanna make sure you have five cups of vegetables a day, being in not your start cheese BLE as that being your crunchy ones, like leafy greens and cucumbers, things that you are having to chew and digest, because those are going to give you the food for your probiotics, so five cups of veggies a day, one to three cups of fruit a day, so that could be just one to three types of fruit, and then you wanna make sure instead of over the day how much you're getting, but at every meal, make sure you're getting a little bit of fat and a little bit of protein, and that should be just consistently in every meal and your carb should be from plants.

Okay, again, I have to work on that too.

Slowly, a little baby step in. I suddenly... It just starts clicking.

Yeah, well, this has been very interesting and yeah, thank you for your time, and I'm gonna again start looking at your Instagram, but you also can be found at St. Jude wellness center dot org, right?

Yes, that's where you can find me at the Wellness Center.

The Wellness Center in the kitchen as well.

Some great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and we look forward to having you on again, thank you so much making things for having me.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market podcast, and for shopping at mother's market, the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.