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.

Have a Lankan really king and welcome to the mother's market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition.

On today's show, your body is always in a constant battle to fight off information and what you eat can go a long way and winning the battle and living healthier, so let's in close and find out how plus later will tell you what's going on around Mother's market and going on around town. But first up, Megan row is a registered dietitian with a background in nutrition education, 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 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 radio show. Megan, how are you?

I'm good, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for being here.

Why don't you fill our audience a little bit in on your mission and your work before we get to today's show, topping... Yeah, I just, I love teaching people about how to eat healthy, my just passion in life is making sure you know how to realistically eat healthy because there's a lot of really bad information out there, so however I can put real good food on the table in front of you is what I wanna do.

I love that, I love... And you are so passionate about that.

Today we're talking about the dietary effect on inflammation and aging, and I'm gonna be your number one fan here, anything that says, aging and then eating healthy. I'm right there. So tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do as a dietician.

Sure, yeah. I do a whole broad spectrum of things as far as education, I teach classes on inflammation, on inflammation and health, I do one-on-one consultations quite a bit and that on anything from in working with people right now in brain health who have some early signs, Alzheimers, all the way over to adolescents who have some overweight issues, so we do one-on-one, we do classes, I do those grocery tours where we actually walk through the store together and we look at how... What are we looking for on a label, because really, it's that hands-on, I can give people handouts all day long, and that might not really make a change, so we look at hands-on things, and then I teach some online classes as well at the college level, so I kind of wear a lot of hats in the nutrition world.

That's awesome, good for you.

We heard a long time ago, I think, when we first started this show about just this is on the grocery store level, about staying on the outside of the grocery store, is that right?

That's tests true, although you know, it's tricky depending on the story you're in, because people, I think started to hear that, and so now we've got on the outside, there's things like certain juices that look really healthy in the produce section, but maybe have a lot of sugar added in, so it's still, I think over-arching a good rule of thumb, but you still gotta be careful in not what you're reading and another quick question on the grocery... Getting them there, some of the mainstream grocery stores have started to go a little organic, but that could be tricky to...

Yes, it really could be organic doesn't necessarily mean healthy. All the time, you can have organic sugar added in, an organic fats added in, and there's all sorts of stuff, plus you have to pay for the organic level, so some really small farms do a wonderful job of being organic and can't really afford that label and doesn't mean their food isn't healthy, so read the labels, read the labels and know your stores, get to talk to people that's actually while of mothers is because of the people who work there and know what they're talking about, and they get educated. So it's good to be out of the market. You can trust also.

Excellent. Well, you mentioned the phrase food as medicine, and I just wanted to see if you can explain what that means.

Yeah, because so often we think about medicine as medicine or I have a problem, let's treat it with a pill, but if you can prevent that issue from happening with your food or maybe once you have that issue, treat it with food, it's actually really realistic. It's just that you have to be very dedicated. A lot of times people think, Oh, food is medicine, so I'll start eating more free or more vegetables, but if you have a really significant inflammatory issue, you need to completely change what you're looking at in the food spectrum, and food can really help you from that diagnosis from progressing further, or possibly from a diagnosed... From happening, if you know you have Alzheimer's in your family, you may be able to offset that quite a bit, if you know that's already happening by just changing the food you're eating.

Okay, I'm gonna call you later on, Ray, what is inflammation then? If you can talk a little bit about that and what does it have to do with health and nutrition... Yeah, it's such a good question. And actually complicated one, it can be... Inflammation itself is a protective mechanism of the body, if you get a cut on your elbow 'cause you fall, there's this inflammatory response of the immune system that's making it red and kind of inflamed, and then it scabs and then it heals, so that's what inflammation is supposed to do, unfortunately, all these underlying inflammatory processes are happening in our gut and especially in our given in our brains too, and things that you're not seeing, you're not seeing that cut on the outside when you're having maybe some leaky gut symptoms, and so you have this ongoing inflammation underneath. It's just happening happening. How many answers? If you're constantly following, it's great thing your elbow over and over and over again, then it would stop healing quite so well. Well, when that's happening in the system within your body, you're not healing, you're actually just creating this inflammatory response which stops you from absorbing nutrients very well, it stops you from healing overall, and it can actually create a cascade, Ive symptoms, and that's a really good... Thank you for explaining it that way because... Right, and if you keep getting headaches or if you keep stomach aches or something, but you just don't recognize that that's that inflammation happening on the inside, you don't see... Yeah, I actually... As a link to aging, there's this overarching term called inflammation now, is that the longer you have inflammation, not only are you getting just symptoms, you might get these chronic headaches or you might get chronic stomach aches, but you're actually hastening the aging effect, and so you're getting there's these molecules called telomeres, in the shorter they get the faster you age, and so you may be getting more memory loss or instability, even things that happen with aging, you may be getting that a lot earlier on.

Wow, and so you're saying that with through health a fitness probably as well, I'm sure you Hattiesburg eating, you can help clear that without having to take all of the medicine.

Right, can you tell us a little bit more about the classes that you teach on the inflammatory eating, and it's called Nutrition Prescription, right. Because we're using food as medicine, so it's my prescription to you is what you should be eating because you can actually eat foods that promote inflammation or you can eat foods that damp in the inflammatory response, and there is so much research now actually out there that shows inflammatory markers are decreasing, it's not just me saying, Oh, these are healthy your fats and vegetables, but it's actually slowing inflammation, so lots and lots of plants is what... We just have a ton that kind of food, any... Mostly plants is a plant-based way of eating to eat anti-inflammatory. We can certainly bring in animal products along a healthy spectrum, so in my class in the intestine prescription in a six-week series, and we talk about first how inflammation is affected by food and how food can affect inflammation, and then we dive into what is plant-based mean what is encompassed in a plant-based diet, how to read a label for that... What are we looking for? Really? 'cause so often I hear people say, Oh, I look at the sugar is... I look at the cars, but if I ask them specifically what they're looking for, they can't really answer me, they say, I want love sugar. But what does that mean?

So we look at labels, we do meal planning together, and they actually have homework assignments where you're creating meal plans based on an anti-inflammatory diet, we look at resources, different books that I like, and authors and what their mantras are, and we eat... In every class, we sit down and have mindful eating, 'cause that's part of it too, is how we eat, not just what we eat, that's all part of anti-inflammatory eating.

So you said it's a six-week series, and then how long... An hour each, so yeah.

So we spend about 30 to 40 minutes, I'm kind of a lecture topic, and then we eat together and it's... Again, we kinda eat family style, and then we go through the recipe and we touch on how does this adhere to the diet we've been talking about all along, did you grow up in a family that cooked or that... Yeah, tell me a little bit about your mom cooking... Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up watching my mom cooked, she cooked all the time, almost every single night, and not necessarily focused on nutrition, what I never learned that, Oh, this is a seed, and this is where this came from. It was just there as vegetables on your plates, and there's proteins on our plates, and it was just very basic eating, and so I grew up knowing how to cook, and that's always been my number one recommendation to everyone is Don't worry about the specific supplements and making sure, everything is perfect and adding nutritional east right away, start just cooking and get rid of the process stuff and the package things and stop eating so much fast food and write the... You're dampening inflammation. So yeah, I guess you could say it started as a very young age, and then spiral as I got older... Yeah, and I love that. Stop going to the fast food. That's a great advice right there.

What does plant-based really mean and doesn't mean that we have to eat vegetarian.

Yeah, so that's a huge question I get asked whenever I say plant-based, and it's a tricky topic in the nutrition world because especially with hashtags as plant-based tends to signify vegetarian and vegan, but it doesn't have to be plant, be-based means that you're eating everything based on plants, your plate, your bowl, your overall day is based on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, nuts, that's the basis, and then if you want, you can add some animal products in, but they're sort of a garnish, if you will. So we can add a couple of eggs or we can add a nice piece of grass-fed meat or pasture chicken, but that's not the main basis of the... The basis of what reading is, plans and knowing that plants doesn't have to be always vegetable to either, while I want people eating tons of vegetables, Keno also comes from a plant and Sesame scenes come from plants. And so you can eat plant-based, including all these types of food groups, but actually the way you flipped it for me as meat as a garnish, so you kind of... Yeah, it's a different way of thinking of... It goes against the meat and potatoes idea, where we have this piece of meat and then we maybe sprinkle some broccoli around it, but I ask people to take pictures of their plates, I ask my clients actually take a picture and we look at... 'cause they say eating vegetables and they are, but the whole majority of that plate is mostly the protein, and so we wanna flip that.

Okay, we hear of so many different fad diets these days, and are there any day is the effective and battling inflammation and aging... Yeah, it's kind of a middle ground of all the diets, there's a ketogenic and there's Paleo, and there's vegan, and there's all these different things, and if you really look at them, they are based on plants, it's just the proteins that kind of shift and maybe the amount of fat that shift, and so vegan, your proteins are all coming from plants, Paleo, a lot of your... Most of your proteins are coming from animal products, ketogenic, we're having much higher than... We are much higher fats and we are carbohydrate, but no matter what we're eating lots of vegetables, maybe some fruits, lots of nuts and seeds, and that's anti-inflammatory, so you can kinda take a mix of all those diets and decide what you want, do you like animal products, maybe you go more in the whole 30 paleo side of things.

Okay, good. Well, this is great information right now, we just need to take a quick break, but more in a minute... Don't go away, we'll be right back with Megan.

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 dietitian, Megan row, and we're talking about the dietary effect on the inflammation and aging, and so Megan, I'd like to clarify what seems to be a huge debate in the nutrition field, and so should consumers be focusing on low fat diets or on low sugar.

Yeah, it is a huge debate, and it's really more focusing on low sugar and what type of them, it's not going low-fat, and that has been a huge shift in the nutrition world, is that that is not necessarily bad for us, it's Which fats are we eating?

So trans fats are terrible, and we wanna get rid of those and saturated fats now, as it turns out, there's a bunch of different types of saturated fats, and so certain ones can be actually very beneficial for us, certain types of what they're called medium chain triglycerides or MCT are very good for brain health, which is very good for dampening inflammation, unsaturated factors are great, and so those are our olive oils, but unsaturated fats, if you're putting them under a lot of heat or putting them under a lot of light, they can get oxidized, so your plastic clear bottles of canola oil are already gonna be giving inflammatory responses to the second you eat it, so it's what types of fats, but really looking at low sugar for inflammation or and or no sugar. Any type of blood sugar increase, if you get a spike at all is going to immediately instigate an inflammatory response, and so we're really looking for if you want something a little bit sweet at your own and add it from dates or coconut nectar, as opposed to just white refined sugars and just really read your labels because sugar is being added to everything, so look at what type of fat is in the ingredient list and then just how many sugar things you can see, it is truly... And everything, if you were to hereafter have weird hidden names, Mount of Dexter is a type of sugar and they'll put concentrate and juice to make it look healthier, but oftentimes, this just means at a sugar.

Yeah, thou could probably teach a class on how to give up sugar secondaries, are there specific things to look for on a food label that would fall within an anti-inflammatory diet?

Yeah, so we dig through labels together whenever I work at my clients, because every time people look at labels, you tend to look at calories and calories don't matter so much they do to some extent, but really you could eat 100 calories of broccoli and 00 calls of cake, either way, you at 100 calories, but what did you just get from that food and what inflammatory response or not are you getting?

So really, you wanna bypass calories, even oftentimes, bypass fat and less, you're a cardiac patient and go straight down to looking at carbohydrates, what type of carbohydrates do you have, are you be having high fiber and low sugar or is it high sugar and low fiber underneath that carb, so you want a minimum of three grams of fiber minimum to hire the better... Maximum seven grams of sugar. And really, you want that to be much lower and ideally there's a little line underneath that that says added sugars now, and you want that to be almost zero, and then you wanna go straight to the ingredients because things can be really tricky, they can say no Trans fats and low sugar, but that's full of artificial things in the bottom, so in your ingredients, your main kind of rules to stick by is everything recognizable. Would you have that in your kitchen if you were to have the time to make this loaf of bread, would you put all of these things in there, would you find those in your pantry and if not... 'cause you don't know what it is, maybe not a good choice. There should be no more than two or three sugar words, so deck strings and syrups and concentrates, and none of those should be in the top three, and you don't wanna see the word hydrogenated because that means that there's trans-fats, so if it kind of follow within those guidelines, high fiber. Love sugar, no trans-fats. And you can recognize everything, it's probably okay.

Those are all key that... Right. Okay, so there's no hydrogenated, nothing. Trans fats. Zero, especially right on the top.

Is there any truth to claims that gluten, dairy and soy are harmful to our health? There can be, it really depends on the person. Those three things are inflammatory triggers that a lot of research has shown may tend to trigger an inflammatory response more often than other types of foods, gluten especially has been found to create what's called leaky gut syndrome, where it can permeate the gut now in very small amounts if you're not someone who's very resistant or who reacts quite often to gluten, small amounts, especially from whole grains like barley, is probably not gonna cause too much of an effect, but again, if you're someone who's that underlying inflammation going on, you have autoimmune or risk of diabetes, you already have an inflammatory response and then you have excessive gluten because it's everywhere and in everything, and it's gonna start permeating the gut and start creating that leaky gut syndrome of inflammation, dairy, same thing, a lot of people tend to be a little bit intolerant and it can create a lot of bloating and kinda mess with the microbiome, not for everyone, and soy is really a tricky one, if you have someone who has thyroid, you do wanna kinda stay away from, say, if not, so it can be really beneficial in whole food, so... So Tammy, organic, tofu and Tempe, but not your soy restive of things, then you're just getting processed for God to get... And I've noticed a lot of times this happens. This occurs when people get older, or there's an age... Like all of a sudden that 40 boomers.

Funny, you said 40. yeah, that's actually the age and research that shows when aging starts to happen, this aging process begins right around 40, and that's when we just start developing less and less enzymes help to break down nutrition and help us to absorb things, but then unfortunately now with our food environment people are hitting that aging process much earlier with that inflammation that we talked about... Yeah, and we're not as tolerant as other things... Yeah, what are probiotics and should we be taking them... Yeah, probiotics are actually live bacteria in our gut, we have this whole little planet inside of us of these little alien being the probiotics in their bacteria that help us or don't help us to digest, to absorb, to metabolize things, but unfortunately, we can affect what type of bacteria, we have in there by what we eat, what toxins we're exposed to by our environment, so the more healthy foods you eat that are called prebiotics, your fiber, the more you have healthy probiotics going on and the more junk food and processed foods you eat, the less pre-bio, you're feeding them, so you're creating more monster aliens then... Good, good for you on. So ideally, you wanna be eating your probiotic, so fermented food source, Keefer, even Tampa and miso, these are all fermented foods that give a food source of probiotic along with the pre-biotic just in the food package, that being said, most of us don't eat these lovely plant based dyes, and we're exposed to a lot of bad stuff in our environment, and so it's not about idea to also take it in supplement form.

Okay, you just answered a question. Thank you. What are some quick and easy meal and snack ideas that fall within the anti-inflammatory diet, and what are your thoughts on desserts?

Yeah, so too, the all forum alor, all of it desserts, breakfast snacks at just real food. My challenge to everyone is to see if you can get veggies at every meal, including breakfast, so we talked about that in my class a lot, and if you love oatmeal, can we put some shorted or some Trade carrots in there and make it skinny bread out meals hot cereals that our whole green are a great thing to start the day, but you really wanna add the proteins to it at the nuts and seeds, the seeds, walnuts and veggies, eggs are a great morning or a smoothie, but make sure your smoothie is not just fruits and milk, because then it's a big sugar spike, you wanna make sure there's names of nut butter in there or some seeds or protein powder, so those are God things to start today, snacks. My rule, snacks is they should just be plans, so don't bring in all of the other junk for snacks axes to get us to that next meal, so nuts and fruit, not butter and fruit. Maybe some sunflower seeds, those are good things, salary with not butter on it, those are awesome. lunches and dinners, stories are amazing. Having some sort of whole grain bowls, a bowl with some Satie and a protein, some fish you could do like even at tuna and cucumber slices are a really nice lunch, and then as far as desserts, focus on the facts instead of the sugar, which is kind of a flip of thinking, but you can make this really yummy chocolate tort by mixing up chia and coconut milk and cocoa powder and then melt that into a crust of almonds crushed up with coconut oil and just the tables. Binary, I'm so hungry. I... Are you guys a... I'm like, Whoa, do you offer all of these recipes... I do, we do.

Yeah, so it's fun to taste those things and see how much, especially with desserts, the facts can be satiated, much more than the sugars.

Wow, okay, this is great. Okay, I was just a... Away are I'm thinking, Where do I go for your website now to get all of these recipes... So let's talk about how you can modify. When you say modifying meals, what does that mean?

There's always a way to make your favorite food work, it's not gonna always taste exactly the same, so if you're someone who needs to watch their blood sugars and you love Livonia, we're probably going to take away some of that pasta or make it mental-based pasta and add veggies and spinach into the sauce, so it's not gonna be exactly the same, but we can mimic those flavors... Yeah, like I had Spanish Liana or Ken or something like to do that.

Exactly, you can use Duke instead. If you're someone who doesn't need a higher fat diet, then maybe we make some sort of putting out of chess and coconut milk instead of just your standard... You'll play yogurt, there's... No matter what recipe you have, there's a way to sort of mix and match the fats and the carbs to make it work for you and mimic the flavors, and you just have to wrap or on your head that the texture... I might be a little different, it all right, be a little bit different, but there's a way to really mimic it... I have a finicky husband too, so I'm gonna have to figure out how do I hide it?

You can, me and don't hide things we really upfront and get people to understand that the learning... Yeah, okay.

And I shouldn't blame that my husband, I said to the kids too, enlisting to the show, I don't think... Do you have any tips and tricks for those that are new to healthy cooking, so that's just... Yeah, what we were just talking about.

Yeah, so get prepared.

So the three things you need to prepare or your kitchen, your menu and your people, Okay, so get your kitchen ready, you shouldn't have junk food all over the counter top and look at your pantry and a refrigerator, what's staring you in the face when you open the doors and what's kind of hint back because of course, we're gonna need some sugar in the pantry if you like to bake, but that shouldn't be on the shelf at eye level when you open the pantry, lots of vegetables, make sure you have herbs and spices and all those good oils. To prepare the meals, so prepare your kitchen, and we do that in class together... Prepare your menu. So you need to get organized. It doesn't happen just like that. If you are new to cooking, you need to spend some extra time doing some prepping, chop your veggies, put things in baggy, so they're ready to cook when you get home super late on a Tuesday, 'cause soccer practice went late, so that you can just throw the starry into the pan. So it takes a little bit at a time up front in order for that to work for you for the rest of the week, and then prepare your people, so talk to your family, talk to your friends of, we're making a change. Because if you are the only one starting to eat anti-inflammatory and everyone else isn't, you're either making extra meals, which doesn't work, or you're getting complaints from the family, and you just need to be adamant, get people on board and ask them what they need from you in order to make it happen too.

Yeah, and especially just going along the lines of If you have something in your family, we have Alzheimer's in our family, so if you wanted to make a great change for other purposes, letting people know, I think that's a... And get their questions, you're... Sometimes kids, if you have kids at home, they just need to know why we're doing this and bring them to a dietitian if they need to hear it from someone other than Mom.

Yeah, and that's a point to...

Well, this is great information, thank you so much for your time and great advice, and we really appreciate your knowledge and look forward to having you on again, but in the meantime, you can get more information on Megan and her website is synergy Medi dot com, it's S Y-N-E-R-G-Y-M-E-D-I-F-I-T dot com. Thank you so much. We look forward to your next visit. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to the mother's market radio show, 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,