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This is a bit of a different style to the previous podcast/videos I’ve done which talk about conditions and naturopathy. In this episode Laura Burton and I talk about our favourite ‘health food’ items and discuss how we use them and what their benefits are. There are links to the items we mentioned in the podcast breakdown below.

But the most exciting bit about this video is that there’s a GIVEAWAY! The good folks at Loving Earth and the Gingerbread Folk have been particularly generous in donating some items for the giveaway, and Laura and I have chipped in a few goodies as well. Find the link to enter below.

Want to subscribe to get podcasts automatically? You can do that here: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/health-wellbeing-podcast/id1006574743

Laura is a clinical naturopath practicing in St Leonards and Dural. Her key areas of interest are female hormone disorders, digestive health, stress & adrenal fatigue. Through her clinical experience Laura has identified the prevalence of stress in our everyday lives and sees it as the most common cause or exacerbating factor of her patients health conditions. Laura believes that we need to get back to basics and work on our ability to release and manage stress in order to prevent and treat disease.

Last year Laura set herself the mission to reach beyond the walls of her clinics and send her de-stress message out to Australian and New Zealand households through the Burton Health Tea Club. Each month she sends love letters and tea packages to her members to inject joy and excitement into their days and to remind them to slow down, relax and reconnect while sipping on a cup of organic herbal tea.

You can connect with Laura via her website www.burtonhealth.com.au, on Facebook, Twitter or on Instagram.

If you’ve got something nice to say about the podcasts please leave a review on iTunes, but I’m also keen for any constructive feedback if you want to comment below!

Podcast Breakdown

2.00 Our favourite snacks

2.10 Nut Butter on brown rice crackers (Deli Grains with black sesame)

4.00 Pic’s Really Good Peanut Butter

4.20 Seaweed – Sea Shanti Sea Crisps and Sea Flakes

5.46 Bounce Balls

6.55 Miso Soup

8.07 Gluten free ginger bread – Gingerbread Folk

9.00 Crudites and dip (here are my recipes for guacamole and Baba Hummus)

9.25 Condiments

9.32 Ghee

10.22 Seaweed Salt 

11.23 Savoury Yeast Flakes

12.15 Honey

13.10 Maca Powder

14.11 Apple Cider Vinegar – try to get a brand that contains the ‘mother’ for probiotic content such as Melrose and/or Bragg

16.05 Saurkraut – Peace Love Vegetables or Kehoe’s

17.20 Coconut Oil – Melrose, Loving Earth, Coconut Magic

18.30 Great Lakes Gelatin (read more about gelatin here) Aussies can buy it here, but it’s also available on iherb here.

20.00 Jarred tomatoes – Blis, and BPA free tinned tomatoes from Global Organics

22.00 Achieving balance with the more expensive but ‘healthier’ options

23.53 Caramelised Buckinis – Loving Earth

24.35 Chia Seeds – The Chia Co

27.18 Sardines – Fish 4 Ever and Wild Planet

29.27 Raw cacao – Power Super Foods, Loving Earth

29.54 Cacao nibs – Loving Earth

31.06 Coconut sugar – Loving Earth

32.30 Our favourite drinks

32.40 Kombucha – Mojo, Tonicka, Remedy or make your own! (recipe coming soon)

35.08 Burton Health Tea – Shop Here

35.40 Coconut Water – Pure Natural Raw C

37.10 Keep Cup

38.10 Burton Health Tea Club –  Click here to learn more

40.34 GIVEAWAY!!! – Click here to learn more and to enter

The post Our Favourite Health Foods (PLUS A GIVEAWAY) – with guest Laura Burton appeared first on Alison Mitchell Naturopath.

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You’ve probably heard me prattle on about nose-to-tail eating before but in case you missed it, I advocate including the occasional organ meat in your diet. It not only reduces waste but they are nutrient dense. Heart in particular has a really epic amount of co-enzyme Q10 (coQ10) which is good for – you guessed it – your heart. It is also an essential nutrient for muscle health, skin health and reproductive health. CoQ10 is better absorbed through food, and it’s also more economical to eat it rather than take it as a supplement. If you’re new to organ meats, heart is one of the better ones to start with because it’s texture is usually the best tolerated (personally I think it’s great!)
Don’t discard the idea straight away, give it a try and let me know how you feel!

Serves 2

INGREDIENTS

• 2 lambs hearts (preferably organic)
• ½- 1 small onion, cut into chunks
• 1 carrot, cut into chunks
• A bouqet garni: 1 bay leaf, a sprig of thyme and rosemary tied together
• A few black peppercorns

Sauce:

• A small glass/big glug of dry sherry
• 1 tbsp cider/white wine vinegar
• 1 tsp redcurrent jelly
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 tbsp hot English mustard
• 1 tbsp double cream
• 1-2 tsp worcestshire sauce
• Salt and pepper
• Chopped parsley (optional, to garnish)

METHOD

1. Cut the lamb’s hearts into half. Rinse them well under cold running water then trim away the tough tubes from the inside (leave on the fat at this stage). Put them in a pan with the onion, carrot, celery, bay, thyme and peppercorns and pour on enough cold water just to cover. Bring to a simmer and cook very gently for 1½–2 hours, until tender. Take out the hearts and leave them to cool. Trim them again, this time removing the bigger chunks of fat if necessary, then slice thickly or into chunks.
   
2. Heat a dash of oil in a small frying pan over a high heat. Add the heart pieces, season with a pinch of salt and sizzle for just a minute to brown them, tossing them occasionally. Then add the sherry and let it bubble for a moment. Add the vinegar and redcurrant jelly and stir until the jelly dissolves. Add the Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, mustard and plenty of black pepper. Let it all bubble down and reduce until thick and glossy – about 2–3 minutes.
3. Finally, add the cream and let it bubble for another minute or two, shaking the pan occasionally, until the sauce is reduced and nicely glossy again. Taste and add more salt or cayenne and black pepper, if you like.
4. Sprinkle with the parsley, if you’re using it, and serve straight away –I accompanied it with a green salad and cauliflower rice.

Have you tried heart? What did you think?

The post Devilled lamb hearts appeared first on Alison Mitchell Naturopath.

Have I mentioned that I love gelatin and bone broth?  Cause I really do.  It’s great for your guts, helps with hormones and it’s awesome for skin and hair health.  In case you haven’t heard me preaching the health benefits of gelatin before, check out my article here. There are seriously so many benefits to having bone broth!

At a recent visit to the local grass-fed butcher, I saw a big ol’ bag o’ beef-bones for all of $3 and it reminded me it was time to make another batch of bone broth.   From this bag I made two batches of broth and it took roughly 4 days (with maybe 40 minutes time actually attending to it total) but this does include some procrastination on my part which dragged the whole process out longer than it needed to be.  I cook my broth for a fairly long time to get a dark, thicker result but if you wanted a more golden colored, thinner broth you could halve the cooking time.  I’m essentially making bone jelly, not broth.  I also make broth out of the same bones twice, as I reduce it so much.

It’s soo easy to make bone broth.  You can use a slow cooker, a pot on the stove or even a pressure cooker.  You’ll need a big strainer, a few bowls to sort it out and strain into once it’s ready and a jar or two to store it in.

The process.

I put some of the meatier bones aside for Chewie’s dinners, and plonked the rest in a roasting tray and cooked in the oven at 200C until brown or for about 1 hr.  They then went into my slow cooker and got covered with cold water.   Set to high, with a heat mat underneath the slow cooker as this baby will be going for a while.

I put in a big splash of apple cider vinegar to encourage the bones to release their goodness, and added some vegetable off cuts from what I had prepared from dinner (the ends and skins of some brown onions, garlic skin, peelings of jerusaleum artichokes) as well as a few pepper corns and a roughly diced carrot and stick of celery.

Leave for 2-5 hours on high, then turn on low for another 12-15 hours.  Turn off and allow to cool.

At this point you can sort out the broth a few ways: you can strain the lot all together before it’s cooled too much and then place the broth into the fridge to allow the fat to solidify and then scrape this off with a spoon and discard.  You can let it cool in the pot, scrape the fat off from the top and then strain.

I put the carrot and celery aside at this point to add to another dish later, but you can keep them all together if you like.  The liquid does reduce quite a lot when cooking for this long, and you don’t have as much room for liquid in a slow cooker as you would in a big pot on the stove, so by all means you can top it up with water as you go making it into more of a stock.

Once you’ve strained the rest of the liquid put it into a jar or container and refrigerate.  Pick off any remaining fatty parts from the bones, and put the bones and vegetables back into the slow cooker with another splash of vinegar and cover again with cold water, repeating the process.

After a few hours in the fridge your bone broth should have turned into jelly. It’s really difficult to get rid of ALL the fat but I don’t think you need to, in fact it can be quite healing for the digestive system.

Hubby decided to evoke his inner child and smash it up with a spoon before I could take a picture, but you still get the idea.

Use 1 tbsp of jelly to 1 cup water

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The post How I Make Bone Broth (jelly) appeared first on Alison Mitchell Naturopath.

Mint jelly

I was looking at some of the mint jellies available on supermarket shelves, and shocked, albeit not surprised at their ingredient list.  Why does anyone really need their mint jelly to be neon green?  And personally I don’t like the over the top sweet flavour that most of these brands offer.

Given my desire to incorporate more gelatin into my diet  (read more about that here), I set out to make my own less fluorescent mint jelly that was gut friendly and not too sweet.  Here it is.

Ingredients

• 5 sprigs of mint, plus 10-20 leaves, thinly sliced
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup white wine or verjuice
• 1/2 cup white vinegar
• 3 tbsp sugar or honey
• Pinch of salt
• Cracked black pepper
• 2 tsp gelatin powder

Method

In a medium saucepan combine the mint sprigs (reserve the separate leaves), rosemary, wine, water, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper.  Bring to the boil them immediately take off the heat.  Cover and allow the flavours to infuse for at least 30 minutes.

Remove the herbs from the liquid.

Pour 1/4 of the infused liquid into a bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the surface and leave for 5 minutes without stirring.  Whisk to combine, gradually adding the remaining liquid while whisking.

Pour this liquid into a jar and allow to almost set, about 20-30 minutes.  Once slightly thickened, stir through the sliced mint leaves.  Refridgerate until completely set (may need another 30 minutes).

The post Mint Jelly appeared first on Alison Mitchell Naturopath.

When I first read about the health benefits of gelatin a few months ago, I began recommending the consumption of bone broths to my patients with degenerative and inflammatory conditions, knee and joint pain, as well as my patients with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.  Broths and stocks are healing foods for the musculoskeletal system and are also alkalizing, making them helpful for these types of conditions.  However, I am now even more excited about gelatin, having discovered an even wider range of health benefits that gelatin and its set of amino acids (in particular glycine and proline) provides us.

What is Gelatin?

Gelatin is a protein substance – essentially it is collagen.  Collagen is sourced from non-muscle animal parts (varying from ligaments, tendons, bone and skin) which are dried and ground into powder.  Because the western diet has veered away from eating these parts of the animal (which our ancestors prized) our protein intake usually consists solely of muscle meats.  Because of this we are not obtaining the balance of amino acids that our body craves which can result in some health problems.

Nose-to-tail eating is a concept which involves not wasting any of the animal by making use of all of it parts (usually by eating them) – this not only reduces food wastage, but is also economical and pays more respect to the animal. Some celebrities and chefs such as Carlo Petrini and his Slow Food Movement, Fergus Henderson, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall from River Cottage, Anthony Bourdain, Colin Fassnidge from restaurant Four in Hand, and Masterchef contestant Chris Badenoch have been promoting this concept for the above reasons, however many people still find that the whole concept makes them squeamish.  If you are one of those people, please read on and I hope I can change your mind.

Benefits of gelatin

From reducing inflammation in joints to promoting thick hair and reducing cellulite and stretch marks, gelatin has a wide range of benefits.

1. 1.  It helps to reduce inflammation (1)(2), by balancing some of the hormones which when too high can cause excess inflammation (oestrogen and serotonin).
2. 2.  It assists in wound healing (3).  Our body will break down our collagen to release glycine which helps to initiate wound healing, and supplementing with gelatin can speed the healing process.  Gelatin has been used traditionally for wound healing and reducing excessive bleeding (e.g. nosebleeds) by consuming gelatin and even by applying it directly to wounds.(4)
3. 3.  It supports digestive health by protecting and healing the digestive lining (5)(6), making it a fantastic dietary addition for people with digestive problems and multiple food intolerances.  Gelatin also contains glutamine, an amino acid which acts as fuel for our intestinal cells.  Our digestion also benefits from adding gelatin rich foods to cooking, as when we cook muscle meats along with gelatin rich parts or meat that’s attached to bone, it helps the breakdown of protein and fat making it easier to digest and absorb.  Gelatin also improves the passage of food through the intestines.
4. 4.  Healthy bones and joints (7).  When gelatin is used as a supplement for knee pain or osteoarthritis, pain relief is usually within a few days.  This fast result is due to its anti-inflammatory properties, but with continued use gelatin can also help to repair small tears in the joint cartilages.  Consider adding gelatin to your post workout protein shakes, or even using it instead of your normal protein shake (glycine and proline are essential for muscle development, and gelatin contains about 6 gram of protein per tablespoon).  There have been claims that when taken 3 hours after dinner, before bed, gelatin helps to boost human growth hormone making it helpful for muscle recovery as well as weight loss (the weight loss could also be due to its protective effect on the thyroid, see below).  Gelatin is also considered beneficial for growing children’s bone health and to promote healthy development.
5. 5.  Better sleep.  Drinking 1-2 tbsp of gelatin or 3g glycine before bed helps your sleep hormones, helping you sleep more soundly and reducing sleepiness the next day(8).  Try adding 1 tbsp of gelatin into some chamomile tea for an awesome before bed beverage.
6. 6.  Beauty.  When you think of collagen, it might conjure up images of women applying ‘plumping/anti-aging/anti-wrinkle’ facial creams.  Collagen is actually poorly absorbed through the skin, but when ingested it does help to improve skin quality.  It tightens skin, reduces/prevents cellulite, and supports hair skin and nail growth(9).  It has been recommended for pregnant women to consume 1 cup of bone broth per day to reduce stretch marks.  Including it in your diet will help your skin to remain youthful a little longer, as well as look more vibrant and heal better.  Some bloggers recommend adding 1 tsp of gelatin into your shampoo to make your hair more voluminous, and it can also strengthen your hair. 

Getting a bit more technical…

Most of what we know about the gelatins’ health benefits is from research done on Glycine, the main amino acid in gelatin (35% of the amino acids in gelatin are glycine, 11% alanine, and 21% proline and hydroxyproline(4)).  Glycine has been shown to have a lot of benefits when supplemented in isolation or in the form of gelatin.  Glycine is a non-essential amino acid, which means that we can make it ourselves in the liver from other amino acids, however by increasing its consumption in supplemental or dietary form via gelatin, we can help to address imbalances and use it as a therapeutic tool.

As mentioned earlier, when we’re not eating in a nose-to-tail method, our amino acids can get out of balance.  The main issue is that we get too much of the amino acid tryptophan, which can affect thyroid function, energy production within our cells (mitochondrial health) and reduces our body’s ability to deal with stress.  Tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin, which can increase inflammation and upset the immune system when too high(4).  Gelatin contains virtually no tryptophan, and can help to restore the balance.

According to Ray Peat, a health researcher and PhD in Biology/Endocrinology :

“When we eat animal proteins in the traditional ways (for example, eating fish head soup, as well as the muscles, or “head-cheese” as well as pork chops, and chicken-foot soup as well as drumsticks), we assimilate a large amount of glycine and gelatin. This whole-animal balance of amino acids supports all sorts of biological process, including a balanced growth of children’s tissues and organs.

When only the muscle meats are eaten, the amino acid balance entering our blood stream is the same as that produced by extreme stress, when cortisol excess causes our muscles to be broken down to provide energy and material for repair. The formation of serotonin is increased by the excess tryptophan in muscle, and serotonin stimulates the formation of more cortisol, while the tryptophan itself, along with the excess muscle-derived cysteine, suppresses the thyroid function.”(4)

Further reading –

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/gelatin.shtml

http://www.westonaprice.org/food-features/broth-is-beautiful

How to take it

While you’ve been reading this, you’ve probably thought ‘isn’t gelatin what jell-o is made from?’  Well, yes it is!  But I’m definitely not recommending you consume jell-o, which contains too many icky artificial colours, sweeteners and flavours.  As you know, gelatin comes from cows (or pigs), so it is beneficial to ensure the gelatin is sourced from cows that are grass-fed and free from unnecessary harmful chemicals.  I recommend Great Lakes gelatin (use the green bottle for mixing into liquids as it won’t congeal, and the orange one for making jellies, lollies, marshmallows and other foods from).

You can buy it on iherb here.

There are plenty of ways in which you can incorporate gelatin into your diet:

• Mix powdered gelatin into liquid and drink it.  If you choose the hydrolysed gelatin you won’t taste the gelatin and it will mix in well to hot or cold liquids.
• Mix into chamomile tea for a great sleep tonic before bed.
• Opt for more gelatinous cuts (osso bucco, oxtail, beef cheeks, lamb shanks) of meat instead of just muscle meats (steak and chicken breast).  These go great in a slow cooker, and are also much cheaper!
• If you’re having muscle meats on their own, try  to consume some form gelatin alongside it (e.g. mint jelly as a topping, or make a dessert with gelatin for afterwards).
• Bone broths.  You can find some recipes here, here, here, here and here.
• My favourite: A myriad of sweets: Pudding,  Marshmallow,  Mousse, fruit snacks and more fruit snacks, gummies,and jelly.

So have I convinced you on the wonders of gelatin?  Do you have another browser open ordering some gelatin right now?

 Let me know your thoughts, and I would love to hear if you discover any more ways to increase gelatin.

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