034 –Unprocessed! –An Interview with Chef AJ Part 2

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In Part 2 of my interview with we start out by talking about the ubiquitous olive oil. We get Chef AJ’s perspective on olive oil. Olive Oil is indeed a highly processed food she points out. You can’t just take some olives and press them in your house and get Olive Oil. She points out that we don’t sit down and eat 40 to 50 olives in one sitting which is what it would take to make some olive oil. This is about the Mount of olives in 1 tablespoon of olive oil. That is 120 calories of pure fat which is 14% saturated fat as well.

She further points out in this epidemic of obesity, where it is predicted that 50% of Americans will be obese, why would we want to feed them a food that is 4000 calories per pound? This is the most calorically dense food on the planet, and it doesn’t fill you up! She therefore recommends eating flax seed not the oil, the corn not the corn oil!

Indeed, it Chef AJ points out that it takes 16 ears of corn to make 1 tablespoon of corn oil.
She points out that Dr Esselstyn’ website and you can find the videos talking about the adverse effects of olive oil here

She goes on to talk about the study that looked at the Mediterranean Diet and how that is not represented correctly to Americans. In that study they asked the people to stop eating powder and substitute olive oil. Therefore this is just a commentary that olive oil is in the that is powder for cholesterol. This was very surprising information to me because I’d never heard that about the Mediterranean Diet.

She talks about how it is important and much healthier to eat the wrong foods such as the olives, or the flax, or the corn.

We then talk about agave. She points out that UCLA did research that showed that fructose contributes to the growth of cancer. Agave is 90% fructose and high fructose corn syrup is only 55% fructose. She points out that the average American eats 150 pounds of sugar per year.
Chef AJ goes on to point out that anytime you process a food, whether it’s beets into sugar, olives into oil, brown rice into brown rice flour, you take a whole natural food that has water, fiber, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants and micronutrients – you now take this natural food and you make it calorie rich and nutrient poor and you’re consuming only the non-nutritive portion of the product. She just doesn’t believe we are supposed to eat our food processed.

Our government recommends no more than 6 teaspoons of sugar per day. One soda can has 12 teaspoons of sugar in it. What does a Big Gulp have in it? This will help you understand why they are trying to eliminate the very large size soda is in New York at this time.

I point out to Chef AJ that my patients want something sweet and food and what she recommends is date paste which you can get from this website.

I then ask Chef AJ about Stevia another popular sweetener. She notes that this is what many health oriented chefs use. However she points out that Joel Fuhrman MD notes that Stevia is so sweet that it is not a natural sensation to the human taste and tends to make a person want to eat more and more sweets.

I then going on to talk with Chef AJ about what brought her to this way of life and this understanding of our diet. She was on to relate her personal health story which started with heavy rectal bleeding. After seeing her medical doctor and getting a diagnosis she went to Optimum Health Institute in San Diego California.
She talks about how that Institute then changed her life.

In the next and last part of the interview we will go on to talk about Milk and the dairy industry.
Chef AJ is the author of the book Unprocessed which you can get here

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