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If you're new to the whole food plant based way of eating, one of the first concerns you may have is can I ever enjoy sweets again? And I'm here to tell you, the answer is a resounding yes. Yes, you absolutely can. In this episode, we'll share with you smarter, healthy ways to enjoy your sweet treats.
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You're listening to the smarter Healthy Living podcast where we firmly believe that getting healthy should never feel like torture. We're your host, Jared and Anita Roussel were college sweethearts, and health professionals who help you redefine what getting healthy looks like using a whole food plant based lifestyle. It's time to hear from the experts and learn the best tips and tricks that helped others get beyond the overwhelm, to create a vibrant life they love. If you're sick and tired of being sick, and tired, you're in the right place. So pull up a virtual chair, grab your matcha latte, and let's get started.
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Hi, friends, we're thrilled to have you join us today. Today we're talking about a thing that is really important for you to understand, so that you can start enjoying your life again, when you're eating healthy. You know, because a lot of times you think about eating healthy, and you've heard carbs or bad
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carbs,
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right. And so you get this idea of I'm going to have to be depriving myself again of something I love, which is sweets. I like eating sweet things I'm going to have somebody asked me that the other day. Well, how do you eat sweet things? I mean, do you still eat dessert? And they just kind of assume we don't. But we we love sweets. I mean, well, what are some of your favorite sweet treats that we enjoy?
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I absolutely love the matcha lattes that we do. Yeah, I think both of us are my favorites, we
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kind of gravitate toward the drinks, don't we, I like just that peanut butter cup.
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It's kind of like I call it a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup shake that we make. And it's, it's very healthy, there's nothing wrong with it, you know, it's not something I'd have for every meal or every single day.
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And it's not a weight loss drink. But it's not an unhealthy drink, either.
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This is something that you enjoy, and you want something sweet, but you don't have to feel guilty about it.
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And one thing about the sweet foods and sweet drinks is that we were created with sweet taste receptors. I mean, we were created to enjoy these things.
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And it's for a reason. I mean, these things didn't really start becoming unhealthy until we started purifying sugars. And those types of things that are is nothing but sugar doesn't have the fiber, the minerals, the vitamins and all the other healthy benefits that come along with
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it. Because it's all removed. I mean, we think about this one little flavor or one little thing that we want out of something and then they take it out of like Jared was saying all the good things that are there, and it's pressed out and it's boiled down. And then you just have this one concentrated thing and your body was never meant to process it separately from the package that it was created in.
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So there's a reason why we do better when we eat the whole plant. And one of our favorite ways to sweeten things now as
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well as the number one
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yeah, just things like the applesauce, mash bananas, things like that. You can use just fresh or frozen fruit. I mean, we do this with our oats, you know, we love to top it with freight. Or I'll even take a banana and mash it and add it into my oats. If I'm doing cooked oats, you could do that with raw oats as well. And banana really is a sweeter food, but it's not bad. It's in its package and you're getting everything that goes along with it the fiber all the nutrients that makes you feel good. You know, I'm not going to eat five bananas a day in one city, right? But I just had that much met we really like those we use them to sweeten our banana bread. We make an incredible banana bread is so healthy. We even like the children make their own in the morning for breakfast, and it doesn't have any added sugar in it. It's just the bananas that sweetness. It's plenty sweet. It's delicious, and we don't have that crash and burn afterwards. We use it for other things like methods and things like that. So think about fresh and frozen fruits and how you can add those.
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They're also jarred options to we commonly will use a whole fruit jam or it's, I guess they call it a fruit spread. Our favorite one is crofters. Just fruit spread.
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I love that one. We
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use that to make peaches and cream oats.
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Yeah, I love those growing up you know you have these certain memories attached to certain foods and I loved when my mom would just buy that she comes into the store and we'd empty I open up the grocery bag and we take it out and I'd look in there and there was peaches and cream packets. They were quick they were easy. They were delicious. And now I make the same thing and it's just as quick and easy and delicious.
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High mix strawberries and cream with the strawberries crofters, just fruit spread. It's amazing and it tastes way better than the other one. It's no harder to make. It's just as quick and We get our sweet things that way.
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It's wonderful. The other thing is, you can think of dried fruits, you know a lot of people there go to his dates here, and we even use it in plant milks, we have an episode on plant milks, go back and listen to it for just the simplest plant milk formula. It is really delicious.
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But coming back to sweets, you know, milk is naturally it has a little sugar in it. So people come into plant based way of eating, and they start making their plant milks and they think it just is off, it doesn't taste good, or that flat or
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has doesn't have the right flavor.
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And so they have to start buying the sweet ones that have sugar added in the store. And, and they'll think, well, the unsweetened is healthier. Oh, of course it is because the sweet one has sugar added to it. But you can make it with a whole fruit, you can drop a Dane in there. And sometimes if I'm making, you've got to kind of think outside the box and start learning these formulas. And this is one thing we really work with our clients on. Because you think you have to have a recipe for everything. But what if you just have formulas to make things. And one thing this this kind of the way we teach people how to think so if you're making plant milk, and you're going to put that into your oatmeal, you can put normally if you're just making milk for something, you might put a half date or one day just to get that underlying underlying undertone of sweetness, we would say that milk normally has, but if I'm gonna put that milk in my oatmeal, and I don't want to pour a bunch of maple syrup or a bunch of sugar or anything like that in there, but I like it sweet. And I'm not making savory oats, which is also good, by the way. But if I'm making a sweet oatmeal, I'll add extra dates.
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Or if I like raisins in my oatmeal, why can't I just add raisins? Why can I make apricot oatmeal by buying some moist dried apricots and just throw those in with my nut milk when I blend it. I mean, this whole new world starts to explode for you when you can understand it. It's that simple. And I can all of a sudden have things sweeter and I can sweeten my milk instead of putting the sweetener directly in my dish. These kind of formulas are what you need. So just try that. Try that when you're adding making your nut milk and it's it takes you two minutes, literally. And then you go ahead and just throw in some extra fruits in there. You also get the free flavor. So you need to start thinking about what fruit flavor Do you want in your dish like, if you're making oatmeal, and you're making one that's more of a peaches and cream, maybe you sweeten it with apricots and then you don't even have to add the crofters in in the first place.
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I'm going to share with you something right now that I just literally just now thought about what about using figs. use something like a dried fig in your milk to do something like oats, you'd have a thing, note meal, oh,
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I'll put you on writing the recipes. See, but when you learn how to do this, even if you're not a chef, even if you didn't grow up in a restaurant, you all of a sudden you come up with these things like Jared just did. And it'll blow your mind you'll be sitting there going, why didn't I ever think of that before? I'm going to share something with you. And I think it's the next episode actually. And we're going to talk about something that I just learned. And it's because you develop these formulas. And as you make things, your ideas expand, and you realize how many possibilities there are just within quick and simple ways to get good nutrition in your life and still enjoy the flavor she love, including some sweets now and then it's really very nice.
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And I'm going to throw an extra thing in there that I didn't plan on adding here. But we think about sweetening our foods if you have a sweet craving, why don't you just add more of the sweet veggies into your life?
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Sweet potatoes are amazing.
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sweet onions are amazing. Do I think those are the only types of potatoes or onions you should have? No, you need to have a variety. But think about other sweet foods that aren't necessarily just a dessert or just fruits, carrots, those are another great option. There's tons of sweet veggies. And the more you cut out the super sweet things, the less sugar she'll use. I mean, take for
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example, we don't get more sensitive, you taste the naturally present sugars there, right?
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And so you see that when we're making cookies and things right? What I always say to you when I'm making cookies, if I have a recipe that I was just glancing at, or I'm creating a recipe, I might go and look at other cookie recipes that aren't wholesale playing bass and just see you know, what are the basic ingredients that they use and then I'll start creating things in my mind. But I look at it and I'll go Thank you. This is one small batch of cookies cheered seriously cup of sugar. Yeah, a cup, a cup and a half, two cups sometimes of sugar and big sticks of butter. What in the world? It's no wonder many of us are walking around and we can't figure out how to lose weight.
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We can't figure out how to get our energy back. I mean,
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we have these highs, these highs and lows where you you're running that energy rollercoaster Were your sugar levels go up and then an hour later you crash and then you're having to eat a candy bar or whatever. And you're just going up and down.
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That's it. And I was dealing with that, you know, I was just basically on the couch most of the day, because I didn't even have the energy to keep up with my children. And you can hear more about our story in episode number one where I talked about that. But it's just honestly, it really is so simple to do this, you just have to know what to do. And these are the sweeteners that you want to try to use. But again, think about the veggies and things that you can use. And then going back to where we were just then talking about the cookies and things, start looking at recipes that you've cooked in the past or made in the past and start asking yourself, why don't I feel good.
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And honestly, nine times out of 10, it's gonna be a lot of the ingredients that are in the foods that you're buying pre pre prepared. Or if you're like I was in you're trying to cook healthier, and you're still looking for the more natural things and you're using organic and you're using grass fed and you're using no hormone added, you know, we were still very sick, we were dealing with a lot of health issues. So we want you to know that there are ways to do this that are simple, and that really tastes great. So far, we've covered fresh or frozen fruits, yes, whole fruit jam, right like crofters fruit spread, just check those and make sure there's no sugar added because you'll look at a whole fruit spread and turn it over and see that ingredients list and sugar.
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And technically they are using a whole fruit but they may still add some other sweetener on top of it. So you want to look at the ingredient list to make sure it's just the fruit list.
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It's very deceptive, they'll try to make it look really really healthy. It's organic, its whole fruit, you turn it over, this has sugar in it, or this has all these additives. So just the fruit one ingredient. Next, this is something we absolutely love using from time to time and it's date syrup. There's a brand that we like it's called date lady, we'll leave a link for you down below. It's really great to use in certain things when you need a liquid sweetener, but it just has one ingredient. Can you guess what that is?
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dates,
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dates. It's amazing how you can take a date. And you can soak it and you can add it to the liquid, blend it up and you have this date paste. It's simple to make. Again, if you're in a hurry, it's already made for you. There's a company like I said called date lady again, we've got the link down below for you for that. But we really like that just drizzle lightly over certain things. That is another nice way to season your oatmeal. If you're not making your milk and you want to sweeten it, you can add pieces of the fruit but you can also drizzle just a little bit of date syrup over that. Another thing is de sugar, they
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make it as a sugar. So what they'll do is they'll actually dry the fruit and then grind it up into not a powder so much. But it's like a powder granules.
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It's pulverized, it's just pulverized and it so it looks like little grains, but when you eat it is still very fibrous, it's not going to melt quite like a sugar. It can be really good for baking, but it's not something unless you like little chunks of stuff in your coffee that you want to add your coffee. Most people don't like chunky coffee. That's not the best thing for that you could use the date syrup in and it would be really good. Another liquid thing you could do as maybe a blackstrap molasses.
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That's another good idea. If you want to have a liquid now, it's not going to be obviously fruit.
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And do you remember how they make
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what they do is they take the sugarcane and press the liquid out of it, they will then boil that taking sugar out of and that's how they get the actual white table sugar that we have. And then from that you didn't get cane syrup, but they'll boil it again and then get molasses and then boil it a third time and get blackstrap molasses. The benefit is that you get a concentrated source of all the minerals and some of the vitamins and some of the beneficial aspects that are inside the plant. Now it will not have any fiber. So it's not something you want to eat a ton of. But if you need a sweetener that you're going to add to other things, and maybe in smaller amounts to coffee, or tea or some other beverage like that. It makes an excellent replacement because you are getting a very good source of some of those minerals like iron, potassium, magnesium, magnesium is fantastic for your bones. And many people don't realize that they think of just calcium but calcium and magnesium are both needed for that has Selenium source of vitamin B six, so it makes a good replacement. It does have a little bit of a stronger flavors that may not mesh well with everything that you use. It
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may not be exactly what you're looking for flavor wise, but I had no idea you're the blackstrap molasses wealth of information.
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Come up with a few little goodies here.
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But what what we don't want you to do is say ooh blackstrap molasses says iron and calcium caesium, selenium, potassium, and therefore, I'm going to use it for everything to get those minerals that I need. It's so good for me, we're not telling you Hey, this is really, really good for you, we're just telling you, if you really need a liquid sweetener, this could be a good option, I'd still lean towards date, because again, it's the whole this the whole fruit. And so that's gonna be a better option with
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the minerals, those you don't need a lot. One tablespoon would actually give you 40% of the iron that you would need in a day, right? So it's not, you don't need to drink cups and cups of this stuff just a little bit in some of your baked goods or some of your recipes. That's really all you would need.
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But we don't want them to see this as their liquid supplement, right? I gotta have my daily strap blackstrap molasses every day to get that supplement. But
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blackstrap molasses does have less sugar in it because it's a product where they've taken a lot of the sugar outside. A tablespoon of honey has 17 grams of sugar, where's a tablespoon of the blackstrap molasses only has 10 grams. It is lower sugar.
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Okay, well that makes sense. So it's a better option.
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It's a better option if you just have to have a liquid sweetener.
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Now we've talked about a lot of different ways. So use fresh or frozen free cheese dried fruits.
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Use whole fruit jam with no added sugar and other ingredients. Just the one ingredient the fruit use date sugar use. Date lady date, paste, we talked about that.
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What else blackstrap molasses was the last option. Do you see a pattern here? This is whole food apart from the LIVE SHOT molasses our top recommendations are all whole food but it's still they're wonderful. I mean, you start adding some dates, and you get a caramel flavor. That's amazing in your dishes. You can use it for a ton of different options, a ton of different things.
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We have even frozen the dates, take the pit out first.
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But then you can freeze it and it becomes almost like a caramel to it seems to intensify the caramel flavor. So that in and of itself becomes just a nice little treat.
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Yeah, if you take if you're not talking about adding adding it to things you're talking about just getting the day in and freezing it Yeah, freeze it and have it with an apple slice up an apple have one little date and just take little nibbles of that date with your apple. Caramel Apple Apple. Oh, it's totally a caramel apple.
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These are the kind of things I love. Yeah, now won't one right?
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I just thought of another great idea what if you took those cut them up into small pieces and then put them in oats? You'd have caramel, Apple loads, caramel and apple and you're
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pretty sure I know what I'm having for breakfast tomorrow. All right, well, there you have it. If this podcast is making you laugh if it inspires or encourages you, would you take just a few seconds to leave a review in iTunes. We know it sounds so simple, but it makes such a big difference because it helps more people to hear about us. And reading it will really really brighten our day. Until next time, we hope you have an awesome day and we'll talk to you very soon.
