It’s people like you (if you are reading this) who inspire me to strive for eating the best I can throughout the year, whether it’s a holiday or not. People like us are not necessarily healthy nuts, we just want to eat in the healthiest and most successful way, without having to be perfect or sacrifice great taste.

Well, there is no other holiday that currently supports you in healthy eating like Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving is already the most nutrient-rich holiday there is, with all the vegetables and fruits and the down-to-earth feeling you get on Thanksgiving day… where it’s all about being truly grateful for all that we have in our lives. After all, we are the luckiest people who have ever been born to date, throughout all of history, who have access to so many technologies and healthy food, sanitation and for the most part freedom from fears associated with mere survival. It’s an amazing time to be alive, particularly if you don’t get caught up with a lot of modern pitfalls.

One such pitfall, as you know, is eating nutrient-poor food, especially when it’s so simple to make the switch to nutrient-rich and get all the benefits of healthy eating, without having to be perfect or sacrifice great taste. This is a far cry from what healthy eating used to be. 

Well, Thanksgiving is a holiday already rich with nutrient-rich foods; but did you know you could actually go through this holiday and eat up to 90% or more plant nutrient rich foods, in the greatest tasting ways and wake up the next day feeling great without the ensuing cold that will befell so many people because they basically ate a heart attack on a plate and all the junk food they could to overwhelm their bodies?

In the past, Thanksgiving has been some sort of license, not only to overeat, but to also overwhelm your body with nutrient-poor foods too, like cake and pie etc, as if it is OK, just because it’s a holiday. I mean, you can eat whatever you want, but you know you can’t eat whatever, whenever and get the results you want. So if you want to have a great Thanksgiving, which may include eating more than you usually do (after all it is a feast), and feel good afterwards, then make this a nutrient-rich Thanksgiving!

Instead of eating meals heavy with calorie-rich, nutrient-poor animal products and ultra refined food stuffs, eat smaller amounts of Turkey and other animal products and discover the dozens, actually unlimited number of ways to eat plant based, nutrient rich menus.

Here’s are two nutrient-rich recipes for Thanksgiving

Porcini Mushroom Gravy.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup dried porcini mushrooms
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup mushrooms sliced (your choice)
• 3 tablespoons whole wheat flour (get 365 from whole foods)
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 1 tablespoon Bragg Liguid Aminos
• 1 Tablespoon Dr.Fuhrman’s Vegizest
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 1/8 teaspoon dried sage
• 1/8 teaspoon black pepper.

Cauliflower with an Attitude (the healthiest mash potato like dish you will ever eat!)

Ingredients:

• 6 Cups cauliflower florets, fresh or frozen
• 6 cloves garlic, roasted
• 10 ounces fresh spinach
• 1/2 cup raw cashew butter (soy, hemp, or almond milk if needed to thin)
• 2 tablespoons Dr. Fuhrman’s VegiZest
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg.

* Keep in mind the nutrient density of cauliflower is stratospherically higher than white potatoes or even sweet potatoes for that matter. It is a cruciferous vegetable with incredible anti-cancer properties according to Dr. Fuhrman. So why not explore a great-tasting mashed potatoes-like dish that provides incredible health benefits at the same time? Enjoy.

Some Nutrient-Rich Holiday Tips

1) Instead of ice cream, eat vice cream – real food ice creams that are made from cashews, water, maple syrup and vanilla, for example. 

2) Rather than seasoning the sweet potatoes with butter or margarine, add orange, pineapple, apples, pecans, cinnamon, nutmeg, date sugar, maple syrup, lemon, and/or lime, to add even more flavor.

3) Enjoy freshly-baked bread by itself – there is no need to spread on the artery-clogging butter when whole grain breads and healthy spreads are all around us. You can use raw nut butters, apple butter spreads and others.

If you choose to leave some of your old food favorites as is, eating smaller portions will likely not happen. So, make the majority of your meals with Nutrient-Rich Recipes, and you won’t have to eat as much to get full. You’ll get fulfilled faster eating nutrient-rich foods when hunger shuts off. You also won’t have to deprive yourself of the great tasting foods that are important to you and the holiday spirit as you make nutrient-rich versions.

Don’t worry, during this holiday you will likely overeat and gain a few pounds no matter what you eat because everything centers on food. Bu,t go through the holidays eating nutrient-rich, and you’ll come through in January feeling like a champ. 

You can then lose weight the Nutrient-Rich Way, without the addictive withdrawal people suffer from that prevents them from eating healthy, with simple adjustments, and there is no dieting required!

Achieving a slimmer healtheir body in after the holidays will be allot easier when you have nutrient-rich holidays. You don’t have to be perfect and you never have to sacrifice great tasting foods.

Make only one commitment his holiday season, which kicks off with Thanksgiving. Raise your standard and eat up to 90% or more plant based nutrient-rich foods, not the nutrient poor foods so many of us are used to, that wreak havoc on your body. 

Start the New Year with the confidence and knowing you celebrated well.

The other thing is, besides avoiding toxicity, which is important, we have to avoid excess in toxicity.  But besides that, we have to make sure that we have no deficiencies as well. 

Another thing that makes my recommendations different from, let’s say, the calorie restriction people – people who believe that calorie restriction is their means to live a long time, which it is; is that while calorie restriction in an environment of comprehensive nutritional adequacy is very important, it's not the whole thing either.   There are some important things we learned from this body of knowledge we call calorie restriction – but while that knowledge is important it is not everything. With calorie restriction diets, deficiencies can develop in later years, and those deficiencies could be a very bad thing. 

In today’s climate, for example, we’re living in northern climates.  We live indoors and we could develop deficiencies in vitamin D and a deficiency of any of the 40 known vitamins and minerals can cause problems. 

Other perspectives that form this body of knowledge we call dietary or "Nutritional Excellence"

We learn a lot from the body of knowledge that recognizes that raw food is rich in nutrients and adds a lot of fibers and natural enzymes that haven’t been destroyed by cooking and that it prevents the formation of acrylamides and toxic compounds which are not helpful in many diets.  We can learn a lot from eating a lot of raw foods and yet some of the concepts people advocate about raw food diets are false.  There are lot of myths and falsities that are promulgated in the raw food movement as well, such as raw foods supply digestive enzymes that aid in the food digestion of what we’re eating.  If we don’t eat those enzymes, our pancreas overworks producing enzymes and that ages us and enlarges the pancreas.  Just a whole bunch of nonsense in that movement that’s untrue but there are still a lot of good things too that we can learn from that. 

The same thing from natural hygiene. There are many things to be learned from that body of knowledge and historical interest is a very important foundation of good nutrition of natural foods and getting the full symphony of nutrients that can’t be duplicated in the laboratory and a lot of important things.  But that body of knowledge is not sufficient to today’s society to guarantee most people live to be 100 especially later on in life when our digestive absorption goes down and certain deficiencies can develop.  Each individual’s character and genetic variability is not taken into account to devise an optimal lifestyle for them.  So clearly, we have to be discerning about various bodies of knowledge giving advice, including the vegetarian or vegan movement, which had a lot of great stuff in it, but that alone, of course, can get us in trouble.

Now, even the Atkins camp gave us a lot and contributed a lot of good things to society, good ideas for people to live a long time because they talked to people how unsafe it was to eat refined sugar and white flour, and the idea that just because something is low in fat, it’s okay, that it’s good for us.  There’s a lot of publicity put out by those high protein camps to make people understand, that just because it’s low in fat, it doesn’t mean it’s good for you.  There’s still a lot of people who believe today, that just because you cut back on fat, you’re supposed to achieve good health and clearly, that’s nonsense and cutting back on fat is not the main criteria which enables a person to live long.  And there’s a lot of people, even the vegetarian movement, who still think that cutting back on fat is an important factor to make us live longer. 

So the other thing we’re talking about is the fact that we have to monitor our deficiencies as we get older.

A whole bunch of famous people, very well known people in the health food and natural food movement died young because they, let’s say, became B12 deficient or where they were found to be deficient in essential fatty acids or they had an increased genetic need for taurine or carnitine or they were low in vitamin D.  I see this all the time.  I see people that are healthy and they get some problem in later life.  And even though they lived a real healthy life, they didn’t develop heart disease or cancer, they start to deteriorate and age fast and develop later life problems. The benefits of a dramatic reductions against heart disease and blood pressure when they were young ends later in life when they begin to fade away as deficiencies express themselves.

So monitoring blood tests or taking supplements to assure no deficiencies develop because we’re all a little bit different and we all maybe have a little bit of different needs for vitamin D.  We may have a little different needs of B12.  Maybe some people need more DHA.  Maybe some people need more taurine on a diet style low in animal products or more carnitine.  Maybe some people need an extra selenium or zinc, and one people may need more iodine than others. 

So it’s just important to perhaps supplement an optimal diet to assure that deficiencies don’t develop or to take blood test to make sure that whatever the levels that they’re supposed to have, you have those optimal levels to assure nothing develops later in life that could be the result of deficiencies because I see this all the time with people.

So clearly, we talked about not having deficiencies.  You know, clearly a feature of living a long time is that diet does not have to be so strict.  The thing is, the most important thing about diet is not making it vegan and having no animal products, it's just not the most important factor.  Nutrient Rich Nutrition or "nutritional excellence" is about much more than that.

> Part 4 Animal Products

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Dr. Fuhrman is a New York Times best-selling author, nutritional researcher and board certified family physician specializing in nutritional medicine.  Learn more by visiting his informative website at DrFuhrman.com.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder of NutrientRich.com a Nutritional Education Trainer, and leading authority on Performance Lifestyle, which teaches people how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and develop Your Lifestyle to better achieve your goals.

One of the most powerful reasons why Nutrient Rich Nutrient Excellence is so effective, is because your body is actually getting the nutrients, specifically the micronutrients it needs to function and perform successfully and if it can function and perform well, it can stay healthy and free of lifestyle-induced diseases.

Nutrition scientists have shown over and over that people who eat more natural plant foods – vegetables, fruits, legumes, etc. – are less likely to be diagnosed with cancer.   But are all vegetables equally protective?  If we wanted to design an anti-cancer diet, we would want to know which foods have the most powerful anti-cancer effects – then we could eat plenty of these foods each day, flooding our bodies with the protective substances contained within them.

So, which foods have the most powerful anti-cancer effects?  Cruciferous vegetables. 

This family of vegetables is named for their flowers, having four equally spaced petals in the shape of a cross, from the Latin word ‘crucifer’ meaning ‘cross-bearer’.  These are the cruciferous vegetables:

•  Arugula
• Bok choy
• Broccoli
• Broccoli rabe
• Broccolini
• Brussels sprouts
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Collards
• Horseradish
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Mache
• Mustard greens
• Radish
• Red cabbage
• Rutabaga
• Turnips
• Turnip greens
• Watercress

 All vegetables contain protective micronutrients and phytochemicals, but cruciferous vegetables are unique – they contain compounds called glucosinolates which are responsible for their pungent or bitter flavors.  When cell walls are broken by blending or chopping, a chemical reaction occurs that converts glucosinolates to isothiocyanates (ITCs) – compounds with proven anti-cancer activities. The many ITCs work synergistically to remove carcinogens, kill cancer cells, and prevent tumors from growing.¹ Some ITC can even help the body excrete estrogen and other hormones, reducing the risk for hormonal cancers.²

Cruciferous vegetables are twice as powerful as other plant foods.  In population studies, a 20% increase in plant food intake generally corresponds to a 20% decrease in cancer rates, but a 20% increase in cruciferous vegetable intake corresponds to a 40% decrease in cancer rates.³

Cruciferous vegetables are not only the most powerful anti-cancer foods in existence, they are also the most nutrient dense of all the vegetables.  Although the National Cancer Institute recommends 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables per day for cancer prevention, but they have not yet established specific recommendations for cruciferous vegetables.  I recommend 6 fresh fruits and 8 total servings of vegetables per day including 2 servings of cruciferous vegetables – one raw and one cooked.  Remember: chopping, chewing, blending, or juicing cruciferous vegetables allows for production of ITCs.  Consuming a large variety of these ITC-rich cruciferous vegetables within an overall nutrient-dense diet can provide us with a profound level of protection against cancer.  

For your next cruciferous vegetable dish, try one of these great recipes! 

Dr. Fuhrman is a New York Times best-selling author, nutritional researcher and board certified family physician specializing in nutritional medicine.  Learn more by visiting his informative website at DrFuhrman.com.

John Allen Mollenhauer is the founder of NutrientRich.com a Nutritional Education Trainer, and leading authority on Performance Lifestyle, which teaches people how to live a healthy lifestyle successfully and develop Your Lifestyle to better achieve your goals.

This coming Sunday, I am leaving for Dr. Fuhrman's 2011 Health Getaway. At least one of my vacations each year is a health getaway of some sort, now usually Dr. Fuhrman's.

There are a few reasons why I getaway this way.

1) I find that once every quarter I need to rejuvenate myself. If I don't, I find myself experiencing personal energy debt which is when you have overspent your vital energy and need to break the pattern of your life and get's lots of sleep, rest, recovery and ultimately rejuvenation so that one becomes renewed. It helps me fully recharge, and renew my outlook and spirit.

2) At least once a year, I enjoy doing this in a combined learning and vacationing environment like Dr. Fuhrman's Health Getaway. It's just the right balance between lectures, exercise, events, and the leisure time I need to to get the benefits I'm really seeking most which is rejuvenation.

One of my primary aims this year is to continue eating when I'm hungry despite the fact that there will be food 3 times per day in amazing abundance. I recently took off a stubborn 20 lbs, just by applying this principle which is only possible when you have a 90% or More Plant Based, Nutrient Rich eating plan.

A little background:

I may be a nutrition education trainer, and lifestyle coach/trainer, but I too have aspects of the lifestyle that I have to work on regularly. In my case, it's eating for the right reasons. When I was first learning Nutrient Rich Healthy Eating, I wanted to try everything. I found it so exciting to experience a new way of eating that I found I was overeating often.

Then when I would face very challenging periods, I would eat incredibly healthy still, but I would eat to cope with stress…not because I was hungry, and so on. You could call this emotional eating.

And to boot, when I am faced with pre-prepared foods in such a healthy environment, historically I would suffer from what I coined as "last supper syndrome". It says, that just because the food is there and I have paid to eat it, that I must eat it. As if there will never be another chance to immerse myself in such healthy eating, or that I'm never going to get the chance to eat again". It is a syndrome and one that I have a fairly good track record in recent times in my life of not falling into. But lord knows, I know I'm still susceptible, like a drunk in a bar, because of all that memory I have despite the fact that I have changed the stories that used to drive me a little crazy, and resolved many of the issues that would give rise to anxiety and stress in my life.

So this year, I am going into what will be an incredible week, knowing that, and very aware of my lifestyle choices so that I come back in optimal healthy and still living at or near my ideal weight. Besides a meal or two, I'm going to leave every meal feeling satisfied but feeling like "I don't even have a stomach". In other words, I will not be overwhelmingly full. If I can feel my stomach, I probably ate too much.

Here are some photo's from last year.

Take a look at the foods and you'll know why this is a challenge for most people, including me!

I'll be posting some video's and pictures throughout the entire experience and I hope to see you there and or next year!

First, on Friday the US Government (I know that can’t possible sound that exciting), is getting rid of the old food pyramid and taking a significant “step” towards Nutrient Rich eating, by addressing the obesity epidemic. This is significant, so it’s worth a blog post. Tomorrow, they are introducing “The Plate”. Read more here.

Second, if you want to discover what healthy eating really looks like and sounds like, on Saturday, you can tune into 3 Steps to Incredible Health with Joel Fuhrman M.D. This is going to be a real momentum builder in this country towards making the switch to nutrient rich healthy eating.

3 STEPS TO INCREDIBLE HEALTH! with Joel Fuhrman, MD is a sixty-minute PBS pledge program that directly addresses the crisis of obesity and chronic disease plaguing America.

Over 65% of Americans are overweight or obese – and that number is growing just like our waistlines!

Dr. Fuhrman will offer a healthy, effective, and scientifically proven plan for shedding weight quickly and reclaiming the vitality and good health we all deserve.
Support Public Television and Dr. Fuhrman.

Click here to see a clip of the upcoming PBS special.

By making a donation during Dr. Fuhrman’s pledge program on PBS, as a gift, you will receive an exclusive Dr. Fuhrman “Incredible Health” combo package – not available anywhere else!* if you are a current member.

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