Newsletter #5: Healthy Super Bowl, save HOURS in the kitchen, and cosmic energy flow

🥑 Good Food - Healthy game-day nutrigenomic snack

The Super Bowl is coming up. And while I have to admit I’m not the biggest football fan, I LOVE healthy snacks with nutrient-rich ingredients that can be eaten during sportsball viewing events.

With that… I’m excited to share: CHEESY CAULIFLOWER TOTS (recipe below), a grain-free whole-food cheesy snack for game day that won’t spike blood sugar and is filled with pro-metabolic nutrients. 

Purple and orange cauliflower can be used the exact same was as regular white cauliflower.

If you follow me on social media, you know I love cauliflower with FERVOR ❤️‍🔥:

• 🍣 I love making cauliflower rice sushi.

• 🥘 I love curried cauliflower rice instead of regular rice as a side to homemade Indian food, or cumin cilantro cauli rice under a taco bowl.

• 🥣 The Cauliflower Rice + Pesto Bowl is my absolute favorite of Daily Harvest’s products.

• 🥦 Gwenyth Paltrow’s dijon roasted cauliflower + chickpeas is a staple in my home.

• 🌪️ I whip cauliflower in my food processor or Vitamix to make a creamy purée to serve under chicken or fish (I’ll add steamed beets to the purée to make it pink or steamed carrots to make it orange!).

• 🥧 I use cauliflower purée instead of mashed potatoes as the topping to this stunning Shepherd's pie-like dish from one of my fave cookbooks, Whole Food Cooking Every Day.

• 🧀 I have an EPIC cauliflower-based “cheese” sauce in my upcoming book, Good Energy. 

• 🍕I love cauliflower crust pizza.

• 🤤 I LIVE for Erewhon’s viral buffalo cauliflower (and my homemade version with roasted cauliflower florets tossed in Primal Kitchen buffalo sauce).

I could go on and on and on. Aside from taste, versatility, and it’s epic place as a low-glycemic grain alternative, the reason I love cauliflower is because it is a nutrigenomic powerhouse 🧬👩‍🔬.

🧬 What is nutrigenomics?

It’s the coolest thing. It is the science of how molecules in the food we eat go into our cells and literally adjust gene expression. It’s one of the topics I studied in college and it’s such a motivating and inspiring topic because when you realize that the 2-3 pounds of food (aka molecular information) we put in our mouth every day can literally change our genetic fate, it is incredibly empowering. Genes are NOT our destiny; our FOOD is. 🍴 

Cauliflower (like all Cruciferous vegetables) contains a chemical called glucoraphanin which is the precursor to one of the most powerful nutrigenomic molecules in the food world: sulforaphane. After digestion, sulforaphane goes into our cells and frees a protein called Nrf2 from its inhibitor, which then allows Nrf2 to act in the nucleus to help express genes that reduce inflammation, protect DNA from damages, slow tumor growth, help neutralize oxidative stress, and even results in reduced skin aging.

The magical Cruciferous vegetable family.

🥦 Here’s the super cool thing about cauliflower:

For the incredible sulforaphane to be generated from glucoraphanin, cauliflower needs to be chopped, chewed, or otherwise damaged, so that glucoraphanin is able to physically “mix” with an enzyme in cauliflower called myrosinase which converts glucoraphanin it to sulforaphane.

This process happens once cauliflower is chopped or cut up

This is why it's best to chop cauliflower and let it sit out and “rest” on the counter for 30-45 minutes before cooking, so that glucoraphanin can bind with myrosinase and convert to sulforaphane. If you chop and cook cauliflower immediately, myrosinase gets inactivated by heat and less sulforaphane gets generated. You want to give time for sulforaphane to be created, then cook. Food is a POWERFUL tool for creating the positive change we want in our lives, and it works faster when we learn to use it properly.

🗒️ Side note: When I’m reading scientific literature relating to nutrition research, I’m always curious to see whether the authors took into account the proper way to prepare or combine foods to get maximal health benefits. You can imagine a research paper denying a particular health benefit of broccoli or cauliflower, when in fact the study authors may have neglected to let the cauliflower simply sit out to activate sulforaphane prior to participants consuming it. I see oversights like this happen frequently in research literature.

Recipe for Cheesy Cauliflower Tots (adapted from Ambitious Kitchen):

Tot tot tot tot tots. 🥔 Expectation setting: my incredible boyfriend taste-tested and loved the cauli-tots, but warned to not think “tater-tot” when you bite in, as these do have a different texture/taste! 😄 

Ingredients

• 4 cups organic cauliflower florets

• 1 large egg

• 1/2 organic onion, grated

• 1/4 cup shredded parmesan

• 1/4 cup shredded grass-fed organic cheddar cheese

• 1/4 cup blanched organic almond flour

• 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast 

• 2 tablespoons chopped organic chives

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

• Sugar-free organic ketchup (I use Primal Kitchens)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with a silicone baking mat (I love this one).

2. Bring an inch of water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Place the cauliflower in a steamer basket set over the boiling water. Cover and steam the florets for 5 minutes, until they’re easily pierced with a fork.

3. Place the steamed cauliflower florets in a large food processor and pulse a few times until the cauliflower is the consistency of a coarse meal.

4. Transfer to a cheesecloth bag (I use the bag I make nut milk in and it worked great, find here). In the cheesecloth or nut milk bag, squeeze out as much liquid from the cauliflower as you can over the sink or in a bowl.

5. Transfer the squeezed cauliflower meal to a large bowl.

6. Add the egg, grated onion, chives, parmesan and cheddar cheeses, nutritional yeast, almond flour, salt, and pepper to the bowl with the cauliflower. Use a rubber spatula to mix everything together. Allow the mixture to rest for 5 minutes so it can come together.

7. Use your hands to form 34-ish small “tater tots” shaped figures, about 1 inch long by ½ inch wide, placing them on a baking sheet about 1 inch apart. Spray with avocado oil or olive oil if you have it (I didn’t do this and it was just fine). 

8. Bake for about 20 minutes, until golden brown. Flip the tots and continue to cook for another 10 minutes, until they are browned all over.

9. Serve with sugar-free organic ketchup. (I use Primal Kitchens)

Pro-tip: I didn’t have almond flour on hand so I just blended organic sprouted unroasted almonds in the Vitamix and it turned to almond flour!

More recipes: I thought this article about healthy Super Bowl snacks had some delicious ideas. Remember, swap out all refined grains and industrial seed oils in the traditional chips/crackers/bread and instead use Flax Crackers, Ella’s Flats, grain-free bread like Base Camp, or Siete Chips (not as healthy as seed crackers, but still better than regular tortilla chips), and you’ll have a much healthier game day!

Next week’s “Good Food” is going to be Valentine’s day themed… healthy pink foods galore. Yay! 💘💘💘 

🔄 Good swap - Don’t waste time chopping 🔪 

I hope this swap changes your life in the same way it has mine… It’s swapping CHOPPING for using a food processor… Stay with me! 😄 

This will save hours of your life.

I think that for many of us, a barrier to eating whole, unprocessed foods is the lengthy prep work. Right? But by outsourcing your chopping to a speedy device, it mitigates this pain point. Imagine mincing 10 cloves of garlic in literally 1 second. Imagine shredding an entire bunch of kale for a salad in 3 seconds. Glorious!

A large and small food processor is my secret weapon for saving time in the kitchen, and is one of the answers to a question I get frequently, which is: “How do you find the time to cook?!”

This swap not only saves time but also unlocks biochemical health benefits of our foods. 

Like we talked about with cauliflower, some foods’ health benefits get “activated” when they are chopped or crushed. Other than cauliflower, another one of those is garlic. If I’m mincing garlic by hand, it takes a long time, so I don’t eat a lot of it, despite it having incredible health properties. But with a food processor, I can mince as many cloves as I want in just a second, so I end up eating tons more.

Before I start cooking, I’ll throw peeled garlic cloves into the food processor so that it has time to “sit” and activate its health-promoting properties, similar to cauliflower. Sometimes, if I’m extra tight on time, I’ll get the pre-peeled bag of organic garlic from Whole Foods.

Here’s the science of garlic 👩‍🔬🧄 

Allicin, a bioactive compound responsible for many of garlic's health benefits, is formed through a chemical reaction that occurs when garlic is crushed, chopped, or otherwise damaged.

Garlic contains a compound called alliin and an enzyme called alliinase, and when the garlic is cut or crushed, the alliin and alliinase come into contact and alliinase catalyzes the conversion of alliin into allicin through a process known as the “thioldisulfide exchange reaction.” This reaction involves the formation of a reactive intermediate that quickly rearranges to produce allicin, which is responsible for garlic's characteristic odor and many of its medicinal properties, including its potent antimicrobial and cardiovascular benefits. 

Garlic’s compound allicin has been shown to be a POWERFUL antimicrobial agent (so much so that allicin is used in the hospital setting for multidrug-resistant pneumonia, drug-resistant diabetic wounds, and fungal and parasitic infections). But like cauliflower and sulforaphane, to get the benefit you need to let garlic sit out for a little while, and ideally cook garlic in lower heat (or eat raw!).

In this picture, the green blob is the protein enzyme alliinase that changes the molecule alliin into a reactive intermediate that then converts to bioactive allicin.

📌 Take-home point: Chop lots of garlic in a mini-food processor, let it sit out for a half hour so that allicin is created, and then use it in your cooking.

My favorite mini-food processor, which I love gifting to friends, is this one. Here’s how I use it 👇️ 

1. 🧄 Garlic: To chop many cloves of garlic instantly (just throw ‘em in and pulse it a few times)

2. 🥜 Nuts: Chopping nuts and seeds to top salads or yogurt with (as an amazing salad-booster, and a great alternative to grain-based croutons, I love pulsing a handful of nuts and seeds – like almonds and hemp seeds – with 1 pitted date and a tiny pinch of flake salt in the food processor. It turns into a coarse crumble that I mix in with a salad after I put the dressing on, and gives every salad an amazing extra kick).

3. 💛 Mincing ginger!

4. 🥗 To mix-up salad dressings or sauces that have a paste-y ingredients like miso or almond butter.

My favorite large food processor, which I use almost every day, is this one. Here’s how I use it 👇️

1. 🥦 Broccoli rice: Instead of throwing away broccoli stems, I roughly cut them into 3-ish inch pieces and pulse them into broccoli rice which can be used as a rice alternative, baked into a frittata, or as a base to the amazing grain-free broccoli-chive biscuits in my upcoming book.

2. 🍚 Cauliflower rice: Pulsing cauliflower florets into cauliflower rice, similar to broccoli rice (using Cuisinart main chopping blade).

3. 🥗 Shaved Brussel sprouts or kale: Throw whole Brussel sprouts through the Cuisinart disc blade for instantly shredded sprouts or kale that can be used raw in a salad, mixed into a sauté, or roasted with a spray of olive oil. 

4. 🥕 Grated carrots and other veggies: Using the Cuisinart grating disc blade, you can grate almost any vegetable super quickly. 

5. 🥣 Hummus/bean dips: Making hummus out of any canned beans with a bit of lemon juice, salt, cumin, olive oil, and tahini. Can throw roasted carrots, beets, or cauliflower in for extra nutrients and color.

6. 🫕 Pureed vegetable dips: Pureeing roasted carrots with spices, harissa, soaked cashews, and olive oil to make an amazing dip.

🧠 Good thought - Hilma af Klint & how mitochondrial health lets cosmic energy flow through us

My incredible, creative boyfriend recently introduced me to the world of abstract impressionist artist Hilma af Klint last week, and my life will never be the same. 🎨 

Born in Sweden in 1862, Klint rarely publicly showed her work during her lifetime and told her family to keep her work hidden for 20 years after her death… because the spirit world communicated to her that the world was not yet ready for her art ✨👀.

When her art was finally revealed to the world just about 40 years ago (in 1986), art history had to be totally rewritten, because her work actually preceded all of the main names in abstract impressionism - like Kandinsky and Mondrian - by many years.

3 works by Hilma af Klint

Klint was a very mystical person who took part in spiritual séances and studied Theosophy and believed the spiritual world was directly guiding her work.

“The pictures were painted directly through me… and with great force.” - Hilma af Klint

She depicted incredible things ahead of her time that are evocative of double helices, atomic orbitals, mycelium networks, World War II, light acting as a particle and a wave, multidimensional universes, and more…

In the 2 documentaries of her work and life that my boyfriend and I watched this weekend (here is a short, free one, and here is a longer paid version), it struck me how some of her quotes about creativity are relevant to a conversation about metabolism, as both prolific creativity and healthy metabolism represent the unbridled flow of energy through our human form.

Klint says about her work:

“I am a vessel through which the universe expresses itself.”

I’m obsessed.

Other prolific creators echo similar sentiments:

• Rick Rubin in the Creative Act says: “The world pulses with productive energy, and everything that exists on this planet is driven by that energy. Every manifestation of this unfolding is doing its own work on behalf of the universe, each in its own way, true to its own creative impulse.”

• In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says: “The truth is, I believe that creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins…. That ideas are alive, that ideas do seek the most available human collaborator, that ideas do have a conscious will, that ideas do move from soul to soul, that ideas will always try to seek the swiftest and most efficient conduit to the earth.”

A similar idea from these artists and writers (and so many more) is that art is created in our physical world by us allowing the “universe” to flow through us freely. It’s when we block that flow that problems - and stagnation - arise.

And this is exactly the case with metabolism.

Metabolism is so awe-inspiring to me because - like creativity - it is the ultimate flow of cosmic energy through us… ☀️ 

It is the flow of light energy from the sun, traveling 92 million miles through space, transformed through the chloroplasts of plants ☘️ into chemical bonds of carbon-based molecules like glucose, eaten and absorbed into our bodies through digestion 👅 , and then alchemized by the mitochondria in our cells into cellular energy that powers our consciousness, our thoughts, our relationships, and our ability to move and transform more energy in the world! 🧠 🤯 

Think about how cool this is: The sun’s energy is stored in the bonds of glucose, which we transform into energy we use to fuel our lives.

When we hurt our mitochondria and our metabolic processes through our choices, we HURT the flow of that energy through us.

Think about insulin resistance - this represents the body literally blocking (at the level of the cell membrane and mitochondria) the free flow of energy (glucose) transformation through us to liberate the sun’s energy to fuel our lives.

With metabolic dysfunction, we are stunting the ability of our bodies to be miraculous transformers of cosmic energy. We also minimize our ability to literally emit light from within (biophotons!). We don’t want to block that magic! 🪄 

Every time we take steps to protect our mitochondrial function –  through regular movement, through good sleep, by avoiding environmental toxins and ultra-processed foods, by supporting the microbiome with fiber and colorful plant polyphenols – we are creating a situation in which we can better enable the miraculous flow of energy through us without a block.

Sending you good energy! 💓 

Casey

The Tree of Knowledge

👀 In Case You Missed It

My brother (and co-author) Calley Means spoke about metabolic dysfunction and our book, Good Energy, in a powerful 45-minute news segment that aired on Friday (and was watched by over 4 million people!). Presidential candidate RFK Jr. watched the segment and spoke about it (and my brother) at length later in the weekend. It is incredible to see metabolic health being talked about on the campaign trail - This is the bipartisan issue of our time that affects everyone. If you haven’t preordered Good Energy, you can here. 

An excerpt from Good Energy was posted in the Commune newsletter and blog, one of my favorite weekly reads written by my dear friend, Jeff Krasno. My upcoming course on metabolic health is airing on the Commune platform in mid-March. It is a masterclass in metabolism. You can sign up for updates here: www.onecommune.com/casey

Forward to a friend: If you enjoyed this issue, please forward to a friend! They can sign up for the newsletter here.

latest articles