Hello Health Champions. What are the top 10 healthiest vegetables that you can eat? Well, number 10 on the list is garlic.
Garlic has been used for thousands of years because of its very broad medicinal properties and to this day a lot of people will eat extra garlic whenever they need an immune boost and I certainly eat a lot of garlic not necessarily for those reasons but I just love garlic and there's a compound in garlic called allicin that gives garlic its characteristics the smell and the taste but also a lot of its health benefits but allicin is only one of 33 sulfur containing compounds in garlic and a lot of plant food a lot of vegetables that are known to give health benefits and people reverse diseases like multiple sclerosis that's because they choose vegetables that are very often high in these sulfur compounds and one more compound is called cysteine and if you've heard of n acetyl cysteine or NAC which is a very popular supplement it is because this cysteine gets converted into glutathione which is the body's number one antioxidant and one of the main ways to detoxify and clean the body. Of course garlic also has a bunch of vitamins and minerals but again you're not going to eat pounds worth of the stuff so you're probably not going to rely on garlic for that but like I mentioned the biggest reason I eat it is that it's delicious I put garlic in just about everything and you can eat it raw or cooked. Now a lot of people will prefer it cooked because they can eat more and it's a little milder but the allicin is mostly active when the garlic is fresh and undisturbed and raw so it might be a good idea to eat some raw and some cooked.
And then of course there are some side effects to garlic namely body odor but it also has been known to keep away vampires and mosquitoes. Number nine is onion which is in the same family as garlic they contain sulfur, cysteine that gets converted to glutathione. They both have lots of vitamins and minerals and that's one of the main reasons we want to eat plenty of vegetables is vitamins and minerals especially minerals we get primarily from large amounts of vegetables.
Onion has about seven and a half grams of carbohydrate, net carbs per hundred, so that's the highest amount of carbs of any vegetable I've included on the top ten and why do we wanna limit carbohydrates? It depends on how sensitive you are how carbohydrate sensitive most people today especially if you're overweight have a carbohydrate intolerance they have poor metabolic health they've overdone carbohydrates so their bodies don't handle them anymore and the solution to a lot of people's problem is a low-carb diet and therefore you want to limit the amount so seven and a half is sort of borderline you can still have some I would say you can certainly have like 100 grams which would be like your average medium onion in a day but you don't want to go unlimited you want to be aware of that. Another thing to keep in mind with both onion and garlic is if you have SIBO which stands for small intestine bacterial overgrowth and a lot of people are getting more and more of that it's when the bacteria grow in the wrong place you're supposed to have them in the large intestine not the small intestine and if you have them in the small intestine and you feed them the wrong things, and we'll talk about fodmap in a second, then you get lots of gas lots of bloating and lots of digestive problems so fodmap stands for fructooligosaccharides, disaccharides monosaccharides and polyols.
So they're different forms of carbohydrates like short to medium sized carbohydrates and polyols which are sugar alcohols and onion and garlic has a lot of fructooligosaccharides and the body doesn't absorb those very much and if you don't absorb them then they go down and they become food for the bacteria in the small intestine so if you think that might be an issue read up a little bit on SIBO and you can look for FODMAP and they list out the things that have high amounts of these carbohydrates that you don't do so well with. If that is a problem then you can also soak the garlic and the onions and that's going to help pull out some of these fructooligosaccharides. Now why did I pick these specific vegetables that we're going to talk about today well because they're low in carbs and sugar you get tons and tons of nutrients but you don't want to load up on sugar in order to get those nutrients and the ones we're looking for specifically is potassium and magnesium there's lots and lots of other micronutrients and the other big one is going to be sodium which we get from adding salt to our food.
We also want to consider serving size because I love parsley for example but there's only so much parsley you can eat I make a salad called Tabouleh and when I make that for two people I use a little over an ounce about 35 grams of parsley so it's like 17 grams per person and it gives us some good nutrients I love the flavor that's why I eat it but you can't eat as much parsley as you could eat cauliflower or broccoli for example so just keep the serving size in mind as well most of the vegetables I'm talking about are going to be liver cleansing for two reasons either they contain these organo-sulfur compounds that help the body detox and make glutathione or they're part of the cruciferous family and that means they contain a lot of phytonutrients and certain chemicals that assist the liver in detoxifying and getting junk out of the body. Number eight is brussels sprouts and they are in the cruciferous family so they'll help the liver they contain one more specific compound that they're known for called Kaempferol that has been studied in detail and known to be an antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and even have some positive impact on getting rid of cancer. Number seven is tomatoes I love tomatoes you can cook with them you can eat them raw you can eat them as a snack you can slice them on things they contain vitamins minerals and a couple of antioxidants called lycopene and lutein that have been very studied in terms of helping health and reversing disease and all that but I'll come back to this I don't want to focus too much on all these specific chemicals it's great that they researches and figure it out but don't complicate things too much.
Get the broad picture know what good vegetables are and then just eat a variety of those. But there's a few more reasons I picked these particular ones I looked at the availability can you buy them in most places are they affordable can you get them around the year and so forth also I included my taste preference what do I personally like and what do I know what to do with them which ones do I know how to cook but also something called the dirty dozen and the clean 15. So from time to time they measure the dirty dozen and the clean 15 which means they measure how much chemicals, how much pesticides they find on the finished produce.
Now here's one of my pet peeve terms organic versus conventional because that makes it sound like there's been a conventional way of doing this for the longest time this is how we do things and then it makes it sound like organic is the exception. Well, that's not how it works. Organic is how the planet has been for as long as it's been around we haven't added pesticides and poison whereas conventional is what we've done for a few decades by spraying poison on the food so when I see this in a store organic versus conventional I'm thinking they should call it conventional and poison that's more true to what's actually going on but anyway, the clean 15 are the ones that they find the least pesticides on and that would be avocado, onion, eggplant, and asparagus.
So that's good to know that if it's a money matter if you're holding back on vegetables because you feel like organic is too much money, then these would be the perfect ones that you can buy that don't necessarily have to be organic. Also cabbage cauliflower broccoli and mushrooms they barely found any or very little pesticides compared to the dirty dozen and those included spinach, kale, tomatoes, celery and potatoes so to the extent that you eat these you want to be really sure this is where it's worth spending a little extra money on getting the organic. Number six is cabbage and it's so useful in many ways and what I like is it's cheap cheap cheap.
I don't know any food that is really cheaper that for a few cents you can get yourself a meal basically. It is also part of the cruciferous family so it does help the liver clean things out it's full of vitamins and minerals and especially vitamin C it's very very high so when people think that they have to eat fruit and oranges and drink orange juice in the morning to get their vitamin C you're much better off having some cabbage. And also there's so many ways of using cabbage you can eat it raw you can eat it cooked you can make coleslaw and of course when you do the coleslaw you don't want to add a bunch of sugar.
There's some super easy recipes you just drizzle a tiny bit of olive oil a little bit of vinegar salt pepper and some herbs like basil and you got yourself a fantastic salad. And of course when we think about cabbage and other vegetables as well we want to think about the biome the microflora the collection of 40 trillion life forms in your gut that help keep you healthy and part of what feeds them is fiber so when you eat things that have carbohydrate you subtract the fiber because you can't digest it. The fiber continues down to feed your bacteria and it's not an absolute rule but pretty much the fiber feeds the bacteria that you want to keep in there and the sugar feeds the bacteria that you don't want so when you eat a lot of sugar and not so much fiber that's one of the main things that create dysbiosis or an imbalance in your flora and now if you ferment these vegetables not only do they provide the fiber but they also come pre-loaded with some bacteria some probiotics if you will and of course cabbage is one of the most popular things to ferment and turn into sauerkraut but there's all kinds of different vegetables that you can ferment and basically the more of the fermented you eat the better you're going to be able to support that biome.
Now one of the most common questions I get are about probiotics do I need probiotics and a lot of people need them but I'm still not a huge fan of the way they're being used I use a lot of probiotics in my office but here's how we need to think about them. Probiotics are seeds when you buy that little capsule with 20 billion units then those are seeds but the seeds need a place to grow if you put flower seeds into the best soil it's going to make flowers. If you throw those flower seeds on the concrete in the parking lot there's not going to be much growth and that's how it is with probiotics that a lot of people's gastrointestinal tracts are so messed up there's nothing that can grow there and that's the problem they have in the first place that's the reason they have a problem in the first place is that there is imbalance and if you throw seeds into that it's not going to do much so we need to look at the bigger picture and we need to eat whole food we need to cut out the sugar increase fiber eat fermented food and now you're well on your way to creating some healthy soil and now those probiotics can be used and now they're going to actually work.
Number five is bell pepper and again lots of vitamin C much better than orange juice and a lot less sugar it has about three to four percent of net carbs so you can eat plenty of bell pepper and what I like is that you can eat it raw or cooked it's one of my favorite things eat it probably every day you can put it in salads you can stir fry it with onion for fajitas and you could even eat it as a snack you could have a little piece of ham or a chicken wing or a hard-boiled egg and and have a little bit of bell pepper along with it. Number four is cauliflower and has tons of vitamins and minerals lots of potassium it is part of the cruciferous group it's going to help the liver and it only has about three percent net carbs and this is one of the reasons it's become so popular with the low-carb community that it has tons of potassium but so low in carbs and you can turn it into sort of mashed cauliflower as a substitute for potatoes riced cauliflower you can steam it you can bake it in the oven and it's easy to eat a good bit you could easily eat three to four hundred grams and there you probably get almost half of the potassium that you need in a day. But I have to mention also one of my pet peeves it is when they say made with so cauliflower has become so popular now with low carb and low carb is just flooding the world with all these recipes and products that are supposedly keto so then now they start to throw cauliflower and it says made with cauliflower and somebody figured out how to make a cauliflower pizza bottom so sure enough all these manufacturers start making pizza crusts with cauliflower and it says made with cauliflower but what they don't tell people is 90% of it is still something else and most of it is some other form of starch.
So if you look for these things and you read the fine print you see these pizza crusts that says cauliflower pizza crust and it has just as much carbs as the regular ones made with wheat flour. So read the fine print just because it says made with something good with cauliflower without gluten that does not make it a health food automatically. Now a list of 10 vegetables is very short compared to all the good stuff that's out there so I want to include a few honorable mentions here that would be mushrooms, green beans, celery, asparagus, parsley and eggplant.
And all of these I also eat on a regular basis these are some of my favorites then there's some that for various reasons I don't really eat much but I know that they're excellent food zucchini radishes spinach kale swiss chard and collard greens let me mention a few things on the color coding the green the mushrooms and asparagus those were on the clean 15 list that means they are least likely to have any pesticides on them whereas the ones in red celery spinach and kale were on the dirty dozen. That means they're very likely to have pesticides so if you get these in red celery spinach and kale make sure that you buy the organic variety. The ones in white were the ones that there was no information on this latest list because they don't measure all the plants every time and also when I get eggplant I make sure it's organic because almost all of the eggplant out there is genetically modified and the same goes for zucchini.
And now we're in the medal rounds. Number three is broccoli it has tons of nutrients it is cruciferous it's in that family it has only four percent net carbohydrate and I love it because it's so easy it's so tasty you steam it you grill it one of my pet peeves though is if you go and you look up the benefits of broccoli or the benefits of lots and lots of these different plant foods is that they're presented wrong they're saying that you can use it to treat things now treat is a medical word let's say you can treat cancer. In the medical world they treat things by giving medication and what that does is it suppresses and interferes.
It acts by stopping physiology it works by getting in the way of what the body is trying to do. That's not what food does food does not treat conditions food does not treat symptoms or disease. Food supports the body by providing what it needs so when they say it treats cancer it treats osteoporosis it treats diabetes it treats aging that is not what it does.
The proper food provides something that the body needs and when the body can return to balance then all of these things get better that's how it works. So we're getting the wrong idea and when we pinpoint and we micro analyze and take things apart this whole food business just becomes too confusing. It is all about health health is when everything works when the body is allowed to return to balance.
When it has what it needs when we give it the things it has to have that moves us toward health when we provide too much of the things that interfere or an imbalance of things that moves us away from health, all right? But we're not treating anything with food that's the wrong way of seeing and it gets us confused and on the wrong track. Number two is lettuce and there's tons of different kinds of lettuce we have all these different ones I don't even know what they're called but the ones I use on a regular basis are romaine and also some green leaf and some red leaf and also what they sell as a spring mix I love all of them they have plenty of nutrients and fiber you can fill up you can make a huge bowl that is very filling but it doesn't have a lot of carbs or a lot of calories it's a great filler I love salads I have salads several times a week you can use it as a snack you can roll up little slices of cheese and ham in it you can also use it for bundles burgers that's what I do a lot I just put a layer of lettuce on the plate I put my burgers on and I load them the way that I would any other hamburger with lots of good stuff but of course don't have the bread.
And number one on the list is avocado maybe the most perfect plant creation ever. It has two percent net carbs so even though it lists nine percent carbohydrate seven percent out of that is fiber so most of it you don't digest and it's a really healthy fiber that goes on to feed the good gut bacteria. It has tons of potassium 500 milligrams per 100 grams so if you eat two or three of these you get most of the potassium that you need in a day and avocado is even filling it may be the only non-starchy water-rich plant food that is filling because it also comes with a lot of healthy fats and there's so many ways to use it you could have it virtually every meal I slice avocado on top of omelets I slice it and put it on top of a chili you can take out the seed or the pit you just drizzle a little dressing in there and you can scoop it out and eat it the way it is.
I make guacamole several times a week as a side dish with whatever else we're eating so there's so many ways it's so versatile. And as if that wasn't enough it is also the number one on the cleanest of the clean 15. so if you feel like avocados are a little expensive and you restrict yourself then know that that's one of the plants you probably don't need to get organic.
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