Yellow and Green Foods: Digestion, Detox, and Heart Health

It's like an internal sunscreen, right, especially if you have fair skin and you know you put on a lot of sunscreen, which a lot of sunscreens are very toxic.

What's really important is to fortify the skin from within with these plant foods. Now, you may still need sunscreen obviously, but at least do your part to be eating these plant foods to protect your skin from oxidative damage from the ultraviolet light.

And it doesn't matter your skin color, but some people are a little bit more prone and a little bit more sensitive to those effects, of course.

And the skin might turn a little bit of a different tinge like I talked about with my mother.

But for the most part, in general, that's not a toxic condition that the body will eventually break that down.

But there is a medical condition where some people cannot break down beta keratin and it starts to accumulate, but that's that's more rare.

All right, I'm going to speed it up a little bit. I know Michael's probably waiting to ask me some questions and we've got 30 more minutes. So I want to get through the rest of the colors.

Yellow, yellow is the gut color. I see it as part of the digestive fire. It's like the fire element.

And so when I think of yellow foods, I think of things like bio flavonoids, I think of detoxification with the bile with the stomach acid.

I think about foods that are rich in fiber to help with lysemic impact, right, because we don't want to spike blood sugar.

We want to have a smooth rolling hill of release of sugar into our bloodstream.

And also some of these yellow foods will help us with acid and enzymes, which will help us with secretions. And that's where I'll talk about ginger.

So here's a short list. Now, keep in mind that yellow is a color that is very predominant in process foods. We think of yellow breads, yellow pastas, yellow cookies, yellow, all kinds of starchy kind of process foods, right.

I'm talking about more natural foods. So even though I have corn here, I'm talking about fresh corn. I'm talking not about corn tortillas or corn chips or, you know, I'm not talking about the process varieties here.

I'm talking about the actual whole foods. So when you look at this list, keep that in mind. And so a lot of these yellow foods being important because they can act as an antioxidant, help with digestive health and somatic activity,

utility of the gut, which is important. You don't want your gut to slow down. You want it just right, the Goldilocks of the gut.

You want a healthy gut microbiome and have healthy glycemic impact. All right. So I'm going to shine a light on certain of the yellow foods. I love ginger.

Ginger is one of those things that's like turmeric where you can have the root or you can also have the powder. You can have the spice. You can have ginger tea.

Ginger has traditionally been used for gastrointestinal disorders, especially the upper part of the gut. So like stomach upset or nausea or dyspepsia or just like this kind of feeling of disease or uneasiness in the upper part, right.

So one of the ways that it may work is through its anti-inflammatory effects, but it also has certain compounds that may stimulate the emptying of the stomach so that things don't hang out in the stomach too long and then start to create an overgrowth.

Citrus fruits, lemons. We just talked about oranges. Now let's move over to lemons. Lemons have their benefit and what we see is that when you add some lemon juice to a starch meal that you can help to reduce the glycemic impact pretty significantly by 20 to 50%.

The intake of citrus fruits has been shown to be associated with reduced risk of esophageal and gastric cancer. So again, upper GI.

These protective phytonutrients against the gastric ulcer risk would be there are certain compounds.

Because these are the bioflavinoids, hisparadin, nobilitan and rootin. And we know that there are some metabolic effects of citrus-based phytonutrients like nirincenin, which you would find in like a yellow grapefruit.

Pineapple is fantastic. In fact, pineapple juice, like a little bit, can be important for having after a meal in order to help with the breakdown of whatever's kind of sitting around because it contains bromelain, which is a proteolytic enzyme, so it breaks down protein.

And with all of the craze on protein, everybody's wanting more and more protein right in their diets, but the key is that you have to be able to break down protein and digest it.

Pineapple has enzymes to help that. And plus there have been other studies, animal studies, looking at its anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial, anti-biotic,

differentiation, also good for parasites, anti-dioreal, anti-alcer. I mean, look at all of these great, great gut effects, right, just from pineapple.

Of course, best to have it fresh when possible.

Bananas and plantains. Now, depending on the degree of how ripe the banana or the plantain is, it can contain prebiotic fiber.

So if you get a green, greenish banana, that's going to give you more in the way of prebiotic fiber, so it won't have as much sugar, it'll have more fiber. And that's more of what you want.

And there was one neat study looking at 80 different foods and looking to see which foods were highest in serotonin, which is the neurotransmitter of happiness.

And the researchers found plantains, bananas, and pineapple were at the top of the list. They're all yellow. Yellow is the color of happiness, actually.

When people are asked about how they feel, when they see the color yellow, many people say, oh, it makes me feel happy. It's like the sun.

So we don't know if eating those foods makes us happier, but they are higher in serotonin.

All right. And this just shows you that, right.

So looking at the high serotonin level of plantain, pineapple and banana.

So kind of interesting. Safron is kind of a yellowish orange spice. It's pretty expensive.

But it does contain certain components that may help with reducing metabolic syndrome and also help with things like mood.

And we know that much of our gut health determines how we feel.

There is this concept called Beijing. And what that means is that certain spices and certain plant compounds can actually take and transform white colored adipose tissue, which is just kind of the storage fat.

And transform it into more metabolically active mitochondrial rich fat.

And so it's like heating up the fat and creating more thermogenic or creating, I would say fat tissue that actually works for you.

So there are more and more of these different plant compounds, but I do think that there's something to this whole thing about certain phytochemicals helping with that bashing or that browning process, helping us to have healthy mitochondria in our adipose tissue.

Okay, for those of you who wanted green and who like green like I do, there's a lot on green.

Green foods, like I mentioned, are in the, I would say the largest supply.

And when we think of green, you think of the heart. I know some people think of red when they think of the heart, but actually when it comes to nutrition, a lot of the green foods contain the nutrients for cardiovascular health.

So things like vitamin K, now there are different forms of vitamin K, the vitamin K that I'm talking about is vitamin K one folate magnesium potassium and even dietary nitrates.

So a lot of these green foods also contain more fiber, so they can bind to certain foods and certain toxins in certain foods.

And I think of green, I think of different fibers, whether it's clorella, I'm thinking of just different sulfur containing foods, garlic is not necessarily green, but if we're thinking of like whether it's the ungreen onions, scallions, things of that nature, kind of thinking of the garlic onion family.

So Lantro, which, which sometimes is referred to as coriander, making a soup of that and that is helpful for binding things like toxic elements green tea, you know, making sure that we get that epigalocatic and galle, you know, just matcha is also great green vegetables, these are just binders in general, but you can see that a number of them are green.

So when I think of green fruits, we've got a list there, but there are definitely a lot of choices, well, depending on how you define a fruit or vegetable, you know, we could actually put cucumber over and fruit because it has seeds, but basically there's a lot here to choose from and a lot of different things that those green fruits and vegetables are doing.

One of the things that makes them green is the chlorophyll, so the chlorophyll is an antioxidant and if you just zoom in for a minute here, you see how this is chlorophyll right here, I have it circled in the middle of chlorophyll, you have what you have magnesium, so that's how we get magnesium and chlorophyll both, which is like a wonderful two fur to have because they're both very protected.

It's effective and much needed in our bodies and what ends up happening is that chlorophyll can bind, you see the green of chlorophyll here, you can't see green, it is on either side of this this one in the middle, but you can see how chlorophyll is a great binder, so if there are things that come in and do damage to the gut, that's why chlorophyll bringing that in can help to bind and carry it out of the body.

And then help to reduce the inflammation in the gut.

So leafy greens like spinach would be a source of many nutrients, especially naturally occurring nitrates, which help with nitric oxide synthesis, they help to reduce blood pressure enhanced blood flow, help with muscle oxygenation and even improve exercise tolerance.

Think about things like if you're looking for nitrates, think about celery, press, sure of all different lettuces, spinach, rocket, but just note that if you are sensitive to oxalates and you are an oxalate stone former right and sometimes you know that might be connected to your gut microbiome as well and not being able to break down oxalic acid.

You just want to watch your consumption of leafy greens things like Swiss chard and spinach.

So this is just a list of some of the nitrate containing foods you can see again the ones that are pretty high are at the bottom.

So again, this is for heart health, this is what is helping your blood vessels to expand.

Some of my favorites because I teach a lot on detoxification would be cruciferous vegetables. Yes, the stinky sulfur containing vegetables like Brussels sprouts also cauliflower not necessarily green but kale and different greens of different kinds like water crusts right.

So there is some good data to suggest that intake of cruciferous vegetables is associated with reduced cardiovascular mortality and the sulfur compounds, even though they're stinky, they're doing their job of helping toxins to be removed from the body.

Sulfuraphane is one of those important compounds in cruciferous veggies and seems to help modify inflammation, oxidative stress and even blood clots.

Thank you very much.