hello everyone welcome to relax with gem and happy holidays to everyone happy hanukkah merry christmas welcome to winter almost thank you so much for joining me today i am so excited about our topic today healthy eating over the holidays and healthy eating over the new year and for every few so choose i am so lucky because my guest today is janet mckee and i want to talk to you a little bit about janet before we actually start talking hi janet thank you for coming on the show i'm so glad you could make it thank you for inviting me i'm pleased to be here jim a key is a board certified holistic health counsellor and a certified member of the american association of drugless practitioners after working in the corporate environment and up taining her master's in business administration from the university of pittsburgh misspent key pursued a career in health and wellness by attending the institute for integrative nutrition in affiliation with columbia university she has a private practice where she helps her clients reach their personal wellness go goals i know because while i'm one of her clients that she has helped she works with individuals as well as groups and teaches how food and lifestyle choices affect one's overall health and wellbeing most recently she has been selected as the pittsburgh representative of the national cancer project founded by dr neal barnard where she leads a series of nutrition and cooking lectures i never knew that cooking and food could be so delicious and good for you at the same time until i met janet so janet again welcome to the show and i have so many questions and we have such a short period of time today but can you talk a little bit about what is healthy eating absolutely so many people think that healthy eating has to be boring and restrictive and they have to feel deprived but that's not what i show my clients healthy eating is just a matter of choosing foods that are not only delicious and enjoyable but that also nourish your body properly you know we look so much at the foods that are available to us today and there are so many processed foods and packaged foods where they take grains and process them and refine them and they're basically stripping them of any nutrients and the items within that food that bring you health and vitality and add so many things such as artificial fats and sweeteners and artificial coloring and preservatives that they're just not healthy for us they're just not real foods so healthy eating is basically eating real whole foods you know i teach a class where i teach people how to read labels and find out what foods they should be avoiding what items they should be avoiding in those labels but then at the end of the class i always say why are we eating foods with labels on them anyway basic wonderful whole foods you go through the produce on the beautiful colorful delicious fruits and vegetables the whole grains beans nuts and seeds and naturally raised poultry and wild caught fish i mean that is healthy eating so here we are around the holidays and everything everybody's looking forward to being with their families preparing delicious dishes i know we're past thanksgiving right now but i'm thinking usually most of us car balance because we don't know any better we get the stuff ng and the mashed potatoes and the sweet potatoes and the white rolls and the white bread it's no wonder we get sleepy at the end of the meal and i'm thinking she i am i'm sure there are healthier alternatives to all those carbs and all those processed foods to prepare us all a days in jan has introduced me to that really delicious dishes that we can all enjoy if we just give it a little thought i myself have not have started preparing chemo which is a  that is high in protein and it's very light and i enjoy that with vegetable dishes that i prepare and every morning i make a vegetable fruit a protein shake which everyone else there will probably go but it is so delicious janet taught me how to take celery and spinach organic spinach and an apple or a pear and some fruit juice without sugar and i put it all in my blender and i mix it up and it tastes good so that's how i start my day along with my vitamins and i get so much energy from doing that but janet help us give us some suggestions on how we could eat healthier over the holidays and maybe some substitutes for all this starts that we put on our plates sure absolutely that's a very good question because that is something we all face we're often visiting with people we're going to relatives homes for our meals and we know that sometimes they may be cooking food are not necessarily what we would choose and so forth but there are so many wonderful things you can do and the key is to feel satisfied you want to make sure that you are getting wonderful food available to you so if that means that you need to eat something before you go to visit write something wonderful that you have at home and that's what i teach my clients have delicious healthy things on hand so that when you are hungry and in a pinch you can just grab something and not grab the wrong thing then also when you do attend parties and go to functions with relatives and so forth try to pick more whole foods pick more vegetables to eat try to select some whole grains as a matter of fact i'm going to show you after our break show some ideas of foods that i take when i'm attending someone's function i actually bring a dish a long they enjoy it they appreciate it and it happens to be healthy but everyone at the party enjoys it so much they're not actually thinking oh this is healthy for me they're thinking this is really delicious so for example i'll do a beautiful brown rice dish so you talked about carving out well the issue with carbs are the simple carbs where everything's refined like you said the white rice the white bread the white everything the white sugar but complex carbs are not only nourishing and high in fiber and protein and minerals and nutrients you can carve out with complex carbs and still feel fabulous and knocking weight and that's the key so bringing in carbs that are better for you and nourish your body is key and also there are so many wonderful things you can do for healthy desserts i am like the queen of dessert because i don't want to deprive myself of delicious sweets so i've taught myself how to make incredible healthy desserts actually some of them without sugar without fat and you would not know what i'm going to show you one this afternoon one of the things that i've been practicing with too is taking my all in milk and putting a cup in my blender and i have one of those new choppers where they have four blades at different levels so i'll put a couple of almond milk in and then i'll get frozen fruit out of the freezer and put some frozen fruit in that blender and then i'll hit the blender for maybe a minute or two and the the frozen fruit turns the allman milk into contact they're starting to get a little bit too ripe peel them put them in a bag or a plastic container put them in the freezer because it's amazing you can make ice cream alternatives with the frozen bananas and other frozen fruit and you don't need any sugar are any fat it so if someone were to do that then if they have a craving for a cookie or a donor or a pause or a piece of chocolate and i'm not talking about deprivation either because if i want to have a piece of pie or chocolate i will allow myself to enjoy maybe one or maybe i'll just have a piece of a cookie or i'll just have a sliver a sliver of a pint still like a quarter of the pie or  a whole slice so different nation is not what we're talking about here absolutely not is magnified you brought up a perfect point you want to live in balance and when you live in balance it's easy not to go out of balance right if we deprive ourselves of everything we enjoy and work completely to one extreme and so what happens is one day we just give up it's not comfortable to be out of balance and so eating majority of healthy nourishing foods but it prescience and enjoying a little bit of all of this foods that we had growing up and that we still love that is living in balance and when you do that you feel good and you don't feel that you're missing something when you feel you're missing something that's when you go to the other extreme exactly so you won't be missing anything once you learn to make healthy choices like that so one of the things that people have a tendency to do and i know i'm guilty of this myself is to over eat around the holidays  plate can you talk a little bit janet about fiber and or whatever you would suggest on how to help us not over eat well let me first mention that you can over eat healthy foods and when still support your health you can eat such an abundance of wonderful vegetables with some fruit wonderful whole grains as i eat cost because i love to eat and love food and i grew up with a family where the food around the table was like the most important part of the day right so you can and it's interesting is since i've been eating an abundance of foods that support my body i don't even have to worry about my weight anymore it's incredible so the key there is the fiber you bought brought up the perfect point the slip this in really quickly before break when we can i don't mean to interrupt you but  n we'll be going to break and then during the commercial jan and i are going to be bringing up some beautiful dishes that she's prepared so we can show you how delicious these foods all look and believe me if you have time if you had a chance to take  recent increases in smuggling are putting american food sources at risk people and businesses are smuggling live birds and poultry products to sell online in specialty groceries or outdoor markets they may think they are simply catering to their customers tastes what they are really importing is trouble importing outside u s d a safeguards is not only illegal it threatens american food production smuggled poultry products were smuggled birds can bring in diseases such as exotic new castle disease or avian influenza bird flu into the u s we need your help to make sure that what is grown and raised two years days safe from foreign pests and diseases if you suspect a business is importing or selling illegal birds or poultry products call the agriculture hotline at one eight hundred eight seven seven three eight three five you can make an anonymous report or find out exactly which products are prohibited america's food supply is too important to let smugglers put it at risk report smuggled birds and poul welcome back everyone before we went to break janet mckee was discussing the importance of having fiber in our diet so janet i'm sorry i had to interrupt you before we went to commercial please go ahead and finish what you were saying about  fiber that was a great moment for an interruption because we were able to bring out some food to illustrate the point five are so important when we hear the word fiber think oh brother whole grain bread bran muffin whatever and what i'm talking about fiber is another word for plant so you only get five from plant foods and what i mean by plant foods i mean fruits vegetables whole grains beans nuts and seeds ok fiber is so important because not only does it feel you are help you feel satisfied it also supports your liver function the purpose of your liver is to clean your blood of excess fat excess cholesterol excess hormones excess toxins but you must have fiber going through your digestive system for your liver to dump those accesses onto the fiber think about like barges going through so that your body eliminates them without fiber you do not support the function of your liver which then supports your health and wellbeing so plant a fiber rich sources of fiber that's the only place you get fiber is from plant foods and so if we can make those foods delicious and satisfying and yummy and beautiful to look at which we're going to show you here then it makes it so easy to eat healthy it sounds wonderful now talk to me a little bit obviously i'm going to tilt this this looks like a delicious salad with spinach but tell everybody what  included in this dish right here as this is a wonderful green salad and i add a little bit of sweet red pepper to give it some color but the dressing for this salad has pears and some lemon juice and a little bit of all of oil or you could use flax oil which is a wonderful healthy alternative as well so not only are you bringing in green leafy vegetables which are the key to good health because it alkalis your blood which is very important to avoid inflammation and other illnesses but also we bring in the sweetness of the pears and pecans to a home that i'm joining for a meal and everyone eats at night and everyone enjoys it and i'm always thanked graciously for bringing such a beautiful dish and people aren't thinking oh this is how they bye challenge right here to gently we have some wonderful soup right here but this is an incredibly delicious holiday alternative especially for the first course of a dinner or if you have like an open house type function it's wonderful to give this soup to your guests in like a mug and they can walk around and enjoy a beautiful butternut squash soup butternut squash which is it's one of there's also supporting your health and well being and so a beautiful warm butternut squash soup that seasoned with sage which is also in season absolutely fabulous everyone even the children love this soup it's very very delicious has a little bit of honest looks and then i mention bringing brown rice has i'm going to switch some of the dishes around so the camera can get a better picture a good idea this is really easy to show  brown rice is wonderful because it's a whole grain white rice they basically took the rice and stripped it of the fiber and the bran and a lot of the nutrients in the protein so what's incredible about this dish is it's amazing how many people in the family love rice and we bring in incredible flavors from not only the piece which adds protein but also parsley and there are leaks in this i knew and garlic are wonderful to include in your diet because they are from the allium family of vegetables and they've been shown to fight cancer are one of those foods of fried cancer so incredible and delicious everyone enjoys it it's a good carb right but it's a complex and hard and it's satisfying and and fulfilling and so many ways now before i forget where can everyone get the recipes to this i know your website is janet mckee dot com but please tell us about how to get the recipes for all this food i have some recipes on my website i'm going to keep changing those but i also strongly recommend if anyone would like a copy of these recipes that they send me an email janet at jenna mckee dot com and just put recipes in the title and i'll be glad to send these right out here you go everyone you can't do better than then just think you know all these recipes for free from janet personally now here is my favorite part of the male dessert yes absolutely and there's nothing better than chocolate those are you know you hear from even the medical doctors in the media saying that a little bit of dark chocolate now and then is good for you and it is good quality dark chocolate that is high mantra oxidants and happens to be high in magnesium but what i do here is i literally take bananas and  rought chocolate power all it is is the cocoa bean that's been ground define into a powder there's nothing out of there's no sugar added there's no fat it's not process with alkali it's very pure and natural and i had a little bit of an eye so all i do is i did bananas chocolate powder and some vanilla and i blended up in a blender food processor and then i put it in the freezer to let a chill it makes the most of that get sweet chocolat yummy dessert i have a banana and some chocolate powered home guess what all i'm to a function that you're going to over eat all of the cakes and pies and already have these treat yourself to some chocolate banana frozen dessert and then you will be satisfied and then you can enjoy a little piece of grandma's pie without over and everybody look at this you can eat healthy and enjoy yourself at the same time it's not out of the question oh my gosh these dishes are fabulous thank you so much for bringing this i think we have a limited amount of time today but i also wanted to bring up the point about the cancer project tell us a little bit about that and your involvement with it yes thank you joan for asking at the cancer project i'm so excited the cancer project is a national nonprofit organization headquartered out of d c and dr neal barnard he is a medical doctor that is teamed up with a group of scientific researchers and medical staff and nutritionists and they were studying cancer what they on covered was nothing short of dramatic they found that food plays a major role in not only preventing cancer but also improving survival once diagnosed their finding and even the national cancer institute will state publicly that fifty percent of cancers are food related and therefore could be prevented so what we've done is we've taken a scientific research and we've brought it forward in a way that makes it meaningful to the general public so this cancer project has trained practitioners like myself across the country i am the local representative and we're giving lectures and cooking classes all over western pennsylvania to teach people which foods fight cancer how they do it and then we actually demonstrate some real simple recipes and you get to taste the foods that we're talking about we are so excited i'm giving lectures all over the place you can go to my website to see my ongoing lecture schedule right now it still has the past six months but i'm going to be updating it this week for the next few months so it is very exciting if you know anyone whether or not you're dealing with i don't miss or not you just want to learn how to prevent which is key and also just learn how to eat healthier and find delicious recipes it is great yes i know that one of the things that i did last year was and i don't necessarily recommend this for everyone but definitely giving up white flour white sugar and i even gave up there and automatically and i still exercise but i automatically lost five pounds without even trying because there is so much garbage in processed food that when my body has real nutrition it can sustain itself a whole lot easier but i was amazed and now i don't even have any  cravings yes i will have one slice of pizza but i don't even crave before used to like want to have the whole pizza and now i just maybe enjoy it once i said that satisfies me but i really try and  i really enjoy having foods that are not processed and whole grains in it for me i have a sensitivity to wheat so i eat gluten free we free products as well but while this has been such an excellent show i am so thrilled that we had a chance to talk about all this and maybe give some of the folks out there some recipes and some good ideas on how to get through the holidays without falling asleep how to get through the holidays in a delicious way without feeling guilty and to be able to get all those recipes on janet's website and then after the first of the year then maybe they want to try and change their eating habits one step at a time and see what happens but janet i want to thank you so very much thank you for coming on the show and doing all this cooking and bringing this food with you believe me ladies and gentlemen this was no easy task to get this into the studio but thank you so much for coming and have a wonderful holiday season everyone out there i wish you health happiness peace and abundance during the holidays and all throughout the new year so you all take care out there healthy eating