Dr Rupy: Today, I'm basically going to tell you everything that is in my new book, Doctor's Kitchen 321, bar the recipes, that wouldn't make for a very interesting podcast, me just reading out ingredients lists and methods. But I'm basically going to tell you about everything to do with 321 and what's in the book, the chapters, a description of what's in the chapters, pretty much everything. Much to the horror, most likely of my publishers, Harper Collins, you're probably thinking, what on earth are you doing, pretty much reading out your book to all your podcast subscribers and anyone who's watching this on YouTube as well. Why would you do that? You've been working on it for two plus years and all the information. The crux of it is, the mission is to get everybody eating Doctor's Kitchen meals every day, at least one. My mission statement is literally to get 10 million people to eat Doctor's Kitchen meals every day. And I want, I genuinely want people to find food and recipes that they absolutely love to allow them to eat well and live well every single day, that are easy to cook from scratch. Healthy living is about consistency. It is the crux. It is not about diets or whether you're going to do veganuary or you're following paleo or you're eating these collection of superfoods or you're calorie counting. No, the crux of it is maintaining a healthy lifestyle. And this is why I created 321. It's why the recipes are formulated to have that 321 formula and why I'm basically giving out pretty much all the information contained in every chapter in this book, because I just want the message to get out there. That's that's generally what the purpose of this is. So for those of you who haven't, and I'm holding up the book here for those of you watching on YouTube, for those of you who haven't come across 321, I've been shouting about it on my socials now for a little while. It is three portions of fruit and vegetables per person, two servings per recipe, and all the recipes only use one pan. As simple as that. Tray bakes, curries, stews, casseroles, stir fries, you name it, it's in the book and it is all 321 inspired. What I'm going to be talking about today includes the chapters in the book. So we're going to be talking about why I'm so obsessed with creating a culture of healthy eating that is inclusive, accessible, affordable, relative, exciting for everyone in this country and beyond, in the UK and beyond. I'm going to be talking about simplifying life in the kitchen, so the whole concept of 321 and where that kind of came from. Um, why more fruit and vegetables is the goal and eating more is really what we need to focus on. The need for better nutritional research. I'm going to talk about the attributes of food that make it so medicinal. I'm going to talk about fasting, something I've talked about a lot, so that's why I included it in the in a cook in the cookbook. You might think it's really weird talking about fasting in a cookbook that's actually, you know, enticing you to eat more, but I think it's a very important topic that needs addressing and I hope I've addressed it in the right way. Um, and also just taking control of our lifestyles and why it's it's actually our responsibility to to do that. So I'm going to talk about those things. Um, so bear with me and hopefully you'll get some nuggets of information. So, the recipe or the ingredients, I would say, for a healthy lifestyle, that we need food and financial security for sure. And I think this year, 2020, has given us all a grander idea and understanding of just how privileged we are to have that position to be able to go into a supermarket and pretty much, most of us this is, buy whatever fruits and vegetables we want every single week. And it's something I'm super grateful for and I'm humbled to to be able to have the opportunity for. It's not about the Rolexes and the fancy cars and lifestyle. It's literally just about being able to maintain a healthy body because your health, ask any successful person, your health is the most important thing. And hopefully this year has really clarified that for us all. And working in the NHS this year has been particularly tough, but with the perspective that I've tried to maintain, and I spoke about in my previous podcast, it's really helped, definitely. You obviously need to be motivated enough to secure time to regularly cook. And that's why in the book I actually have done a whole section on the 321 week kickstarter. It demonstrates to you that you can do breakfast, lunch, dinner with only 15 minutes of, I've said that correctly, 15 minutes of prep per day. And I've given you an example of seven days in which you can do that as well. And it and it does work. I I gave the the 321 kickstarter to a bunch of colleagues and friends and even some followers prior to it being printed to test it out and it's been game changing for a lot of people, including patients as well, actually, I should say. So, you know, we have to be motivated to secure the time to regularly cook, but we don't actually need that much time to regularly cook. And the other thing we need is education, culinary inspiration, culinary confidence to maintain that motivation for the long term. So those are the those are the ingredients. It's financial security, obviously. It is the motivation to secure time to regularly cook, and also the inspiration, the culinary inspiration and the education around food to to maintain that motivation. So, 321 ticks all those boxes when it comes to those ingredients. It is cheap when you're cooking from scratch. It is about making sure you hit that plant consumption without even having to think about it. You don't have to calorie count or colour count or superfood count or whatever. You don't need to really have that much of an understanding of nutrition. You just need to follow the recipes and rest assured that the 321 recipe is going to be looking after your health. One thing that I think I was going to get pushback on is the simplicity of it. And why I everything is about more is more is because the five a day message has been pretty successful in that everyone knows about it. Everyone can reel off, you know, how many fruits and vegetables you need every day? Five. Everyone knows, whether you're in America, whether you're in Australia, they've got their own versions in Japan, but everyone kind of knows the quota of vegetables that they're meant to be eating. The average consumption across the UK is around three, 3.5. But that ranges from zero to five, which is a huge spectrum and it means that some people aren't even getting one fruit and vegetable per day. And that honestly broke my heart. And and this is something that we've covered in culinary medicine modules as well, looking at food security. So the worst bit about that is that five a day is is actually scratching the surface. We actually need 10. There's some really interesting research conducted by Imperial College researchers looking at how many fruits and vegetables or the quantity of fruits and vegetables that we need to be able to protect ourselves by reducing the risk of cancer, type two diabetes, cardiovascular problems. I mean, you name it, dementia, a whole load of relationships. There is a huge inverse relationship when you consume an optimal amount of food, which is 10 a day, and even upwards of 10 a day. That sounds wholly unachievable. However, when you break it down into meals, it is the equivalent of three Doctor's Kitchen meals a day plus a snack. And when you reduce the effort and the hassle of cooking those three Doctor's Kitchen meals a day into only using one pan, making rigorous use of leftovers like I've done in the 321 week kickstarter and having a snack of fruits or nuts or whatever, it makes it a lot more manageable. And this is where we should be aiming. We should be as aspirational as we can when it comes to protecting our health and trying to reduce the risk as much as possible of ill health. Lifestyle related diseases are the biggest killers and this is something we need to really focus our resources on. So that's why more is more and and actually consuming fruits and vegetables is yes, a very simple strategy to improving the health and and and the livelihoods of of millions of people around the world, but it is achievable. The other thing is, the simplicity of it, I think is quite jarring for a lot of people. You know, how can, all right, having a few more fruits and vegetables per day, how is that really going to make a difference? Think about some of the biggest impacts of simple measures and the number of lives saved on the basis of those. Sanitation is a very easily forgotten example. Hopefully it's come more to light this year, but the simple act of sanitation systems or washing our hands, infection control has been responsible for saving millions of lives across the world. It is a very simple strategy. And I think sometimes we are lost in this noise to signal ratio. And when I say noise to signal, I'm talking about the noise of sometimes misinformation and too much information and the signals which are the things that we actually need to hear. The signals that we need to hear are increasing plant consumption, increasing colours, quality fats, fibre, eating more whole foods. Those are the clear messages that we all need to to maintain. And actually that's the foundation for healthy eating. These are the healthy eating principles that I also bang on about. The noise is eat this superfood, have this supplement, try this diet, try veganuary, try, you know, all these different sorts of new vegetables that come from halfway across the world. What about fasting? Like all these different signals here, all these different noises here. This is what clouds the core signals that we all need to hear. And that's why 321 is formulated, honestly, to just be the signal. It's just follow some 321 recipes, try and maintain that, try and learn some 321 recipes yourself that you can annotate, and that is key to healthy eating. And then you can focus on the other aspects of healthy lifestyle that are just as important, whether it be exercise, whether it be making some time for stillness, whether it be connection, making sure that you're spending enough time with loved ones and actually engaging with them without distractions, fostering a sense of community, something that I think is very easily forgotten, but we are communal animals. We are created and we have evolved to live in networks of of people. Um, and healthy eating has become so confusing for a lot of people. My aim is to really simplify it with 321. That's what I'm going to say about that. The other thing is, um, nutritional research. So I I talk a little bit about nutritional research and why in many ways it's flawed because of a of a few core issues. So the quality of nutritional research is always going to be low because we are relying on the lower uh standard or the the the lower types of rigorous studies, observational studies. Um, and we have something called the hierarchy of evidence and a lot of the nutritional research is of the lower end of the scale. And despite the thousands of people that can be used in observational studies, it still doesn't negate the fact that it is very hard to tease nuance from those studies. And so you can have thousands of people on a with vitamin D levels, um, that are subpar and there isn't that much of an effect that's born out by vitamin D supplementation. However, there are so many other things that could be going on. So it's very, very hard to tease that out. The expense of doing the higher grade trials and the amount of time that it would take, uh, it's huge. And that's why generally there isn't an impetus to do that and there isn't the financial incentive to do that. So that obviously degrades the quality. And then there's also interpretation bias. So if you are of a plant-based persuasion or a paleo persuasion or you have an inherent belief about the way food should be acting because you are bound to that calorie in, calorie out paradigm, then it is going to influence your interpretation, the way you write an abstract and the right the way you write the conclusion for your study. And so and that leads to more picking apart. So it's very confusing, particularly for someone who is outside of the academic um institutions to understand with the nuances. And that's why we tend to revert back to media headlines that there to sell papers and to get shares and likes and comments and all the rest of it on social media. So that's why it's very, very hard to really look at nutritional science and interpret nutritional science, which makes it very difficult for someone like me to do my job. And that's why I'm sticking to my purposely simple message of 321. Get more fruits and vegetables into your diet and all the quality fats, fibre, colours, diversity, whole foods, I've taken care of because I've formulated the recipes to be um as as impactful as possible from a nutritional medicine perspective. And I know it sounds a bit too easy, but the more vegetables in your diet, the better general health outcomes and there are a number of different reasons why and a number of different podcasts I've talked about this on as well. Um so it should be really clear if you've been a listener or an avid follower of the Doctor's Kitchen for the last four or five years, it is pretty clear we need to have more fruits and vegetables in our diet. I'm not vegan, I'm not vegetarian, but 85 to 90% of my diet is is plants and so should most of ours. Um, the other thing I I think it's uh pertinent to to talk about quite honestly is it's our responsibility. We cannot rely on the food industry to provide these solutions for us, which is why you've got these weird examples of what counts as a as a portion of your five a day. You know, a can of spaghetti is technically one of your five a day because it has tomatoes in the sauce. But really when you look holistically at the product, it has got added sugar, added salt, refined flowers, a number of different fillers. It is really against the spirit of what counts as one of your five a day. And so this is why we really need to take responsibility from for cooking from scratch as much as possible to maintain our own health benefits and our own health attributes because you cannot rely on industry to do this for you. Um, and it's not me being conspiratorial or whatever you call it. Um, it it's it's genuinely our responsibility. I've also put in the book some examples of what portions look like. As you can imagine, because of mass and weights, it's vastly different. So a portion of chickpeas is going to look completely different to a portion of watercress, which is going to be mountains of food. And in the formulation of the recipes, you know, I had to be quite mindful of that because you can't just whack in three portions of fruits and vegetables for for everything because some of them look vastly different and you'd just be mounding on, you know, munching on a a huge bowl full of salad leaves and that's not what 321 is about. It's about enjoyment of food, variety, exciting food, all the sort of culinary instincts that I have. The other thing I do want to bring attention to is I've included nuts and seeds uh in some of the recipes as some of the portions. And the reason why is because A, we need to eat more nuts and seeds in our diet. There are fantastic sources of micronutrients like zinc and magnesium and vitamin E that we need to eat more of. B, they are good sources of quality fats, including monounsaturated fats, which are brilliant for satiation, they're brilliant for cardiovascular benefits. We know overall they are really good sources of fibre as well, which is going to feed your microbiota, which has another huge knock-on effect to to health. Um, but also because it's taking a stand against this huge injustice against fats in general and the common idea that persists and has persisted despite the decades of of research now to state the the opposite, that fats are universally bad. And when you're getting quality fats into your diet in whole fats like nuts and seeds and even cold pressed oils, it is universally a very good attribute of your diet. We need to encourage more eating of those. And the portions are 30 grams versus 80 grams of fruits and vegetables. But they still do have a lot of those benefits. So that's why I've included it in some of the oats recipes and for textural reasons as well as the base of curries as well. I've added almond butter to one of the kormas and stuff. So it's it's really important to have those nuts in and I've put that in purpose. I might get some pushback on it, but I'm a firm believer that we need to be having more nuts and seeds in our diet. Obviously, if you don't have allergies, um, otherwise, yes, absolutely. Okay, so attributes of food of what makes it medicinal. And I mean this in the truest sense of the word. When I say food is medicine, I mean food as medicine. Medicine, let's let's break it down for a second. Medicine is the use of substances or interventions to prevent or treat disease. I'll say that again. The use of substances, this is the definition, the use of substances or interventions to prevent or treat disease. So when I prescribe a better sleep uh schedule or I prescribe exercise, I am practicing medicine. When I'm listening to someone and I'm actually providing psychological support, I'm practicing medicine. When I provide a recipe or if I'm trying to coax someone's diet to move more towards the principles of healthy eating, more fibre, more plants, more colours, I am practicing medicine because we know without a shadow of a doubt, improving diet can greatly reduce the risk of a number of conditions, including cardiovascular disease and type two diabetes and all the other ones that I always bang on about on this podcast. So it's really important to get the message across that food is a really important tool in our clinical toolbox. It is not cure all, it is not to be treated like a pill, but to belittle medicine as purely the prescription of tablets or the performance of surgery, it is such a naive and microscopic view of what I do on a daily basis as a medical practitioner and what my colleagues do uh across across the healthcare service. So it's really, really important that we get that across. The other thing that I think is really important in this book is to get the message around why food has so many of these medicinal properties. So antioxidants, inflammation balancing, gut microbiota, detoxification systems and nutrigenomics. These are all things that I've talked about in previous podcasts, but on this in this book chapter, I really wanted to distill it into, you know, the the core features of why I'm so passionate about this subject. You know, it's very, it's it's very easy, I think, it's easier for me to just list out everything rather than trying to simplify it for the reader or the listener. So I'm going to try and do this. Antioxidant food, we all know that antioxidants are uh things that reduce um reactive oxygen species, it clears them away, balances inflammation. But that cannot be the finite element of food in itself. There has to be more than that. And one of the things that is really important, I think, is to look beyond the antioxidant paradigm. It's to look beyond, okay, this has an antioxidant, let's say vitamin E or vitamin C from a tomato or a tablet, and this is reducing reactive oxygen species and that's why it's health giving. That's part of the story, yes, but it's not the whole story. There are direct mechanisms by which the phytonutrients in plants can have a direct anti-inflammatory effect. There are nutrigenomic reasons. So there are there are ways in which food can change the expression of genes, not the sequence, but the expression of genes such that it has a beneficial effect on the host, i.e. the the person consuming that. There are inflammatory reasons. So inflammation is something that I talked about a lot in my previous book about beating inflammation, what inflammation is. Inflammation is one of the most important aspects of our evolutionary biology. It it is our evolutionary processes. It is critical to our biology to be able to mount an immune response which has inflammation as as its core arm. But it's the imbalance of inflammation, i.e. the excess of low-grade, something described as meta-inflammation that sort of hangs around and causes very vague symptoms, pain, brain fog, fatigue, lack of energy, uh sometimes skin issues, sometimes it erupts in different ways, gut problems. That's the issue that is almost the defining feature of our time, which is dominated by chronic lifestyle related illnesses. And food is one of the ways in which we can mitigate against inflammation by having a more whole diet, a more plant focused diet, a more fibre rich diet. And obviously the plant fibre rich diet dives into the microbiota, which is the population of microbes living in and around our body, largely concentrated in our gut and in our large intestine and are integral to inflammation balance, yes, but also sugar balance and creating neurotransmitters and making sure that our immune system is appropriately functioning and not allowing products that are in our external environment via food to come into our bloodstream and then cause havoc. The other thing I've talked about, and this is uh something that I probably probably will raise a few eyebrows when you read it, but it's detoxification systems. So this is food has an impact on our detoxification systems. Food isn't the detoxifier, that's our lungs and our liver and our kidneys and our skin and you know, a whole bunch of other features of our organs are doing the detoxifying, but there are certain co-factors contained within foods like B vitamins and even other phytonutrients contained within things like broccoli and and other dark green leafy vegetables that are critical for improving and perhaps even certain circumstances heightening our ability to detoxify. So it is a really, really important uh feature of food to to make sure that we we maintain that. Fasting. Okay, everybody asks me about fasting. Should I fast? Intermittent fasting, alternate day fasting, yada yada yada. We've done a whole podcast episode on this with Walter Longo, um, and a few other people as well, um, that I'm due to speak to about this subject because it is fascinating on one hand, but it's also super confusing for for other people as well. And it's one of those topics that I was hesitant to write about in the book. Like I said, it's a cookbook I'm writing and I'm talking about fasting, i.e. the absence of food. But I think it's really important to get the record straight because even in the academic literature, they confuse a lot of the terms. So they call time restricted feeding the same as certain other methods of fasting, like alternate day fasting. And it's really important to separate all of them out. So, overall, there are there are three main types. There's water fasting, complete absence of food for 24, 48 or 72 hours and sometimes even more extreme versions of that that I'm not a big fan of. There's intermittent fasting, which is a very vague term that can incorporate things like time restricted feeding where you're only eating for eight hours in a day and then fasting for 16 hours, but also alternate day fasting, which is where you do a calorie restricted diet for two days, let's say, less than 500 calories, and for the rest of the time you're eating 2,000 calories per day. And there are a number of different mechanisms by which all these different methods of fasting can work. There's metabolic switching, for example, which is where you become a lot more efficient at burning off fuel. There's ketone production, so ketones are produced in the liver and those can be used as an alternative fuel source for your cells. And it also creates a a mechanism by which you start burning off fat cells instead of glucose to um uh to burning off fat cells instead of um uh muscle to to utilize for for fuel. There's nutrient sensing, there's autophagy, so which is basically where you recycle old or dysfunctional cells or clear something called senescent cells that are sort of aged cells that are hanging around, not really doing much and causing inflammation and recycle those parts into brand new spanking new cells. And that can have longevity benefits. The biggest issue is we don't know which form of fasting is beneficial for which person. And the other thing, and this is the the big elephant in the room is comes back down to consistency. Can you consistently keep a fasting regime for the long term? Or is this going to create a cycle into binge eating, uh a worsening disordered eating pattern if you are unaware that you have a disordered eating um uh issue. Uh there are a whole bunch of different problems with fasting that I think again, it goes into that noise signal ratio. I think can be a distraction to the main issue, which is we just need to maintain a healthy eating pattern of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole foods, quality fats, etc, etc. Yada yada yada, insert Doctor's Kitchen classic blurb. So this is where my my reservation around promoting fasting or even talking about fasting comes from. My my main message is to consider a rough 11 to 12 hour window that sort of hints at all those different benefits that fasting can can provide. So the metabolic switching, the improved insulin control and glucose regulation, um the giving your gut a rest, trying not to snack in between meals because we know that you do need to have some some gut rest and that is beneficial, particularly towards later aspects of of uh the evening. These are all attributes that I think can be achievable in just an 11 to 12 hour window of eating. So really, really easy to maintain, something that I personally uh do as well. And I just think, you know, it's it's better than a rigid way of looking at fasting where you have to fast for, you know, 24, 40 hours, you have to count or, you know, things that I I just think are a distraction to the other lifestyle means that will yield 80% of the benefits versus the extra potential of what fasting can offer. That's my two cents in it. And I've written about it in the book in a bit more detail as well. So, where do we start with this? 321 is about starting, it's it's about taking control. It's about creating a framework that you can maintain for life. And I mean that genuinely because 321 is the way I cook my own meals. I always start with one pan. I concentrate the flavours into that pan. I add the nuts and spices and seeds and all the rest of it into one pan. So you're getting all those those toasted, those um the the uh caramelization that all concentrates in one pan. So you're actually getting some culinary benefits as well as the health benefits and the mindset benefits of 321 as well. To wrap up, I want everyone to feel as vibrant and as energetic as everybody can do when we eat and live well. And whether that's through the different mechanisms that I've described through food, by improving our microbiota, uh increasing the antioxidant load of our meals and nutrient density, detoxification systems, inflammation, glucose balance, all the mechanisms by which food has medicinal properties. For me, it's about creating a culture of healthy eating every single day. And that's where 321 came about. It's to make it as effortless as possible to eat well, making it more simple than ever to eat well every single day, to remind us of the beauty of food and the medicinal effects of eating well, and to remember flavour as well as function. And if you have the book, I sincerely hope you enjoy it and share it with loved ones. And honestly, take pictures of it, share the ingredients with your friends. There's a QR code on every recipe where you are able to pull up a list of the ingredients on your phone so you can shop them online or go to the store in the normal way with the digital list. Honestly, I don't care if you don't buy the book. I just want you to make the recipes because 321, I imagine is going to help so many people eat well every single day. Don't tell my publishers this, but my mission is to get 321 methods and formulas into as many people's hands as possible. And making up your own 321 recipes as well, I think is a really good way of just permeating culture such that healthy eating becomes the norm. It becomes the default option. And that's what the Doctor's Kitchen is all about. Making healthy eating easy every day. So that's my pitch for 321. I hope you enjoy the recipes. I sincerely hope you enjoy the book. I've given you most of the information in the front end anyway, so you can just get stuck into the recipes. Do send us messages, do share it. I'd love to see your recreations of the food and any improvements to it as well, send them my way. Uh, and what you think I should be doing next. I mean, there's a few things that we're doing within culinary medicine, trying to tackle food insecurity as well as educational issues within the medical health system and the nursing health system, uh nursing education system. But 321 is sort of my gift to as many people as possible. And throughout January, I'm going to be doing live 321 recipes every Monday to Friday at 6:00 p.m. So make sure you're following on social media. It'll be on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. So do follow along, make some 321 recipes with me and create it such that we don't ever have to choose or follow a diet ever again. It's 321 is the normal.
