Eliminate Processed Foods & Eat for Life [Podcast with Dee McCaffrey]
Once you start to release the processed foods from your diet and start introducing healthier foods, your body chemistry actually changes, and your taste buds will respond to the foods that are good for you. – Dee McCaffrey
In today’s podcast, I speak with Dee McCaffrey, an organic chemist turned clinical nutritionist and internationally acclaimed author. She walks us through her method and explains how she was able to lose 100 pounds and keep it off for three decades by eliminating processed foods.
Tune in to learn:
- How chemicals in processed food lead to addictions
- How to respect the natural design of your body
- What it means to be overfed and undernourished
- Deep exploration of natural cane sugar
- Which sugars are best for PCOS
- Why vegetables are the prime fuel for your body and weight loss
All PCOS Diva podcasts are available on:
Resources Mentioned:
Processed-Free America
The Science of Skinny
Diet Science Podcast
Complete Transcript:
Amy Medling:
A while back I asked PCOS Diva’s on social media, who they would like to hear from on the PCOS Diva podcast, and a long time PCOS Diva Deborah mentioned an author Dee McCaffrey, and she’s the author of The Science of Skinny. And she said you have to have her on the program. She’s helped me so much in my journey. And so I picked up a copy of Dee’s book and I was so impressed in her way of viewing, fueling, and nourishing your body with whole foods was so much aligned with the PCOS Diva philosophy, but she takes it really a step deeper because Dee McCaffrey is an organic chemist, turned clinical nutritionist, and she lost a 100 pounds and has kept the weight off for near three decades.
Amy Medling:
She’s an internationally acclaimed author. As I had mentioned, The Science of Skinny and The Science of Skinny cookbook, and she really breaks down the nitty-gritty of why we need to be eating healthy food. So I’m thrilled that she’s going to share all of her wisdom and knowledge with us on the PCOS Diva podcast today. So thank you, Dee, for agreeing to come on.
Dee McCaffrey:
Thank you, Amy. I’m so excited to be here.
Amy Medling:
Well, I really loved your book and I thought that you had an extremely powerful, personal story, and I was hoping that you could start it off by sharing your story and what led you to write this book, and yeah. So why don’t we start there?
Dee McCaffrey:
Sure. Well, oftentimes I say that it was sort of like a perfect storm of events that brought me to where I am today, but I had struggled with overeating, emotional eating, and of course, weight gain from the time I was a child. My earliest recollection of overeating or compulsively eating was when I was five, and I stole a Tootsie Pop from the corner store and then I snuck in my room to eat it. As the years went on, I continued to gain weight. My parents got divorced, it was quite tumultuous. And as a young child, I just turned to food as my comfort. And then that became a pattern that I took into my adult life. And so by the time I was graduated from high school, I weighed about 180 pounds and I’m 4 ft 10, and I have a petite body frame.
Dee McCaffrey:
So being 180 pounds, I was about 75 pounds overweight. And then I tried all the myriad diets from the time I was out of high school, all the diets that were popular at the time, and then I even made up diets of my own just thinking that I knew what to do, and I could lose weight for a time, but then, of course, I always say the pounds came back and brought their friends. And then it just started this cycle of yo-yoing and by the time I was getting into my thirties, late twenties, early thirties, I always said all I could do at that point was yo, like I could just go up, but not down and I actually had gotten to the point where I thought, well, maybe I’m just supposed to be overweight.
Dee McCaffrey:
Maybe I should stop trying, just accept that this is my fate for my life and maybe I’d be happier if I just did that. And however, there was like this little voice that kept telling me, no, it can’t be true that you’re destined to be overweight your entire life because being overweight as you are, is not healthy. And I don’t think you’re destined to be unhealthy for the rest of your life. And so there was this drive in me to continue to seek and search for what would be a healthy approach. And around that time, I was studying chemistry in college and I always say I was a late bloomer for college because I didn’t start till I was 26. So by the time I was 30, I was getting ready to graduate. And I was majoring in chemistry and environmental science. And so my idea was to combine the two and become an environmental chemist, which I did eventually do.
Dee McCaffrey:
So during that time, I actually got a job at an environmental testing lab and my work was to test for pollution in the soil, water, and air in the environment of where I lived at the time. And so as being a newbie chemist, I wanted to learn the names of all of the chemicals that we used in the lab. And then I was also really into cleaning up the environment and I wanted to clean up the planet. That was another one of my passions. And here I am, the new chemist working in a lab. I had no connection in my emotional life or in my physical body to chemicals being a part of food at that time. And, of course, this was back in the late 1980s, early ’90s.
Dee McCaffrey:
And I was in the lab one night and I’ve noticed the name. There was this one name of a chemical and I was at home and making an angel food cake mix from a box and I did something I had never done before up until that point, and that was to read the ingredients on the box. This was not a common practice back then, as it is today. And I noticed the name of a chemical called sodium lauryl sulfate on the ingredient of the cake mix, and at that time, it kind of struck me funny like is that what I think it is? Because that’s the name of a degreaser that we use in the lab to clean up the really oily, smelly water samples that come in. Because they would gunk up our instrumentation if we didn’t degrease them.
Dee McCaffrey:
And when I went back to where the next day I was confirmed that it was the exact same chemical. And then I thought, what is that chemical doing in my food? And then more than that, what is that doing to my body and what other chemicals are in food, and are they having an impact on my body? And maybe this is why I have a difficult time with my weight. And that basically opened up the Pandora box for me because being in science, I had the science mind and I just wanted to know more, and back then, that kind of information, yeah, we didn’t have internet like we have today. If you wanted to find out that kind of information, you would have to go and read journals and try to find information about chemicals and looking at studies and once I started doing that, I was shocked.
Dee McCaffrey:
I mean, I started learning things about chemicals and how they can impact our health. And then for me, that was the turning a turning point in addition to just hitting a bottom with my weight and my eating because at that point, my eating was kind of out of control. I didn’t talk a lot about that yet, but during the whole course, I was struggling with my food addiction and I had hit a top weight of 210 pounds and I was just kind of at my wit’s end. And when I saw that chemical in the food and putting it all together with everything, I thought, do you know what? I think we as a country, we’re just eating wrong.
Dee McCaffrey:
And then I wanted to learn more about the role of food and the human story. What is it that we’re doing today that’s different than what people were doing 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 500 years ago? And then started realizing really what’s different today is all these chemicals in our food and all the processing that we do, we take food apart, try to make it look better, taste better, last longer, and our bodies are not designed for that. And I studiously removed these processed foods from my life and I didn’t do it all at once, it was a gradual process, but I know I started with sugar, white sugar, like refined white sugar and refined white flour. Those were the two things to me that were the biggest culprits at the time. And then started looking at other ingredients, chemical names that even as a chemist, I was just learning to pronounce them and thought, what are they doing on the ingredient list of the food?
Dee McCaffrey:
And from there, I gradually started letting go of other things. And then I started paying more attention to the quality of the food. Back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, organic wasn’t necessarily something that we were paying attention to, not in the way that I pay attention to it today. We didn’t even have genetically modified foods back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, because those didn’t enter the food supply until the mid-90s. And sometimes I say I feel like I inadvertently dodged a bullet there because I stopped eating processed foods in 1992. And so I basically dodged the bullet of GMOs for sure, but I see a lot of people dealing with the impacts of those today. And so it basically started with me on this journey of wanting to know more about how food impacts our health and being a chemist, I basically took my chemistry background and applied it more to food, even though that wasn’t necessarily my exact role in my job at the time as I was just testing water, soil, and air samples.
Dee McCaffrey:
But I spent all my off time about food and nutrition and eventually went back to school and now I have a master’s in clinical nutrition, which has been a joy for me to just continue learning more. But I released 100 pounds in 13 months, basically a year of when I stopped eating processed foods. And because I never went back to eating processed foods, and not like I had done in the past where I dieted and stayed to the rules of the diet for a period of time and then eventually went off the diets and always went back to eating the way that I used to. I didn’t do that this time. What I did was I just learned to eat better and learned to live better. And as a result, that’s what has helped me sustain this for nearly three decades now.
Amy Medling:
What I loved about your approach as a chemist in looking at food, is that for women with PCOS, we are affected by chemicals in our environment, more so than women without it, it’s shown in different studies, showing that we have higher levels of BPA in our blood. And I think when we think of chemicals, we think of maybe chemicals in cleaners, or now health and beauty products, that’s kind of like a hot topic right now, but I still think that people overlook chemicals in our food. I was just having this conversation with my daughter the other day, because she came home from a party where there was lots of chemical-laden food, like Doritos and junky candy. And so she had eaten a lot of that, and for the next two days, she was really down and depressed. And I was trying to help her draw the association between the junky food creates the junky mood.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yes.
Amy Medling:
And that when you eat whole foods, the way that nature intended there, it creates a different quality of thoughts that run through your head. And so I think that even all of these years after you’ve written this book or that you’ve done your research, I still think that this message is so important because I just think people still don’t look at the chemical aspect of packaged food in today’s world.
Dee McCaffrey:
Right. And also, I feel that people are very convenience-oriented and they lack a lot of time to prepare or even pay attention. So, I mean, I notice that even with people that I’m working with one-on-one and coaching that they know that they should be eating foods that are more healthy, but when they get into a jam, they’re ready to just grab something and they don’t look at what’s in it and then they go, oh, I don’t know why I didn’t look at it I just needed something to eat and it looked okay. But then when they look at the ingredients later, they’re like, oh my gosh, it had sugar in it, or it had a food coloring in it or something. And so oftentimes the food manufacturers are very tricky too. And they kind of know you’re not going to look, right?
Amy Medling:
Yeah. Don’t they call it green-washing?
Dee McCaffrey:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Amy Medling:
I think. They make it seem a lot healthier than it actually is.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah.
Amy Medling:
But I think also focusing on eating whole unprocessed foods, rather than focusing on the latest diet trend, especially in the PCOS world where keto seems to be a hot trend or even though I find that most women with PCOS gluten and dairy are inflammatory, but there’s certainly a lot of gluten-free foods that are not healthy.
Dee McCaffrey:
Right.
Amy Medling:
So I love this way of eating and just focusing on eating lots of whole foods in their original form. And I was wondering if you could kind of lay out some of your, I mean, I hate to call them food rules, but maybe your key tenants of your lifestyle, because I think they’re really powerful.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yes, actually. So in my book, I laid out the premise for the book with what I called my Science of Skinny laws. And basically, I said we have laws in nature, basically. And when in science, we actually have a law, for example, the law of thermodynamics or the laws of gravity, right? So, basically, these are laws that are true when they can be repeated in they’re true all the time. So we have laws for how our bodies work as well. And basically, a lot of it have to do with food and breaking myths of what we’ve been told about food. So the first one says healthful eating is about respecting how our body is designed. And one of the things about that is I feel like in our culture, we’re not really taught to respect our body and our health. When we go to school we don’t learn nutrition anymore. That used to be something I think we learned, but now it’s an elective.
Dee McCaffrey:
So you have to go out of your way to learn it. And we don’t necessarily learn how foods impact our health. And so we have to learn how our bodies are designed and our bodies are really designed to utilize the nutrients that are in the food and any time you eat something, your body’s going to assume that the things that you just ate can be used in some way to build up your health or build up your body. So it breaks it down indigestion and then absorbs it into the bloodstream and then sends it around to all the different cells, and so if you’re taking in toxins or if you’re taking in foods that are what I call they don’t come intact, they’ve been processed in some way, for example, white flour. When you take a whole grain of wheat and you take all the parts away, you lose all the vitamins and minerals.
Dee McCaffrey:
And then all you’re really absorbing is the starch part of that. You’ve got starches and you’ve got some proteins from the grain and they’re not intact so you don’t have fiber, you don’t have vitamins, you don’t have minerals. And when that gets into your body, it sends a confusing message into the DNA, which basically, food is supposed to be information to help our bodies express health, right? So when you get this basically fragmented information that’s coming in, the body kind of doesn’t really know what to do with it and so it tries its best because the body is designed to be healthy, not sick.
Dee McCaffrey:
And so basically, the body tries to utilize it, but let’s say, for example, you take in something that really requires calcium or magnesium to run the biochemical reaction to convert that food, and into energy and you don’t have those nutrients coming along with the food you just ate. So your body will just pull those nutrients from places where they’re stored like your bones and tissues and teeth. And basically, you’re setting yourself up for deficiencies of those. And also, the diseases that come along with deficiencies, such as bone density issues, basically wasting collagen building is affected because you don’t have enough of the right nutrients. We need vitamin C, zinc, magnesium, all of those things to build collagen. So we start losing our health because we don’t have the right information coming in.
Amy Medling:
And I also feel like that state of being, I like to kind of call it overfed and undernourished, where you’re eating all of these foods that are devoid in nutrition, you never feel satisfied.
Dee McCaffrey:
You never do because your cells are expecting to get nutrients and all they’re getting is chemicals. And so you still feel hungry because your cells are signaling your brain to say, hey, I need nourishment, and if you’re not aware of what the nourishment you really need is, you’ll just keep eating the same food that’s depleted. And so your cells never really get the nourishment they actually need and so you don’t feel satisfied. And, of course, this leads to a lot of other issues.
Amy Medling:
Right.
Dee McCaffrey:
You have blood sugar spikes, you’ll have which could end up becoming diabetes. The imbalances that happen in the body sometimes happens quickly. Sometimes they happen slowly over time. And I hear people talk about this when they say and you’ve probably heard this too, Amy, I got to the age of 40 and everything fell apart. Right? Well, that’s not because you turned 40, it’s because probably from the time you were maybe 20 this slow degeneration had been happening all over the time. Finally, your body gets to the point where it can’t sustain the equilibrium.
Amy Medling:
Yeah. And I think one of your rules deals with the… You just mentioned the refined flours, but refined sugar. And I know that’s one of your rules. If you could just briefly talk about the difference between, and you do a great job in your book, the difference between natural sugar cane and the nutrients that has versus what we see in the grocery store when we go and pick up a pound of sugar and how our body reacts to that, especially women with insulin resistance.
Dee McCaffrey:
Oh, right.
Amy Medling:
Women with PCOS.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yes. Yeah. So when I was writing the book, I did a lot of research into trying to understand how sugar is refined in the first place. And then what is the difference between if we just chew on a natural piece of natural sugar cane, or just squeeze the juice out of it? What would be the difference in the nutrients? And obviously, there’s a huge difference. So if we were to go out into a field of sugar cane growing and just cut off a piece and start chewing on, it would be basically extracting the juice out of it and consuming that. So the sugar cane in its natural form contains a myriad of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and of course fibers. And when we consume it in its whole natural form, those nutrients work together synergistically to actually nourish the body, and we even have studies that show that consuming natural sugar cane juice, like just a fresh extracted amount of juice can actually help people stabilize their blood sugar levels, which was quite astounding to me.
Dee McCaffrey:
And part of the reason why that happens is because the phytonutrients, there’re polyphenols in the sugar cane that work to slow down the absorption of the naturally occurring sugar. And not only that, you’ve got vitamins, you got vitamin C, you’ve got minerals, also chromium, which is extremely important for sugar balance in the body. But natural sugar cane has rife with chromium. It’s also got magnesium B vitamins, which B vitamins are important for energy production in the body. They help our body to convert glucose into ATP within the cell. So when you consume this new natural sugar cane, you’re getting everything you need to help your body digest and then utilize the sugar that was in there. And in order to make refined sugar, you squeeze the juice out of the sugar cane and then it gets boiled at a high temperature.
Dee McCaffrey:
And basically, then they add in these little seedlings of sugar crystals, and what that does is it helps separate the sugar molecule away from everything else, all of the nutrients and the polyphenols. And then they sort of do like a filtering away and they try to get as much of just the crystals and separated away from the rest of all the nutrients, which actually ends up becoming molasses. In the sugar refining industry, they basically say we separate the crystals away to get rid of impurities. And I thought that was interesting because really the impurities are all the nutrients that were once in the sugar cane, because once they get the crystal separated, then they do another boiling step, and then they do a bleaching step. And by the time it gets to be refined sugar, it’s this white crystal is a pure sucrose, which doesn’t exist anywhere in nature.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dee McCaffrey:
You know, you can’t just go out and find a plant that has only sucrose in it in a high quantity. In fact, the natural sugar cane, its sucrose content is only about 15%, the rest of it is all the water and the minerals and fibers and vitamins and everything else. So I thought that was interesting too, that it really isn’t super high in sugar. But when you separate the sugar molecules out of it now, and you take a teaspoon of that and dunk that into your coffee, now you’re getting a super-concentrated form of sucrose without all of its accompanying nutrients.
Dee McCaffrey:
And then when you take that into your body, that’s why I said the body goes into this sort of freak out in a way because it’s taking in sucrose with nothing. It’s kind of like oh my God, now I have to try to deal with this. It’s like a glut of glucose and sucrose which breaks down into fructose and glucose. And then all of that goes into the bloodstream and the body has to try to deal with that without its accompanying nutrients. And that’s why I said it we get depleted of our stored nutrients, and not only that, if the body can’t convert that glucose into energy, we know that it will just store it in fat cells. It’ll convert it to fats and then store it.
Amy Medling:
Because I know that when I was on my journey and trying to figure out what sweetener I could use that made my body feel better. I know that Stevia, I could tolerate Stevia, a little bit of maple syrup, a little bit of raw honey, maybe a little bit of coconut sugar. And that was about it. I was curious, what do you recommend to your clients if it’s hard to give up sugar completely. That’s that sweetness. What do you recommend?
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah, actually I’m along the same lines as what you do as well. So one of the things that I always mention to my clients is that if you are going to eat sugar in any form, make sure that it has some nutrients coming along with it.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dee McCaffrey:
So the less processed the sugar, the better. Right? So I really do like coconut sugar because of the fact that typically, they press the little SAP out of the flowers of the coconut tree and then just do a low heat dehydration on it to get rid of the water. And then you have these, it’s not even really crystals, right? It’s more like a granular type of sugar where you can’t see through it, right? There’s no transparency on the grain of the sugars. And that’s an important thing that I always let people know. If you can’t see through it like that, then it’s probably got nutrients in it and it’s in a more whole form because that dark color is polyphenols and other nutrients that are important. So coconut sugar or the nectar, either one are two that I like. Maple syrup is great, because it also has minerals. It’s obviously not a whole food type of sweetener because it’s been boiled, but it’s still better than refined white sugar. And then I’m actually a huge fan of Stevia.
Dee McCaffrey:
I’ve been using Stevia since the ’90s and it actually is my preferred sweetener of choice, but I have some standards for myself on that. And I always try to tell people get the liquid extracts of Stevia rather than the powders, because there’s a few brands that do have a good quality powdered Stevia. But for the most part, a lot of the powders are cut with other things. They put some fillers and things in them. And so they’re not as pure and healthy and may not even be real Stevia in some cases. Whereas if you get the liquid extracts, basically what that is taking Stevia leaves, which is just a herb and extracting in water the sweet compounds out of it. And then I always tell people, it’s like making a cup of tea, right?
Dee McCaffrey:
You put your tea leaves in your cup of hot water and then you let it steep in all the compounds from the tea leaves go into the water and then that’s what you drink and you get those nutrients. So with Stevia extracts, it’s the same thing. And what I like about the Stevia extract is the compounds which are called glycosides, the sweet taste, but they are not a type of sugar, and so they do not break down in digestion and they don’t introduce any type of sugar into the bloodstream. So you get the sweet taste, but you don’t get any calories from it since you’re not getting any actual macronutrients from it.
Dee McCaffrey:
But the other thing about Stevia is the glycosides have been kind of pretty widely studied. And one of the things that’s kind of cool about it is when you get that sweet taste on your taste receptors on your tongue, there’s like a little signal that goes to the pancreas, and then there’s like a signal that helps to balance out the insulin levels in the body. So it’s got more going on for it than just having a sweet taste. It’s actually a healing herb.
Amy Medling:
Oh, that’s so interesting. I didn’t know that.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah.
Amy Medling:
I wanted to shift to talking about vegetables.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah.
Amy Medling:
I say that you really can’t heal PCOS if you don’t eat lots of vegetables and that really parallels in one of your skinny laws. So I was wondering if you could just kind of share your thoughts on vegetables and how they impact our body.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah. So the law that I wrote, there was the amount of vegetables you eat is directly proportional to the amount of weight you will lose and the amount of health you will gain. So whether or not a person is seeking to lose weight, it doesn’t matter, but vegetables need to play the starring role on your plate or your bowl, or your wrap or whatever. I just like to see lots of vegetables on a plate. The reason for that is, so one thing, vegetables is they’re very low in naturally occurring sugars that’s different from fruits. Fruits have their place in our diet as well, but vegetables actually need to be in more abundance than fruits. And the reason for that is they have nearly every vitamin in them. But the exception of vitamin D, which is typically not found in very many foods, we actually need to get it from the sun.
Dee McCaffrey:
But with the exception of vitamin D, we have every vitamin in green leafy vegetables, and then other vegetables of color have their various nutrients to them that provide health benefits. So the other thing too is the vegetables help slow down the absorption of other things, and they help you digest your other foods. So if you’re eating proteins, whether you’re eating animal protein or plant proteins, the vegetables within the same meal help with the digestion and help you absorb your nutrients better. There’s something called food synergies, which is where there are certain minerals and vitamins that need each other to do their jobs in the body. And so vegetables typically contain the synergistic nutrients so we don’t have to really think about, oh, should I eat this with that? If we just eat a lot of vegetables, we’re going to be getting the wide variety of nutrients that we need for the synergies to happen in our bodies.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dee McCaffrey:
But vegetables are very detoxifying to our body. Now, we talk about people with PCOS being exposed to pollutants in the environment and all the chemicals that they are exposed to and how that impacts their health, the vegetables help deal with that because they’re natural cleansers to the body. They contain Sulforaphane and other types of nutrients that are natural detoxifiers in the liver, the liver is our body’s main filter and it helps us break down toxins. So the vegetables contain the nutrients that do that. Plus, obviously vegetables, the more vegetables you eat, the more room it takes up in your stomach, and typically you won’t be so full for other foods.
Dee McCaffrey:
If you eat more vegetables, that’s why I say the vegetables should take up at least half of your plate. And then you fill up on vegetables and then you’ll have enough room for the moderate amounts of other types of foods. So especially the carb-type foods. I feel like as a country, we eat way too many carbohydrates in our diet. Even if people are switching to eating healthier forms of carbohydrates, things like brown rice, grains that are good for us, but if you’re eating them in excess and not in the right proportion to the vegetables, you may still have an imbalance.
Amy Medling:
Right. And I want to know, what do you say to folks that really dislike vegetables? I get that a lot. And I know you talked about this in your own personal story about how things changed for you.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah.
Amy Medling:
So yeah, go ahead.
Dee McCaffrey:
Well, one thing is that once you start to release the processed foods from your diet and start in introducing healthier foods, your body chemistry actually changes, and your taste buds will respond to the foods that are good for you. It’s kind of interesting. I think I mentioned this in my book. I was really surprised when I started actually craving vegetables, which I never thought that would ever be the case for me because I was a Dr. Pepper, M&M kind of girl. And those were my favorite foods in the past. So the thought of eating things like broccoli and salads and even things like carrots. I mean, it just wasn’t something that I was drawn to in the past. Because when you’re eating a lot of processed foods, that’s what your body will want. I always say you, your body can’t crave what you don’t put in it, but you will crave what you do put in it.
Amy Medling:
Oh, I love that.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah. So if you start eating more vegetables, it’s like your cells are responding and they’re happy and they’re going to want more of that.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dee McCaffrey:
So you literally start changing. So for people who have a difficult time, because I encountered this with clients quite frequently that they say I can’t eat that many vegetables or I just don’t like a certain number of vegetables. So I would say, well, whatever vegetables you do like, just start eating those more frequently, making those more part of your meals. And then with the invention of smoothies, I think it has become easier now for people to get more vegetables, especially the leafy greens because you could put a whole salad’s worth of leafy greens in your blender and add about a cup of fruit in there.
Dee McCaffrey:
And then add some water or you can use some non-dairy milk or any other things that you might want to add in and blend it up and you’ll get a smoothie that’s full of greens, but you won’t taste them because you’ll really just be tasting the fruits. And I tend to recommend things like berries because berries are very low glycemic and you can eat a lot of them. So they’ll mask out the flavor of the greens. And even if people really need something that is a little more sweet, I’ll say, so add a little bit of Liquid Stevia into your smoothie too if you feel like you need it to be a little more sweet for you, but you’ve got to get those greens in there.
Amy Medling:
You mentioned there were a couple of brands of liquid Stevie that you liked. Would you mind sharing those?
Dee McCaffrey:
Sure. Yeah. And, of course, I have no affiliation to any of that. But it’s called Sweet Leaf.
Amy Medling:
Oh, right.
Dee McCaffrey:
That’s the brand, in fact, and I like Sweet Leaf. And then there’s another one, NOW, they do one as well. But what I know about especially Sweet Leaf is that they use a cold water extra. And then they filter. Because a lot of the time the question that I get is how do you take a green leaf, which is Stevia which is an herb and then get a clear liquid extract? And the answer to that is that when they extract the leaves, of course, it’s going to be green at first, but then they filter it through a filter paper that has very tiny pours so that all the glycosides and water can come through, but the chlorophyll molecule, which is a little bigger doesn’t come through the filter.
Dee McCaffrey:
So the chlorophyll is what gives it the green color. So that’s how you get a clear liquid extract. And I just like the purity of that. It reminds me of my chemistry days of working in the lab and doing filtration’s and understanding what that’s all about. If you want something to be in your end result, but you want something else not there, you just filter it through a filter paper that is designed to allow the things you want to come through and the things you don’t want to come through and not to come through. Yeah.
Amy Medling:
Yeah. Well, I had no idea, that’s that makes a lot of sense. You have so much information in your book and you have some great recipes and I know you have a cookbook out. I think it’s important for folks to know that you can make healthy food taste delicious and it’s important to find resources like your cookbook. And it’s called The Science of Skinny Cookbook, as well as your book, The Science of Skinny. I have lots of seasonal meal plans as well for ideas on how to take whole food and make it into something that really tastes delicious. So that’s important. You also have a website. So I was hoping that you can tell listeners how they can find out more about your work and your Processed Free America website.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yeah. So our website is processedfreeamerica.org, and we are a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people about the health benefits of whole foods and the health impacts of processed foods. So we have a number of things available on our site. We also run a podcast, it’s called Diet Science and our podcasts are available on the website. We also run a facilitator training program for people who are interested in teaching the processed-free philosophy in their communities. So we have that. We have lots of articles that I’ve written on various topics of health. And we have a message, like a discussion forum. There’s just a lot of different things available on the website. And then for one-on-one nutrition coaching, I also have my page on the website there. People can find that under the store on the website, if you click on store and then on nutrition counseling, you can find me there.
Amy Medling:
Well, excellent. And I will post all of that on the show notes as well. And it’s just been really a pleasure to chat with you Dee. I’ve been wanting to have you on the podcast for so long. So I was glad that we were able to make it happen.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yes. Thank you so much, Amy. I think it’ll be impactful for your listeners. And I have a lot of information. I work with clients who have PCOS as well. So even though I didn’t get into a lot of that today, I do have the knowledge and the education on that, so I know how to do protocols to help people in utilizing this whole food approach.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dee McCaffrey:
Because I really feel that the way to health, like I said before, our bodies are designed to be healthy. They’re not really designed to be sick. And one of my things, my little motto’s is whenever we’re out of balance, it’s either because we’re not getting enough of something we need or we’re getting too much of something we don’t need. And so I feel that my role is to help people find what they really need and how to balance it all out.
Amy Medling:
And the knowledge is such power. And having the information about how food impacts you on a cellular level from a chemist is really powerful. And I think before we go, I also wanted to just share, or if you want to share, your very powerful prayer that you start your day with in order for you to make good choices with what you eat.
Dee McCaffrey:
Yes. So this is a prayer that I have been saying since day one of my journey into health. And basically, I say, God, please infuse me with the courage, willingness, and strength, to make wise and healthy food choices today. That’s what I say at the beginning of the day. And then at the end of the day, I say, thank you for the courage, willingness, and strength, to have made wise and healthy food choices today. It’s a beginning of the day and the end of the day acknowledgement and prayer for the ability to do it. Because I find that sometimes of my own humanness, we all are faced with challenges. And I feel like the more support and strength that I can get, not just from a power greater than myself, but from others as well, other people. So having that support is so super important.
Amy Medling:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s such a simple but powerful habit ritual to add to your day. So glad that you were able to share that with us.
Dee McCaffrey:
Thank you.
Amy Medling:
Well, thank you again for joining us. And thank you to everyone for listening. I look forward to being with you again very soon. Bye-bye.
