Transitioning to a Plant-Based Diet - Health Channel

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Transitioning to a Plant-Based Diet |

Rodney Knight, Executive Chef with West Kendall Baptist Hospital, recommends trying plant-based foods. “You will be pleasantly surprised that there is plenty of variety out there that you can potentially make a new meal every night for the rest of your life, without doubling back.”

Natalie Castro, Registered Dietitian with Baptist Health South Florida, says it is important to make sure at every meal you have some type of veggie or some type of high fiber food.

Transcript

We’re gonna get into our final thoughts here particularly on plant-based diets, if you want to leave our audience with our final tip of the day what would it be? > So I would say try try them try them and you will be pleasantly surprised that there is plenty of variety out there that you can potentially make a new meal every night for the rest of your life, without doubling back. > And I would say just making sure at every meal you have some type of veggie on there or some type of high fiber food. So whatever that choice is making sure you have that option, if you’re gonna have breakfast make sure you have some oatmeal add a lot of banana to add some blueberries, there you’re adding that Pro… plat based foods in there. The veggies, the foods, the whole greens, if you’re gonna have lunch, what is your vegetable gonna be? > Make that first your decision and then work around that. > I also want to say give time for your palate to adjust to the new flavors, a lot of the times I see that people get discouraged because the food doesn’t taste the same. It’s not supposed to taste the same, so your body will adjust to it and you’ll you’ll be you’ll be happy with the results. Now we can you tell us about some foods that maybe can cause high cholesterol triglycerides? > So actually a lot of people think cholesterol is linked just to cholesterol and diet. So we used to be told “Oh eggs” you have to reduce your egg intake and your shrimp intake because those are high in cholesterol. So they do have higher cholesterol levels but those aren’t actually not the foods we should be focusing on. We should be focusing on the sugars and the processed foods and how much of those carbohydrates, the refined carbohydrates were eating. So a normal level of cholesterol should be less than 200. So something as high as 400 is very very high, and as well as the triglycerides. So you want those two to reduce you want to take a look at how much sugar you have in your diet if you’re drinking sweetened beverages or things like alcohol that will drive the triglycerides to go up and if you’re not having the sweetened beverages then taking a look at those refined carbohydrates. So you want to make sure that if you’re at which refined carbohydrates are gonna be like your bread, your cereal, your crackers. So if you eat a lot of this throughout the day… first of all you want to make sure you’re doing the whole grain options that have at least three grams of fiber per serving, so that you make sure you’re having enough fiber, and cut back on how often you’re having that throughout the day.

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