Help Yourself | Lindsay Maitland Hunt
Help Yourself: A Guide To Gut Health For People Who Love Delicious Food
By Lindsay Maitland Hunt
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City, sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Hi, I'm Lindsay Maitland Hunt, and I am the author of Help Yourself, A Guide To Gut Health For People Who Love Delicious Food, as well as the cookbook Healthyish, which came out in 2018
Suzy Chase: For more Cookery by the Book. Join me over on Instagram and if you enjoy this podcast please be sure to tell a friend. I'm always looking for new people to enjoy Cookery by the Book, now on with the show. So you've lived in LA, New York, Berlin, and now Jackson, Wyoming, hopefully back to Berlin soon. You've been a recipe developer, a magazine editor at Real Simple, one of my all time, favorite magazines, and now a two time cookbook author. This cookbook has come out at the perfect time for me. I'm not alone when I say I've been emotional eating and drinking during the quarantine, so much banana bread and so many Aperol spritzes. Who is this cookbook for?
Lindsay Maitlan...: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. And the answer to your question is it's for everyone, because the thing about gut health is what that term is referring to is that we all have this collection of microbes that lives inside our large intestine, which is known as the gut microbiota. You might also hear the term gut microbiome, which is another term that's used for the collection of microbes, but also refers to their genes. So what happens is that this is the waystation to health because everything we eat gets digested by these microbes. And then those end up communicating with the rest of our body via chemical messengers. So the point is that this book is for everyone because we all house a community of microbes. No two are exactly alike. It's sort of, I like to compare it to a fingerprint. They all look similar, but they're all completely individual. And like I said, these microbes are the waystation to health. And so even if you have a diagnosed illness that you might be treating via how you eat or via the gut microbiota, it's also true if you're in great health, you still maintain this community of microbes. So no matter what this cookbooks is good for you
Suzy Chase: Let's start with your food journey. So you were sick for three and a half years. Describe the tipping point for you when you knew you'd exhausted all the doctor's visits and 17 pills a day.
Lindsay Maitlan...: So what happened was that I was accumulating a grab bag of symptoms, and I think so many people can relate to this. It wasn't necessarily something so clear. There was no straightforward diagnosis, but rather symptoms. So heartburn, migraines, itching, weight, gain depression, you know, hives all over my whole body, not even looking like myself in the mirror to me. And what happened was every time I go to a doctor for whatever symptom I had, you know, you go for the hives, you go to an allergist for feeling depressed you go to a psychiatrist or psychologist, things like that. Never was anyone able to connect for me that these were coming from something together. And I would say, you know, is there a connection? I, I never had heartburn and I never had itching and hives and I never had migraines. Could these things be connected at all? And I would always be told like, no, there's no connection. And then I would ask, is there something that I'm eating? I don't know. I mean, I'd been a recipe developer for so many years at this point, but I really saw food as a modality that had mostly to do with taste and maybe secondarily to do with how much I would weigh or how I looked but I wasn't really thinking about it translating and how I felt. And these doctors also told me that there was no connection there. So what happened was that after all these years, I really didn't feel like myself. And I ended up going to stay with my parents in Wyoming. I was feeling really depleted. I'd been living in New York and felt like I just have to give up because I'm spending all my time, going to doctors, dealing with the health insurance claims that come with that calling the insurance company, because inevitably something went wrong and really starting to feel like my identity was changing and being defined by feeling sick all the time. And I went to this functional medicine doctor. So he's someone who's trained in functional medicine, as well as having a traditional MD and he charted all the symptoms when they started and showed me this graph that showed them coming up into a wave and he said, this is totally normal. I can help you. What he told me to do was actually to cut out foods to cut out gluten, dairy and eggs. And I tried that and I did not feel any better. And so when you ask about the tipping point, you know, that's when I really had the ah-ha moment of like, I think I just need to buy the books by the scientists about this gut microbiota, whatever that means and start interviewing them and start reading scientific papers and figure out based on the science, which turns out it's these health promoting microbes that live in our gut. What they actually thrive on is dietary plant fiber. Once I understood that, I just started adding in those things that the microbes loved and also taking out refined grains to excess, not fully cutting them out and cutting out refined sugar to excess, again, not fully cutting it out, but really cutting back. And that's when my health started turning around.
Suzy Chase: So the standard Western diet today is centered around many forms of the same thing, sugar, how toxic is sugar?
Lindsay Maitlan...: I think this is something I say in the book, it's a saying from toxicology, which is the dose makes the poison. I think sugar in its self, like any ingredient or food is not inherently bad. Like I really like to stay away from moralizing terms like good or bad or guilty, or, you know, guilt-free, I think sugar is fine in moderation. And, and again, like I think part of this way of eating that is more like what I like to say, plant focused rather than plant-based because it's not a vegan cookbook, although it encourages eating as many plants as possible as making up your day-to-day way of eating. Sugar has a role for many people who get in better touch with their bodies and, and want to have some things sweet and delicious. It's so satiating, it speaks to pleasure. Or, you know, you mentioned stress eating during the pandemic. I certainly know I've wanted more sugar than ever in the past six months and anticipate through the election and to come that I'll probably be wanting sugar as well. Um, yeah, it's really when you get into excess, because it starts changing the way our body functions. And so what happens there, so satiating that you end up eating something and maybe it takes the place of those foods that actually the health promoting microbes in your gut need to thrive, which again is like a variety of whole plant food sources. So you might eat something that's really high in sugar and therefore skip that plate of broccoli because who really wants broccoli when a cookie is sitting in front of you. Like I know I don't.
Suzy Chase: So I think you just touched on this a little bit, but to me, this seems like a modern phenomenon. My mom and grandma never complained about these issues. Do you think it has to do with our modern process food?
Lindsay Maitlan...: It has to do with processed food. I mean, yes that's, that's definitely true. Um, the rise in use of antibiotics, indiscriminately is one thing that's also pointed to because there's nothing wrong with antibiotics they are such life-saving tools. But often, I mean, we know this right now, there's a pandemic caused by a virus, a virus isn't killed by an antibiotic. An antibiotic can only kill a bacteria, but so often people have taken antibiotics sort of just in case. And what happens is that those don't just kill one tiny individual microbe, but they wipe out whole strains and that can change how the gut microbiota community functions long-term because you can end up wiping out so many of these health promoting species. Yeah. And you mentioned processed food. I think also the reality is that it takes time to cook. And this is something, you know, that I think is a little more complicated than we have time to get into the podcast but if anyone's interested in the way that the rise of women not having as much time in the home or working, the second shift has affected the way we eat. There's this book called Formerly Known As Food by Kristin Lawless that really digs into that. So it just takes time to go healthy food, which is something that I think a lot of people want to shy away from. But that's the truth it's a process food it's just fast and ready to go and so when you have less time, you're less likely to create the dinner that's made from whole food plant sources.
Suzy Chase: So instead of recommending high fiber foods for gut health, you say work in a variety of plants, including vegetables, whole grains, beans into your diet. I love that this cookbook makes it clear exactly what we need to get at the grocery store.
Lindsay Maitlan...: So there's a book, another book I love reading. And, um, there's a book called Nutritionism by Gyorgy Scrinis, who's a researcher professor out of Australia and he is the one who coined the term nutritionism which Michael Pollan also popularized, which basically says, when you talk about the nutrient above the food. So originally I went straight forward with the proposal for this book. I was like, it's about low-glycemic high-fiber foods, you know, but if someone hears that they don't necessarily know what that means. Then they look at the carrot and they're thinking, is this low-glycemic and high fiber? What does, what does that mean? What does glycemic even mean? But if you understand that, the reason that we know that a variety of plants is so good for us is because of some things that we know they're high in complex chains of carbohydrates, which are what dietary fiber is, and they contain antioxidants and polyphenols and all these flavonoids, these complicated words. Sure. But at the end of the day, does that really matter? Those are the things we are able to name, but what about all the other components of the food that we don't know about yet and what happens when they're combined together? Instead, if we think about just getting the variety of those whole food plant sources, we're still getting the high fiber low-glycemic high antioxidant, all this sort of health jargon that's out there and is meaningful in a lot of ways. But at the end of the day, often I think for many people obscures what we eat away from choosing the whole foods when possible, and going for the packaged foods that might say, Oh, this is high fiber, you know, but it's actually a carrot that's been dehydrated and refined and used as a powder. We don't know what that's inherently as good as eating it and it's whole food source. And in fact it seems that there is actually a complex matrix of things that happen when that fiber is encased in the actual food. So that's why I try to stay away from those sorts of jargony health terms.
Suzy Chase: Two weeks ago, I finished a 10 day cleanse and boy was that rough. And you know, my biggest problem was with flavor. I wish I would've had this cookbook, back then to learn about your nine ways to dress up a meal. I basically relied on flaky sea salt the whole time. Can you give us a couple of your delicious examples?
Lindsay Maitlan...: Of course. I'm curious to know what kind of cleanse you did while I'm looking up that page.
Suzy Chase: I did The Class.
Lindsay Maitlan...: What's that?
Suzy Chase: Do you know The Class by Taryn Toomey?
Lindsay Maitlan...: Oh, it's a workout.
Suzy Chase: Well, it's a workout called The Class by Taryn Toomey, but then she has The Cleanse. So you do The Cleanse and then you do classes every day of the cleanse.
Lindsay Maitlan...: I see. Okay. So the nine ways to dress up your meal is something I like to just have on hand for always thinking about how to make a combination of relatively plain ingredients taste more delicious, add half an avocado out a quarter cup of chopped nuts, always adding fresh herbs tastes delicious. And this is part of a section called Prep city, which is in the front of the recipe portion of the cookbook where I give basic vegetable recipes, a little section, I call Three Magical Transformations, which includes roasted chickpeas, pickled shallots, and breadcrumbs made from cauliflower. I also talk about making beans, legumes and whole grains, broth, chickpea, flatbread, and idea is that, of course, it's great to make a whole recipe if you want. That is either from my book or someone else's book or anything, but sometimes it's actually more efficient to have some components ready to go, to throw together a meal. But if it's just a bowl of like brown rice roasted, cauliflower and you know, steamed broccoli, I don't know if that's going to feel like a meal. And so this nine ways to dress up your meal. Like I said, avocado nuts, herbs, you could add a fermented food, you could shake some seeds all over. I have a seed shaker in my book, which sounds kind of silly to stir some seeds together in a jar, but it is actually amazing because instead of pulling out the bag of hemp seeds and flax seeds and chia seeds, there's in a jar ready to go, always sea salt and get a real pepper grinder. Don't use the kind in the tin and finishing with a cold pressed oil, whether that's pumpkin seed or walnut oil or olive oil, these types of things make a random jumble of components or take out or whatever you have leftovers. They make them feel a little more satisfying flavorful and usually colorful and more exciting to you.
Suzy Chase: The other night, I made your recipe for Shrimp Black Bean and Kimchi Tacos on Page 260. What an interesting flavor combination. I would never think to mix black beans with kimchi. Can you describe this recipe?
Lindsay Maitlan...: Absolutely. This is something I get told a lot about my recipes, like, oh, I never would've thought of putting that together. So what you do is you start scallions, beans, kimchi, fish sauce, and some water and a skillet so that everything is bubbling and sort of starts to have a sauce. And then you just store in shrimp and those steam through just, you know, two to three minutes, you don't ever want to overcook shrimp in my opinion, and then throw some cilantro on top and those get piled onto corn tortillas. And it is an unbelievably fast dinner. And it gets a lot of the things that we know are good for gut health, like beans. You have the corn tortillas. I love sprouted corn tortillas. Kimchi is a fermented food also what's great is that it has cabbage in it so there's that extra vegetable in there. And obviously like shrimp is delicious and has a lot of benefits for us.
Suzy Chase: What I don't see often in cookbooks as a nutritional index. And wow, I can tell you put so much work into this. Talk a little bit about the nutritional index because it is a thing of beauty.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Thank you. So I really appreciate that. So one thing I did was partner with two nutritionists, one who was a supervisor on the book for me and another who ran the numbers. And the three of us worked together to make sure that nothing was too out of control when it came to what the general health recommendations of the government and of these nutritionists were. And so I paid for the nutritional analysis because I knew that it would be valuable and it is a lot of work because you're looking at so many numbers, but part of what I do at the beginning, when I introduce it as say, like, I really don't use these numbers, but what I do look at, and if anyone wants to, and these are marked in blue rather than black for the rest of the numbers for each recipe, the total dietary fiber and the added sugar are marked, because as discussed earlier, dietary fiber corresponds to what we know that beneficial microbes like to eat that's comes from plant food sources and added sugar as on the flip side, the thing that we're trying to reduce for a variety of reasons that are a little more complex. And so those are marked on the nutritional index for anyone who wants sort of a light touch engagement with understanding what we're thinking about overall, getting towards helpfulness with the gut in mind, that being said, there's also this scorecard, which is something that's on every recipe, which is another way of thinking about nutritional, which is more my way of thinking, which is the additive way because everyone's body is different and I mentioned this like a calorie is not equal. So if I eat a 500 calories slice of cake, and then I do 500 calories on the elliptical, then I'm fine, right? It's not a net net like that. And a calorie from sugar is not the same as a calorie from a carrot is not the same as a calorie from a kale. And on top of that, your individual community of microbes in the gut microbiota and the large intestine changes how you actually extract calories. So someone might extract 570 calories from that piece of cake and someone else might extract 470 calories.
Suzy Chase: Wow. I haven't never heard that.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Oh, it's crazy. I mean, it's so, so interesting. And another book that's amazing by Gary Taubes is called The Case Against Sugar. He talks a little bit about that and another book called 10% Human and all the books that I read and referenced and the scientists I spoke with and there's all the citations in the back as well for anyone who wants to do further reading. I created this thing called the scorecard, which you'll see on each recipe. If it's relevant, it'll have a little check mark for how much to check off on the scorecard, which you can download on my website and you can either save it to your phone or print it out. And the idea is you actually check off what you do in each day. So you had a serving of leafy green vegetables, you had two servings of other vegetables and fruit. You had a serving of whole grains and you can sort of track over time how it is that you're doing in terms of keeping your beneficial gut microbes in mind.
Suzy Chase: For the Shrimp Black Bean and Kimchi tacos the scorecard is LGVs beans and legumes and fermented food. What's LGVs?
Lindsay Maitlan...: Leafy Green Vegetables.
Suzy Chase: Oh yes. That ticks so many boxes.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Yeah, exactly. And that's what I wanted to show was like, this is not crazy. There's so many ways to be incorporating these types of things into our way of eating that maybe we wouldn't have because it wasn't on our minds. It's like, I know this is true for me. I just wasn't that focused on making sure I ate leafy green vegetables every day, because I had this idea of like healthfulness being determined by calories and exercise and how big my body was. And I think that's a really dangerous way to be thinking because like health has just, it's not just about whether your jeans fit.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment, this season called last night's dinner, where I ask you what you had last night for dinner.
Lindsay Maitlan...: I'm really glad that I have a good answer to this.
Suzy Chase: Pizza Hut! ha.
Lindsay Maitlan...: I actually made a version of the recipe it's from prep city. So one of my favorite recipes in the book that I cannot recommend more is on Page 253 Roasted Eggplant and Chickpeas with Herbed Oat Pilaf. So I had the herbed oat pilaf. I roasted some patty pan squash. I sauteed shallots and swiss chard stems together to make the sort of topping and then braised the swiss chard leaves separately, more like spinach. And then I roasted some leftover broccoli, like the way that I do the cauliflower breadcrumbs cut them really small, toss them with olive oil, salt, and pepper, roasted those until they were crispy and delicious to sprinkle on top and then had some of the tahini sauce from the book to drizzle over top. Oh, and there were some roasted lion's mane mushrooms.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Where can we find you on the web and social media and where can we find the digital scorecard?
Lindsay Maitlan...: So you can find me at lindsaymaitlandhunt.com and if you go to lindsaymaitlandhunt.com/help-yourself, you can get a little overview of the books and some blurbs see some links to buy the book. And if you go to lmh.house/scorecard or lindseymaitlandhunt.com/scorecard, you'll be able to get a little overview of how the scorecard works and I recommend actually best just taking a screenshot with your phone because you can use Instagram to just mark it up in the little stories function, if that makes sense.
Suzy Chase: Oh, that's smart.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Yeah. And then I write a newsletter, which you can find at lmh.substock.com or you can find me on Instagram at instagram.com/Lindsey Maitland.
Suzy Chase: Awesome. Well, thanks Lindsay, for coming on Cookery by the Book podcast.
Lindsay Maitlan...: Thank you so much for having me it was a delight.
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