Dr. Mark Hyman walks through four budget-friendly whole-food recipes: Greek yogurt parfait, overnight oats with resistant starch, homemade hummus, and an apple cinnamon burrito. He shows how to eat nutritious meals for roughly $6 a day and challenges viewers to try whole foods for seven days.
Chapters
The foods you eat every day, your meals, your snacks, even dessert, shape more than you realize.
Not because they're complicated, but because they add up over time.
And when you've had a few simple, reliable recipes, well, everything gets easier. So in this video, I'm going to show you 4 go-to staples: a yogurt bowl, overnight oats, homemade hummus, and a simple apple dessert. Real food, easy to make, and built for real life. So let's get into it. So breakfast is confusing for people because in America, people eat dessert for breakfast.
You don't want sugar for breakfast.
You want protein and fat. Something easy you can make is a yogurt parfait. And basically, I like to use Greek yogurt because it's higher in protein.
You want to use full fat.
The new dietary guidelines said don't worry about fat. They're right. So don't worry about the fat. No nonfat yogurt.
It's got more protein. So all you have to do is— it's very complicated. You have to take the yogurt and you have to put it in a bowl. Very hard, but you can do it. I know you can. And this is for 2 people for breakfast. And then you And cut up a little banana, little banana, about half a banana per person, and throw it on top of the parfait. And then you got some berries, these are ripened right on the vine. And then put a little bit of, of walnuts or any kind of nuts on top, and a little bit of almonds, and you got a high protein, high high-fat, delicious breakfast for two. Ta-da!
Now, if you heard me talking in the past, you might have heard me saying I'm not a big fan of oats, but there's an exception: overnight oats. Overnight oats are special because they turn into something called resistant starch, which actually helps regulate your microbiome and your blood sugar. Super good. And when you add full-fat Greek yogurt, which has extra protein, extra fat, and you add nuts and seeds, you really slow down the glycemic load of the meal, and it's actually great to eat for breakfast.
So I love this. It's yummy. You basically take half a cup of rolled oats, half a cup of water. You can make two at once if you want. Pretty easy for your friends and family. I'm gonna have this for breakfast tomorrow. And then use a quarter cup of yogurt, Greek yogurt. Kind of mix it all, put it in there. Also, I put a little splash of salt because it kind of makes it taste a little better. Not too much. And a little bit of cinnamon. Cinnamon actually also helps your blood sugar, by the way. It's a great spice. Spices are great for all sorts of things. But you can really just have a nice mixture of the yogurt and the water and the oats, and then you throw on top of it a little banana, a little bit of berries. Use the frozen berries. I like the frozen berries because they're riper and juicier and more delicious. Take a little almonds, walnuts, throw them on top, and you have this incredible breakfast in the morning. And then you just cover them with this little kind of yummy breakfast parfait, yogurt, and then cover it over and stick it in the, uh, stick in the fridge. Now the beautiful thing about overnight oats is you don't have to cook them because they cook overnight. That's why they're called overnight oats. And they're really quite yummy. I'm gonna have them for breakfast because I'm hungry. Mm. So I'm going to show you how to make a few snacks that are really simple, really easy, and that you can have around, keep in the fridge.
And if you're hungry, this is a fine snack to have and it's very affordable.
So it's very simple to make hummus, homemade hummus. Use chickpeas and you can use canned chickpeas. They're very affordable. You don't have to cook. It's very easy, very quick. Boom, boom, boom. You open the can, drain it, rinse the chickpeas, and there you go. We're going to stick those in a bowl and we're going to then chop the veggies, which we're going to use to kind of actually make a little kind of dip. So rather rather than using bread or something else, you actually can use veggies as your snack. So carrots are good. They're really hard. You want like hard kind of veggies to do the little crudité, I think. But you can slice these up and they become little things you can kind of dip in the hummus and eat the hummus with. And the same thing with celery. You know, you can cut it in half. Cut it again in half and you've got this beautiful thing. Or you can just leave it, leave it whole, but you know, you get more bang for your buck here. And so you've got these beautiful things to dip in the hummus. And then same thing with the green peppers, just cut them in nice slices like this. And this comes the hard part now, folks, mishing and mashing. So you take a lemon and again, a nice juicy lemon, cut it in half. And if you have a lemon squeezer, that's fine, but if you don't, you can just kind of take the pits out yourself by your fingers and do your best. And then this is the old-fashioned method— you just stick your thumb in the middle and squeeze, and you get this beautiful lemon juice everywhere. A little bit of salt, and you can salt to taste. Put a little olive oil in there, and then a little bit of chopped garlic. I'm going to use a fork to mush it. If you have a masher, that can work too. If you have a blender, you can throw in a blender or food processor, makes it easier. But this is more exercise, so you get a twofer. It's more kind of a rustic version. Okay, so then once you got all smashed up and mashed up, you got a high protein, high fiber, and good fat snack, which is really nutritious, full of minerals. Beans are great for you.
You know, the thing is, everybody likes something sweet, and I do too.
And so you don't have to go whole hog and eat a ton of sugar, but you can make things that taste sweet, that are delicious for dessert, and that your kids will love. It's kind of like an apple turnover, and it's fun to make, it's easy. You make them with these really cool little rice paper-thin things that you can get from the store. And they're basically with apples and cinnamon and butter. That's the thing, you have to know how to pare an apple, and you just cut the apples into slices. You can keep the skin, because the skin has a lot of the nutrients in it, so you want to keep the skin. And make sure you wash it really well. There's actually washes you can make for vegetables and fruit that take pesticides and things off if you can't afford organic, but that's okay. Or if it's not organic, you might want to peel it. And then you just heat up the pan and put a little butter in there. Like roasted, kind of pan-roasted apples. Little cinnamon. Okay, so once you've been like cooking the apples and they get a little soft and Buttery and with cinnamon. And then you take one of these little rice sheets and you dip it in water. It takes about a minute or so to kind of soak up the water. You put a little bit of the apple in the middle here. It's like an apple burrito. And then you basically fold it over like this. Apple burrito. Like that. And once you've got your apple burrito, you put a little more butter in the pan, and then you can make it like a crispy apple burrito. And you've got your little apple burrito here, and you can kind of roll it over gently, get it crispy, buttery. Okay, so let me just take your apple burrito, and you have this beautiful little apple homemade turnover burrito.
Now, I want to be clear. Food access is a real issue. Policy matters. Food deserts exist. And none of this is your fault. But you're not powerless. Even one small change can shift your health and your future. So here's the challenge. Eat a whole foods diet for 7 days on about $6 a day. Now, that's the reality that many families are living with. And it's possible to make nourishing choices on that budget. Now, if you plan to do the challenge with me and want a little extra guidance, download my free PDF, A Budget-Friendly Guide to Healthy Eating. I created this guide to help you take what you learned in this video and apply it in real life. All the recipes you saw me make here are included in the guide, plus about 30 additional recipes, all for about $6 a day. You also get a sample meal planning template grocery lists, a batch prep guide, and some must-have kitchen essentials. Now, if you're eating on $6 a day for a week and that feels like too much to do, start smaller. Maybe it's cooking one whole food dinner this week or swapping out processed foods for real food for a few days. It doesn't matter what you choose. What matters is that you start. Do it with somebody you trust, cuz getting healthy is a team sport and it's more fun together. Learn together, help each other, support each other. And if you join the challenge, don't forget to tag me in your journey at @drmarkhyman on Instagram and all social media.
