What Are Your Thoughts on Coconut Product Substitutions?

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Sweet Ray Ban Meta Glasses available at Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers. What are your thoughts on coconut product substitutions? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert and and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Karen from Facebook asks, what are your thoughts on coconut product substitutions? I have a family member who's allergic and when everything under the sun seems to recommend coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut water, coconut flour, coconut aminos help. All right, I'm going to give you a lot of swaps. Stay with me, I'll be right back.

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Oh my gosh, things are so much easier now than they were before. Back when I first wrote the Virgin Diet. In fact, I'm gearing up for virgin diet 2.0 because there's so many easy swaps now. And I remember back then I was using coconut milk and coconut cream to do things like whipped cream, to use in smoothies, to use in cream based soups because there really wasn't any other options and it was really hard to find. You had to go to like the Asian side of the supermarket or go to a specific Asian store to find them. It was only in cans. So good news is it's so much easier now to find that and many other substitutions. So if you're saying, oh my gosh, we cannot do coconut, let's talk about some of the different things that you could use instead. Now, coconut oil, one of the great things with coconut oil, coconut oil is like one of those things that you can take with you and use for so many different things. It can be massage oil, you know, it can, you can use it on the ends of your hair, you can use it to cook with. So there's a lot of great different things. I'm going to give you some of the things that I like to use instead. I'll be honest with you, you're hearing it here first. I don't like the taste of coconut. Really. I'm not a big coconut fan. So using coconut oil on foods, like for me, it's just kind of ugh because I don't really love it. So if you're cooking at a higher heat, the ones that I like to use is sesame oil. Another one that you can use is ghee. And if you're using it more like, I know some people kind of use it more, coconut butter, you've got all the different nut butters that you can use. Anything from almond butter, cashew butter, walnut butter, pecan butter, and if you can't use nuts, you could use sunflower butter. So lots of options there. Now let's talk about milks. It's so important with milks to make sure that you're getting unsweetened versions. So that's the first thing I'm going to stress is get unsweetened and ideally get full fat on these things. With coconut, the full fat ones, I will stick a coconut full fat carton in the fridge, I will let it get cold and then I'll pull it out and I'll pull the cream off the top and get rid of the water. And I can use that for making my chocolate avocado mousse. Yum. And I'll also use it to make whipped cream. Now, you can't do the same thing, I gotta be honest with any of the other nut milk options, so bummer on that. But they do work great for making your smoothies. And I have found one that frosts well if you want to put it on top of your coffee. So some of the different options for milks are almond milk, flax milk, oat milk, hemp milk. And with oat milk, I found that the full fat oat milk, again unsweetened, makes an amazing froth. For coffee, I have one of those little travel coffee frothers. We are serious about our coffee over here at the Virgin Household. Oh, my gosh. So we actually travel with a coffee frother and use that full fat oat milk to froth. So good. All right, so those are my milk options. Almond, flax, oat and hemp. I gotta tell you, I'm not a fan of the hemp. And if you do not have issues with goat, you could do goat milk, which I'm also not a fan of because I don't know, I don't want goaty flavor in my. Not a fan of goaty flavor. So there's that. All right, now water, I am not a fan of coconut water because of the sugar in it. So coconut water for me is a no. Just drink spring water. So let's just get rid of the coconut water altogether. Drink string water. If you're trying to do it for the electrolytes. There is an electrolyte product that I got a couple that I like. Now I tend to use either designs for health's electrolyte synergy or there's another one called It's. It spells out element. It's lmnt and it's. It's a little saltier, so I dilute it down. But that's another one with a lot of amazing flavors. So that's what I do. Do not if you need an electrolyte type of thing. Otherwise, if you're drinking water, drink water. There you go. How about flowers? Wow. There's a lot of options now in Flowers and thank you Siete. Shout out to the to them over there at Siete Brands for bringing out the cassava. Now the thing is with these flour so is they can still be high sugar impact like cassava and rice, right? The cool thing with coconut flour, because it comes from a nut, it's very low. Right. It's, it's not really a carby thing, it's a fatty thing. So what you can do is a blend. And I really think this is the way to go is you can do almond flour blended with cassava blended with rice. So look at the different ways that you can blend the flours together. That makes it a little bit more interesting. And coconut aminos finally is the one that we've been using as a substitute for soy sauce. When you're on the virgin diet and pulling out soy, once you've gone through that testing period on the virgin diet, if you find that you can tolerate soy and you don't have any thyroid issues, gluten free tamari used when you're having sushi can be an option for you instead of the coconut aminos there. So there's so many options now. It's so exciting. It's very exciting right now as I, as I work through the swaps for the virgin diet and all of these choices and I think that the bigger vision is this and I love the question is find the healthy swaps for foods that may not work for you. Like it might be a healthy food, but it's not healthy for you. Right. Or that just are not healthy. Let's be honest. Okay? So find those healthy options. There's so many available now out there. All right, happy hunting. And if you've got questions, I've got answers. Jump on over to Instagram DM me @jj virgin. We're looking for the questions. We'll pull them up on my spreadsheet. I'll answer them and make sure you don't miss that. So go to subscribetojay.com so you hear the daily dose foreign this is JJ.

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