Stay Healthy when Eating Out, with Nicolette Richer

Vegan does not mean healthy. Gluten free does not mean healthy at all. At the end of the day, what you're looking for is whole foods.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Five Journeys podcast where.

We empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

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Welcome back to the Five Journeys podcast. Live like youe Matter Today. Our guest is Nicolette Richet. She is a regenerative medicine educator, entrepreneur, author, doctoral student, and speaker turned endurance athlete. Did I mention she's wicked cool? She's a savvy wellness facilitator and a renowned environmental and sustainability expert with an insatiable desire to research and educate. Nicolette speaks regularly to captivated audiences on how to use food as medicine to reverse their chronic degenerative illnesses so they can reclaim their lives and realize their peak potential. Hi, Nicolette.

Hello, Wendy. Hi, Ed. Really, it's a pleasure to be here with you.

It's our pleasure. So I want to know first, like, what you do and how you do it.

Yeah. So, you know, I've been in this space for the last 15 years and one thing, you know, led to another. I was coaching clients and then all of a sudden we had restaurants and then we had a wellness center and a, you know, now we have a documentary that's just coming out. So it's all kind of just flowed from there. And the green mustache is a collection of plant based, whole food, 100% organic, nutrient dense food restaurants. And so we have four locations and we have 10 more coming to New York. And I think we're still the only restaurant chain that serves complete, unrefined whole foods. So, you know, the food comes from our farmers and our distributors. And we basically cook it, juice it, turn into smoothies, desserts, dips, dressings. We make everything from scratch. No oils, no salt, no sugar.

You beat me to the punch. Because that was going to be. Why? Because one of the challenges, and that's why I'm so excited about this conversation, is going out to restaurants. No matter how good restaurants claim to be, usually the oil is inferior. So just that alone is good. Be trouble. And then the quality of food is, even though it might be organic, may not have the farmers touched.

Yeah. And that's the hard part is going out and getting the quality of food that you need made somewhere else. And this quality of food should leave you feeling better and should be healing your body. But unfortunately, that's not true in 99.9% of cases out there. You have to be very discerning when you go out or you have to be very, and I don't want to use the word aggressive, but you have to prioritize you and you have to prioritize your own health. So therefore, you need to demand that, you know, the chefs just prepare the foods in the way that you want them and they will do it if you ask. But most people don't even know to ask for that.

Self advocacy, advocate for yourself a hundred percent. So your restaurants are vegan?

Yes.

But other restaurants are also vegan. And how do people tell whether their vegan place is actually healthy? Because it may not be. From what you're saying, it sounds like there's a lot of options, that it's probably not healthy. Yeah.

So I don't even like. Even though we have vegan on one of our signs on our windows, I don't really love using it. If anything, I would call ourselves the nutritarian restaurant. We're nutritarians. We're all about maximum amount of nutrients and minimum amount of tough toxicity, chemicals, refined ingredients, all of that. So, you know, I can drink whiskey and snort cocaine all day long and call myself vegan and gluten free. Okay, Those are pure.

They're pure forms. Pure forms of drugs.

It's whole food.

You should really chew the coca leaves, not snort the cocaine. That's better for you.

I had coca tea in Peru, actually, from the leaves.

I'm going to google that. So I can also eat in a bakery every single day, muffins, donuts, you know, I could eat all of that food, pastries, everything. And it can be vegan and gluten free as well. And I will create an autoimmune disorder. I will create a disease. I potentially give myself heart disease by doing that if I were to consume those ingredients even though they're gluten free and vegan. So people again need to be discerning about those labels. Vegan does not mean healthy. Gluten free does not mean healthy at all. At the end of the day, what you're looking for is whole foods. So you can have Fruit Roll Ups, right? Fruit Roll Ups only contains fruit, but it's not a whole food. The water has come out of it. A lot of the nutrients have been lost in that dehydration process. You know, the skin has been taken off. And that's where the maximum amount of nutrients are actually contained right underneath the surface of the skin. So fruit roll up is not food. You could also have an applesauce, right? So let's take it up a notch a little bit better. Applesauce. Applesauce is still a very highly processed, refined food. It's been overly cooked and then again, preservatives added. And even if the preservatives aren't added, it's still not the whole food. It's not the same as eating the apple. So at the end of the day, call yourself what you want to call yourself. Vegan, gluten free, vegetarian, whatever. At the end of the day, just go for the whole foods and be the whole food vegan, be the whole food, gluten free, you know, consumer. And that's what you are going for because that is what's going to keep you free of disease until you're 110.

So what do people have to ask? What, What. How should they be advocating? What do they need to know? Because I think most people really look for taste and maybe the organic. If it says organic, then they just trust everything's organic and they leave it at that. So what do people have to watch out for when they eat out?

Yeah. Yeah. So when you go out to eat, organic is vitally important because of the fact that you do need to have clean, real food that's not sprayed in pesticides, herbicides, insecticides. So that should be a priority. Now, when you go out to eat, it's hard to get restaurants that, you know, like ours that just use 100% organic ingredients 100% of the time. So you need to do your research. So you're going to research some people. You might have to go out of your way to go to a restaurant. So you find a place and maybe the food's organic or not great. The second step is you want to make sure that the restaurant doesn't use refined, processed ingredients. So, for example, everybody raves about this one restaurant, I won't mention it in Canada. And they're like, nikki, you're going to love it. So then I get there and for example, I'd order, you know, the vegan cheesecake, or I want to have an amazing sandwich, or I'd want to have, you know, a delicious Buddha bowl or, you know, like a big vegetable bowl smothered in oils, sugars and sodium. Okay. And we have to really get clear on the definition of salt. So I like to say sodium instead of potassium or magnesium. You know, phosphorus, all of that. So tons of sodium. So if you can go to a restaurant and you see that the food is just smothered in that, then you might not want to opt in for that. Unless you're. The chef is willing to actually. Not the excess sodium, not add the refined oil, not add the refined salt. These three things are what is contributing to the demise of our entire system. Your cells do not thrive on that. They actually get quite sick when you consume those refined products. So those are the three things you absolutely need to look for. Now, every chef is trained in using those three ingredients to flavor their food. So this is the challenge. So you really need to just really do your research and find the restaurants that are minimizing those ingredients that are. That are willing to leave them out. I used to be the person, I would say, before I learned all about this, when I'd eat out, I would never return a meal if it was bad. Now I'll call the restaurant in advance and I'll tell the chef, hey, listen, I can't eat anything at your beautiful restaurant, but I want to go there with my friends or my family. So could you make me a meal that doesn't have any refined oil, salt, and sugar? And sometimes they're like, we don't make substitutions. I'm like, well, I'm going to bring you a lot of business, and if I come to your restaurant and eat anything like that, I might drop dead from it. And I know this seems extreme.

I like that that makes them wake up.

I eventually would drop dead, right? Maybe it would take me 20 years to develop, if I ate there every day, to develop a chronic disease from, like, eating that food.

But.

So it's partially true. But, you know, it's because I put my health first, and so it's beautiful. I can go to, like, fine dining, French cuisine, and the chefs will make the most beautiful food for me. They already have all the ingred. The beets are already cooked, but they just don't have to sprinkle the salt and toss it in the oil. So they'll just put it on my plate. And usually they whip up an amazing dip or something like that, like blending together some herbs and vinegar and, you know, and then drizzle that on the beets. And then I'll get a beautiful, like, you know, baked cauliflower and on a bed of greens. And then I'll get, you know, some quinoa and rice and potatoes and, like, all the local seasonal vegetables. So I can still eat there. They have all the ingredients. But I'm just going to catch them before they destroy the quality of the food.

That's a lot because salt is the flavor, oil makes it filling, filling. And then sugar. I mean, everybody's addicted to sugar.

Yeah. Now it's time we turn those addictions around. And you can do it. So when my clients do the therapy that I teach, that's all 100% organic, plant based, whole food eaten in abundance, huge diversity, 350,000 plant species that they are allowed to consume. So it's not minimalism diet, it's not a limitation diet. It's nothing like that. It's literally a lifestyle of abundance. And when they cut out those three ingredients and including the dairy and including the animal products, because that is not going to allow you to regenerate your body and reverse your chronic disease. So when you cut those things out in three weeks, your taste buds are completely regrown. It's amazing. They come back to life. The brain connections are like alive. And so when you go to eat a tomato or carrot or even romaine lettuce or, you know, any of the abundance of vegetables and fruits and grains out there, all of a sudden you can taste like 10 different flavors of sweetness. And you can taste all these different levels of salts. Even though you never added those into there, you'll taste an avocado and you'll actually be able to sense the actual fat in the avocado. Your taste buds come alive. It's amazing.

You know, I would say for myself last April, I essentially said, okay, if it comes from a package, I had gotten there. I've been for many years, mostly no sugar, and I've been gluten free for 16 years. But I'll have gluten free products here or there. So my son loves those little rice crackers. They're just rice, salt and water. And he loves them. And so he'll always have a package in front of him. And I walk by and grab a handful, then walk by again, grab another handful. And what I recognized is I had not just gotten off what works for me, but I had basically dived headfirst down the greased slide of eating too many processed things. And it was very interesting. My taste buds changed quite quickly. My emotional attachment to those foods is still going. And the really strong ones occurred for about. It actually took about five months before those cravings really quieted. But I noticed recently, I don't think this will be a surprise to Ed, but we haven't spoken in a few weeks. But I was so stressed. And all of a sudden I was, I need that, I want that. And the cravings came back. And so it's absolutely at some level, both a biochemical and also an emotional attachment to the foods. Yeah, that was the hardest one.

And that's an interesting. I'm really glad that you brought that up because what happens with my clients is after they start the program and within a few days they come back to me and they're like, it's weird. I'm not craving a bag of chips and I'm not craving junk food and I'm not craving, you know, a burger and fries or whatever food, or even healthy food that's been covered in salt, oil and sugar, refined ingredients. And so what happens, and this is my theory about this because obviously we'll need to do some clinical trials to test this one out. But in our society where our food is so highly processed, denatured, it's not nutrient dense, it's filled with so many fillers and preservatives. Your brain is constantly looking for food. It's constantly looking, looking to calm the nervous system. It's constantly looking for comfort. So in the sense of like going back to those, you know, socially acceptable foods, those comfort foods. So then what happens is you're, you can't fight your brain. You're not going to win. Your brain will reach for the bag of chips, those, you know, beautiful seaweed crackers or, or whatever else. But my clients, that doesn't happen to them. And you said it took about five months. So when your brain is, when your body is saturated with nutrients at the maximum level, okay, so where you're literally peeing out all those water soluble, you know, vitamins, because you've consumed so many nutrients, all of a sudden your brain is able to calm down and stop looking for food and it stops looking for it for all reasons. It doesn't need the comfort anymore, it doesn't need the nutrients anymore. And so they're so shocked that all their cravings completely disappear. And of course their taste buds have come alive. So they're willing to eat, you know, an apple for dessert because they can taste the 90 flavors in there.

So I know if I go on a three or five or seven day fast, slightly steamed cabbage is the best food, the best taste I've ever had in my life. Like the taste it tastes, it's full, fully rich and fully amazing. That's opposed to, we have a, I'd say better than 95 or 99% of diets of most people. And when you talk about, then you go to even the people that are 80 or 90%, they're still having a lot of sugar, salts, oils. How if your restaurant is really that refined, most people aren't going to have the palate for it. So how does that work?

Right? Like, how do you straddle commercial appeal with your commitment to high quality food?

Well, but it's also, how do you make taste palatable for the general public? Maybe not the general public, but at least the top 10 to 20% of people that care about their health.

Yeah, so we serve about 150,000 people a year at each restaurant. And so that's a lot of customers coming through. And I can guarantee you lots of these people are meat eaters. They eat refined, processed food. We had a mom eating Kentucky Fried Chicken inside our restaurant. Like, while she was eating our delicious meal, her kids were eating that. And we had to say, excuse me, but that's not gonna work here. So, you know, we know that their palates are not as refined towards the art like the. The food that we serve, but they still find the food delicious. So that's a great question. And this is wonderful because if you think about all the vast amount of flavors that are out there in the world, cinnamon, nutmeg, cilantro, parsley, onions, garlic, you know, turmeric. Like, there's just so many different flavors out there. So we just use those to make sure they're included in our food. And it's not even hard, you know, as a little bit of vinegar, lemon. That goes a long way in flavoring food. Lime goes a long way in flavoring food. So there's all of these beautiful things. And so we make everything from scratch. We do use maple syrup because we consider that as a whole food, we use dates, which is. Are incredibly sweet. Like, we make this amazing caramel sauce from literally dates and water caramel sauce that goes on our desserts and our pancakes. We make, you know, we serve incredible waffles with a cashew whipped cream. And most people don't even know that it's not dairy. Minimal ingredients. It doesn't take much to make food taste delicious. And even just roasting, the way you cook your food, when you cook it slow enough, the flavors naturally come out and the nutrients don't get released. So then the nutrients are kept in the food to give the food this delicious flavor. So we make sure that a lot of the nutrients are still contained within the food. I mean, our soups are delicious and there's no added sodium in there. Sometimes if we need to add that extra little kick, we'll juice some celery juice because that is high in, in sodium, but it's also high in 125 other nutrients and different salts as well. So you're getting the perfect balance of salts versus undoing the natural state of what your body's supposed to be at. Your cellular intake of sodium, we don't want to disturb that. So there's lots of different ways to use all of the abundance of nutrients to flavor food.

So I have another question. It's politically incorrect, so I'm good.

Brace yourself. When he gets that look, you brace yourself.

I'm br. I'm holding the table.

You're obviously a huge advocate for no meat, high nutrient dense food. In my practice, I found that there's no one diet that works for everybody. And that may or may not be what you're in agreement with.

Not in agreement. So I want you all to brace yourself, okay? Because what I'm about to say is going to hopefully blow your minds. Okay? So prior to agriculture, what we know is that there weren't bags of chips living on grocery store shelves. People didn't carry flour around with them. And if they made flour like my grandmother does or did up until she passed away last year in Malawi, Africa, little village that I was born, okay? Only whole foods. So when we talk about there's not one diet that works for everybody, what we do know from the research communities around the world, this still eat food the way that the humans have eaten it. Prior to colonization, when it was really an abundance of just whole foods, real food, there was an apple, you picked the apple and you ate it. If there was ginger root underneath the ground, you picked that and you made something with it. So we know, and that's not a diet, it's a lifestyle. So we know that lifestyle. The research shows us that when people eat this way, they actually can live to be a centenarian. So older than a hundred in huge population numbers. So and this is happening still today, there's communities around the world that still eat this way, clean, real food every single day. And they might have a little bit of wine, they might have a cake once every, like, you know, when there's a celebration, for example, but they're not consuming it every day. And these people, the most important part about the story is that they live disease free. So that's why I'm not in agreement with there's not a diet that works for everybody, because we actually do know that there is. But What I do want to say about that, the caveat, it's how do you get people to live that way? That's what doesn't work for a lot of people in our society because they're so busy, they don't have the education and they can't access the food.

Yeah, I'm a thousand hundred thousand percent in agreement with you, like 100,000%. And in those communities, some of those communities still ate meat occasionally.

Yeah, but very few. That's what they found through the Blue Zones research. That's what they found through the China Study. It's what they found through big mass population studies. Yeah, they still consumed a little bit of meat, but not enough to justify that the meat was the reason why they also lived that long.

Correct? Yes, fair.

And some communities don't eat it at all. My grandmother, you know, she died at 92, chronic disease free. She maybe ate meat, I don't know, four times a year when there was a funeral or when there was like cause for a big village, you know, gathering. And if they did eat meat, this is the other difference. It's the volume of meat and animal products that are consumed. She would share a chicken with 70 people. So the chicken, you know, would be butchered and it would be cleaned and then it would really just be flavoring or garnish to the meal. It wasn't eating two barbecue chicken breasts smothered in barbecue sauce, you know, not like that.

And the quality of food, they will be wild animals eating wild foods, et cetera. It would be a very different quality than even our grass fed beef. It would be very different. So what else should we know?

I'm not sure I can cope with any more.

Okay. So one thing you should know is, you know, I'm running and biking across Canada next year. I did the run bike ride across British Columbia. It's a huge province. And so I did that this summer, last summer. And I'm doing this fully on a plant based whole food diet. And I have more than enough protein in my diet through consuming these vegetables and fruits. But I don't worry about the protein. I'm more concerned about getting the zinc, the, you know, all the other minerals. Like if you look at the periodic table, I want to get all of those elements into my body. This is what people actually should be concerned about. If you eat food, you'll be getting your protein. If you eat whole foods, you'll be getting the right amount of fats. If you eat whole foods, you'll be getting all the good healthy sugars. Whole food, sugars that you need. So I want people to stop talking about macronutrients and you need to start thinking about the micronutrients. This is the difference between you dying with heart disease, diabetes, you know, autoimmune disorders, and it's the difference between you living medication free and having tons of energy. Because at the end of the day, these micronutrients are what fuel your mitochondria and actually build energy. And the number one thing everybody wants on the planet is energy. Because that energy liberates you from mental health, disease. That energy in your body liberates you. And so that you can shed weight easily, that energy deteriorates, detoxifies you, it builds strong muscles, it allows you to do every single thing that you want to do in your life. So that's the shift that we need to be making in our life right now.

Okay, so great. More importantly, when you're coming to Boston.

Yeah. Oh, well, you know, that's a great question. So we know because of COVID it really slowed down our ability to open up our cafes quickly because it takes about a year and a half for a brick and mortar store to literally get up and running. And so what we've actually done is we're just about to launch it in two weeks. And what we're doing is we're actually training, training 1200 restaurants across North America. So we have a list of restaurants that we're going to be reaching out to in your community. So we are going to train them on how to add menu items to their existing menu with the existing ingredients that they already have and how to make sure that those foods are healing their customers instead of harming them. And then we're going to give them a green mustache approved, richer health approved stamp so that you can go to these places and get, get super delicious, nutrient dense foods now at 1200 different locations across North America this year.

That's awesome. So where can people find you? We'll put this in the show notes, but where, where can people find you?

So definitely head to our website, greenmustache.com and mustache is spelled the French Canadian way. So it's M o u S T a c h e.com and we're not the same green mustache that's in the States because you will find an organic food company in the states called the Green Mustache. But they're the refined version. So lots of refined ingredients. That's not us. Not us. And they're so lovely. They're doing for all the right reasons. They're doing what they're doing. So I can't say anything bad about them. It's a lovely story behind their story. So go to greenmustache.com we have green Mustache University on that website as well. So you can see all the courses that we offer, the programs, the teachings we teach physicians if you ever want to. So please go there. And then also check out our podcast because we cover a lot of client healing stories. We interview amazing experts. We interviewed you, Wendy. So yeah, Eat Real to Heal podcast. And if anybody wants to learn more about reversing their chronic disease and they maybe can't afford my service, my consulting our courses, then just get the book. I think it's $24. Eat real to Heal, it's called. It was an Amazon bestseller for years. Get the book. Do what it says. You will reverse your chronic diseases. Amazing.

Thank you. It's really been an awesome.

Thank you very much. I love your questions. They're brilliant, especially for audience members too, that are maybe just hearing this for the first time. So I really appreciate being on your show to be able to share this.

We love having you. Nicolette, thanks for joining us for another episode of Live like youe Matter. Our guest today was Nicolette Richet. Don't go it alone.

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