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Common Food Substitutions: Will You Share Some? - Chef Melissa Costello

 
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Personal Chef Melissa Costello provides common substitutions to help a woman upgrade the food she consumes.

Chef Melissa Costello:
What I’d like to do is give you some common substitutions that you can use to upgrade your food. So say you are drinking Gatorade or any kind of sports drink that’s sugary. Now there’s coconut water that’s available to us, which is nature’s Gatorade. It’s loaded with potassium, loaded with magnesium, all the electrolytes you need for after you are exercising or if you feel run down and you need more energy. Coconut water is amazing and it comes from nature. It’s nature’s Gatorade.

Also if you love, say you love to eat pizza, say pizza is one of your favorite things, I suggest substituting gluten-free flour, which is made mostly with the garfava bean flour, which is a bean flour. It has a lot of protein, or just different types of flours that are gluten-free that are not going to upset your digestive system and dairy-free. We have so many options these days of dairy-free cheese is out there. There’s almond cheese; there’s rice cheese; there’s all these different options that may help you in the long-term if your body has any sensitivity to dairy, which a lot of women do. We do have the sensitivity that we don’t even know about and a lot of times gas and bloating is a symptom of that.

So another great one is pasta. A lot of people love pasta. They feel like when they are doing these food upgrades that maybe they have to give up things that they love, but they don’t have to because now there’s so many options. So I love to substitute brown rice pasta. It’s made with whole grain brown rice. It’s really delicious; it’s got the same consistency and it’s just so much better for you because it’s made from whole grain and it’s more lower processed than a white flour pasta.

Once you start making these substitutions you will find that your body will respond to them and that over time as you are eating cleaner and cleaner, if you go back to eating the other way your body will not want it and your body will kind of tell you, “This does not work for me,” and you will notice right away that you don’t feel good.

You know, I gave up eating white flour a long time ago and any time I have any little bit of it I immediately, my sinuses clog up and my eyes are red and I just notice a lot of things. So as you eat cleaner and you start to implement these substitutions you will notice a lot of change in your body.

About Chef Melissa Costello:
Melissa Costello, the founder of Karma Chow, has always had a passion for healthy, delicious food and nutrition. After years of struggling with a minor eating disorder, she became a vegetarian at age 19 and began experimenting with healthier versions of everyday recipes, which led to her fascination for cooking.

Visit Chef Melissa Costello at her website

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