Beyond Labels: The Power of Plants in Your Diet – with Chef Leslie Durso

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I bring you Chef Leslie Durso. So chef Leslie is one of the chefs that I hired to do the recipes for eat like a girl, and I’ll give you a little back story on that, because when I set out to write a companion book for fast like a girl, a book that really brought recipes to the forefront and explained how to break a fast explained how to rock your eating window, these are all big goals that I had in mind when I put this book together. I also really wanted to bring some experienced chefs to you, and I wanted to bring all types of food. I call them ethos, your food ethos, like your belief around your food system. I wanted to bring those all into the conversation around hormones and so chef Leslie, as you’re going to hear, is a master chef at the Four Seasons resorts. Those of you that watched Bill Nye, the Science Guy, she was also on his show. She was Leslie the lab girl. So you may watch this episode on YouTube and see some of the videos we did on YouTube, as she has some videoing claim to fame there, and you might recognize her. But where this conversation goes, and what I really am proud to offer you, is we, we start off talking about plant based living. So now this is not to make anybody, convince anybody to be vegan. That is a personal choice, both Leslie and I strongly believe, but it is to bring a conversation, to bring plants back into using food as medicine. When I look at all food through the lens of it is either building health or building disease, and one of the things we cannot ignore is the fact that plants help our Hormonal Health. So whether you are all in with plant based living, or you are plant curious and you just want to bring more plants into your life, this conversation is one you’re going to want to hear. So we talk about just the definition around plant based, vegan, vegetarian, but then where we ended up going is over some really important concepts that we need to know when we cook food. And we want food to not only be yummy, but we want it to be medicine. And how should we look at that? So we go into, you know, salt, we go into vinegars, we go into oils, we go into pans that you use in your kitchen. We went through topic after topic after topic like this. It is probably the deepest conversation I have ever brought you on food as medicine and on how to cook in a way that amplifies that medicinal piece of food it is. It is brilliant, and I’m so excited to bring it to you. So chef Leslie Durso, she did the plant based recipes, and eat like a girl. Eat like a girl is now out for order. So please pre order it if, if you’re listening to this between before October, after October, you can get grab yourself a copy, and as always, I really hope this deepens your understanding of how to use food as a powerful medicine and a path towards happiness.

Dr. Mindy 

Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again, if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. So I am so excited to have this conversation, and just want to say, welcome to the resetter podcast.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Dr. Mindy 

There’s so many reasons that I think this conversation and all the work we’ve done over the last couple of days are just going to be so helpful for people. Where I really want to start this with is really understanding the definition. And I know you have your definition of plant based, vegan, vegetarian, I have my own definition that I’m now using for myself, called plant forward. Why do we have all these labels for plant based eating? People

Chef Leslie Durso  

love labels. But

Dr. Mindy  

is it like tribalism? I feel like it’s a little bit like I need to pick a nutritional camp, kind

Chef Leslie Durso  

of Yes, and I think that, I think if you take those labels away and you just kind of figure out how you want to eat, then the world probably would be a better place. But the easiest one to define is vegetarian. So veg.

Vegetarian is someone that doesn’t eat meat, but they do still include dairy and eggs or one of the other in their diet. Okay, great chapter.

They’re easy to figure out. Yeah, plant forward, or I like to call veggie curious. Vegetarian is also an easier term, because it’s just somebody who kind of eats everything, but is looking at incorporating more plants into their diet, because, as we’ll talk about, I’m sure, more in depth than we’ve been talking about for days, how important it is to have plants in your diet, no matter what you choose to have as your protein. And then plant based, and vegan is where it gets slightly more complicated. So vegan has no animal products at all, so no milk, no cheese, no eggs, no nothing, no animal proteins. And then I like to call plant based a little bit even more, because vegans still have a lot of junk food. They eat sugar, yeah. I mean, now it’s actually like the best time in the history of the world to be vegan, because there are so many great products for everything. I mean, when I grew up and I stopped eating meat at seven, I mean, the only non dairy milk was a powdered rice milk that you had to stir in water, and it was like it was not even consumable. And so now you walk in and the whole dairy department is practically plant based milks, which is really cool. So it’s very easy now, but so then plant based, in its title, is having a diet based in plants, and not using the processed foods, and really trying to stay as whole real ingredient as possible.

Dr. Mindy 

Okay, so that leads me to, and you brought it up. I don’t know if I’ve even told you this, that we’ve been together now for the last two days, but when I was 19 years old, I was a competitive tennis player. I played on a college scholarship, and I got injured, and I have some pretty gnarly scars of like a surgery. I had a fasciotomy on my on my legs, and out of that, I got chronic fatigue syndrome, and from that, I got very interested in the healing power of diet, and I tried lots of different diets afterwards and and could experiment with what felt made my body felt well with, and what it didn’t feel well with. And at that time, I stumbled across a book, and the book, this is like 1990 and the book was diet for new America. I know, can you believe we’ve been together for two days? I didn’t tell you this, that’s

Chef Leslie Durso  

bearing the lead. I mean, yeah. So that was one of the very first books on diet I ever read. And I believe I was like eight or No, I think it was like 10 or 11 when I read

Dr. Mindy 

I was like 1920 and I think we’re like 10 years apart. But for people who don’t know that book, he was the heir to the Baskin and Robin’s ice cream, and he gave that up because he didn’t like how the cows were being treated, and he saw the cardiovascular damage of dairy, and I literally read that book and went, went, I wasn’t vegan, I was vegetarian, and I went vegetarian for 10 years, wow, but I didn’t know what I was doing, yeah. And so over that 10 years, I was like, what do we call like, a junk food tarian is what that you probably could have called me, yeah, like, I just ate a ton of carbs. So out of that experience, I realized that actually going plant based, there is an art to it. Well,

Chef Leslie Durso  

there’s an art you’re just eating in general, yeah, you’re choosing to eat animal proteins or not. Yeah, at the end of the day, plants are where all of the essential vitamins and nutrients to make your body function properly and regularly are, and so unless you’re getting those every single day in your diet, there’s room for improvement, right?

Dr. Mindy 

So that’s interesting, because now we fast forward. So that would have been like, let’s just say it was like, you know, the 1990s 2000 here we are in 2024 and we I feel now it’s, I sort of always try to, like, look at nutrition from the widest lens I possibly can, to just understand the culture and hear what everybody’s doing. But in the last year, protein came out of the gates. And everybody was like, and especially in the menopausal world, everybody’s like, one gram of protein for every pound of body weight. And so then I decided to jump on that bandwagon over this year. And in January, I was like, protein. I was eating meat sticks and tons of protein. And I was just obsessed with protein, and I it caused me to lose my focus on plants, and I gained, like, you know, 1015, pounds. And I was like, What is going on so it there is something I feel like that we need to bring into the conversation. That’s more balanced and

Chef Leslie Durso  

listening to your body, and I’m so glad that you have listened to your body and you say like, this is not working. This is not feeling good, and I have to change it and adjust it. Because I think so many people just live with these not just sitting in their bodies and not feeling well and not knowing that they can change it and feel better. And so knowing that and making that decision is step one, and that’s amazing, but it’s also really listening to the signs of your body telling you what it needs, because it is telling you what it needs every single day, if you just listen to it and get quiet, and I talk a lot about that, on how to listen to your body, what are the signs, and really kind of dive into that so that you know what you need to get. Okay, this

Dr. Mindy 

is really interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever had this conversation on this podcast, which is, how do you know from a feeling level, not blood work, not the scale, not how your clothes fit? How do you know from a feeling level that you’ve put a meal together? That’s right, that your food system, that you believe in, is working for you?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, the easiest one is, how do you feel after you’ve had that? Yeah, great. If you have a meal and you’re exhausted and you are bloated and you’re full, that’s your body saying, I don’t like what you just put in me, right? And so clock that, listen to that, and then maybe don’t do it again, yes. But then there’s tons of other signs too. It comes out in your hair, in your nails, in your skin, in your eyes, in your tongue, where you’re gaining weight, acne. There’s so many symptoms and signs that your body is shouting at you and saying, I don’t want this, and here I’m trying to tell you I don’t want this, but people just don’t get it, because they don’t connect that the cells that they’re ingesting in that food are the cells that are becoming your body, and

Dr. Mindy 

it’s live food when you’re doing like live plants that haven’t been cooked. There’s an energy in there.

Chef Leslie Durso  

I think there’s energy in cooked food, raw food, all of all of the food, even animal based food, I think there’s energy in all of it. And I think that there are good energies and not as good energies, and you really have to be aware of that. And again, how do you feel when you eat something? Yeah, really be honest with yourself. Not did it taste good, right? The taste has absolutely nothing to do with this, only about how you feel and how your body reacts to

Dr. Mindy 

things, agreed. Okay, so then, then, let’s say I’m, like, decide to go plant based. What are there some tried and true like, rules to follow? Because we just did a ton of videos, and I did a ton of research on seeds and nuts and legumes, and I got to say, I rocked my own world, like, I was like, like, we had this earlier today. I’m like, hemp seeds. Hemp seeds have all nine essential amino acids in it. Why are we not talking about this? So what is it? Is there like if I wanted to go plant based, are there some rules I should probably follow,

Chef Leslie Durso  

not rules as much as suggestions. And my suggestions would be, first of all, eat a wide variety of food. I always say all of the colors of the rainbow, because every color represents a different vitamin that you’re getting. And you have to eat a very nutrient dense diet. Again, whether you’re having animals or not animals in your diet, you have to have all of those nutrients in your system at all times. And then past that, it is really about educating yourself. And so where are the best sources of protein in the world? Where are the best sources of iron, where are the best sources of manganese, and all of the things that your body needs, where is the purest form of them? And a lot of people say animals for protein, but look at what we’re eating and the animal protein, the animals vessel for that protein, that animal we only eat in society, this society, we only eat vegetarian animals. And so those animals are getting it from plants. And so take out the middle man, and you’ve got more pure protein coming in and easier to digest protein for most people. A lot of people that eat animal based proteins don’t realize how difficult it is to digest the energy it takes for the energy that it takes. Yeah, yeah. And it’s weird, you you. And

Dr. Mindy 

I also talked about the oxalate lectin thing, and I kind of shared with you my opinion on it, and I think my audience has heard it before, where I again, I’ve studied so many different belief systems on on nutrition, and when the plant paradox came out, I literally was the first time I just put my hands up in the air, and I’m like, if we’re gonna villainize something that comes out of the earth. Earth, I’m out like, I don’t, I don’t know. Like, we’ve gotten so extreme with nutrition now that we are making plants an enemy and calling it a toxin.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Yeah. Well, I think there’s too many people trying to sell too many theories, in my opinion. Well, said, Yeah, I think it’s everybody feels like they have to have their own diet, their own soapbox, own way to sell you a course, to sell you a diet, to sell you supplements, to sell you pills, they have to come up with a new thing in order to sell you on it, yeah, and instead, just let people eat real food, right? And, yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think that there’s anything that’s come from the plant kingdom that doesn’t have a benefit to you now, of course, there’s, there’s poisonous plants that I don’t want anyone coming after me in the comments. Yeah, there are poisonous plants. I got it. Yeah. But like you’re saying, any of the foods that come from the plant kingdom, how can you go wrong?

Dr. Mindy 

How can you go Yeah? And when you actually dive into the research on those it will blow your mind. You know, like, you know, I’ve been on this quest to bring soy back, because I think it’s so important for women, which I’m the cheerleader right behind me, and you know, where it came from. I’ll just share my own personal experience. Is, as I’ve gone through menopause, I was like, Okay, so I’m losing estrogen, so I need to see what I can do to support as much estrogen as possible. And then that opens up the question of creams and patches. And then I brought a beautiful integrative OB on who I just adored, this woman, and she doesn’t get enough attention. Her name’s Dr Felice Gersh. She’s in Orange County. And amazing, amazing woman, and I asked her the question. I’m like, Okay, how do menopausal women get more more estrogen? And she’s like, well, nature provided some, and they’re called phytoestrogens. And so she was the first one to help me understand, like, we can actually talk about soy without thinking it’s going to cause cancer. Yes. So what I what? That then opened my mind to go, Well, okay, there, then are there plants that help support progesterone? And then I, we found, I found the sweet potato, and I found chocolate because it has magnesium in it. And then you start to, I told you about I had Dr Lee on this podcast. I’m like, what, what can we do to support the bacteria in the gut that break down estrogen? And he’s like, tempeh and fermented miso. And all of a sudden you start looking at the plant kingdom, and you’re like, Whoa. It’s like a medicine cabinet.

Chef Leslie Durso  

It is a medicine cabinet. But let me ask you this question, how now you’ve incorporated soy back into your life? How do you feel? Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

I mean, I’m doing a lot of things for my health so, so I can’t say one or the other is, like, totally rocking my world, but I’ll tell you that I have a diet and a lifestyle that when I live this diet and lifestyle I need, I rely less on my bio identicals, like, I just don’t need the creams as much I can almost get complete, completely off of them. Amazing. And it definitely is a better pace, like a slower pace, but it was bringing plants back in. Yeah, that was the major thing

Chef Leslie Durso  

I know. So if you conspiracy theory, it i whenever somebody says, Well, this study, this and I say, Stop, who funded that study? Right? Who did that study? Was the study on men, or was the study on women, right? Break it all down. Unbox all of it. Get curious with all this information. Stop just saying, Oh, well, so and so said this, so I’m going to believe it, right, do the research. And so if you start digging into down the soy rabbit hole, it’s very interesting to see who funded a lot of those studies and why they kind of wanted it out of the American diet. Yeah. I

Dr. Mindy 

say this all the time. Did you know that the the tagline breakfast is, is the most important meal the day. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

do know was Kellogg. Kellogg’s and

Dr. Mindy 

like, here we are, like, years and 50 years later, and we’re like, or it’s probably maybe, like, 40 years later, and we’re, we still follow that ethos, and we never question it No, which is crazy, yeah. So, okay, so let’s go and look at like, I want to break it down according to hormones, because that’s sort of this, this vein. And then, as people will hear in the introduction, like you are a major contributor to eat like a girl, and you and I have had so many conversations about plants and hormones. Yeah. Protein, super important for the female body. What plants do we have that are packed with protein?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well packed with protein. Almost all plants contain some trace amount of protein, which is a very interesting thing to think about. Yeah, and then it’s about building it up. So with plants, you need a variety of it. It’s not like, okay, great. I can have a tablespoon of hemp seeds today, and I’m good to go. Yeah, it’s about combining them. And so if you’re doing a salad on top of that salad, put TOF baked tofu, put hemp seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, pepitas, sunflower seeds. Like, really do? Combination of all of them to build up to your number of protein, if that makes sense, yep. So it isn’t just one thing. It isn’t here. Just have a steak and you’ve got your protein. Yeah? You

Dr. Mindy 

have to be a little more you have to be more intentional, yeah, yeah. But nuts,

Chef Leslie Durso  

legumes, beans, seeds, all are packed even we were talking about like, potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin all have protein and fairly significant. It’s just the combination and putting all of the things together, right

Dr. Mindy 

that I don’t know if you saw in the book, but one of the things that was really important to me and eat like a girl, was to create two charts. I put a chart in about, like, here are some amazing resources for protein. And then I did it for plants as well. And again, when I was researching the book, I’m like, Oh my God, there’s so much protein here in plants. But what humans do is, and this is why I wasn’t a great vegetarian, is we eat the same damn foods over and over and over again. And when I’ve sat with people who have been really sick, when I ask them, give me a list of the foods you eat, there’s, like, less than 20 Yes.

Chef Leslie Durso  

And that is it is variety. You have to get into variety. And I really like to say too, when people people get in a rut and they’re not sure what to eat, and people say, like, Oh, you’re vegan. Like, what do you eat? Just salad. I’m like, no, no, yeah, there’s only 11 ish, widely sourced animal proteins out there. There’s over 23,000 edible plants. That’s crazy. Could you just take a moment to think about that? 23,000 edible plants on our over 23,000 edible plants on our that mother nature has provided for us, and they all serve a purpose, yeah? And so the possibilities of eating plant based are endless, yeah? And it’s your responsibility to have all of all 23,000 I mean, I’m on a mission to try

Dr. Mindy 

all of I know you are, and I love that about you. When I first, you first told me that, I was like, Yes, I want to. I want to go on that hunt with you.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Yeah, it’s the first thing I do when I go. I travel a lot, a lot, a lot, if you don’t know that about me. And the first thing I do will go to markets and I buy everything that I’ve never seen before. Yeah, and I just want to rip it all open and aid it and research it and figure out what it is and what it does for me. And it’s just, it’s so interesting to me, because the world is just so big and it’s so full of so many cool things,

Dr. Mindy 

so many and then and plants, if you look at plants, they’re actually different. Plants grow in different climates, yeah, so like, if you’re like, I don’t know if I told you the story, but our daughter moved to Victor, Idaho, and the big thing in Idaho is Huckleberry shakes. Oh. And I was like, I never had a Huckleberry. I never, I was, oh, huckleberries are

Chef Leslie Durso  

delicious, but I’ve never had a

Dr. Mindy 

shake. Yeah, the shake was really good. Now, there wasn’t a lot healthy in the shake other than the Huckleberry, just so we’re clear. But she kept, they kept saying, Yeah, it’s a big berry in this region. And I was like, we don’t have huckleberries in California. Well, that’s an interesting

Chef Leslie Durso  

conversation about eating local, and the importance of eating local, and what that means on a global scale. Because we live in Southern California, you go to the grocery store and there’s basically everything you could ever want from all over the world in one store. Yeah. And so how important is it there’s there’s not that much research out there on how important is it to eat hyper local So do people in Idaho need huckleberries more than people in Florida? And do people in Florida need more citrus or tropical fruits than somebody that lives in Alaska? Yeah, and it’s it’s really interesting to think about where plants are grown, and if those people adopt to needing that thing more than anybody else.

Dr. Mindy 

So that nature would provide a plant that would help supply a nutrient that would help with the climate. With that climate, that climates

Chef Leslie Durso  

eat a ton of tomatoes. And what are tomatoes? Tie in, lycopene,

Dr. Mindy 

lycopene. I was like, 10s. It’s not that, yeah, um.

Chef Leslie Durso 

And what do they do when you eat a lot of them, it helps the tie ins are in the sun a lot, and it helps your skin, and it helps them tan and not burn. Wow. And that makes sense. So cool, right?

Dr. Mindy 

God. Nature’s so freaking cool. Nature’s amazing. That is insane. Okay, so that leads me to, I want to come back to this lectin thing for a moment, because I have had to field so many questions about oxalates

Chef Leslie Durso  

I have, I’m

Dr. Mindy 

sure you have, so I have a theory on it that might be helpful when you have to field the question, I think we have gotten, there’s so much toxicity in our food system now that our bodies, our guts, are becoming hyperactive to reacting to these toxic ingredients. So if you fast, if you go back in time, I was born in 19. 69 in the 70s, plant toxin like you would have, people would have laughed at you peanut peanut allergies. We didn’t have separate peanut allergy tables, gluten free. Nobody talked about that like it was really clear in the 70s, just like eat real food and chemical laden food, like Twinkies and Ho Hos, they were just starting to come out into the world. Now, fast forward to where we are today. There are so many toxins in food that everybody’s guts are such a hot mess that now they’re reacting to plant toxins.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, yes, and think about how the diet has switched. It used to be, you ate a ton of real vegetables and plants and they, there were not a whole lot of allergies, right? And then it’s and you just had a Twinkie or Ho Ho every now and then, right? And now we have completely flip flopped that the bulk of most people in the United States are only eating processed foods, right? And they have all of these allergies, yes. And so we need to look at that, right? Is it the plants that are giving us these allergies, or is it all these other chemicals that we’re eating in all of these processed foods? Agreed? I don’t have the answer for that, but it’s something really worth exploring and looking at in my mind.

Dr. Mindy 

So my chronic statement is that one lens I feel like we could look at is that we’re in an evolutionary mismatch, like the human body in this modern environment is not thriving so and plants is not the problem, because plants have been around forever and people have been eating plants forever, yeah, but the physical, emotional, chemical stressors are so big that the immune system’s mixed up, the nervous system is dysregulated, and the human body is in such a crisis that it can’t find its its center. It can’t find its way back home. Yeah, and so in that scenario, I mean, I actually think that’s why fasting works so well for so many people, because all I did is say, hey, why don’t you take all this toxic living that you’re doing and compress it into the small eating window, leaving a longer period of time for your body to heal and rest from the toxicity. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

yeah. And I will say, I want to go back for just one second. I do agree with you there. But I’ll also say, because people will come at us and say, well, vegetables are now toxic too, right? And they they can be because we have made them that way. Yes, we are covering them in pesticides and herbicides. We are destroying the soil that they’re growing in, so the nutrients are depleting. We are genetically modifying the seeds so that they’re containing chemicals. We’re doing all sorts of bad things to the plant kingdom right now, and so it is your responsibility, your the listener’s responsibility, to know where their food is coming from, yeah, and to know what they’re putting in their bodies, yeah? And it is a big challenge, and it is hard, yeah, I’m not gonna lie, it’s hard, really hard. It has Yeah, but it’s also your responsibility to do it, yeah? Because No, you are responsible for the the form of your body, yep, this is your vessel, no one else’s, yeah, and only you can take care of it the way it really needs to be taken care of.

Dr. Mindy 

This is why I always, I just keep saying that your health in this moment may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility. Yep. And then I love what Dr Lee said on this podcast, which was, when you go to the doctor, that’s sick care. When you go home and you open up your refrigerator and your pantry, that’s health care, yes. And so we have to start separating out and going into these nuanced conversations, yes,

Chef Leslie Durso  

and it’s not your doctor’s responsibility to fix you, no, it is your responsibility to fix you, absolutely. And your doctor can give you advice, yeah, but you really need to know we talked about this earlier. I have this thing where I say that all the answers that you need are already inside you, yeah. And you just have to listen and quiet your mind. And it is true, if you get sick, there might be a little light bulb that goes off in your head, and you might say maybe there was some intuition and that that was a bad decision. Yeah. And that’s a hard pill to swallow for most people to take that kind of responsibility. We haven’t been trained to do that. So we’ve been trained to do the exact we’ve

Dr. Mindy 

been trained you’re totally healthy until you have a symptom, and then you go the doctor, and the almighty doctor will give you the answer exactly.

Chef Leslie Durso  

And that usually comes in the form of a pill. That’s right. It destroys lots of everything in its path. That’s right, and you have to put yourself back together.

Dr. Mindy 

So if I’m gonna look at plants as medicine, I like this look at eat the rainbow. I’m gonna put in there second, like, eat the plants have a lot of protein, yes, because I still believe we need more protein, but I don’t believe you have to get it all from meat. I think if you choose, I told you about Stacey Sims because she is considered, right now, one of the top exercise physiologists and nutritional scientists for menopausal women. Amazing, beautiful heart. I brought her on this podcast, and she is plant based, and I was rocked. She’s an extreme athlete like. Rocked menopausal woman rocked my world, amazing. So I then, out of that conversation, started to look at all the amino acid profile of plants. And so I would put the second component to that is make sure, if you’re going with a plant forward diet or a plant based diet, that you’re getting the protein rich plants. Okay, then the third category that I would look at are the plants that feed the microbiome. Yeah. Now all plants feed the microbiome, but talk a little bit about, are there some plants that you like to use that feed the microbiome more than others? And then yes, yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

treatments of those foods, we talk a lot about probiotics and about pickling and about fermenting, and how those techniques can just make your body so happy and really support that digestion system. And it’s so much easier than people think, and it goes way beyond, I mean, people, when you think about that, think about yogurt, pickles and sauerkraut, and there’s just a whole world out there that is not those three things, yeah? So, yeah, I do. I do talk about that a lot, yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

So you’re focused on when you ferment these foods, and you’re doing some cool stuff on your Instagram, like fermenting strawberries and grapes. Yep, I’m like, Oh my God. I didn’t ever think you could ferment fruit. I thought about it.

Chef Leslie Durso  

It’s so cool, it’s delicious. But So that’s been my mindset as a chef, and as a chef that didn’t go to culinary school, is that I’ve studied these techniques and how people cook food all over the world, and then I’ve taken those techniques and applied them to plants and vegetables. So when I think about, okay, well, what do I want to pickle? And what do I like to pickle? And then it’s like, but what else? Yeah, what else could I do? And then I just started throwing all these random ingredients and pickling solutions and liquids and seeing what happened. And a lot of them are really good and really cool.

Dr. Mindy 

So I’ll tell you my full transparency, my number one concern with fermenting things at home is that I will, I will create some horrible bacteria and make myself sick. Yeah. Is that possible?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Look, anything is possible. But I always say to use your nose. Your nose is a very underused sense. And if you open something that smells really bad, that’s your brain and your body telling you don’t eat that, okay? And so if you are fermenting foods, and it’s all working, like, take a little, tiny taste or take a smell and just see where it’s at. But it is pretty easy, and there are so many resources now for doing it. Like you said, I’m sharing a lot about that right now. So there’s places you can go and resources and people that you can ask,

Dr. Mindy 

okay? And then that leads me to, like, my and this is the way my brain likes to chunk things down, because I’m always, like, absorbing so much information, and then I’m like, What do I do with all this information? So this whole idea around plant based living, I’m like, there’s so much here to unpack. How do we make this system systematic for people who are like, well, I want to live a more plant rich life. How do I do that? So if we’re looking at the colors of the rainbow, we’re looking at protein, we’re looking at fermentation, those being some really good steps. What is it? Does it matter if I cook it, have it raw? What happens if I microwave it like can you talk a little bit about that process? Because I’ve watched a lot of people. I remember this in my practice all the time. People would be like, I’m finally eating more vegetables. You’d be so proud of me. Every night I put broccoli in the microwave, and when I ask what they’re doing, they’re putting plastic saran wrap over the top. Like, no, wait, wait, wait, we need to back up a step here.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Talk about, well, first of all, that broccoli will not taste good. No, don’t, don’t do that. No, but don’t do

Dr. Mindy 

it wrong like that. No, but here’s the thing about taste buds. If the the further down the rabbit hole of horrible eating you go, the less in touch you are with your taste

Chef Leslie Durso  

buds. You know, what’s really interesting to me is that that’s the first thing that people say to me when they start eating more plant based is that, oh my gosh, my taste buds are changing. Everything tastes better and more vibrant, and I have to use less salt and this and that. And I’m like, Yeah, you’re giving your taste buds a break, yeah? Now, all of a sudden they get to enjoy all of this stuff. Yeah, that’s amazing. Very cool. Okay, and so then, yes, when you’re cooking plants, it does make a difference,

Dr. Mindy 

okay, yeah, what’s gonna hold the most nutrients of all the cooking, roasting, roasting, more than raw.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, sorry, cooking, we’re holding nutrients. Yeah? Cooking, yeah. Sorry, yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

Professional chef, I forget the new one. Yeah. You have your lens as much when

Chef Leslie Durso  

you say cooking, because when we talk about raw food, it’s preparing and not cooking, right? And yes, whole raw foods do contain a lot the ultimate amount of nutrients for most of them, some of them, like we just mentioned, tomatoes, the amount of lycopene in a tomato actually is more when you cook. It that when you eat it raw, just so interesting. And then a lot of people have difficulty digesting seeds from raw foods, so tomato seeds, cucumber seeds, stuff like that. And so it really just listening to your own body. Yeah, if you can digest some things raw, eat those things raw. But

Dr. Mindy 

if you eat something raw and you’re like, not really for me, then cook it or don’t eat it at all. That’s kind of the beauty of having over 23,000 plants to eat. You don’t have to eat and like all of them, that’s you can just find what you like, and that’s what works. Yeah, go to the next thing, go to the next thing. You know, raw would be the most nutrient dense for the majority of plants. Yes, okay, with a few exceptions, like tomatoes. That was really interesting. My brain also thinks in books, yeah. And I was like, Oh, now there’s a book where you, like, take all the foods and you’re like, these foods, you get the most nutrient power if you eat them raw. These foods, you get the most if you roast them, these if, maybe we should write that. I know, but the research on that book would be insane. It would be insane, but it would be so fun. It would be that information. You’d get to eat a lot. You get to eat a ton. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

would cook a lot. You would eat a lot. Yeah, there

Dr. Mindy 

we go. Yeah. Well, as long as it was plants, I think I would be okay. So okay, now talk to me, though. Let’s go back to the roasted So of all the cooking, you’re saying roasted is the best. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

think so, because I think it really seals in the the nutrients, the sauteing is probably there. I was wondering about that. But then when you do something like steam, like if you like a softer vegetable, some people do, I like my vegetables still very crunchy, but if you like a softer vegetable, and I know there’s a lot of older people, when I was cooking for my grandparents, they needed everything softer, but all of those nutrients, because water is a flavor conductor, get leached into the water. Don’t throw that water away. Yes, use that water for something else. Use it for cooking. Drink it like a tea. You can put it in your smoothies. There’s so many things, anything that you would do with water, do with that cooking liquid?

Dr. Mindy 

Yeah, I that I really got a hold of in the last couple days hanging out with you, I am definitely been throwing the water away, I’m not gonna lie, and because, but I was been like, what am I gonna do with that? I can see the tinge of color change in the water when I like, steam vegetables or boil vegetables in there, but I’m like, What am I gonna do with that? And I never thought to actually put it in a jar and then put it into a smoothie. Once I make a smoothie, yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

or the base of a broth or soup of some kind, yeah, throw it in an ice cube tray, freeze it and then pop it out. Use it however you want. That’s such a

Dr. Mindy 

brilliant idea. So then if I put roast it in the oven, do I need to put some oil over the tub? Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

it would be the most. It would be helpful. And it gives it that nice, like, Browning color and right? So

Dr. Mindy 

it gives it a, like, a little bit, a little bit of a crunch to it, that can be nice. Then we also talked this one, I think is really interesting. We talked about when you are at the grocery store and or hopefully the farmers market, or hopefully your

Chef Leslie Durso  

backyard. I was just gonna say,

Dr. Mindy 

even if it’s your backyard, we have the most amazing artichoke plant I

Chef Leslie Durso  

know. I’m dying to see this, this garden of yours, this

Dr. Mindy 

thing has a life. I will take pictures and send it to you. It has a life of its own. And this artichoke plant, you know, my husband was so into regenerative farming and environmental issues. And so when we put this garden together, he was like, once everything dies, we’re not going to pull it out. We’re going to let it go back into the earth, because it’ll make the soil richer. Oh,

Chef Leslie Durso  

the way that it’s supposed to be, yes. So

Dr. Mindy 

this artichoke plant is, like, gold, and every, like, twice a year, it comes back. And it’s huge. It could, like, take over our front yard, and these beautiful artichokes appear. And I always look at that, and if you let in our chart go too far, and it creates this flower, it flowers. It’s so gorgeous. And you know,

Chef Leslie Durso  

you can use that flower for a tea? Oh,

Dr. Mindy 

no, you can, yeah, you would just take the flower off and put it in tea, yeah. Oh, my God. I hadn’t realized

Chef Leslie Durso  

that dry it, but they are so beautiful. I use plants and flower arrangements all the time. Oh,

Dr. Mindy 

they’re I could totally see it in a flower arrangement, yeah, but what? When do I know to pick it like, I don’t want to pick it too early, because then it might not have as much nutrients, just like when I’m at the grocery store. I don’t want to take like an under ripe fruit, because does it not have as much nutrients? Like, do we have any sense where the sweet spot for nutrient is, density is?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, the best thing to do is to have it ripen on the vine. Yeah, is the problem. But that is very difficult when you’re at a grocery store, yeah. And so they try to do things like sell tomatoes on the vine or sell oranges that still have leaves attached to them, but is very challenging when you’re shipping food, especially from further away. There’s been studies now that the is true the second a plant leaves its stem or leaves its plant, so second. Area or something leaves, it starts losing nutrients. And so if it’s traveling for days week to get to you, then it sits in the grocery store, and then you take it home, it hangs out in your refrigerator for a couple days. What’s left in it? Yeah, we don’t know exactly, and it changes for every plant that’s in the grocery store. And so you don’t know exactly, but yeah, the fresher you can get your food, the better. And the thing with farmers markets, and why they’re so great is because it’s typically food that was either picked that morning or the day before, yeah, and so you’re getting something pretty dang fresh, yeah, yeah, but you asked a lot of questions in there, so it it’s not really possible to have a once over like, because every plant is different with its ripeness and how fast it ripens, and does it continue to ripen off the finer does it not like? Strawberries stop ripening the day they’re picked. They start rotting after that. That’s why you never see like. If you pick a strawberry that has a white patch on it, that white patch never goes away and turns red. It stays white forever, okay? And so, like a strawberry, you just want it to be bright red and no bad spots on it, and hopefully red in the center as well as on the outside, okay, but that’s going to be totally different from something like an apple, which you want it to be nice and firm, and you know, you don’t want any soft spots on it, and it’s a it’s a different way. But apples can also be preserved and stored for long periods of time. And so there’s, there’s so many factors that go into it. Obviously, leafy greens are going to wilt the second that they start going bad. And so there’s a lot. And then, you know, you have new companies like appeal that are going to be spraying things on produce that’s going to make it last way longer. And what the heck is in that? And do we really want to eat something that’s been right for four weeks, five weeks a month? I don’t know, no,

Dr. Mindy 

and that’s how I feel about like conventional apples and bananas right now. Like, I’ve been at hotels, like, traveling, and you’re like, Okay, I’m not gonna get food. Oh, they gave me a little fruit bowl in the lobby of the hotel, and I go to eat it, I’m like, Oh, what is this? This is not an apple. There’s like, a chalky taste in Italy, yeah, or the banana. What is that? Is that a peel?

Chef Leslie Durso  

I don’t know. We don’t really know all the places that is being used right now. So there is this kind of the wild west on that. This is what makes me yeah, if you don’t know what we’re talking about, please Google.

Dr. Mindy 

Yeah, it’s so it’s like a chemical that that slows down the ripening, yes, of fruit. So my understanding when, when we’re picking plants, and specifically fruits, but anything that comes right off of vine is that they want to print, pick it green, so it hasn’t had as much time on the vine to get the nutrients from the soil, so and get all those those vitamins in it,

Chef Leslie Durso  

yes, but then it lasts longer in the store. But it lasts so it’s,

Dr. Mindy 

it’s an advantage to the store making profit,

Chef Leslie Durso  

yes, but disadvantage to the customer, yeah, and to your nutrition, because

Dr. Mindy 

now it’s ripened in the store, and so it’s not ripening on like a nutrient, like a hose of nutrients, it’s ripening in the in the store.

Chef Leslie Durso  

That’s a great way of putting it, too, by the way, that the stem is like a hose of nutrients, and it is, that’s exactly what it is, yeah and yes, yes. So the best answer for that is to grow your own food. And I know that not everyone is capable of growing on their own food. Yeah, I always say, like, try and grow something. Even if you have a tiny studio apartment with one sliver of light that comes in from a crack of a window somewhere, try and put a little herb plant there. Try and put one little thing there and grow something on your own, because even just the the nutrients that come from a basil plant are so vibrant when you when you grow it and grow it yourself and then eat it immediately, you can taste the difference. Yeah, once you’ve grown your own herbs, it’s very difficult to go back to store herbs, because there’s so much more flavor and intensity to them than when they’re at the store, and that’s a really good factor. Another one is arugula I love. Have you ever grown arugula? I have

Dr. Mindy 

and it flowers, yeah. And we’ve taken those flowers, and I actually take them off, like, just pull them off, like a nasturtium, and put them in my salads. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

yeah. So good. But then you notice when you pick arugula, the second you pick it, it’s very spicy, yes, and then it gets more mild as the minutes, hours, days go by. And so if you’re buying arugula in the store, and it just kind of tastes like lettuce, I then it’s probably been picked a long time ago, but it’s still got spice to it? Yes, it’s fresher. I

Dr. Mindy 

don’t, I don’t taste any spice in the arugula in the store. Yeah, very rarely, but you’re absolutely right. When I pick it from my garden, it’s super spicy, which is why I love it, me too. So it’s and then I take those flowers and I put the flowers in the South. Palette, and now it looks really pretty, and it’s a beautiful it’s one of my favorite lettuces to grow. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

it means here, it’s also very nutrient dense. Well, yeah, it’s

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

great for the liver. What else does arugula? I mean,

Chef Leslie Durso  

liver was what I was just about to say. And maybe I’m just thinking about

Dr. Mindy 

this now, in our talk about the saving humanity from hatred, the organ that has that stores hatred and anger is the liver.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. And so the body is like, you know, filter, I feel like, so

Dr. Mindy 

in a time when we got a lot of anxiety going on, a lot of pointing fingers, maybe people need just more arugula. They might.

Chef Leslie Durso  

But truly it does. I mean, it really affects your your mood, and that’s why, I mean, I’m not pro work on drinking alcohol, but a lot of that gets stored in the liver, and it really affects the way that you feel the rest of the time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I know. I never understood why meat eaters ate liver. Well,

Dr. Mindy 

the theory is, like heels, like so that’s a home that’s an old homeopathic theory, a lot of Chinese medicine where, like, if you have the org, if you have an ailing organ, you eat the Oregon and then you get, like, heels, like, so, so that part is really interesting. And you know, the whole organ meat thing is fascinating, because when you look to go eat meat, there’s a there’s same thing you need to not just eat a burger or a chicken breast and and when we look at those foods, it’s like, if they’re pumped with antibiotics, growth hormone, right, separate like, I actually had an ethos for a long time at restaurants, that if I didn’t know if the meat was organic because I eat meat, then I would only Order a plant based meal, because I was there. I mean, my brain, I was like, the chemicals in that meat are more damaging than, you know, anything I could find in the plant. So it’s a really interesting when you it’s like, which lesser of two evils are you gonna go but when you look at the amount of hormone disruptors put in meat that is of concern, absolutely, yeah, it’s of a lot of Yeah. So okay, one thing we didn’t get to talk about that I and unpack, is salt and spices. So something interesting about that we did, like, years ago, I brought Dr Terry walls on this podcast. Do you know who she is? I don’t. I don’t know. Okay, so you would sorry. No, you and she’s a beautiful woman who had MS, and she was she’s a medical doctor. She got diagnosed with MS, and then they put her on all the trial medications, and in one year’s time, she got sicker and sicker and sicker. And so she went and researched that MS was really a dysfunction of the mitochondria, and that if she could get the right nutrients to her mitochondria, she could actually start to get her body to heal itself. And so the first thing she did is she said, I’m gonna have eight cups of vegetables every single day, and they’re gonna be of a variety of colors. And so she did like that already, yeah, no, I’m telling you, you would love her beautiful heart woman too, like so heart centered. And so she did that. And every day, she made sure that she had eight cups of eating the rainbow, like you talk about. And within a year, she she had gone from like being in a wheelchair to being able to bike and walk, and her whole whole life was restored just from these eight cups of vegetables. It’s

Chef Leslie Durso  

truly amazing what can happen. I wrote a little bit in ERIC mayor, Eric Adams book, the mayor of New York City, he talks very openly about how he had type two diabetes, and he actually went blind, and his mother also had it so badly, and they’re talking about toes and fingers. And he said no, and he decided to go full plant based and eat a huge amount of nutrient dense foods. And he regained his eyesight. That’s crazy. That’s in his book, like that. Is he wild? To me, yeah, that is crazy. The body are so amazing. Yeah, when you give it the right Nutri, give it the right nutrients.

Dr. Mindy 

So Dr walls had something called a plant diversity score. Her original statement to me was, 200 plants in one year. Could you get 200 plants in a year? And my brain was like, well, that’s not a lot. We should probably get more plants than that, yeah. So I went to my community. This was like six years ago. I went to my community. I said, Hey, how about we all just count up how many plants we can get in one week? Yeah. And so we made we gamified, it fun. And there was a couple of things that we learned in that process. Like one, I think I actually got to a salad that I had put together, like 17 different plants in one salad. Whoa, I love salads. And I was like, what else can I put in there? And so that was really fun. And then the second thing we realized is that really good spices are a form of plants.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, spices are a plan, right? I know so.

Dr. Mindy 

But. But the spice that’s sitting on the shelf that has been in my jar over and over and over again probably doesn’t have as many medicinal qualities as as fresh. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

I think it depends on the process. If it was freeze dried and then, yes, that maintains a lot more of the nutrients than if it was air dried or heat dried, and so you really need to look and do your research. But it doesn’t mean that those don’t have any nutrients in it. Just the most come from freeze drying quickly. Okay, yeah,

Dr. Mindy 

are there certain spices you like to cook with? More than ever, all of them.

Chef Leslie Durso  

What do I love to cook with? Well, I use some fresh Android. I mean, I love turmeric, I love garlic, I love ginger. I’m Italian. I love basil, I love oregano. I love him rosemary. I love smoked paprika. I That’s kind of my secret ingredient a lot of my recipes. Oh, do

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

you smoke it yourself? Yeah, I

Chef Leslie Durso  

can. Wow, yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

Do you have like, a do you put it, like, on a grill or a smoker smoke in your oven?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Oh, put, like, a little smoking piece of wood in your oven. Just maybe don’t try this at home if you’ve never done it before. Watch some videos on how to do it so you don’t burn your house down, please. I know don’t burn your house down because you heard me say that on Dr Mindy’s podcast. But yeah, you can do it at home yourself. Safer if you have a barbecue, put a little smoking piece of wood. But you have to also be careful what kind of wood you’re smoking. If it’s true, been treated with anything like, don’t just, don’t just do this with anything, right? Yeah? Do your research. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

So spices, what, from a culinary standpoint, are spices supposed to enhance the flavor of the overall dish? Are they supposed to add a new they add, they add. So

Chef Leslie Durso  

there’s three things that, like we talked about, the flavor conductors that will pull flavor out of vegetables and plants, and then everything else adds to it. So when you properly balance your dish with spices, then you’re getting, like, this just beautiful dance of flavors in your mouth, and everything is working together, and it’s all perfectly balanced. Okay, yeah, my

Dr. Mindy 

God, spice. And then which spices do you find combination of spices work well? Because the way my brain goes is that I’m like, okay, can put cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves, like the, you know the holiday spices, I like, know how those go together and but then when I get out in the other spice world, it gets really confused. It gets

Chef Leslie Durso  

confusing and tricky, yeah. And so this is my I’m glad you brought this up. We didn’t even prepare this ahead of time, but I do have a thing for it, and it is, again, using your nose and so to if you’re curious and want to see if, would it be good if I added this into it, I’m gonna use your glasses, yeah, example. So if you’ve got Isla in your hand and you’ve got garam masala and your other hand, which is an Indian Yeah. And so if you’re not sure if they’ll go together, put them together and smell them together, does it smell good, or does it smell kind of funky and weird? And if it smells kind of funky and weird, no, yeah,

Dr. Mindy 

because taste starts in your in your nose. Taste in your starts in your nose. Well, you actually, what did you say? It starts in your eyes. You said, you Well, I

Chef Leslie Durso  

think you eat first with your eyes. You

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

eat first with your eyes. You said, I really love that idea, yeah.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Because if it’s beautiful, yeah, you’re gonna want to eat it. And all of a sudden you automatically have a more positive outlook about what’s about to sow your body, if it’s so pretty, yeah. And then if it smells good, you’re dying. If it looks good and smells good, like you’re automatically gonna love it even more. So

Dr. Mindy 

I can take two of my spices and I jars. I can put them together, and I can smell them and go, does these two smells come together, yeah? Oh, my God. So we also have a joke. Yeah, we have a joke in our family, because the men of our family are the spice hounds, and I always feel like whenever I go to spice anything, I defer to them, because especially my husband, has taken on this real love for a combination of spices. And I feel like such a novice. And now you taught me,

Chef Leslie Durso  

why not you that? But then also regions, so spices that go together grow together. And so when you’re thinking about Mediterranean spices, and you’re thinking about like basil and parsley and oregano, they all go together. And so when you’re thinking about Indian cooking, it’s like I said, like the mixture of the garment, massage, the warmer things, and it’s the turmeric and it’s the ginger and it’s the garlic, and if you’re in Mexico, it’s the cilantro and it’s the onions and the oregano. And so what grows together goes together.

Dr. Mindy 

I love that. I love that. Okay, talk about salt, because you we’ve also share a real love for salt. And why do people fear salt? And there’s so many different types of salts now, so

Chef Leslie Durso  

many. Okay, I have traveled the world. I have harvested Salt, salt all over the world. I’ve made my own sea salt from salt water and harvested it myself. I’ve gone underground into mines. I have harvested salt. Mara. That’s the oldest Salt Flats in the world. Like, I’m truly obsessed with salt.

Dr. Mindy 

It’s so I am obsessed for my taste buds, but I’ve never taken it to the level you have. And for so many years, I’ve been like, I don’t think salt’s the problem. Salt’s not the problem and there. And like, there’s a difference between the salt shaker you’re gonna get at a restaurant and the salt that you’re about to talk about. And yeah, can you just, can you lay that out for

Chef Leslie Durso  

sure? And there’s also a really big difference between sea salt and mountain salt, and it’s really important to unpack that as well. Okay, because sea salt is fresh from the waters of today, okay? And so what do the waters of today have

Dr. Mindy 

in them, plastics and chemicals.

Chef Leslie Durso  

So now micro plastics are found in sea salt. And yeah, it’s not so good so, but mountain salt actually doesn’t come from Mountain it comes from ancient sea beds. So it’s ancient seas that used to be there that are no longer there. And so then you can harvest and mine the salt from those ancient seas. And what do ancient seas not have plastic and so that’s the way that I’m leaning more towards today. And then where you’re getting your salt matters too. The way that it’s mined is it mined with c4 is that mined by hand? And and there are different practices all the world. You got to do your research. And some places are not regulated at all, like, I know a lot of people like Himalayan pink salt, but there’s very few regulations in that part of the world on mining salt. And so you really don’t know what you’re getting, or is it being cut with anything. That’s always a big fear of mine, too,

Dr. Mindy 

cut with anything meaning, like chlorinated, like something, yeah, or adding in

Chef Leslie Durso  

a different powder, different powdered mineral to make it go further. And, I mean, I don’t know if we can talk about brands, because I feel like we should go ahead and talk about your there’s a brand called red men that makes a salt called Real Salt. And I actually went to their minds in Utah, and they’re 800 feet below ground, which is an experience in itself, going down that deep into the earth. It was so cool. You feel alive, like there’s so much just beautiful energy coming off of these. It’s just solid salts everywhere. It was very cool. But they have very, very clean practices. All the salt is mined by hand, and I just love it. And it’s very mineral rich salt as well. So you’re getting a lot of the other minerals that are necessary for your body and that as well. And so I really like their salt, yeah, and it has a great flavor to it from a chef’s perspective. It’s really tasty. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

So talk about salt as far as what it stimulates in the tongue. So you and I chatted about this briefly, but as you know, as to fill everybody in, my son, who’s 22 is is training to be a chef. Now, he’s in a very nice restaurant, working his way up. So he comes home and I don’t I’m usually asleep when he comes home, because he comes home, because he comes home at like 11 o’clock at night, but the next day, I’m like, teach me what you’re learning. Teach me about what you’re learning. And he talked about how all the chefs in the kitchen go on these salt free diets, so that they could really help their taste buds be able to experience the full flavor of food. But then we mix that with salt. Invest, especially in high end restaurants, a lot of chefs put a lot of salt in, and I think it’s because it’s that umami taste, right?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, because something that is pretty salty is going to taste good to most, Oh, okay. And so it’s a lot harder to make food with no salt or very low salt, okay, I actually prefer to make my food with less salt in it, because I I want all of the flavors and the ingredients to really sing out of my dishes, and I don’t want them to be covered up by any singular flavor. And I feel like salt does that when it’s improperly used, is it kind of just creates a blanket of salt flavor on everything. And so I like when I’m making a soup, I don’t like putting salt in the soup. I like garnishing with the salt on top, so that you’re getting the bites of salt, but you’re also able to separate the flavors of the salt from the flavors of the soup.

Dr. Mindy 

Okay, yeah, yeah. It makes total so it should be enough that it just kind of pops the flavors. Yeah? But I do know, because I love salt, I do know that if the dish isn’t really satisfied my brain, I keep adding more salt. Yeah?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, you’re doing that for a variety of reasons. Your brain might not really like what you’re eating. Let’s make this palatable. Let me eat it so I can get it down, yeah? But yeah. And you could just really like it, and the more you have of something, I feel your body continues to crave it. Yes, and I think that that when you’re talking about diet, and we’re talking about getting things out of your body and out of your system, when you stop eating salt, you stop craving salt. When you stop eating sugar, you stop craving sugar. Yeah, when you stop eating me, you stop craving me, and the body emotion stays in motion. And so whatever you’re doing in large quantities is usually what it wants to continue to do, right? And so again, another reason to mix up your diet and have a wide variety of foods in it so that you’re always exciting different parts of your system, and you’re not getting locked into the same thing over and, okay, that

Dr. Mindy 

totally makes sense. That totally makes sense. Okay, so then what about let’s move on to oils. Because what am I yeah, I know we’ve had so we’ve had a lot of conversations last couple days. And if you’re listening, you know, as you’re listening to this podcast, you go go to my YouTube channel, because all these videos I did with you are there. But oil has also been it’s, I mean, each one of these things has its own road to navigate. So we do, if people aren’t aware, like, hands down, the Mediterranean diet has been considered, yeah, it’s been proven over and over and over again to have such a benefit to the human body, and a large part of that is because of olive oil. But then, on the flip side of that I’ve heard, don’t cook with olive oil, because if you heat it up, it turns into an inflammatory oil. Yes.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, from the research that I’ve done and the olive oil experts that I’ve spoken to in Italy, is that it’s the quality of the olive oil. Yeah. And so the extra virgin olive oil is the first press of olive oil, and that has a much higher smoke point than a regular olive oil. And we talked about this a little bit already, but it really you have to do your research on your oils, because not all are created equal. There are so many tips and tricks for how to buy good olive oil versus it might not even be olive oil, right? One of that the easiest way to figure that out is take your olive oil and put it in the refrigerator overnight, in the morning, if it’s solid, it’s real olive oil, then let it come back to room temperature and use it as normal. But if it’s still liquid in that bottle, that’s not olive oil. Wow. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

So if I’m staring like, like, if I look at the market, there are so many olive oils, it’s so

Chef Leslie Durso  

it’s overwhelming. So I want to go extra virgin. You want to go extra virgin, organic, organic. And you want to go, if you can get a single origin olive oil is the best. A single farm is the best, best. Okay, so if you get a Mediterranean olive oil, that could be olive oil from anywhere in the Mediterranean, coming from any of these different farmers, and it just gets either all put into one VAT and bottled together, or it gets bottled separately from God knows where, and they’re just pulling it from everywhere and shipping it out. Okay, so there’s not really a whole lot of regulation, except for that it came from the Mediterranean, and then you unbox that, and it’s like, okay, you get a Greek olive oil, or Spanish olive oil, or Italian olive oil. Well, that could come from anywhere in the country, and it could, again, it could be blended together. This is why it’s hard to regulate. And so other oils might be cut into it. You don’t really know all the time, interesting and so, but if you find a singular farm that all of the olive oil from this bottle, olive oil is coming from this farm, and it’s this one harvest of this olive oil, and that’s the best to get.

Dr. Mindy 

So how would I know, like we looked at a really good quality of olive oil that I was sent was gifted, and it said grease, yes, so it didn’t say it on the bottle, yeah, but I’m a big fan of going to the website next Yes.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Writing to them, yeah, writing to the company. They have people at all companies that are just anxious and excited to answer your questions, yeah. So ask them where these things come from.

Dr. Mindy 

That’s a I love that idea. And then once you find like a brand you love, like, you probably stick with it. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

yeah. Well, I’m also very lucky that I know olive oil makers and farmers, yeah. So you’re like, Yeah, I come home from Italy with a lot of olive oil, or I just ship it. Well,

Dr. Mindy 

the where I want to go with you is to the olive oil sommelier, your friend, that’s the olive oil and like, hang out there, because there was a restaurant that I went to once in Utah that had all these different olive oils, and, I mean, I wanna say, like, 50 plus, and they would give you all these different tastes. And I’m like, I love that. I never realized how diverse olive oils could be. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

think olive oil tasting is more fun than wine tasting. I can I can see that it’s so interesting.

Dr. Mindy 

Yeah, really cool. Okay, so outside of olive oil, any other olive or any other oils you’d love to cook with. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

really like cooking with coconut oil as well. Okay, yeah. How come? Well, for all of the reasons it’s got, it’s a really good, clean fat, and better for you, it’s we can. I feel like this conversation is leaning into seed oils too, and kind of like where we could talk about that, we could talk about a little, but there’s also a lot of nuance in that as well. So much difference between cold press, there’s a difference between regular press, there’s there’s so many differences in seed oils. There’s a there’s a lot to unpack there, but I do really try and stick with coconut and olive those are my jam. Then every now and then I do some avocado too. I know you’re a huge fan of avocado, yeah. Well,

Dr. Mindy 

I switched avocado when I started looking at the fact that if you heat up olive oil, it turned to inflammation, inflammatory oil. So then we just got avocado oil. But you actually have me rethinking this now, like many things over the hanging out with and same, yeah, and like, I’m really like, oh, good quality would make sense, just like everything else, when humans have destroyed these amazing foods that we have, yeah, it gets a little complicated. So you have me really thinking differently, because I love, love, love the taste of olive oil. Now coconut oil, I did a lot of research on that, because MCT oil is a small piece of coconut oil.

Chef Leslie Durso  

That’s how we bonded. Yes,

Dr. Mindy 

that’s right, that’s how we bonded. So just to fill everybody in, I was at a retreat with you, and I had my continuous glucose monitor on, and I was eating all these amazing foods that you were making, and I had a dessert that was a flowerless.

Chef Leslie Durso  

It wasn’t Flourless. It was my chocolate cake as you’re chopping glitter free. It was gluten

Dr. Mindy 

free, because I wouldn’t have eaten it if it wasn’t gluten free. And I it was the thing out of everything you had cooked that made my blood sugar drop. And I think I even came and said, Did you put MCT oil?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, you also were like, well, I guess I’ll have this, and that’ll just spike my blood sugar. And I was like, we started off, and you came back. I know you came back in your room, and you’re like, What did you put in that MCT oil? Yeah,

Dr. Mindy 

so the story we probably should have told in the beginning, I’ll tell it in the intro, but what was literally, when I heard we were having a vegan chef for three days, I was like, Are you serious? Oh, my God, I’m gonna go without meat for three days. But I was so happy because I had my blood sugar reader on. So I was just testing you so badly wanted to prove me wrong. I really did, and you

Dr. Mindy 

so knew it just amazing that we’ve ended up. Here you go. But it was the chocolate, you know, cake thing with the MCT oil. That blew my mind. Yeah, it was like, Oh, you can take something that’s technically sweet and you can put something like MCT oil with it, and it drops your blood sugar. And that was amazing, because

Chef Leslie Durso  

food needs to be balanced, and food combinations are important when you’re digesting anything or eating anything, and how it gets absorbed in your body,

Dr. Mindy 

amazing. So the only thing I would say that I’ve found with cooking, with all with coconut oils, it has a very strong taste.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Okay, so there’s two kinds of coconut oils. There’s refined and unrefined. Okay? And so refined is not going to taste like coconut at all. It has in this very neutral, zero flavor to it at all, and the unrefined is still going to taste like coconut. Okay? So if I am baking something like a chocolate cake, or something that I really don’t want the coconut flavor in, I’ll use the refined, yeah, but if it’s something that I don’t mind, if I’m making a Asian stir fry, or if I’m doing something and I like the idea or curry, and I like the idea of having that coconut in there, then I’ll use the unrefined Okay,

Dr. Mindy 

and then in that recipe, you use just the MCT oil, which is just a small piece of the coconut. Why did you choose to do that? Because

Chef Leslie Durso  

it balances the sugar even more, is it also, I also didn’t have a financial budget, and it is definitely more expensive way to go. So anybody that’s listening at home, don’t feel like you need to bake with MCT oil. You can bake with coconut oil and get the same effect. Yeah. But I was kind of on this mega, super food kick that weekend, and so I was just like, with

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

no, no financial budget. With

Chef Leslie Durso  

no I was throwing in everything under the sun to make everything more nutrient done. Yeah, but yeah. I mean, when you can, I think I also put lines main extract. And I mean, it literally had so many things

Dr. Mindy 

so good. It was so good. It should be a giveaway for the book. Do you have the recipe somewhere? I

Chef Leslie Durso  

mean, but are people going to make a cake where the ingredients cost $80 I mean, probably not, probably

Dr. Mindy 

not. Okay. Well, you know, I guess if you’re as you’re listening to this, you know, shoot us a DM, if this is what you want that recipe. But yeah, that’s a really good point. It was so good. Okay, my last group of foods that I would love to unpack are vinegars. So again, where I get stuck in the kitchen is with how do I know what vinegar to use? And I one of my superpowers that I mentioned as we were videoing is I love making salads, yeah, and I love putting all kinds of things in salads. I always felt like when my kids were growing up, I could get all the right nutrients and salads. But then when I go to buy, when you go to buy salad dressing. It’s horrible.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Don’t buy salad dressing. It’s literally the easiest thing on earth to make. And the difference between homemade and store bought is a world’s difference. It’s so fast, it’s so inexpensive, there’s no reason to buy salad dressing.

Dr. Mindy 

Yes, and it’s so expensive and toxic and yeah, so when I would get. To the what I noticed is I would combine three things for a salad dressing, yeah, I would put a good quality oil, and then I would need to find something vinegary. So I had, like, my options were balsamic apple cider, or we have a Meyer lemon tree, yeah, so that could be one, and then I would take a little dash of raw honey, or even, like some like apricot jam, and I would put it in there, and everybody would go crazy over my salad dressings, nice, but the vinegar I was, Did you do any

Chef Leslie Durso  

fresh herbs in it? Too? Because that’s my fourth no necessary ingredient. So same is like a good quality oil, a acid, which so a vinegar or a lemon, or some sort of citric fruit, a touch of sweetener and herbs, right? Okay, so I feel like those four combination herbs

Dr. Mindy 

and yeah, and now I know how to maybe, maybe I could smell what’s in the dish and the spice together.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Yeah, you could do that. Well, yeah, absolutely. Or you’re chopping

Dr. Mindy 

up, like fresh mint, like you’re actually chopping the herbs, yeah? Like you’re not going into the dehydrated herbs.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Well, you can when making the dressing. Most of the time I will use a dried herb, because it’s what I have on a hand. But if I have fresh herbs, then I like to just tear them and put them right in them in their salad.

Dr. Mindy 

And when do you have one egg? Yeah? Do you have ones? Your go to ones for

Chef Leslie Durso  

salad that I love. Well, I love a salon, I love cilantro, and it works well for me, but cilantro, parsley, basil, mint, those are probably my four favorite herbs to have fresh in a salad. Mint

Dr. Mindy 

is my secret ingredient in salads. Yeah, because you can’t see it, and then you eat it, and you’re like, there’s like a burst of Oh, and freshness. Yeah, I

Chef Leslie Durso  

wondered about dill too. Okay, yeah. So

Dr. Mindy 

you, you would add, you would if we’re making a salad dressing, you now have me thinking about the herbs, but go back to the vinegars. Oh, okay, so

Chef Leslie Durso  

back to the vinegars. There’s a lot of theories on vinegars. Okay, too. And again, pure versus not pure, the price difference in vinegars, if you just go to the grocery store, is very great. And so what are you looking for? Like, when you buy an apple cider vinegar? What are you looking for?

Dr. Mindy 

I’m a brags fan, just because they’ve been around forever and that’s it. Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

they’ve been around forever. But are there any key things that you look for besides just brand recognition? I don’t

Dr. Mindy 

actually Enlighten me. Okay, so for apple

Chef Leslie Durso  

cider vinegar, you should be looking for a couple things. Okay, you should be looking for organic. Yes, we do organic here. And then you should also be looking for the mother still in it. So if you ever see that cloudy bit that’s at the bottom of the vinegar in apple cider, that’s a good thing. Okay, that’s not a bad thing. That’s the the mother, so to speak. Like, if you if you’ve ever had, if you get into a kombucha and stuff like that, but that, you want that in there, if it’s just crystal clear, it’s been filtered, and a lot of the nutrients, and it tastes sweeter for some reason. But that’s what I look for when I’m buying apple cider vinegar, which is, again, when probably my favorite vinegar for the base of a salad dressing, because it’s already got a natural sweetness to it, the health benefits are off the Oh yeah, compared to other vinegars, insane. It’s insane. So that’s why I like, I also really like red wine vinegar. Oh, okay, why? It’s just good. It just tastes good. And, and it’s not a particular health but,

Dr. Mindy 

yeah, but it’s your but, but does it mix better into, like, a salad dressing?

Chef Leslie Durso  

It does work well with salad dressings, because you can really balance it. Okay? One of my you know, you’ve had Greek salad dressing, yeah, that’s usually a red wine vinegar base that’s in that balsamic I like, but balsamic, I’m it’s a very specific salad for me with balsamic, because balsamic is such a strong flavor that I only use it in certain salads, and I use it for things that are more simple. So like, if I’m just having raw tomatoes and herbs, I’ll put some balsamic overpower it, right? If I’m making a big, beautiful salad with lots of different things in it, I don’t like balsamic on it, because then all I taste is balsamic. Okay,

Dr. Mindy 

interesting. And then would you put lemon in there too, like I

Chef Leslie Durso  

would use? Well, lemon is a strong flavor, but it also is not overpowering, right? And so lemon marries really well with so many things. So lemon is probably my go to acid for salad dressing, and then red wine or then apple cider vinegar and then red wine vinegar, that’s probably the order that I would put them in, and then balsamic at the end. Okay,

Dr. Mindy 

yeah. Oh my god. I love this. You like this was like a curiosity. Every time I go to put a salad dressing together, I look and I make a conscious decision in my head. I’m like, am I gonna go pick a lemon? Or am I gonna look at all these vinegars? And we have so many, and I didn’t know the difference between them all from a taste profile. So yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

and if you’re gonna do something herbaceous and you’re gonna have something like mint, yeah, you’re not gonna do, I would not do. Definitely don’t do balsa bag and maybe not even red wine vinegar. I would stick with like a lemon juice or maybe apple cider. But then if you’re gonna do, like, strong, really bold, yeah, or, like, if you want a lot of raw onion in a salad, then you could go with, like a balsamic,

Dr. Mindy 

ah, to count to kind of its opposing taste, that would kind of like blend them together, yeah, ah, and I just need to hang out with you more. But I told you, like, everybody in my family is a foodie, and so you have to fight to be the one that cooks a meal in my family, that’s so cool, yeah, except for, here’s the deal, the one, the one that cooks, doesn’t clean, so then I’m sort of left like, I guess I’m gonna clean, but I’m always deferring to them because they get and salads are the one that I own. They’re like, Oh, Mom, you can do the salad, because I have knocked that out of the park. But I feel like, after hanging with you for a couple days, I’m like, Okay, I’m gonna get it back into the kitchen. I’m gonna show them I know what I’m doing. So, yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

absolutely, you do know what you’re doing and what we’re talking about before, like, the actual salad, there’s components to it too. And so that makes a salad really great, or not great, too obviously greens and then something a little sweet, something a little bitter, something crunchy, things that are higher in fat, like avocado and so like you really want to make a combination of all the textures, the textures

Dr. Mindy 

and how you cut them up matters. So I look at a salad in a smoothie almost as through the same lens as is, if you can put as many healthy things into them as possible, and they will taste great, but you can kind of hide all these like I would, I would take sauerkraut and I would dump it into my salads, and my kids wouldn’t even notice. And I was like, sit there with a smile on my face, cuz I go, we’re getting some fermented foods. So it was so amazing. So

Chef Leslie Durso  

that also makes great salad dressing using the liquid from fermented food. Oh, so the liquid from the sauerkraut or kimchi or even pickles make really good salad dressing. Oh, actually, I just did a video on that. I with my pickled strawberries. I take the pickling liquid and make a like a strawberry vinaigrette with it. Oh, my

Dr. Mindy 

God. Where can people find that video? In case

Chef Leslie Durso  

they’re on my Instagram and YouTube account and YouTube, okay, again, we’ll put all the links in there. Yeah. Well, it’s easy, because everything is Leslie or so, because I’m not very original. What do you mean there’s only one Leslie? That’s true? Do you know that there’s only one Leslie or so in the whole wide world? You’ve How do you know this? Because I’ve Googled a zillion times trying to find another Leslie or so, but it’s a very British name with a very Italian name. So it’s a very weird

Dr. Mindy 

comment that’s, I’m surprised to hear that. Yeah, fascinated. Oh, my God. Okay, well, I can talk to you all day, but I want to end on two thoughts here. So we did over 100 recipes for this book. Yes,

Chef Leslie Durso  

we did.

Dr. Mindy 

What I want people to know is that what I love, is you and I sat down and we started off with some calls of like, Hey, here’s hormones, here’s food, here’s how they pair. And you’re like, Okay, great. And then when you were actually we did, like, a couple calls like that. And then when you were actually in the making, you would text me, or like, what about this? What about that? So it was just a I love how we, like, melded our two minds together. Me too. So my question is, do you have a favorite recipe in the book?

Chef Leslie Durso  

Oh, God, I know. I know. It’s like asking you to pick your favorite child. So I have a favorite recipe in the book. You could pick a couple if you want. Well, there’s a pretty killer lasagna recipe in there. Yes, there is. I would definitely put that on the list. Yeah, the favorites. There’s a couple really good bowls in there. Well, there’s more than a couple, really,

Dr. Mindy 

yeah, we did. We did a video on the kimchi edamami bowl, and then the Bucha, everybody’s favorite. Yeah, the Bucha, not to take it away from you, but the Fettuccine Alfredo everybody loved as well. That’s a great recipe too. That was so good. That’s

Chef Leslie Durso  

a fun one, and super high in protein, yeah and yeah. Just really healthy and delicious. Has a good one. I’m trying to think of the dessert ones too. The date bark is really delicious. The chia protein bar, oh yeah, yeah. There’s a lot of good ones.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

I know there are. I

Chef Leslie Durso  

know. Yeah, we did the walnut pate. Great appetizer. I love the Brazil nut salad too, because I love Brazil nut Yep.

Dr. Mindy 

My first when you turned in your recipes, my first thought when I looked over them, because I remember you turned them in, and you’re like, tell me what you think. And I was like, I gotta try them. I don’t know what I think, but the first thing I thought is simple. Simple. You put such a beautiful combination of plants together, and then the way you wrote the recipe up, the way it reads, and then our interior, you know, our packaging team put these beautiful designs to these recipes, but you made it so simple.

Chef Leslie Durso  

Thank you. Well, that was really important to me, because I think a lot of people hear plant based food, and it’s either salad or it’s insanely complicated, and I have to soak things for three days and dehydrate things and do all these things. I was like, I don’t want that. I want these to be really, really approachable and easy and fast and relatable, and because I want someone to be able. To do the full plant based track, or to do some of the meat, some of the veggies, and feel like they can go back and forth and still feel really good about their decision, yeah, and you,

Dr. Mindy 

and it’s very flexible like that, you know. And And again, I’ll mention this in the intro of this podcast. But so much of what I wanted to bring together was the really highlight plant based living, and you were the person obvious to bring that. And then, you know, I have a whole team of people that took all of your recipes and matched them to my 30 day fasting reset. So there’s actually a 30 day program where people can just do plant based mixed with fasting. We taught, we show like what recipes to break your fast with, like that. I was like so grateful for my team member, Gina, who put that together, and then I wanted omnivore track, because I still see some benefit to omnivore, and I’m an omnivore, although I would say I’m becoming more plant forward, because I feel better in my post menopausal body with all that extra fiber, it feels like it breaks down hormones. So much as

Chef Leslie Durso  

you talked about fiber for a whole hour, I mean, that is what I think is lacking the most in the American diet, is fiber. Yeah, and we don’t talk about that enough, yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

On this podcast, I brought Mary Claire haver, who is one of the leading OBS right now, she wrote a book called The New menopause. She I love this woman’s heart, and we had such a great conversation. And when I asked her the number one food menopausal women should be incorporating, she said, fiber and and it was like, I said, How much? And she’s like, around 20 grams of fiber. I don’t know how much that is like visually, if I’m looking

Chef Leslie Durso  

I don’t either. What would vary greatly depending on what the produce, yeah, but it’s a lot. I mean, really, every meal that you make should have something with fiber. And the good news is, is that all plants have Right, exactly. And so if you’re just eating a lot of plants, you’re going to get the amount of fiber that you That’s right.

Dr. Mindy 

And what’s also interesting is because I’ve been teaching the ketogenic diet for so many years, and then I created a version called ketobiotic, because what I realized when people went keto, like 1015, years ago, is that they left fruits and vegetables out right,

Chef Leslie Durso  

and where plant based protein might have a place in your diet, there are so many things that it cannot provide for you. The keto you cannot just eat animal based protein. That’s right, nothing else in your diet, yeah? Because yeah, I mean all of the essential vitamins and nutrients that’s right in plants, yeah. So it is if you are going to do animal protein in your diet is so important to have all those other things there. Agreed, yeah,

Dr. Mindy 

and with the keto diet, that we always talked about net carbs. And so when I first started teaching this to my patients, that a lot of them were like, Oh my gosh, I can only have 50 net carbs. But what they heard was 50 grams of carbs. And I said, there is a big difference between total carb and net carb, and that is the fiber. And when you start looking at a carb through the lens of nature’s carbs, and that’s what I call them now, and I it’s all over the book. I don’t know if you read that in the front matter, like nature’s carbs. Nature’s carbs. Let’s get away from human made carbs, and let’s go to nature’s carbs. All of a sudden, 50, and I think I even upped it in this book to 75 grams net carbs is a ton of carbohydrates because it has all that fiber, yeah, which, again, the nuance matters. I’ve been training my following and community recently to understand that podcasts like this are and my YouTube videos and my books are long format. Yeah, long format content is where you can learn these things. Whereas you can’t build your health around a 92nd reel.

Chef Leslie Durso  

No, no. And we need to stop that. We need to stop that anybody can have a reel that’s for. Anybody can make a reel and have. Who are they? Have they done the research? And I, you know, I’m still learning all the time. I’m always still curious. I’m very open about that. I love that about you, and I just anyone that’s online pretending to be the end all be all of something and demanding things and saying that’s really just run, run, yeah,

Dr. Mindy 

yeah. Amazing. Okay, so the last question, this is a question I’ve been asking people all year long, and I find it fascinating, and so I’m curious your answer, what is your definition of health? Because we’re all we’re all trying to achieve optimal health, but we don’t know how to define it, so we all have individual definitions. And then how do you know when you’re healthy?

Chef Leslie Durso  

I think you feel healthy. I think everyone has that intuition to know when they feel healthy. What does that what are the indicators, and what does that mean? So I’d say for me, my overall health and my definition of it for myself, and again, I think it might be a different definition. Mission for everyone, I agree, is when my head is clear, when my heart is clear, when my stomach is clear, when my whole life is working in one motion, and everybody is on board with the same mission, and then I feel healthy and I feel strong, and I feel like I have the ability to take on the world and do all the other things I want to do, because everything is working at its optimal level. Yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

Okay. And then, so your definition would be alignment of all of those centers, yeah. And then, and I’ve had a few people say that it’s alignment of different things that makes them alignment of their life, down their values, things like that. But I think it’s, you know, I one of my big pet peeves is health should have never been a noun. It’s not a destination. It’s not a tangible thing. It’s a it’s a living energy that you constantly have to work at. It is a verb. It is an action item. And I think what I just heard in what you said, is congruency. And you said this throughout the last couple days, is like you’ve been plant based since you were eight years old, like you like came out of the womb, ready to teach the world plant based. And when you’re standing in that power, you are healthy, yes. And that’s that everybody should have a center and a quest to do that for their lives. Yeah? And when we’re looking at a time when everybody’s arguing about nutrition, I’m over here saying, Where is your ethos, where’s your personal belief system? Yeah,

Chef Leslie Durso  

where does everything line up for you? Yeah, you know, you got to line up the nutrition benefits of things. You got to line up your morals, you got to line up your lifestyle. There’s so much that you have to line up to create that diet that’s perfect for you. Yeah. And again, I think we both align on that. And why we connected so hard is that we’re just trying to empower people with knowledge to create their own we’re not trying to sell you a snake oil and say, here’s the answer. Go do it. It is. It has to come from within you. Yeah, agreed, yeah.

Dr. Mindy 

Oh my god, I could talk to you forever. I love you. I can’t wait to get this book out. Me too. And, you know, depending on when people are listening to this, I hope they tag the recipes. Tag us both in the recipes, yes, please, yeah. And I will tell you something really fun when you put a book out, like you literally put it out, and then you sit back and you watch, and you watch the comments, you watch the beautiful reviews, you watch the pictures, and it’s like a really interesting human moment to share something that you feel so deeply about. So, you

Dr. Mindy 

know, some people watch the Super Bowl together. We’re gonna get together and watch the long chain of eat like a girl. Yes,

Chef Leslie Durso  

I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

Dr. Mindy 

So love you, and how do people find you? We’ve already talked about this social media.

Chef Leslie Durso  

I love connecting with people on social everything is just Leslie or so on Instagram, YouTube, all of the all of social media, amazing.

Dr. Mindy 

Okay, thank you. Love you. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it, so please leave us a review. Share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is. You

Transcribed by https://otter.ai