When you think about diabetic food, you likely don’t think about carbs. But, author Dr. Cyrus Khambatta from “Mastering Diabetes” says that carbs can be the king of your plate. There is one subtle adjustment, it needs to be low in fat. Find out what carbs you can have, what ratios you need, and the one berry that could help your overall health.
Joey Thurman:
Dr. Cyrus. Dude, I haven't even called you "Doctor" before. Can I call you "Doctor"?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
You can call me whatever you want.
Joey Thurman:
One of the authors of Mastering Diabetes: The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently. Thanks for coming on Talking Plant Protein, dude.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Joey. It's always a pleasure to talk with you.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, so your book is great, but what makes it so revolutionary?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
What makes it so revolutionary is that effectively what we teach people living with all forms of diabetes is that carbs are not the enemy. I know that may sound like a very simple concept.
Joey Thurman:
Whoa, whoa. Pump the brakes.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Yeah, it's true. You've seen it. I mean, even if you're nondiabetic you go onto the Internet wherever you are on the blogosphere, there's this giant stigma against eating carbohydrates. People say, "Oh, don't eat carbs because carbs will make you fat. Don't eat carbs because carbs will raise your cholesterol. Don't eat carbs because carbs equal sugar and sugar will make you more diabetic more and more."
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
The problem with that information is that it's biologically inaccurate. It's actually been disproven multiple times over, but yet the information that exists in the scientific world hasn't fully transitioned the way that people in the general public think about carbs, so as a result of that, wherever you go, people are always fearing eating carbohydrates, especially people living with diabetes, myself included, living with type 1, is that from the time that you're diagnosed, your doctor also has been taught this information in medical school and it's just this anti-carbohydrate everything, "Do whatever you can to avoid eating carbohydrates, whether it's a potato, whether it's a banana, whether it's a piece of bread, it doesn't matter. Carbohydrates are your enemy. Don't eat them at all."
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, and so they're basically looked at as enemy. You have a piece of bread, whether that's like a spelt or Ezekiel versus a white bread, and I want to get into this a little bit, but both you and Robbie have diabetes.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Correct.
Joey Thurman:
It's really interesting, looking at you, you're in shape, you've got abs, and you have, what, like 600 grams of carbs a day or something crazy?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Yeah, easy. On a bad day, I eat 600 grams. Sometimes I eat upwards of 900 grams of carbohydrate depending on how much I'm training. I'm eating 600 grams, 700 grams, 800 grams per 24-hour period, and the kicker here is that if you follow the Mastering Diabetes method exactly the way that we describe it, not only will your carbohydrate tolerance dramatically increase so that you can consume hundreds of grams of carbohydrate, but if you inject insulin like myself, or if you take Metformin, or if you take any other oral diabetes medications, your use of those medications goes down, and that's the interesting part, as far as I'm concerned, so when I made a transition to eating a plant-based diet, I went from eating a hundred grams of carbohydrate a day per day to 600 grams of carbohydrates, so I literally six-folded my carbohydrate intake, but yet my insulin use fell by 40%.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
If you choose to eat a low carbohydrate diet, what that means is that you're going to be getting the bulk of your calories from either fat or protein or some combination of the both, so you limit your carbohydrate intake and that forces you to eat more fat and protein. When you do that, you actually are suppressing your carbohydrate tolerance. In other words, you are making insulin less active inside of your muscle and inside of your liver in as much as a week, okay?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Now, a lot of people are like, "Come on, are you kidding me? You're telling me that I've been living with type 2 diabetes, I'm taking Metformin, maybe some other oral diabetic medications, and you're telling me that I could need a higher-carbohydrate diet, and all of a sudden, my glucose is going to improve?" The answer is, yeah, and I can say that for a couple of reasons. Number one, personal experience, no questions asked. Within 24 hours, I saw my blood glucose plummet when I made the transition.
Joey Thurman:
What's the low in fat guidelines? Is there certain parameters that people should stay below?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Yeah, so what we recommend is keeping your fat intake to approximately 15% of total calories, somewhere between 10 and 15% of total calories, but another simple way to think about it is to try and keep your total fat intake to approximately 30 gram per day or less. If you can do that on a daily basis, then you can literally watch as your ability to consume and metabolize carbohydrates goes up and your blood glucose improves. It's a mindbogglingly cool system and we see it every single time.
Joey Thurman:
I mean, I'm pretty much ideal right now, but let's call it I'm 210, so let's say 200. It's summer, lean out a little bit.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, so you want to weigh 200?
Joey Thurman:
Sure.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
You're 210 now, so we take the number 200 and we divide that by 2.2 to turn it into kilograms. 200 divided by 2.2 gives us 91 kilograms, 'kay? 91 kilograms is your ideal body weight, so what we're going to do from that point is we're going to take that number, and we're going to multiply it by some factor. The factor that we're going to multiply it by is the amount is the sort of protein conversion factor that's going to determine how many grams of protein you eat per day, okay?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
At the very base level, what I would recommend is somebody consume about one gram of protein per kilogram body weight. That would be for an individual who's maybe moderately active, maybe not that active to begin with. But if there's somebody who's much more active, maybe they're performing a lot of cardiovascular resistance exercise and they're putting their skeletal muscle under a significant stress on a relatively frequent basis, their protein requirements go up.
Joey Thurman:
Uh-huh (affirmative). Pardon me. I'm flexing a little bit. All right.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
There you go. Right, so you need more protein now, right?
Joey Thurman:
Cool.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Your protein requirements are going to go up the more weight training you do, the more resistance exercise you do, as you know, so as a result of that, what we encourage people to do is go all the way upwards of like 1.4, maybe even as high 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram ideal body weight. If you take the number 91, like we calculated for you, and we multiply that by... You tell me, what do you think is your proper conversion factor given your activity?
Joey Thurman:
I mean, I'm very active, so I'd say 1.3, 1.4.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, perfect. Let's multiply by 1.4. That would put us at 127.4 grams of protein per day, so let's just call it 125 for the sake of simplicity, okay? The question is, how can Joey put 125 grams of protein into his body on a daily basis, and is it even possible for him to do that using 100% plant foods? You can find that actually in a whole collection of plant-based food.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
First things first, foods in the plant-based world contain every macronutrient and almost every micronutrient. Let's take a banana as an example. A banana does contain carbohydrate, but it also contains protein, it also contains fat. It also contains vitamins, minerals, fiber, water, antioxidants, and phytochemicals, so there's macronutrients and micronutrients that all are packaged together into a thing that looks like a banana and tastes and smells like a banana, right?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
The question is, well, how much protein is present in a banana? How much carbohydrate, right? One banana is going to contain approximately 20 to 25 grams of carbohydrate. The amount of protein that you get from a banana is very small. It's like two gram, three grams of protein, so I would consider that to be not a significant protein.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Every bean, every pea, every lentil. I don't care what color, I don't care what shape, I don't care what size. It could be black beans, navy beans, kidney beans, refried beans, it could be garbanzo beans, it could be red lentils, black lentils, orange lentils, green lentils. You name it, it could be sugar peas, it could be green English peas, you name it. On average-
Joey Thurman:
You sound like the character on Forrest Gump where he is talking about you got shrimp gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, shrimp... That's Bubba. It was Bubba on Forrest Gump.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
... Oh, I love it. I love it.
Joey Thurman:
I digress. Keep going.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, so if you take on average, if you take one cup of cooked legumes, that contains between 15 and 20 grams of protein right there, all right, so that's a decent serving of protein.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, that's solid.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Let me ask you this, Joey, how many cups of legumes do you consume per day?
Joey Thurman:
I usually do, honestly, one to three cups per day.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
One to three cups per day?
Joey Thurman:
Yeah.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, so just that right there is going to get you anywhere from between 15 and 45 grams of protein. How do you determine how much legumes you're eating per day? Is it just based off your training load, or is it just whatever you feel like eating at the time?
Joey Thurman:
Generally, whatever I feel like eating at the time, and then I log everything as well. I have about 10 servings of leafy greens a day, so then depending on what that is, if you had asparagus in there, it's 10, 15 grams of protein per bunch of asparagus. Yes, my pee smells every now and then, but yeah, I just track all that in there and I just have fell in love with just legumes in general once my body got used to them. But man, delicious, and then making a big chili or something as well, just like a three, four-bean chili. Amazing.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Yes. I mean, we could literally do an entire session on the health benefits of legumes because, I mean, I'll be perfectly honest with you for the first 15 years of being a plant-based eater, I didn't prioritize legumes in my hierarchy of things that are important in the plant-based world. I was eating a lot of fruit at the time and I felt fantastic. But then as I started learning about legumes and started to learn about their micronutrient value, the ability of legumes to not only help control your blood glucose response at the meal that you're eating them, but actually at the second meal, the next meal, you actually get a blood-glucose-lowering response from the beans that you ate the previous meal.
Joey Thurman:
Wow.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Then in addition to that, the ease of digesting them once you've adapt your microbiome to being able to consume them, because it can take a while, and then how satiating they are, and I mean, number five, how delicious they are. They're unbelievable, right?
Joey Thurman:
Yeah.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Legumes are, without question, the king of plant-based protein in my professional opinion, no questions asked. Then in addition to-
Joey Thurman:
I mean, I love them tremendously. I'm going to cover two birds with one stone here. You have a three-light system, right? You have green light, yellow light, red light, so those would be in the green light, the good foods.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
... Absolutely. Those would be in the triple green-light category, no question. The differentiation between green and yellow and red in the Mastering Diabetes method is basically the value of the food versus its total saturated fat content. Foods that are in the green-light category have a very high micronutrient value and a low saturated fat content. Foods that are in the red-light category are the opposite. They have a low micronutrient value and a saturated fat content, all right? What we're trying to do is we're trying to play a game where we're like, okay, fine. What are the sources of calories that I can find either in the animal-based world or the plant-based world that are going to limit my saturated fat intake? Because saturated fat can cause a number of cardiovascular problems and insulin responsiveness issues, so how can I lower my saturated fat intake while maximizing my micronutrient intake? If you take all the foods and you classify them, then you come up with what we came up with, which is the traffic light system.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Another source of good-quality protein in the plant-based world is from whole grains, whether those whole grains are things like quinoa or whether it's from seitan or whether it's from farro, any of these sort of strange-sounding names-
Joey Thurman:
Fun to say.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
... oftentimes are very, very protein-dense.
Joey Thurman:
Okay. Often, I find, when I was having people track calories or sleep or anything, first week or two week, it's just kind of annoying, after that, just becomes second nature.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Totally.
Joey Thurman:
For me, I know how to work the calorie-tracking app, so for me to log my lunch takes 20 seconds, where before, you got to figure out how to use the app, so I think people just using that and making it a habit is really easy. Okay, I got two more questions for you.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Hit me.
Joey Thurman:
What's one of your favorite medicinal plants?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, my favorite medicinal plant of all time are called "Indian gooseberries," otherwise known as "amla." Have you ever heard of these things before?
Joey Thurman:
I've had gooseberries before? I didn't realize that the name was amla though, yeah.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Yeah, okay. Indian gooseberries are these little berries that come from India. They're like the size of a grape, they're fluorescent green, and they taste like absolute crap. It is incredibly hard to eat an Indian gooseberry.
Joey Thurman:
You're really selling this.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
People in India have evolved their palate to be able to eat these things and pop them in and they find them very tasty, right? Now, the reason why Indian gooseberries are so powerful is there's many reasons. They've been using Ayurvedic medicine for like 2,000 years and they use them to treat literally every condition that you can think of, whether it's a fatty liver disease or diabetes or migraines or unclear skin. Women use it all the time to get stronger nails and thicker hair.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
When I first read this information, I was like, "Okay, well, that's interesting, but where's the science?" Then I started reading the science about it and there's modern scientific evidence. When I say "modern," I mean it's happening on a daily basis now and a very large quantity of it that has tested the ability of amla berries versus pharmaceutical medications, like statin medications and blood-glucose-lowering medications, and what the research world has found is astounding, that amla berries are, number one, the world's most powerful antioxidant-rich food ever discovered.
Joey Thurman:
Wow.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
You read about this in the news all the time. It's like, oh, goji berries have a lot of antioxidant power, or dark chocolate, or red wine, right? If you compare the antioxidant value of amla berries versus something like acai berries, amla berries have an antioxidant value of 261,000 versus amla berries that have the same ORAC score of about 8,000.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Research has found out, number two, it's also the most powerful cholesterol-reducing food ever discovered by human beings. It's unbelievably powerful. Amla berries are a substitute for statin medication. Number three, it's a very powerful blood-glucose-lowering food, and number four, it's a very powerful blood-pressure-lowering food. It almost feels like there's nothing that amla berries can't do.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, correct.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
So, we actually created a product, full disclosure here, I'll tell you this right now, we created a product it's called Amla Green. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it at amlagreen.com. It's a tea that contains amla berries that either has amla berries plus oolong dark green tea, or amla berries plus hibiscus, which is really tasty.
Joey Thurman:
Wow.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Or our newest flavor, which is amla berries plus elderberries because elderberries are a very powerful immune-boosting food as well, so we've created a whole product line, and when people with diabetes and heart disease take this stuff, the stories are tremendous.
Joey Thurman:
Amazing. Cool.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
I'd like to get some in your hands and see if you enjoy eating it yourself.
Joey Thurman:
Yeah. Send some to me. I would appreciate that.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Uh-huh (affirmative).
Joey Thurman:
I like free stuff, too, so it's cool. I'll take that.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Don't we all?
Joey Thurman:
All right, one more. What makes you excited as far as where the industry is headed in plant-based eating culture?
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Okay, so what I find exciting is that the number of people who are opening their eyes to eating a plant-based diet is increasing tremendously with every passing day, right? If you go on to Netflix and you take a look at a lot of the most popular documentaries, not even food documentaries, but just documentaries, a lot of them are food documentaries, and a lot of talk about the power of eating a plant-based diet, whether you're talking about The Game Changers or Forks Over Knives or whether it's Cowspiracy or Seaspiracy or any of that whole collection of movies, the conversation about eating a plant-based diet is now open to the masses, and as a result of that, people who used to question a plant-based diet 15, 20 years ago, the people who turned to me and were like, "Cyrus, you should be careful. You shouldn't eat a plant-based diet, right? You're going to become protein-deficient. Where's the research about this?" I was like, "Trust me, there's plenty of research about this. You just have to read it."
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Right, those people who were questioning it are knocking on my door and knocking on other people's doors and they're like, "Hey, I heard this whole plant thing is effective. Can you help me out?" Right? I see that there's sort of like this groundswell of people that are interested in plant-based nutrition, and in addition to that, I also see that there's like, you go to the grocery store these days, I mean, I'm sure you've seen it, plant-based products are all over the place, right? Whether they're burgers or milks or powders or pastas or cereals, I mean, it's everywhere. I love that because what it's doing, it's taking something that used to be an alternative way of life and it's making it norm, and because it's now the norm, or it's becoming the norm, there's less of a social stigma about it. You don't have to defend yourself if you choose to be plant-based. You're like, "Yeah, I'm plant-based and so is a lot of people and cool." All of a sudden, it just seems much cooler, you know what I mean?
Joey Thurman:
Yeah, I think the conversation opened up, and now, just having that conversation, and years ago, you'd still be like, "How do you know when someone's vegan?" Well, in the first 30 seconds, they'll say, "I'm vegan."
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
I'll tell you.
Joey Thurman:
They'll somehow get that in there. It's like, how do you know if someone went to Harvard? "Oh, when I was studying at Harvard," or Berkeley, maybe like you.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Correct.
Joey Thurman:
See? Look at that. Look at that memory. It was really interesting just to see that, and now outlets, such as Talking Plant Protein, which is why we're just so pleased to have you on. I really appreciate your friendship and you sending me free things as well.
Dr. Cyrus Khambatta:
Anytime.