Ice Cream that Burns Fat and Boosts Health (Part 2 of 2)

Jonathan: Hey, everyone. Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown back with another special ice cream edition of the Smarter Science of Slim podcast. Carrie, this is part 2. Part 1, last week. We broke the incredible news that you are launching a 30-recipe SANE, tastes-as-good-if-not-better-than-‘regular’-ice-cream ice cream cookbook. This week, we promised to give the readers a bit more information on what they can expect when they hop up to Amazon and grab a copy.

Carrie: Hello.

Jonathan: That’s Carrie, by the way.

Carrie: Yes, hello. Three hours later.

Jonathan: You know what, Carrie? You can’t tell me that you’ve got 30 ice cream recipes, let me taste three of them, me not believe that they’re SANE, then you show me how they actually are, and expect me to let you talk it all, because I’m so excited!

Carrie: You forgot to mention all these SANE recipes for mix-ins. Because it’s not just ice cream, some of the ice creams have mix-ins in them, like the lemon meringue pie ice cream.

Jonathan: When you say ‘mix-ins’, isn’t there a chain of ice cream stores that is like famous for just the fact that they have these….?

Carrie: Right. Cold Stone’s in the States.

Jonathan: Yeah, Cold Stone’s. Okay.

Carrie: For example, there’s a lemon meringue pie ice cream. Of course, you have to have the meringue and the pie bit, so the recipes for all the mix-ins are also in the book.

Jonathan: What?!

Carrie: So you’re not just getting ice creams, you’re getting all the bits that you’re going to want to put in them to come up with various flavors.

Jonathan: Listeners, we got some feedback after the first episode. In addition to people just being super-excited about the book – and reasonably so, I was this way – people were saying that this is BS. They said, “No. It cannot possibly be true that you have ice cream recipes that are SANE and as delicious and don’t contain a bunch of artificial garbage.” So what I wanted to do in this episode…. Carrie, certainly we’re not going to give away the farm here. We’ve got to pay the bills. We’ve got to keep the lights on. But the thing that makes your ice cream recipe so unique is the ingredients. You’re using stuff that I don’t think people ever thought to use in ice cream – which is cool!

Carrie: Well, there are a bunch of recipes out there that are dairy-free, but I think what makes mine specifically different is that dairy-free doesn’t equal SANE. Of course, if you want SANE, you’ve got to get the protein up somehow. The other thing that I was really clear about was that I wanted these to be very, very reproducible at home, by anyone, without anyone having to feel like they have to go to culinary school for three months. Traditional ice creams, for the most part, require the use of what we call an egg custard which means, cooking the egg yolks. It’s tricky! It can go wrong in a heartbeat. You turn and blink and the whole thing is ruined. So while eggs are a great part of a healthy lifestyle and healthy diet, I didn’t want them to require them to make the ice cream because I wanted them to be clear-cut and very simple so that anybody could reproduce them.

Jonathan: So it wasn’t a health decision, it was an ease-of-use decision.

Carrie: No. It was an ease-of-use decision because I want everybody of any skill to be able to make these ice creams so that we can all have them and enjoy them.

Jonathan: Alright. Carrie, tell us about some of the key….? I know because, Lord knows, I’ve pressured you, “Coconut, coconut, coconut. I want more coconut.”

Carrie: Well, honey, have we got coconut for you!

Jonathan: So you’ve got some coconut. There are all kinds of other good stuff. Tell us about the coconut. Coconut milk? Coconut what?

Carrie: All the recipes are different. There is not one base recipe that I use for all of them and just make them different flavors. They’re all created from scratch because ice cream is chemically not – and I don’t mean ‘chemical’ as in that way. It’s physically very, very complicated in the way all the fat and sugar molecules have to work together.

Jonathan: Yes, there’s a reason ice cream only came around recently. Just try to make some ice cream right now. Not easy! Not easy to make.

Carrie: So depending on what flavor it is, I had to change the base recipe for all of them, so they’re all different. But I’ve used a variety of non-dairy milks as bases. There is a lot of coconut involved. Of course, you can’t taste it. By the time I’ve developed the recipe, you wouldn’t know that coconut milk was the base of a lot of them.

Jonathan: That’s the other cool thing here, Carrie. Because we have an eye on SANEity, because we have an eye on keeping things as natural as possible, you’re not going to have a bunch of GMO soy nonsense when you’ve got coconut, and maybe some hemp, some almond, all kinds of good milk derivatives.

Carrie: Yep.

Jonathan: Love it, love it. Now, Carrie, sweeteners, I know a lot of listeners, especially if they’re new to a SANE lifestyle. There’s sugar, there’s caloric sweeteners – and those aren’t great for our health – quite bad for our health. There are artificial sweeteners and that’s what you’ll find in traditional diet ice creams.

Carrie: And you can taste that.

Jonathan: And you can taste that for sure. You introduced, though, the third category, which are SANE, natural, non metabolically-devastating sweeteners.

Carrie: Yup. So I use – and this will not surprise anyone that’s been following my recipe blog, which is at carriebrown.com, is that I use xylitol and that I have continued in this cookbook.

Jonathan: Xylitol. Remind our listeners of what it is. Xylitol, that sounds like an alien.

Carrie: It’s actually a natural substance. We actually have it in our bodies. There are a lot of plants also that contain xylitol. The xylitol that you purchase for cooking – there are types made from corn, but the type I use and recommend is made from 100% birch bark and is safe for diabetics. Because it’s a sugar alcohol, it is digested in a very different way to regular sugars, which is why it doesn’t have the same impact on your metabolism. I’ve just forgotten where I was going with that.

Jonathan: I think you were going – if you stop eating non-starchy vegetables and you stop eating healthy nutrient-dense meats and fish and low-fructose fruits and whole food fats and you eat just Carrie’s SANE ice cream, the amount of xylitol you would take in might give you some gastrointestinal problem.

Carrie: That’s exactly where I was going!

Jonathan: But no one’s going to do that because although you could, people don’t get this one, Carrie. Most people say, “Well, Jonathan, you tell people not to worry about calories. Doesn’t that mean you’re going to overdo it on calories and blah, blah, blah?” Not consistently.

Carrie: Well, Jonathan, you’ve tried three of my flavors, so you can back it up. You can endorse the fact that they are very satiating.

Jonathan: Correct. That’s the other key thing here, folks. If you get the xylitol and therefore the sweeteners, you’re also going to have that natural sugar found in some of Carrie’s fruit recipes. There are just no added damaging sweeteners. Because these are whole foods, because you’ve got not only your fats, and it’s not hard to find ice cream that contains fat, but it is hard to find ice cream that contains the most satiating of the macronutrients, which is unequivocally in the literature. Protein. So, you’ve got your protein. In many of these, you’ve got your healthy low-glycemic carbohydrate and you’ve also got your healthy fats. So it’s nearly impossible to over-eat them because it would be unpleasant to continue eating them beyond a certain point because they are so satisfying.

Carrie: They really are. I mean, for the last 8 weeks, I have lived in a house which has between 14 and 20 different flavors of SANE ice cream in the freezer at any one time, and it’s just me and five cats. So if that stuff’s getting eaten, it’s going to be me. I do not struggle to stop eating it. I’ll have a scoop or maybe I’ll have two scoops – I’ll have two different flavors – I’ll have a small scoop of each and I just don’t want to eat anymore because I’m so satiated with that enough. It’s very filling. The same goes for my taste-testers. One scoop and they’re like, “That was awesome, but I don’t want to eat any more. I don’t need any more. I just feel full.”

Jonathan: Yeah, I don’t want to get too political or moralistic, but, Carrie, what this reminds me of a bit is the ‘forbidden fruit syndrome’. For example, if you go to Europe where the drinking age and the way alcohol is perceived is much different than here in the States, binge drinking is much less of a problem. It’s just like, “Oh, yeah. That’s alcohol.” You drink it. You have dinner. Your 9-year-old child might have some wine with dinner. Here in the States, we’re like, “Oh, alcohol! I don’t know.” So people go crazy with alcohol. I feel like, with ice cream, we’re kind of the same way. Now, once ice cream becomes SANE, there’s not this forbidden fruit and you’re just like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll have some ice cream. That’s cool.”

Carrie: But it’s not only that. Remember the sugar – regular sugar – and those kinds of carbohydrates actually switch on all the addictive regions in your brain. So they actually make you crave more. So once you start eating it, it’s physically harder to stop. And because it’s not satiating, you can literally just keep on going. All the time your brain’s going, “More, more, more!” You can keep on going because you’re not getting filled up.

Jonathan: Carrie, Carrie, that’s brilliant. Not only do you have the neurological and emotional, but you have biochemical, gastrointestinal reasons why this ice cream can be enjoyed fully and your body will automatically enforce ‘moderation’. When you don’t need to think about moderation, your body will moderate things for you, which is what your body is supposed to do, and regulate your blood sugar and it regulates your blood pressure. It regulates everything else – except we’re led to believe it doesn’t regulate energy amounts. It does. And this ice cream will help it continue to do that.

Carrie, you also use powdered egg whites, which is not something that I think a lot of people will be like, “You know what? I’m going to make some ice cream. Give me some powdered egg whites.”

Carrie: Well, I needed to come up with recipes for the people who either can’t or don’t want to eat dairy. So where there was whey, I needed to produce some high-protein ice creams that didn’t have whey in it. So, I started using powdered egg whites. However, bear in mind that the two are not interchangeable. When you read the recipes, you’ll understand you can’t just switch out whey for egg and vice-versa. You will not like the results.

Jonathan: Yes. That is because the whey has a flavor in and of itself whereas the egg does not. Certainly, we’ve got some lovely heavy creams in some of these recipes because we’re not afraid of fat.

Carrie: A small amount – not a lot – but it does add to the flavor and the texture.

Jonathan: Carrie, in many of your recipes, I have found that – in some ways, cheeses are almost a good example of this – were using the cream or using cheeses just a little bit, you can use 10% of what you might think you need to use and get 90% of the benefit, which is really cool.

Carrie: Yeah. However, for people who are dairy-free, they can switch out – and I’ve written in the book, I won’t tell you now – but in the book, I’ve told you if you want it to be completely dairy-free or if you need it to be, what you can switch out for that to make it so.

Jonathan: Of course, we’ve got our gut-healing, set point lowering, prebiotic – I make it sound so delicious! – Guar gum.

Carrie: Our special friend, guar gum, which is made from ground guar beans. So, all goodness there. Because there are no eggs involved, you do need something to act as an emulsifier and guar gum is freakin’ awesome!

Jonathan: Not only is it awesome because it helps to create delicious SANE ice cream recipes, but I know many of the listeners will be familiar with some of the research we’ve talked about here and I’m sure they’ve heard about it in the news because it’s super-exciting! We’re learning more and more and more that part of the homeostatic regulation of weight involves not only the brain that sits on top of your neck – your traditional brain – but also your second brain, the one that sits above your waist in your gut. Part of that has to do with the bacteria that lives in your gut and research, as we know, has shown that individuals who are metabolically dysfunctioning have a unique and distinct makeup of their gut bacteria; whereas if you look at individuals who are metabolically healthy, they have a very different makeup. What’s cool – the reason I say this – is in my studies, when they want to take rats and mice that are metabolically clogged and unclog them, one of the substances they’ve used is a prebiotic fiber known as…. Guar gum! So not only will you enjoy ice cream, but you will literally be unclogging as you eat it, which is cool.

Carrie: It’s not just cool, that’s just awesome!

Jonathan: It’s awesome! You know what else is awesome? Cocao nibs! I love cocoa and nibs. I like saying nibs. Nibs! I want to get a little dog and name him ‘Nibs’. How cute of a little Boston Terrier, “Come here, Nibs.”

Carrie: Can I carry on now?

Jonathan: Yes.

Carrie: So yes, there is quite a lot of chocolate involved in this SANE ice cream book of mine – cocoa powder, raw cocoa, 100% chocolate, which is chocolate that has no sugar in it, and cocao nibs.

Jonathan: The beauty of it again here, folks, besides the chef herself – Carrie Brown – is the media likes to say things like ‘chocolate is healthy’. What the media means to say, is that cocoa is healthy. Like, if you take a vitamin pill and you stick it on top of a Snickers bar, that doesn’t make the Snickers bar healthy. So, cocoa is healthy. Adding a bunch of sugar and garbage and processed trans fats to it, like you’ll find in commercial chocolate bars – not healthy. What Carrie is taking is the thing that is actually healthy and concentrating it along with all of these natural, non-metabolically deranging sweeteners and creamy fruits and add-ins and… Mm, mm, good! Carrie, you have essences in your ice creams.

Carrie: Yes. All pure stuff. Because sometimes you need a boost of flavor without adding three pounds of fruit, so I’ve used essences to do that.

Jonathan: Essences. And spices, in addition to essences.

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: Tell us about how you use spices like cardamom in ice cream. I don’t even know what cardamom is, but it’s spelled interestingly – ‘cardamom’.

Carrie: Well, you ate my apricot cardamom muffin and thought it was the best thing ever!

Jonathan: I didn’t realize what I was eating.

Carrie: So I have changed that muffin into an ice cream.

Jonathan: “I have changed that muffin into an ice cream.”

Carrie: This is my own – the apricot cardamom ice cream. It’s my absolute favorite ice cream ever in the whole world. I know that sounds a bit egotistical because I made it, but seriously, the flavors of that thing made me so happy I cried.

Jonathan: We haven’t even mentioned this yet, Carrie, but I’m lucky enough to be looking at a pre-release version of this book right now. Folks, you know Carrie is an awesome blogger. She’s an incredible podcast co-host. Obviously, she is a master in the kitchen. What you may not also know, is that she is a world-class photographer – and I do mean world-class. Are we allowed to share some of the places your photographs have been featured in?

Carrie: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan: So we’ll get to that in a second, but I also mention…. About how many photos are in this book?

Carrie: Well, there is at least one for every recipe.

Jonathan: So, there are at least 30. There are more.

Carrie: 38.

Jonathan: Carrie, I just want these pictures! The pictures that this woman has done….I just want to draw an ‘S’ on her chest because she’s like Superwoman. Tell us about some of the other places your photographs have been featured.

Carrie: Actually, the log screen for Windows 8 is mine.

Jonathan: What?! So, we’re right up there with Windows 8! I love it, I love it.

Carrie: And I actually just had…. Well, by the time this broadcast airs, it’ll be a little while, but I just had another note from our friends at Microsoft telling me that they had chosen three of my images to go in the next version of Windows.

Jonathan: What?!

Carrie: Yeah.

Jonathan: So, folks, not only will your mouth be very happy, but your eyes will be very happy when you experience the SANEity and the smarter ice cream that you will find in the to-be-titled compilation.

Carrie: But it will be ‘Ice Cream’ somewhere.

Jonathan: So, search for Carrie Brown ice cream. Folks, oh, I forgot to mention this, too. The amount of time and effort Carrie has put into this, I know and I’ve seen firsthand. You’ll find a lot of recipes on the web. People just do recipes. Each and every one of these 30 recipes, Carrie literally….Like, have that vision in your mind of the Muppets’ Swedish chef just throwin’ things around the kitchen, covered in flour. This woman has destroyed her house for months and months and months and months, literally! Like, that image you have in your mind of the crazed baker making these things picture-perfect, literally and figuratively. So, do check them out. Your taste buds, your eyes, your stomach, and everything else will be happy because of it. I love it, Carrie. Proud of you!

Carrie: Thank you.

Jonathan: Folks, if never before, now certainly – eat more and exercise less. Just do it smarter. Chat with you soon.

Carrie: See ya!