Newsletter #10: Healthier cookies, the 4 best grain-free cracker brands, and stimulating GLP-1 naturally

Articles

Mar 19

Written By Casey Means

Welcome back! This week’s newsletter includes:

🥑 Good Food: A one-bowl recipe for vegan, keto, grain-free chocolate chip cookies! 🍪
🔄 Good Swap: A guide to grain-free crackers!
🧠 Good Thought: Understand how GLP-1 works naturally in the body, then optimize it. 💪

🥑 Good food - Vegan, Keto, Grain-free Chocolate Chip Cookies! 🍪

To me an ideal dessert includes the following qualities:

✅ Delicious
✅ Organic
✅ Grain-free
✅ Refined sugar free
✅ Seed-oil free
✅ Minimal to no blood sugar spike
✅ Zero artificial colorings, natural or artificial flavors, or preservatives

(Bonus points if a dessert has some of the 5 elements of Good Energy meals, including fiber, antioxidants, protein, omega-3 fats, and a probiotic source!)

That’s a lot to ask of a dessert, but the following recipe does it all! 👉️ Epic chocolate chip cookies from the amazing blog Chocolate Covered Katie. 🍪

I chose this recipe because it had a 4.99 star rating across 3,700 ratings, takes less than 10 minutes to prep (and only 10 minutes to cook!), fits my “ideal dessert” criteria (listed above), and they can be made with things you probably already have in your pantry (the recipe doesn’t call for any refrigerated ingredients like eggs, butter, or fresh milk, so these are great for impromptu cooking making). 🍪😛

The only swap’s I made to Katie’s original recipe is that I used allulose (Rx Sugar) instead of erythritol (because sugar alcohols do not agree with my GI tract), and date-sweetened organic chocolate chips (because most sugar free chocolate chips, like Lily’s, have erythritol).

Recipe (adapted just slightly from Chocolate Covered Katie!)

Ingredients

1 cup finely ground almond flour (I used Terrasoul Organic Fine Almond Flour)
2-4 tbsp organic chocolate chips (I used Just Date Organic Date Sweetened Dark Chocolate chips)
2 tbsp allulose (I used Rx Sugar)
scant 1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp baking soda
2 tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2-3 tsp milk of choice, as needed (I used Alexandre Farms A2 Grass Fed Whole Milk)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325 F.
Whisk dry ingredients very well (so you don’t end up biting into a clump of baking soda!).
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients to form a dough.
Shape into balls and place on a sheet pan and then pat them down so they are relatively flat. (I always cover my sheet pan with a non-stick silicone liner, I love this one)
Bake on the center rack for 10-12 minutes.
Let cool an additional 10 minutes before handling, as they are very delicate at first but firm up completely once cool.

✏️ Notes: I doubled the recipe and it still only made 12 cookies, so I would highly recommend doubling.

If you make it, I’d love to see! Tag me on Instagram @drcaseyskitchen.

🔄 Good swap - Grain Free Crackers, the best and the worst

If you know me, you know my passion for grain-free crackers is STRONG.

We eat grain-free crackers every day in our house. We have them with grass-fed cheese as an appetizer. We put tuna salad on them. We eat them with hummus and other dips. I eat them with almond butter. Heck, I’ve even made nachos with them instead of chips. They are such an easy swap for regular grain-based crackers that often have one or more of the Unholy Trinity in them (aka, refined grains, refined sugars, refined seed oils).

I have an easy and delicious recipe for grain-free crackers in my upcoming book, Good Energy, but when I don’t have the energy to make them, I am happy to know that there are MANY great brands on the market, outlined below.

Some of my favorite grain-free, organic cracker brands compared to regular grain-based crackers (Ritz and Wheat Thins 👎️ )! Best scores go to crackers that are organic, high fiber, low net carbs, high protein, etc.

You’ll note that I don’t include total calories or total fat content in this chart, because I don’t really care and I do not track these. What I care most about is ingredients (Is the Unholy Trinity in there?), whether a product is organic (pesticides are toxic), and level of processing (I want minimal processing, which is why I love Flackers - it’s literally just whole flax seeds and apple cider vinegar and salt - chef’s kiss!).

Why don't I track fat or calorie content? Instead, I focus on eating whole, unprocessed foods, and I let those whole foods trigger my satiety mechanisms and regulate my hunger (which works exquisitely well if you eat whole foods… starting adding refined grains or refined sugars into the mix and those satiety mechanisms gets mucked up). I DO mentally track fiber (I aim for 50+ grams per day), protein (I want around 30 grams per meal, and to try to get over 100 grams per day minimum), and net carbs (I don’t care if a product is fairly high carb if most of that is fiber, because net carbs - ie the amount that actually will impact your blood sugar - is so low).

Here’s a list of my recommended grain-free cracker brands:👇️

Flackers - Love this brand because the ingredient list has ZERO BS. Minimally processed. HIGH fiber (9 grams per serving!).
Brad’s Veggie Flats
Top Seedz - Has cornstarch and higher net carb than Flacker’s and Brad’s, but still a good one!
Cult Crackers - This one uses cassava flour, so net carb is a bit higher as well. Delicious.
My favorite tasting grain-free crackers are Ella’s Flats, but only some of their ingredients are organic. I hope they move towards fully organic! 🤞

🧠 Good thought - BYO-zempic

GLP-1 receptor agonists (like Ozempic and Wegovy) for weight loss and type 2 diabetes are taking the world by storm, and people have a lot of opinions (including myself on Fox News last year…).

While there may be utility for these drugs in certain patient-specific situations, these injectable medications that promote satiety, glucose control, and weight loss are obviously not the public health panacea for the metabolic dysfunction crisis affecting 93%+ of US adults.

Why? Because our chronic disease and excess weight epidemic are caused by our toxic environment damaging our mitochondria across the pillars of food, environmental toxins, sedentary behavior, lack of quality sleep, poor light hygiene, chronic stress, and too much indoor time. (Pre-order my upcoming book Good Energy for details on all of these pillars and how they underlie the metabolic disease epidemic).

These weekly GLP-1 receptor agonist injections may work for individual medical scenarios, but they are not the answer to the global metabolic crisis affecting billions of humans that has cropped up in just 100 years and that requires a multi-pronged root cause approach to reverse it. A shot cannot change the toxic environment that will continue to distort our cellular biology until fixed.

As my brother, Calley Means, said in an interview that got 12 million views on X: “If the fish tank is dirty, you clean the tank. You don’t drug the fish.”

These peptide injections that act like long-acting GLP-1 in the body are estimated to cost around $16,000 per year per person, have profoundly high rates of adverse effects (some studies reporting 82% of people experience these side effects!), and are being offered in kids as young as 8 🤦‍♀️ .

What astonishes me is how there is virtually zero conversation about the fact that the body makes its own GLP-1, naturally, and there are specific food and lifestyle choices that stimulate more of its production.

Despite the body being able to pump out its own GLP-1, we are being sold exogenous solutions (💉💉💉) instead of learning how to naturally impact our GLP-1 levels (🥦🥩🥑).

So with that: how does the body get more circulating GLP-1? First, understand how GLP-1 works naturally in the body. Then we can work to optimize it. Thinking logically, there are 3 main ways we’d get more GLP-1 in the body:

Generate more of the cells that make GLP-1 (L-cells of the small intestine).
Get the L-cells to produce more GLP-1.
Stop GLP-1 from being broken down and inactivated. (GLP-1 is rapidly degraded by the enzyme DPP-4).

The great news is, there are food and lifestyle choices that may do all 3 of these things. Much of the research is done in animals and cell cultures, but the bottom line is that choices impact GLP-1, not just injections.

To quote one literature review:

“It is evident that manipulating the composition of the diet in order to promote GLP-1 secretion represents a promising lifestyle strategy for obesity and T2D management.”

My summary of the research - and the specific foods that stimulate L-cell proliferation, GLP-1 secretion, and inhibition of DPP-4 - can be found on my blog, here:

✍️🖥️ BYOzempic: Learn to naturally stimulate GLP-1 in the body.

Why does it matter? Why not just take the shot? 💉 Aside from price (you could easily buy organic food for a year for an entire family for the yearly price of this med) and side effects, it comes down to empowerment. We have MIRACULOUS bodies and a brief and wondrous moment in eternity to be alive, and knowing how to use natural food (aka, molecular information with thousands of chemical compounds per bite) to stimulate our cells and bodies in a way that naturally optimizes their function is a gateway to freedom, health, and happiness during this lifetime.

With good energy 💓

Dr. Casey

👀 In Case You Missed It

Yesterday, I shared an exclusive excerpt from Good Energy on the Levels blog, Metabolic Insights. This excerpt talks about the 7 reasons why I believe CGM is a crucial tool for improving metabolic health. Read the full article on the Levels blog, here.