Top 5 Holiday Superfoods You Didn’t Know You Needed

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Go to beyondbloodwork.com to learn how to break free from cell danger response and make the effort pay off. Hey everyone, welcome to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. I'm your host, Dr. Axe, and each and every week on this show, we dive deep into the science and principles behind how to grow in body, mind, spirit, and take your health and your life to the next level.

Today, I'm going to be talking about the 5 superfoods that you should be consuming around the holidays to help you heal. There are a lot of different options. There are a lot of different foods that you can be exposed to. But if you truly want to help heal your body, these are some of the absolute best according to the scientific evidence.

And I'm going to dive deep into the nutritional profiles of certain types of berries, including cranberries, of certain herbals like cinnamon and cardamom, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, certain types of nuts, and certain cruciferous vegetables like Brussels sprouts that have been shown to help our body heal.

Also, when you look Traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, there is an idea around eating foods that are in season and eating certain foods that are going to support organ systems at different times of the year. I'm going to dive into that and a whole lot more on today's episode.

Also, before I dive in, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and sign up for my weekly wellness newsletter at the link in the show notes. This is completely separate from my website. This is a very unique newsletter where you get free PDFs, you get advanced topics. You get the podcast notes and a whole lot more. So make sure to check that out and subscribe in the show notes.

Well, the first thing I want to say is, is that if you are going to support your body nutritionally, there are certain nutrients you want during different seasons of the year.

And when we're talking about the holidays, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas, you want to focus on foods that tend to be orange in color, that tend to be yellow in color and that tend to be this sort of dark blue, purple, red, those sort of colors as well tend to be the most nourishing for people.

But also there are certain compounds in foods that are various colors that are beneficial that I'll walk you through in a minute. But one of the first groups of foods that has tremendous benefits for you around the holidays are cranberries.

And cranberries have compounds called anthocyanins, and these forms of antioxidants have been shown to help relieve women and prevent and treat urinary tract infections and generally keep your urinary tract, your kidneys, and bladder healthy.

And there is a comprehensive review of 20 studies involving over 3,000 participants, and they found that cranberry products reduce the risk of recurrent UTIs by 26% in otherwise healthy women. They also were shown to promote Heart health. And we know around the holiday season is when many people experience heart attacks.

And that being said, the antioxidants found in cranberries have been shown in a study to reduce inflammation, lower cortisol levels, and support cardiovascular health. And it has antioxidant properties that supports cellular health, reducing oxidative stress that is linked to aging and promoting longevity. So cranberries have loads and loads and loads of benefits.

I also want to mention, if cranberries aren't available, there are some other berries that have some similar qualities of these anthocyanins, and they tend to be the berries or fruits that are more sour or berry-looking. Another one is currants. Red and black currants have some of these compounds. Aronia berries also have some of these compounds. Blueberries are probably the next closest one.

So if you can't do cranberries, blueberries Blueberries are a great option as well, as are cran— as are pomegranates in, in that similar nature. You'll notice that cranberries and pomegranates have a very similar red color to them, and so that, that's, that's another good one. So again, cranberry— do cranberry salad, do cranberry smoothies, cranberry juice.

But cranberries are great during the holiday season because of their benefits around heart health, around urinary bladder health, and also being a great longevity food. The second superfood you want to consider consuming consuming around the holidays is cinnamon. Now, there are numerous reasons why cinnamon is so amazing, but number one has to do with blood sugar regulation.

There was a meta-analysis of 16 studies, and they found that cinnamon significantly reduced fasting blood sugar levels and helped fight prediabetes, diabetes, and insulin resistance.

Also, cinnamon has major anti-inflammatory benefits due to a compound called cinnamaldehyde, and this anti-inflammatory compound has been shown to be effective at treating things like we talked about diabetes, but also issues like PCOS, dementia, and a number of other health issues.

And when you look at the antioxidant activity of cinnamon, cinnamon ranks in the top 5 herbs up there with clove in terms of its antioxidant properties. And of course, when you're around the holidays, we tend to overconsume carbohydrates, right?

And so cinnamon is very specific, is probably maybe the most powerful food I could list here today in terms of the number one superfood you should get around the holiday season because of its ability to balance blood sugar.

Now, one of the ways I love to get cinnamon is via pumpkin pie spice, and that's a blend of cinnamon along with clove, nutmeg, sometimes allspice, sometimes cardamom, sometimes— almost always ginger when you look at the blend that's in there, but cinnamon is always in there. But pumpkin pie spice is really great to add to your smoothies in the morning.

You could add a little bit of extra cinnamon to your pumpkin pie recipe, but cinnamon has loads and loads and loads of benefits. About a teaspoon a day would be tremendous for you and for your health. And other herbs similar to cinnamon— I mentioned cardamom earlier.

Cardamom has major benefits for digestive health, and so that's another one I would encourage you when you're eating more food around the holidays. Cardamom reduces gas and bloating. It also has blood sugar benefits. And so combining cinnamon and cardamom, adding that to your coffee, adding it to hot chocolate can be great.

So those 2 flavors in particular, cinnamon, cardamom, these herbs that have been used for thousands of years for their medicinal benefits, are ones you're going to want to incorporate around the holiday. Number 3 food group to heal around the holidays are squashes, things like— and potatoes, like sweet potato, pumpkin, and forms of squash like butternut squash.

And there's a principle in Chinese medicine that in the fall season, especially early fall, you want to consume more foods that are orange and that yellow in color. So spaghetti squash, acorn squash, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, pumpkin— these foods are very nourishing to your pancreas.

And, and these are foods that are naturally sweet but also don't have to necessarily tax your pancreas and blood sugar levels. What I love to do is take sweet potato, pumpkin, and squashes and use pumpkin pie spice, use cinnamon, use ginger, use these sort of herbals on there to to actually bring a little bit of flavor to them but also create additional health benefits.

Now, when we're looking at sweet potatoes and pumpkin and squash in particular, they are very rich in vitamin A, vitamin C, beta-carotene, fiber. A medium-sized sweet potato provides over 400% of your daily recommended of vitamin A. It's also— they're also incredibly high in potassium. We tend to overconsume sodium during the holidays and not get enough potassium in our diet.

Potassium helps lower blood pressure, decreasing your risk of a heart attack or stroke. So we know that in particular sweet potatoes and these squashes are tremendous around this time of year. And there, there are— again, this is the number one food recommended in the, in the fall season in Chinese medicine.

I want to also mention that there was a study published in the Journal of Clinical Nutrition showing that There are certain forms of cancer that sweet potatoes and pumpkin actually help fight. And of course, eye health, macular degeneration, because of all the vitamin A content, is also something that's very, very high in. But these are beneficial. Now, I want to mention another big bonus here.

When I have people that struggle with constipation, which tends to happen around the holidays, right? You might notice this for yourself when you travel. You don't have as many bowel movements. And doing foods like sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and squash in a smoothie can help this.

So what I will do oftentimes is rather than doing fruit in a smoothie, is I'll take half a sweet potato along with some flax meal and some, you know, some, some protein powder, typically vanilla flavored, and then I'll add in like a whole teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice. And I'll do that in the morning, and it's really good for bowel movements and bowel health.

Do that, drink a lot of water, go on some walks, and, and it's going to help you with your bowel movements. But there are loads— and one of the reasons why these foods are so beneficial, they're very high in fiber. Especially pumpkin. I mean, pumpkin is very, very high in fiber, and sweet potatoes and squash are fairly high too.

That when you get this fiber, it's great for gut health, it's good for feeding the good bacteria in your gut. So loads and loads of benefits here as we're talking about sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and squash. I also do want to mention, sometimes people get concerned about the carbs in sweet potatoes in particular, and pumpkin and squash actually tend to be lower than sweet potatoes are.

But it's relatively low on the glycemic index, and pumpkin and squash are very low. There's a study published in the Journal of Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, and they found that those people who consumed more sweet potatoes and pumpkin, uh, had lower blood sugar levels than others.

And so it's important to recognize that this tends to be a fine food, especially if you're doing it with pumpkin pie spice and cinnamon and you're not doing a lot more carbs and your other meals and loading up on other carbs. This is probably the ideal carb for anyone wanting to support their blood sugar balance. And there are a lot of great ways to do this.

Again, just throwing them in the oven for an hour at 400 and letting them just bake, you know, just like that, tremendous benefits. Something I'll do is I'll add again pumpkin pie spice, sometimes add some quick oats to it, some raw oats, and it almost tastes like a little bit of an oatmeal cookie. You can add pumpkin puree to soups. You can do butternut squash soup. You can do pumpkin soup.

You can do smoothies. You can do, of course, sweet potato pie and pumpkin casseroles and other options there. And, you know, adding in things like grass-fed butter or coconut milk can also be very complementary, along with, again, cinnamon and ginger and some of those sort of herbals there.

As we're talking about sweet potatoes, now listen, you can definitely make sweet potato pie very unhealthy by doing conventional marshmallows and adding about a pound of sugar to But again, you can eat them a healthy way by just adding a little bit of grass-fed butter to it or some pumpkin pie spice, and— or adding it to a smoothie as I talked about earlier.

So loads of benefits there as we talk about these sweet potatoes and pumpkin and squash. Number 4 are nuts like walnuts, pecans, almonds. You know, these foods are heart-healthy, and especially walnuts and pecans.

You know, pecans are high in ellagic acid, It's probably the most powerful anti-aging compound on the planet that we know of that turns into urolithin A. Walnuts are very high in omega-3 fatty acids and other unique antioxidants that support heart health, weight management, brain and neurological health.

So walnuts and pecans are great options when you are traveling around the holidays, having snacks of walnuts, pecans. And listen, I also do like almonds, macadamia nuts, Brazil nuts. You know, these can be great as well, pumpkin seeds. But walnuts and pecans in particular are, are, are, tend to be more complementary around a lot of the foods we're talking about around the holiday season.

Of course, pecan pie is very popular, and you can do a lower sugar, healthier version of that if you focus on doing more dates as the sweetener and not trying to make it too sweet. Okay. And doing a pie crust, what I, what I did, I did a pie crust this year and I took Now, Chelsea typically does an almond flour pie crust, which is great.

I like to try new things, and so I did a mixture of roasted chestnuts, oat flour, and einkorn flour, and I mixed date in there with some sea salt and coconut oil, and that was fantastic. It was amazing. So you can get creative there with your pie crust, but you can make a pie crust out of nuts like pecans, like walnuts, like almonds, like macadamia, and they're really delicious doing it.

But almond flour is probably the easiest to do there as, as that sort of option. But again, when you're traveling, so you can do pie crust, you can use walnuts and pecans just as a snack, uh, when you're traveling or on an airplane, tend to be better options than, than most others. And you can do that with a handful of dried cranberries. Okay, there you go.

Dried cranberries or dried blueberries, uh, with some walnuts and pecans as sort of a trail mix you can have when you're traveling there as well. A great way to do it. Um, last food here I want to talk about, superfood around the holidays, are Brussels sprouts. Brussels sprouts are an incredible superfood.

Now, we, we tend to hear people talk more about the benefits of broccoli, sometimes even cauliflower and other cruciferous vegetables, but Brussels sprouts are a cruciferous vegetable that are very high in vitamin U or sulfur, which have powerful detoxification properties. So if you want to detoxify your body and fight cancer, Brussels sprouts are one of the top foods you can consume.

Now Brussels sprouts, another thing that makes them so unique is not only are they very, very high in vitamin U and sulfur, which supports detoxification, they're also an excellent source of vitamin C. They're very high in vitamin K. They're extremely high in fiber and antioxidants.

And so as we're talking about Brussels sprouts, they are an incredible superfood, and they contain compounds like glucosinolates. And these have been studied for, again, their anti-cancer benefits. We know cruciferous vegetables, many of them have this, but Brussels sprouts are particularly high in this compound that has these anti-cancer properties.

And they're also great for digestive health if you cook them. I'm— I am not a fan of raw Brussels sprouts. I think they're Too hard on the digestive system. But I do love them if they're steamed or if they're baked.

I mean, one thing you can do is cook them in butter or coconut oil, bake them, or fry them up in butter or coconut oil, or just steam them and have them with something like a hummus or tahini sauce, garlic sauce, something like that. That's also— or a raw vegan cheese or a real true raw cheese as well. So there are lots of great ways to do Brussels sprouts.

We— I had done before kind of frying them up in like a coconut olive oil or a butter and doing a little bit of honey with them. They also go very, very good with balsamic vinegar. So lots of great ways to get Brussels sprouts in. But a simple way, again, you can drizzle with olive oil, add garlic to them, add them to casseroles.

But Brussels sprouts are an amazing superfood you want to consider incorporating around the holidays. And the reality is this, is that be mindful around the holidays of Yeah. What you're eating, incorporate these 5 superfoods and superfood groups as much as you possibly can, and you're going to have substantial health benefits.

From the antioxidant-rich benefits of cranberries and cinnamon to the nutrient-dense benefits of sweet potatoes, nuts, and Brussels sprouts, these superfoods are going to help you stay healthy around the holidays. And I want to say thank you so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Axe Show. I do this show because Because I want to help you heal. I want to help you grow.

I want to help you be the best you and know that I am praying for you around the holidays for extraordinary health. And I want to wish you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone out there. Hey, make sure to subscribe, like, and share this podcast.

I just want to say, one, I am thankful and grateful for all of you that are subscribers and that have shared any single episode over the past couple of years of this podcast. I'm so, so grateful. Thank you. Thank you. I'm so grateful for you and being on mission with me. We're making a real difference in the world. Again, have an amazing holiday and a Merry Christmas.

I'll see you on the next episode.