Brain Food Recipes

So you all know that fried food is bad for you, right?

But I know (and I suspect some of you have the same dilemma as me): it tastes so damn good!

In an attempt to make fried food less bad for me and for all our clients that love it, I wanted to see if we could remove some of the biggest reasons I don’t allow standard fried fare in the NeuroTrition Rx. Specifically, I wanted to see if we could take out the 5 baddest-of-the-bad reasons I’m against fried food, and I wanted to see if it could still taste awesome. Spoiler alert: we did, and it does. We made a healthy version of the much loved fried dish, tempura, that is delicious and drool worthy.

What are the top 5 “baddest-of-the-bad” in fried foods, anyway?

1. Processed Oil —> Good Oil

Tempura typically uses the cheapest, most processed and refined oils. They’re bad for so many reasons, but heating these oils creates a bunch free radicals that you then eat alongside your tempura (or any fried food). So we opted for a high quality almond oil that can still safely be taken to a really high heat.

2. Old Oil —> Fresh Oil

When you’re eating fried food at a restaurant, you never know how many times that oil has been used before your tempura gets in there. Re-using oil increases carcinogenesis (cancer-causing) risk — think about this the next time you get fries at a fast-food place, where often the oil is changed once a day! Make your own tempura at home, and you’ll know your oil was only heated once.

3. Refined Flour —> Better Flour

Standard flours for frying are white, and like most things white in the grain world, it is refined and processed. Specifically, it’s fibre has been stripped, which means it won’t fill you up or help with all the things fibre helps with (eg. weight control, blood sugar balance, heart health, bowel health, etc). So we chose to use a lower glycemic, higher fibre brown rice flour.

4. Soggy, Old Vegetables—> Fresh, Crisp Vegetables

All our chosen veggies, including sweet potatoes, have science-backed brain benefits. Plus, because you’re buying (or growing) them, you’ll make sure they are fresh. Fresh veggies are higher in nutrients and they tend to diminish in important antioxidants like vitamin C the longer they sit around chopped up. Also, nightshades (i.e. eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes) produce alkaloid compounds that can cause an inflammatory reaction in some people, and they tend to be higher in alkaloids the older they get. Opt for organic if you can to reduce your exposure to brain-draining pesticides!

5. Unhealthy Dipping Sauce —> Healthy Dipping Sauce

When eating out, you don’t ever really know what’s in the dipping sauce. From MSG to artificial flavours and colours to white sugar, it could (and often does) have it all. Our sauce is clean, simple, and only contains brain-loving real ingredients (like ginger). 

This tempura and dipping sauce turned out amazingly delicious, and really stood up to the NeuroTrition-ification on multiple tests! I am not here to say that this should become a regular part of your diet, it is still fried food after all! Rather, this is to show you that (yet again, in true NeuroT style), when we unpack and understand what makes something unhealthy (1 - 5 above, in the case of fried food), we can play around with changing those things and make something less bad. This means that, rather than not being “allowed” to have certain foods we love that are unhealthy (which, in my experience with clients usually results in a binge with ensuing guilt and self-loathing), we can tweak and then still enjoy some of our Fave foods from time to time.