Recipe FAQ

Certainly! If you’re feeling creative, have challenges getting a particular ingredient, or simply want to use something you already have on hand, use our recipes as a guide and customize to your liking. Many recipes are flexible with the kind of whole grain, bean, fruit, or vegetable suggested, so feel free to get creative with what you have.

What are your favorite whole food, plant-based alternatives? Add them to the comments of our recipes to help other people navigate ways they can adapt the recipes, too.

Pure maple syrup is a fairly common ingredient in many plant-based recipes online. Because it’s an added sugar, we encourage using date syrup instead, the whole-food alternative. If you had to choose between pure maple syrup and corn syrup, for example, definitely go for the former, but date syrup wins every time.

When people were randomized to drink beverages sweetened with aspartame, monk fruit, or stevia instead of sixteen spoonsful of sugar (the amount of added sugar in a 20 oz bottle of Coke), they were all found to be equally bad when it came to calorie intake, blood sugars, or insulin spikes throughout the day. Similar results were found for Splenda (sucralose). How is that possible? The mystery is solved in my video see.nf/sweeteners.

For most of our recipes, it is easy to swap-in an allergy-free alternative. Some of our favorites:

• Instead of nut butter, try seed butter.
• Try sorghum instead of whole wheat or hulled barley for a gluten-free option.

The USDA recommends properly storing leftovers in the refrigerator for three to four days or in the freezer for longer. Make sure to keep leftovers in tightly sealed containers.

After dressing has been added, some salad greens, such as the lettuce used in this Super Salad recipe, do not hold their texture well after a while. To prevent greens from getting soggy, add any dressing right before serving.

Hardier greens, like kale, collards, and arugula, stay fresh longer after being dressed, so you can add your dressing before serving and keep any leftovers without ending up with a soggy salad. You may even find hardier greens more appealing after marinating in dressing for a bit.

We do not provide nutritional analysis. While individual nutrients and adequate calories are important for our overall health, we emphasize a whole food, plant-based approach to eating. The Daily Dozen is a simple tool of the healthiest foods that we should strive to include in our diet every day. It’s not a meal plan, nor is it meant to be prescriptive. Do your best to eat a diverse array of whole plant foods and adapt the Daily Dozen to quantities that work for you. For other nutritional considerations while eating a plant-based diet, please see our Optimum Nutrient Recommendations and Healthy Eating Guides.

If you’d like to do your own nutritional analyses of recipes, there are free online tools, such as cronometer or the USDA Food Database. To know your individual nutritional needs or concerns, please consult with a registered dietitian.

We often provide suggestions for the number of portions a recipe will make. Serving sizes aren’t set in stone, though, nor are they necessarily the same for everyone in every instance. Just use them as a guide, and adjust as needed.

Those who choose organic produce seem to have lower cancer rates after controlling for confounding factors, but even if it is cause and effect, the benefits of consuming conventionally grown produce are likely to outweigh any possible risks from pesticide exposure. So, concerns over pesticide risks should never discourage us from eating as many fruits and vegetables as possible. The potential lifelong damage of any pesticides on produce is estimated to cut only a few minutes off a person’s life on average, which is nothing compared to benefits we get from eating fruits and veggies. For more about the residues left on conventional produce, see see.nf/pesticides.

Arsenic is a naturally occurring element that can build up in water-logged crops like rice. To minimize exposure, cook rice with plenty of extra water that is poured off after cooking, kind of like cooking pasta.

Raw nuts and nut butters are preferable to roasted or toasted because of advanced glycation end products (AGEs), so-called glycotoxins, which are known to contribute to increased oxidative stress and inflammation.

Not a single study adding an average of hundreds of calories of nuts a day for fifteen weeks to people’s diets resulted in significant weight gain, but there is a limit. Do not regularly eat more than a cup of nuts a day because of oxalates—the same reason we should avoid daily multiple cups of spinach, beet greens, or Swiss chard, more than a few starfruits, multiple cups of rhubarb, or even spoonsful of chaga mushroom powder. See see.nf/oxalatefood for other risky doses, including sixteen glasses of iced tea a day and regularly eating in excess of a cup of cashews or almonds, or a combination of five handfuls of almonds and six tablespoons of chia seeds a day.

Swapping in potassium chloride (a naturally occurring mineral salt) for regular salt can not only lead to significant reductions in blood pressure but can prevent hypertension in the first place. Even just switching to half potassium salt appeared to effectively make people more than a decade younger when it came to the risk of death. (Older adults, ask your doctor to get your kidney function tested before starting salt substitutes.) I use potassium salt every day.

A natural senolytic compound, piperlongumine, is found concentrated in a spice commonly sold in Indian grocery stores as pippali (Piper longum, also known as pibo in China and long pepper in Europe). Pippali is now part of my daily spice regimen alongside amla, black cumin, ginger, and turmeric. (Pippali during pregnancy and breastfeeding is not recommended). For more on pippali, see my video at see.nf/pippali.

Despite having hormonal effects, bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen, is one of the most widely used chemicals worldwide. Exposure is correlated with increased weight and associated with declining male sexual function—decreased sexual desire, more difficulty having an erection, lower ejaculation strength, and lower level of overall satisfaction with sex life.

Consumers using aluminum cookware had twice the level of aluminum in their blood, and those with the highest levels tended to suffer significantly more damage to their DNA. Occasionally using aluminum pots, utensils, and bottles may not be problematic, but regular, daily use isn’t ideal, especially when cooking acidic foods like tomato sauce. And aluminum foil? There is leakage from foil to food, but it’s more of an issue for young children or those suffering from diminished kidney function.

Nonstick pans seem like a great option since, well, food won’t stick, but are they safe? At normal cooking temperatures, Teflon-coated cookware releases various gases and chemicals that present mild to severe toxicity, and the coating itself can degrade over time, so some of the Teflon can chip off and make its way into the food. I’d stick with non-nonstick pans to be safe.