Superfood-Stuffed Squash
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This stuffed squash recipe is packed with so many nutrient-dense ingredients, yet it feels delightfully decadent—a great recipe to have up your sleeve ready for fall.
You will need
- 1 large or two medium butternut squashes, halved lengthways and seeds removed (keep them; they are full of nutrients! You can sprout them, or dry them to use them at your leisure), along with some of the flesh from the central part above where the seeds are, so that there is room for stuffing
- 2 cups low-sodium vegetable stock
- 1 cup wild rice, rinsed
- 1 medium onion, finely chopped
- ½ cup walnuts, roughly chopped
- ½ cup dried
cranberriesgoji berries ← why goji berries? They have even more healthful properties than cranberries, and cranberries are hard to buy without so much added sugar that the ingredients list looks like “cranberries (51%), sugar (39%), vegetable oil (10%)”, whereas when buying goji berries, the ingredients list says “goji berries”, and they do the same culinary job. - ¼ cup pine nuts
- ½ bulb garlic, minced
- 1 tbsp dried thyme or 2 tsp fresh thyme, destalked
- 1 tbsp dried rosemary or 2 tsp fresh rosemary, destalked
- 1 generous handful fresh parsley, chopped
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tbsp black pepper, coarse ground
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
- Extra virgin olive oil, for brushing and frying
- Aged balsamic vinegar, to serve (failing this, make a balsamic vinegar reduction and use that; it should have a thicker texture but still taste acidic and not too sweet; the thickness should come from the higher concentration of grape must and its natural sugars; no need to add sugar)
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Preheat the oven to 400°F / 200°C.
2) Brush the cut sides of the squash with olive oil; sprinkle with a pinch of MSG/salt and a little black pepper (grind it directly over the squash if you are using a grinder; hold the grinder high though so that it distributes evenly—waiters in restaurants aren’t just being dramatic when they do that with pepper or Parmesan or such)
3) Arrange them cut-sides-down on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and roast for at least 30 minutes or until tender.
4) While that is roasting, add the chia seeds to the wild rice, and cook them in the low-sodium vegetable stock, using a rice cooker if available. It should take about the same length of time, but if the rice is done first, set it aside, and if the squash is done first, turn the oven down low to keep it warm.
5) Heat some oil in a sauté pan (not a skillet without high sides; we’re going to need space in a bit), and fry the chopped onion until translucent and soft. We could say “about 5 minutes” but honestly it depends on your pan as well as the heat and other factors.
6) Add the seasonings (herbs, garlic, black pepper, MSG/salt, nooch), and cook for a further 2 minutes, stirring thoroughly to distribute evenly.
7) Add the rice, berries, and nuts, cooking for a further 2 minutes, stirring constantly, ensuring everything is heated evenly.
8) Remove the squash halves from the oven, turn them over, and spoon the mixture we just made into them, filling generously.
9) Drizzle a lashing of the aged balsamic vinegar (or balsamic vinegar reduction), to serve.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Brown Rice vs Wild Rice – Which is Healthier?
- Why You Should Diversify Your Nuts!
- Goji Berries: Which Benefits Do They Really Have?
- Chia: The Tiniest Seeds With The Most Value
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- 10 Ways To Balance Blood Sugars
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Why You Keep Overeating (It’s Not What Most People Think)
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Dr. Ruth Machin explains the factors that conspire to get us to eat too much:
À la carte
In menopause, diminishing estrogen increases hunger while muscle loss and lower activity decrease the body’s ability to metabolize the extra calories.
So, for many people, there are three things we can do about that already:
- Correct one’s estrogen levels with HRT
- Take care to maintain muscle mass
- Make sure to continue to be active
However, there are more factors at hand than just our own bodies, for example:
- Processed foods and eating speed: highly processed foods are eaten more quickly and can disrupt hunger hormones, leading to higher calorie intake even if they have similar nutritional profiles to less-processed versions.
- Portion size effect: larger portions lead to consistently higher intake without later compensation, so controlling portion sizes when serving is important. You’ve probably heard this tip before but: use smaller plates/bowls!
- Energy density considerations: high-calorie foods that aren’t filling are easy to overeat regardless of being homemade or processed, while low-calorie-dense foods like fruit, vegetables, beans, and lean protein help control intake.
- Liquid calories zip straight into places we don’t want them: drinks like sugary sodas, sweetened coffee, juice, and alcohol add calories without fullness, making them easy to overconsume and overlook.
- Food variety matters (this is both good and bad): greater variety on the table increases consumption by resetting taste satisfaction, but this can be used beneficially by increasing variety in fruits and vegetables!
As ever, slow and steady is the best approach, and gradually replacing processed foods with whole foods and aiming for “mostly whole-food” diet is more effective than strict elimination (that usually doesn’t last anyway).
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
The Science of Hunger, And How To Sate It
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Fasting Cancer – by Dr. Valter Longo
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We’ve previously reviewed Dr. Longo’s “The Longevity Diet”, and whereas that one was about eating, this one is (superficially, at least) about not eating. Nor is this any kind of dissonance, because, in fact, it’s important to do both!
That said, he discusses not just fasting per se, but also the use of a personalized fast-mimicking diet, to accomplish the same goal of not overloading the metabolism—as overloading the metabolism results in metabolic disease, and cancer is, ultimately, a metabolic disease of immune dysfunction with genetic disorder*—which makes for quite a deadly trifecta.
*not in the sense of “hereditary”, though certainly genes can influence cancer risk, but rather, in the sense of “your gene-copying process becomes disordered”.
The first three chapters (after the introduction, which we’ll comment on shortly) are devoted to explaining the principles at hand:
- Fasting cancer while feeding patients
- Genes, aging, and cancer
- Fasting, nutrition, and physical activity in cancer prevention
In those chapters, he details a lot of the science for exactly how and why it is possible to “feed the patient and starve the cancer” at the same time.
After that, the rest of the book—another nine chapters, not counting appendices etc—are given over to fasting and nutrition in the context of nine main types of cancer, one chapter per type. These are not hyperspecific, though, and are rather categorizations, such as “blood cancers”, and “gynecological cancers” and so forth. It’s comprehensive, and while it could be argued that it may mean chapters feel irrelevant to some people (à la “I have never smoked and have no pressing concern about my lung cancer risk” etc), the reality is that it’s good to know how to avoid them all, because if nothing else, it’d be super embarrassing to get a cancer you “thought you couldn’t get”. So, it’s honestly worth the time to read each chapter.
In the category of criticism, he did open the introduction with a handful of anecdotes to defend the consumption of (well-established group 1 carcinogens) red meat and alcohol as “secondary concerns that might not be such a big deal”, even discussing how surprised his colleagues in the field are that he has this view. Suffice it to say, it’s contrary to the overwhelming body of evidence, and reads suspiciously like a man who simply doesn’t want to give up his steak and wine despite his own longevity diet forswearing them.
The style is self-indulgently autobiographical and very complimentary, and (in this reviewer’s opinion) it can be tedious to wade through that to get to the science, but at the end of the day, his self-accolades might be needless fluff, but they don’t actually remove anything from the science in question.
Bottom line: as you can see, there are good and bad things to say about this book, but the information contained in the good makes it well worth reading through the stylistically questionable to get it.
Click here to check out Fasting Cancer, and starve cancer cells while nourishing your healthy ones!
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The Midlife Mindset Blocking Your Health Goals
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How much compromise is best? Dr. Ruth Machin advises:
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good
All-or-nothing thinking, also called black-and-white or dichotomous thinking, is a cognitive distortion where people think in extremes, ignoring the grey areas in between. It can derail health goals by fostering guilt, shame, burnout, perfectionism, and often as not, completely abandoning goals when setbacks occur.
It’s particularly common in diet culture, because food is unavoidable and often tied to generational messages about thinness and restriction. Restrictive diets invariably fail long-term because the brain rebels against deprivation and has a negativity bias, focusing on perceived failures and amplifying them.
Dr. Machin points out that perfectionism tied to black-and-white thinking has been linked to depression, anxiety, emotional eating, and can worsen mood changes, including those that are common in menopause.
Her advice: notice when it happens, challenge whether your thoughts are truly black or white, and reframe them with kinder, more realistic alternatives. Focus on balance rather than perfection; for example, walking 4 days per week is better than none, 7,000 steps per day is frankly as good as 10,000, and an “80%” rule when it comes to eating rarely goes far wrong.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
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Want to learn more?
You might also like:
What Flexible Dieting Really Means
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Top 10 Unhealthy Foods: How Many Do You Eat?
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The items on this list won’t come as a shocking surprise to you, but it can be a good opportunity to do a quick tally and see how many of these have snuck into your diet:
The things that take away health instead of adding it
Without further ado, they are…
- Alcohol: not only is it high in empty calories, but also it’s bad for pretty much everything, especially increasing the risks of liver disease, high blood pressure, and stroke.
- Processed snacks: low in nutrition; contain unhealthy fats, refined sugars, and artificial additives that often aren’t great.
- Potato chips: get their own category for being especially high in fat, sodium, and empty calories; contribute to heart disease and weight gain.
- Processed cheese: some kinds of cheese are gut-healthy in moderation, but this isn’t. Instead, it’s just loaded with saturated fats, sodium, and sugars, and is pretty much heart disease in a slice.
- Donuts: deep-fried, sugary, and made with refined flour; cause blood sugar spikes and crashes, and what’s bad for your blood sugars is bad for almost everything else.
- French fries & similar deep-fried foods: high in saturated fats and sodium; contribute to obesity and heart issues, are not great for blood sugars either.
- White bread: made with refined flour; cause blood sugar spikes and metabolic woes.
- Sodas: high in sugar or artificial sweeteners; can easily lead to weight gain, diabetes, and tooth decay.
- Processed meats: high in calories and salt; strongly associated with heart disease and cancer.
- Hot dogs & fast food burgers: get their own category for being the absolute worst of the above-mentioned processed meats.
This writer scored: no / rarely / no / no / no / rarely / rarely / rarely / no / no
How about you?
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You might also like to read:
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Seven Things To Do For Good Lung Health!
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YouTube Channel Wellness Check is challenging us all to do the following things. They’re framing it as a 30-day challenge, but honestly, there’s nothing here that isn’t worth doing for life
Here’s the list:
- Stop smoking (of course, smoking is bad for everything, but the lungs are one of its main areas of destruction)
- Good posture (a scrunched up chest is not the lungs’ best operating conditions!)
- Regular exercise (exercising your body in different ways exercises your lungs in different ways!)
- Monitor air quality (some environments are much better/worse than others, but don’t underestimate household air quality threats either)
- Avoid respiratory infections (shockingly, COVID is not great for your lungs, nor are the various other respiratory infections available)
- Check your O2 saturation levels (pulse oximeters like this one are very cheap to buy and easy to use)
- Prevent mucus and phlegm from accumulating (these things are there for reasons; the top reason is trapping pathogens, allergens, and general pollutants/dust etc; once those things are trapped, we don’t want that mucus there any more!)
Check out the video itself for more detail on each of these items:
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Want to know more?
You might like our article about COPD:
Why Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Is More Likely Than You Think
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Red Lentils vs Oats – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing red lentils to oats, we picked the oats.
Why?
In terms of macros, oats have more protein, carbs, fiber, and even a little fat—mostly healthy mono- and polyunsaturated fats, thus making them the more nutritionally dense. That said, red lentils have the lower glycemic index, (low GI compared to oats’ medium GI) which offsets that, so we’ll call this category a tie.
In the category of vitamins, red lentils have more of vitamins B6, B9, and choline, while oats have more of vitamins B1, B2, and B5. Another tie!
When it comes to minerals, however, we have a tiebreaker category: red lentils have more selenium, while oats have more calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc. An easy win for oats this time!
So, thanks to the minerals, oats are the clear winner in total. But by all means, enjoy either or both; diversity is good!
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
The Best Kind Of Fiber For Overall Health? ← it’s β-glucan, the kind find in oats!
Enjoy!
Don’t Forget…
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