Metabolic POWER BOWL Recipe: Micronutrients for Optimal Health & Blood Sugar Levels | Levels Kitchen

Hello! Today we are going to make a Lovell's favorite recipe. This is the metabolic power bowls. These are perfect for lunch or dinner. They are so versatile because they are all about components, five to be exact, that are part of metabolically optimal meals. So the five components that we are going to put into this bowl and that you can incorporate into really any metabolically healthy friendly meal are minimizing refined sugars and grains, two, making sure we've got lots of fiber, three, getting really good omega-3 sources in there, four, lots of micronutrients and antioxidants which help our cells do their work and protect our mitochondria, and five, topping with some sort of probiotic rich food to support the microbiome which is so critical for metabolic health. So these metabolic power bowls have all of these and sets us up to learn these principles so that we can implement them with really any meal that we cook. Within each of those five categories there's lots of different options. For omega-3s we could be using salmon or sardines or chia seeds or walnuts or basil seeds. They all have omega-3s so we can kind of mix and match with what we like. For probiotic rich foods we could use sauerkraut, we could use kimchi, we could use some tempeh, we could use some unsweetened yogurt to top it. It's really all about knowing which foods meet each component and then creating this beautiful bowl with all these different fabulous features that support building a healthy body for optimal metabolic health. So let's walk through what we're gonna make today. This is gonna be a beautiful bowl with a base of cauliflower rice and broccoli rice. So that's gonna be our grain-free alternative that's immediately going to shave a bunch of the glucose spike off this meal. We're gonna chop a ton of veggies and really the name of the game with micronutrients and antioxidants is get colored. We have the full rainbow here and rainbow meals means lots of diverse micronutrients and antioxidants which is so good for metabolism and our metabolic machinery to work properly. So in your power bowl when you're making this at home doesn't really matter what vegetables you use but go for at least three different colors as a base. For some protein and omega-3 we're going to be leaning into salmon so we've got some smoked salmon but you could also use sardines or tuna. Other omega-3 sources that we're going to have in this meal include some basil seeds, chia seeds would also work and walnuts are also a great source of omega-3s. We are going to be making a fabulous sauce for this meal that's almond butter based with some ginger and some lime and garlic and red miso also a fermented food red miso but the beauty of a bowl like this is you could actually do whatever sauce you want. You could do a beautiful pesto, you could do a marinara sauce, you could drizzle it with tahini and some flake salt. It really doesn't matter but the key is just get more nutrients in that sauce. So this is going to be a powerhouse, so many plants. I think we counted that there's going to be like 17 different plants in this meal and so get ready it's easy, it's fun and it's very versatile. One of the best parts about a bowl concept like this is that there can be so many different varieties. So for base while today we're using a cauliflower and broccoli rice mixture you could also use zucchini noodles like zoodles that are just lightly sauteed as the base or you do something like an alternative pasta like a cognac root noodle which is very low carb and also delicious. So the base is quite versatile and the really key thing that we're trying to do is minimize the heavy carbohydrate rich bases that we usually see in bowls. So either like a huge amount of grains or a refined grain like a pasta. So this gives you several options for a base that are going to be lower spiking potential. In terms of other components the fiber element there's so many options that you can use to get that fiber in there. The average American is getting about 12 grams of fiber per day and fiber is critical for our microbiome health which is critical for our metabolic health. So we want to get more fiber to feed those microbiome and there's lots of ways to do it. Beans and legumes are an amazing source. For some people these do cause a glucose spike but when the beans are balanced with protein, fat, and additional fiber often people tend to do better. So today we're going to use lupini beans which are an incredible bean because they actually have zero net carbs. These beans by this brand Brami have three grams total carbohydrates for serving but three grams of fiber. So to get net carbs you subtract dietary fiber from total carbs and that tells you what the net carbs are which is really what we care about and these have zero three grams carbs three grams fiber so these should not cause a glucose spike. Black beans are another good option that have a ton of fiber which are organic and canned. They have nine grams of fiber per serving and there's 3.5 servings in one can. So great great tool for stabilizing glucose is fiber. Other options aside from beans for fiber in your bowl include nuts and seeds. So basil seeds have almost 10 grams of fiber per two tablespoons. Nuts also have a good amount of fiber and then legumes so things like lentils. So we've preheated the oven to 400 because that's what we're going to roast the brussels sprouts at and the first thing I'm going to do is actually chop a few things in a mini food processor because honestly I don't like chopping that much and if I can get a machine to do it for me we love it. So I'll grab my food processor. I use this thing about 10 times a day. I just love it and you'll see why in just a second. So let's say you need to chop a bunch of garlic. I'm just going to take a bunch of cloves and three seconds later it's going to be done. We have about 10 cloves of chopped garlic now. I love this and the other beautiful thing about chopping your garlic really early in the meal is that the really healthful benefits of garlic like their anti-inflammatory and even antimicrobial properties, they actually are activated by chopping. So the interesting thing is it takes about 30 to 40 minutes for these enzymes in the garlic to work and so if you can chop early and then just set it aside for 30 minutes you're going to get way more of the health promoting properties of garlic. The same is actually true for cruciferous vegetables so broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts. So we'll cut the brussels sprouts early let them sit to the side and let those health promoting properties kind of do their work. Again it's because of being exposed to air and being chopped it activates some of these health promoting properties and it takes about 30 minutes for that to work. So garlic's done. I'm going to put that in a little bowl and then we're going to chop some pecans. Oh my gosh look at all that gorgeous garlic. So easy probably saved five minutes of chopping. Next I'm going to do this with the pecans. So I love pecans because they're actually one of the most antioxidant rich nuts. So I've been trying to add more of them into my diet. So throw them in there and then we're going to just pulse. Gorgeous. All done. Beautiful chopped nuts. We'll add those back to our bowl and these are just going to be a nice crunchy topping on top of our power bowl. I really love when you have a variety of textures in a final meal. I think it really adds to the interest when you have a lot of textures, a lot of flavors, a lot of colors because food is a totally full sensory experience and so having something like a chopped nut on top next to a creamy sauce, next to a chewy cauliflower rice, it really makes it a more interesting meal and more fun to eat. Okay so we've done our pecans and now we're going to chop all our other veggies that can't be done in the food processor. So start with our orange peppers. Orange peppers are amazing. They are filled with vitamin C which is a potent antioxidant. They're also a great source of beta carotene which is really good for the eyes and our cardiovascular health. I'm just going to cut these really thin and sort of like a julienne style to just put on top of the bowl at the very end. These are going to be uncooked and add a little bit of crunch. Okay beautiful. So we've got that orange pepper sliced up. We'll just leave that to the side. We're going to use it later. Let's cut some of these beautiful cherry tomatoes that we got at the farmer's market. So these cherry tomatoes are just going to go on top of the bowl at the very end. Add color, add flavor, add a little bit of a different texture and tomatoes are an incredible source of the phytonutrient lycopene and lycopene is pretty amazing. It's a well-known potent anti-inflammatory substance that actually has been shown to reduce the levels of this inflammatory compound in our bodies called TNF alpha which we know is increased in inflammatory conditions. It's also increased in people who do worse with COVID infections. So lycopene is known to lower TNF alpha and also decrease the expression of one of our genetic pathways called NF kappa B which is an inflammatory pathway. And something interesting about lycopene, we actually absorb it better when we eat tomatoes with olive oil and so this is one of those cool food pairing facts where actually putting two different foods together can increase their absorption. Another example of this is turmeric and black pepper. Black pepper increases the absorption of the really healthful chemical in turmeric called curcumin. So some fun facts for today. So I think that's enough tomatoes for our bowl. Put those off to the side and I just de-stemmed them before I cut them because those stems don't really taste very good. Now let's chop our brussel sprouts. Again brussel sprouts are part of the cruciferous vegetable family. A word you definitely want to commit to memory because cruciferous vegetables are one of the healthiest things that we can eat. They are such a powerhouse and the reason that cruciferous vegetables are so powerful for health is because they contain a compound called sulforaphane and sulforaphane is a superpower chemical compound. It's also a genetic regulator. It up regulates the expression of a gene that actually increases our antioxidant defense systems and the reason we care about antioxidants in the body is because when we're doing metabolic processes like converting glucose to energy, the body essentially makes reactive byproducts kind of like waste products that are called free radicals and there are these reactive compounds that can actually hurt our body in excess. So by giving the body antioxidants through all these colorful foods or through sulforaphane expressing more antioxidants because we can both make them by activating our antioxidant genes or eat them, we want to do both, we protect our body from those excess free radicals. So when I'm eating cruciferous vegetables I'm thinking sulforaphane, I'm thinking reduce free radicals, I'm thinking reduce oxidative stress, protect my body and specifically protect my mitochondria because those excess free radicals can damage our mitochondria which is of course the powerhouse in the cell, the seat of our metabolism. So it's just fun to think you are doing such good stuff to your body when you're eating these types of foods. Other foods in the cruciferous vegetable family are cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, bok choy, kale, watercress, there's a bunch of them and these have that similar property garlic where when you chop them, when you traumatize the tissue of the plant, it activates the healthful property. So it actually is what allows for that sulforaphane to be created because it's actually a precursor molecule to sulforaphane that's in the cruciferous vegetables and when you expose it to air and traumatize the tissue, it converts to sulforaphane and that process takes about 35 to 40 minutes. So while we're preparing our other vegetables and chopping things, these will just sit out and that precursor will be turning to sulforaphane and we'll be getting all those healthful properties in the final cooked product. I usually like to make them really small pieces because they get really crispy in the oven. So the first thing I do is just cut the little root base off and I toss that. Then I cut them in half and then I cut those halves in half again. So that's quartered. So you end up with four pieces and then if some of those pieces are still really big, you can cut them again. Basically the smaller they are, the crispier they're going to get in the oven. I like salads and bowls that have really small chopped things, which is one of the reasons I like using food processors to cut things. But the Brussels sprouts are all done now and again we're going to let those sit out for a little bit to activate that sulforaphane. Next thing we're going to chop is a little bit of purple cabbage and what I love about purple cabbage is that it makes every meal look beautiful. I love pinks, I love purples. So if I can incorporate beet juice or purple onions or purple cabbage onto the top of the meal, it honestly just brings me joy and that's what I'm looking for when I'm eating. So this is a bit of a decorative piece for our bowl but also is such a powerhouse in nutrients. It's got all these purple phytonutrients which are so incredible for our body. Things like anthocyanins, which we also find in blueberries and things like cherries and for the cabbage, which again is also a cruciferous vegetable. We're just going to chop it really thin and then leave it off to the side so that sulforaphane can activate and this will just be a little sprinkling on the top of our bowl at the end. So much of what I'm thinking about when I'm cooking is what the plate is going to look like at the end because to me cooking is really a creative outlet and colors are just incredible for health and also just so visually pleasing. So when I'm at the grocery store, I'm often thinking about like what colors can I get that I know will look so beautiful on the plate. Typically I want my plates to look like a rainbow and you can already see on our cutting board we basically have a rainbow. What that means to me is not only is it going to be joyful and beautiful when we eat it, it's also meaning diversity of micronutrients and antioxidants and phytonutrients which is so good for the body. Next up we're going to chop these beautiful onions from the farmer's market. So the cool thing about these onions is that you can actually use the entire top part so I'm going to chop those and set them aside and then we'll sprinkle them on top like scallions at the very end. So I'll cut the top really thin. The onions themselves I'm going to saute in the pan before I cook the cauliflower and broccoli rice to give it a little bit more of a kind of caramelized onion feel to that cauliflower and broccoli rice. Beautiful. Actually let's try something here. I'm going to cut it into quarters like that and then I'm going to use that food processor again. Toss them in. Boom. Completely minced onion in two seconds. I just love that. All right let's cut some avocado. Oh gorgeous. These are perfectly ripe. Is there anything better than a perfectly ripe avocado? I love those memes where they talk about the different life cycle of an avocado and it's like you've got them for a week and they're just like no good, no good, no good, no good and they decide one day they're ready and you get about five minutes to eat them before they go bad. So we are in that five minute period right now and they are perfect. Oh my god. Have you ever seen a more beautiful avocado? So yummy. And then the way I like to cut an avocado is just do a few slices, get a spoon, slice around the edge, and you've got a gorgeous cut avocado. If you want to do more cubes, do the same thing. Make your little hash, your little hashtag marks here, hashtag avocado and then now you'll have more like cubes of avocado. So we'll save that for the end. So good. The perfect avocado. Next thing we're gonna do is cut some jalapenos. Again the jalapenos are going in the sauce so we don't actually have to chop them up fully but I just need to get them prepped so that we're not getting the whole seeds and stem in there. So the name of the game with cutting jalapenos is don't get your hands on the seeds. It will ruin your day, literally. So I cut the top off and then what I usually do is I cut down the middle lengthwise and those are the seeds which are the spicy part and so then what I usually do is I just cut the membrane at the base there a little bit, kind of cut under the membrane at the end and then you can kind of just flip out the inside part. All the seeds are basically gone and I haven't touched it but keep that away from you and the other food and I'll maybe leave a few little pieces of seed in there because that'll give it a little spice but I don't want all that spice. So that's ready to go for our sauce. Again I'm gonna sever that membrane there. I'm gonna cut under the membrane at the base and then I'm just gonna flip it out. Boom, done. Leave a few seeds in for spice. Okay last thing we're gonna be using a little bit of ginger in the sauce. I'll just chop about an inch off, have that ready to go. I honestly don't peel my ginger because when you blend it into a sauce you kind of can't taste it so that saves us a little step and let's now get our cauliflower rice ready. So again we're doing the cauliflower broccoli rice base for this bowl and this is fresh broccoli rice not frozen and really fun pro tip if you have a food processor is take the stems of your broccoli, chop them into little two inch pieces, throw them in the food processor, pulse it about five times and you get homemade delicious broccoli rice. So we'll throw that in to add a few more nutrients. There's two ways to do cauliflower rice to the base of this. You can get frozen cauliflower rice from pretty much any grocery store these days and I always have about five of these bags in my freezer because it is the base of so many easy dinners. Stir fries, power bowls, really great to have on hand. Throw a few veggies, some protein and some spices in there you have an easy 10 minute dinner but you can also make cauliflower rice from scratch. So first thing take off the greens and these are great for composting. I've also been known to throw cauliflower greens into a smoothie before because they're pretty innocuous, they don't really taste like much. So now you've got your head of cauliflower and we're going to just like roughly chop this into basically eight big pieces that we can use to make the cauliflower rice. So first cut a little bit of that stem off and then you kind of just chop this into big pieces. It doesn't need to be artful, you don't really need to get the florets intact as you would if you were roasting because it's all going to just turn into cauliflower rice. So this is about the size that you want, any bigger and it won't turn into rice very well. So you want them about three inches by three inches. So we're going to take these over to the food processor back here, about that much, put them in there, pulse them about five seconds. Oh perfect, I love this so much. Look at that, 10 seconds we have this entire bowl of fresh organic cauliflower rice. Look at that, oh my gosh, gorgeous. Again not to talk about sulforaphane constantly but same thing with this, chop it, leave it aside for 30 minutes or so and all that sulforaphane is going to form. One thing to know about making your own cauliflower rice fresh like this is that there is sort of this moment that is the perfect moment where it really looks rice-like and like two pulses more than this it gets too fine and then it gets really watery when you cook it. So you want to kind of err on the side of having a few bigger chunks still in there and that's when you know you're not kind of overdoing it but don't pulse too much, less is kind of more. So let's do the second batch. One thing I want to do as an experiment is to try this in the mini food processor. I don't think I've actually done this before but I think we can make it work so let's try. So put that blade back in there and then get a few cauliflower pieces. Let's pulse. Worked perfectly. So yeah sometimes you'll see a little big piece that doesn't get done and that's fine you can just do it in the next batch. Those are ready to go. I'll add it to our bowl and one thing that I did, just a little quick tip, if you press chop and grind they go in different directions. So what I'll do is chop, grind, chop, grind, chop, grind so it kind of bounces the cauliflower around more and tends to make for a better rice because what you don't want is for this to just all go in one direction and kind of turn into a puree. So if that helps try it out. I'm going to put that into our bowl and we've got some gorgeous cauliflower rice. Now it's time for us to make our delicious almond butter ginger lime red miso sauce which you are just going to literally want to drink. It's so, so, so good and it's so easy because you just throw it all into a blender, press go and we'll be done. So let's start by getting the blender out. You're going to want some kind of high-powered blender this to really get it all creamy and emulsified. Okay we're going to start with the coconut milk. So one cup. Then we're going to do half a teaspoon of jalapeno. That's about half teaspoon. One tablespoon of minced ginger. One teaspoon minced garlic. Two tablespoons lime juice. This one because tang can really overpower a recipe I'm going to measure this one out. A little tip to get more juice out put both halves of the lime back in there and you can get a little bit more out. I think that'll do it. All right so two tablespoons. There's one. We're going to do one eighth teaspoon of cayenne pepper. This is a quarter teaspoon so I'll just do half. Two tablespoons of tamari which is going to give us both that salty and umami flavor. Often things that are super delicious are things that have an umami flavor, a savory flavor, a sweet flavor, and a sour flavor and I think that's why this sauce is so delicious because we get the umami with the tamari. We get the sour with the lime. We get the sweet with a date and the coconut milk and we get that savory with that almond butter. It's just so good. Speaking of almond butter we want one half cup. If you didn't have almond butter on hand you could just soak a half a cup of almonds in water for a few hours and then throw those straight in because the blender is going to emulsify them basically into almond butter just by blending it. So that's another option to make an equally creamy sauce. God I can't let this go to waste. So good. One tablespoon red miso. A lovely fermented food. We love the ferments. The recipe calls for one teaspoon of chopped dates. Sometimes a tiny tiny touch of a flavor like a sweetness can totally change the whole thing and I don't think this is going to cause too much of a glucose spike. So we'll throw the top on the blender here and then blend away. Let's taste it. Oh it looks gorgeous. Absolutely perfect. I'm actually going to put that in the fridge just so it kind of sets a little bit more and then we'll roast our Brussels sprouts. So to do these Brussels sprouts we're going to grab a baking sheet or some sort of ceramic dish and I tend to really like to use a piece of tinfoil down at the bottom of a pan to help with cleanup. If you're using a baking dish a silpat silicone mat is really fantastic and it just makes cleanup so so so much easier. So we're going to take our Brussels sprouts and just throw them on here and then we're going to just drizzle it with some kind of healthy fat to help it get crispy. So that could be a little bit of ghee. It could be coconut oil. It could be olive oil. It could be avocado oil spray. It could be coconut oil spray or it could be avocado oil. So for today I think I'm going to use a little bit of olive oil. Just drizzle about a tablespoon on there. Some salt and pepper. Keep it really simple. These do not need much. Every time I take roasted vegetables out of the oven I'm like astounded by how delicious they are. Whether it's green beans or onions or Brussels sprouts or roasted peppers just throw them in there. Chop them. Olive oil, salt, pepper. 20 minutes at 400. Flip them halfway through. Delicious. Gonna throw them in here at 400 again for about 15 to 20 minutes. Check after about 10. Make sure they're not burning. Stir them around a little bit. Now it's time to make our broccoli cauliflower rice. We've got a medium hot pan. I'm going to spray it with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil spray. And the first thing I'm going to do is just saute the onions that we chopped up in the food processor earlier to create a little more interest in the cauliflower rice. We'll just get those hot and a little bit caramelized. They smell so good. So our onions are getting translucent, a little bit browned. Just takes about four or five minutes. Stir them around a few times. A little bit of flake salt. And now we'll put our cauliflower and broccoli rice in there. While this is cooking, I'm going to check on our Brussels sprouts, which are looking so good. Give them a little stir. Starting to get browned and gorgeous. They probably need 10 more minutes. I'd say the cauliflower rice takes about five to seven minutes to cook. You're wanting it to get a little bit softer, a little bit crispy, but you don't want to overcook it so that it either gets watery or that it loses all its moisture and almost gets dry. One thing I just realized is that we have all this leftover garlic, which actually I think it tastes really good in here. So I'm going to add it now. Normally you'd saute your garlic before adding this other stuff, but something I do when I want to add garlic late is I'll create a little space on the pan, separate from everything else, add a little bit of olive oil, and then take the garlic and kind of cook it on the side. Kind of saute it over here, and then once it has like a minute or two to saute and get delicious and olive oily, then mix it in with the rest of it. I'm going to add turmeric. I'm not going to measure this, but I'd say about a teaspoon. I'm going to add a little bit of flake salt too, and then stir it all around. Our garlic's good to stir in now. I love having turmeric at the ready, really easily accessible to throw on different meals because turmeric is one of the most metabolically healthy nutritional super house spices out there. It is filled with antioxidants that give it that bright orange gorgeous look and color, but it also has this really special chemical compound in it called curcumin, and curcumin is actually a genetic regulator of a pathway called NF kappa B, nuclear factor kappa B. NF kappa B is a gene that ends up setting off a bunch of inflammatory cascades, inflammatory process in the body, so curcumin in turmeric negatively regulates NF kappa B and decreases inflammatory pathways in our body. That's a good thing because we don't want that chronic inflammation that's plaguing so many Americans today and which underlies so many of our chronic illnesses, and this is one where adding black pepper actually makes the bioavailability of that curcumin much higher, so I'm going to reach for the pepper and put a little bit on there, and see how just adding a little bit of that spice totally changes the color here. Going back to that concept of the plate as art and that full sensory experience, now we've got this gorgeous yellow to set off our purple cabbage and our orange peppers and our red tomatoes, and it's just going to be stunning, and I'm so excited. So this is done. This is ready to go. The cauliflower is looking a little soft but not dry. It's not watery. I never add water to the pan with cauliflower rice so they can get kind of mushy. It's got a little bit of a brown crispiness to it, and I'm just, my mouth is watering, so I know we're ready to go. Let's check the brussel sprouts one more time. Ooh, they're looking awesome. Still need a couple more minutes though, and while that's all waiting, we can get our salmon ready. You want the salmon to be out for about 10 minutes before you cook it. Oh, it looks gorgeous. I'm gonna lay it into the pan. It's a pretty thin one, so I'm probably only gonna cook it for about eight minutes. This is a beautiful wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and when possible, try and get wild-caught fish. The fish are raised in just a much healthier way. They're feeding on their natural diets out in the ocean as opposed to in a farmed environment where they're eating mostly corn and soy, so you're gonna get a maximal omega-3s, minimal antibiotics, and other things that you're gonna get in more of a farmed fish operation. However, if farmed fish is all the grocery store has, it's better than a lot of other protein options. You still are getting a ton of the omega-3s with fish, but if wild's an option, go with that. So I just used a paper towel to just blot off the salmon, get any moisture off of it. That is our Brussels sprouts ready to go. Let's grab them from the oven. We're looking for brown and crispy. Oh gosh, they're gorgeous. This is exactly what I like to see. We've got these little crispy bits on the side. So good. Tender, not too mushy, still a tiny bit crisp, and a little bit of that brown crispiness on the side. I love it. Perfect. Let's finish our salmon. So we paper towel it off the salmon to get any moisture, and we're just gonna throw a little bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper on top, and then we'll throw it in the oven. About a tablespoon over these. Gently rub that olive oil into the salmon, and then a little bit of flake salt, and some pepper. And sometimes a little citrus on the salmon can be really good, so like some lemon zest or some lemon juice. I happen to have about a half a teaspoon of lime juice from when we made our sauce, so I'm actually just gonna put a little bit of that on. Again, there aren't really rules here. We're just going for delicious flavors. Now we're gonna get this in the oven, and I'm gonna have it at 400 for about eight minutes because these are pretty thin pieces. Salmon's ready. Let's get it out of the oven. Oh, it looks gorgeous. So we want our salmon to be at an internal temperature of 145 for it to be fully cooked. This actually took a lot longer than I thought. I said eight minutes. It ended up taking more like 15, but it's looking perfect now. So now we assemble our metabolic power bowls. So we've got all of our toppings laid out here, and now is the fun part where we get to be food artists and just load our bowl with so many nutrients that are so good for metabolic health. So we're gonna start with our base, which was this gorgeous cauliflower broccoli rice. So load up the bottom. A nice alternative to grain. And again, when you're assembling bowls like this, this could be a bed of zucchini noodles. This could be konjac root pasta. It could be miracle noodles. It doesn't matter. Just something that's really nutrient-dense and isn't gonna spike your glucose, and those are some great options. So now we've got our cauliflower base there. Let's start adding our toppings. First, let's get a gorgeous piece of salmon, and I'll lay that there. And remember, we've got those five components of the metabolic power bowl that we want to be including. So we want to include foods that don't spike our glucose and have no refined grains or sugars. So that's where our base comes in. Next is that we want omega-3s. So again, the sources of omega-3s, we've got the salmon. If you did not have time to cook salmon, you could use some smoked salmon. And honestly, why don't we just do a little double because we can be fancy today. So like a little bit of smoked salmon there too. Other great sources of omega-3s would be basil seeds, chia seeds, or walnut. So I'm gonna sprinkle a few basil seeds on there, which also creates a nice color contrast with that salmon. Then we want maximal micronutrients and antioxidants. And so this is where we're gonna get at least three bright-colored vegetables on here because we know we're getting some good nutrient diversity then. So we have our beautiful orange peppers. Put those over here. We've got some lovely cherry tomatoes. We've got red, orange red, and then purple with this cabbage. Do some scallions on there. Beautiful. And then we also want fiber on our bowls. So that's why I have some of these zucchini beans, which have three grams of fiber per serving and zero net carbs. So not gonna spike your glucose. So I'm gonna put a few of those on here. And some of these ingredients double up on the different elements of the Metabolic Healthy Meals. So the basil seeds have a ton of fiber and omega-3s. The beans have a lot of fiber, so we're getting double fiber here. What else? Our Brussels sprouts. So this adds to our micronutrient and antioxidant quota. So I'm gonna sprinkle a few of those on here. This is looking fabulous. We don't want to hide all our yellow. And then we've got some avocado, more color. And then our fifth component, which is probiotic-rich foods. And there was a study out of Stanford that showed that six servings of probiotic-rich foods per day actually has a really positive impact on the microbiome. And so really always trying to think about how do we get something probiotic-rich or something fermented on almost every meal. So for breakfast, that could be an unsweetened yogurt or kefir. For lunch, you could just be throwing some sauerkraut or kimchi on top of your meal. For dinner, same thing. Or have a low-sugar kombucha with your meal. So these are all ways to get fermented foods. And if you're thinking that way, it's actually pretty easy to get six. We'll probably have two or three servings on here. So the way I actually make this happen in my life is that when I'm at the store or farmer's market, I find just like gorgeous local ferments. And I just try something new. And I like to have like three or four in my fridge at all times so that I can just grab them and throw them on top of whatever meal I'm making. So here I've got three different types. And I'm just going to put, I think for this one, I think we need some more pink in this corner. So I'm going to do the beet kraut. That is absolutely gorgeous and gives it a beautiful tang as well. All right, we still need to put our sauce on here. And we've got some chopped pecans. Again, the pecans are for that texture, a little bit of crunch. Pecans also have really high antioxidant content. And fun fact, they contain ALA, alpha lipoic acid, which is actually one of the micronutrients we need in our mitochondria to turn glucose to ATP to energy. So these hit multiple levels of the metabolically friendly meal. I'm just going to sprinkle those on top. This is looking so gorgeous. And last step is the sauce. And before you freak out and think, oh my god, there are like 10,000 components to this meal. How would I do this on a weekday? Just remember a ton of this can actually be meal prepped on the weekend. And a lot of it can be chopped in the food processor. And if you can chop a bunch of this stuff on the weekend, you can make a bowl like this literally in five minutes. And so now for our delicious almond butter sauce. So we're going to just do a little drizzle on here. I think we're done. I am so excited about this gorgeous bowl. When I look at a bowl like this, I'm literally feeling pure, honestly ecstatic joy, because I know that this is going to build my future self. This is going to turn into my cells. It's going to feed my microbiome. It's going to change my gene expression. It's going to help my mitochondria thrive. And it's going to help me be metabolically optimized. And metabolically optimized means that I can produce energy effectively in my body. And energy, it's the spark of life. It's what lets us get up and go and do what we want to do in this world. And so when I'm looking at a plate like this, that's what I'm thinking about. And that's why I love food so much. Remember, this is just an example. You can swap in whatever vegetables you love and you have. You can make it your own work of art. And I'm so excited to see what you come up with. So try it out. Let us know what you think. Tag us with your metabolically friendly power bowl. And now it's time to eat. So excited. So good. Enjoy.