Savoring Health: From Siberia with Salmon🐟

TUNE IN TO LEARN: 
What if you could elevate your breakfast game while boosting your cognitive flexibility, your dreams for abs and overall wellness? 
 
Join me, Angela Shurina, your Brain's Coach, as I take you on a mouthwatering journey through the intersection of traditional Russian cuisine and modern nutritional science. 
 
Through personal anecdotes from my life in Siberian Russia, we'll explore how I re-invented our family eating habits, combining local and family traditions, my mom's cooking, my traveling explorations with the principles of balanced nutrition. 
 
You'll learn about my specific goals aimed at enhancing productivity and gut health, all while enjoying the richness of traditional flavors. 
 
This episode is loaded with practical tips for adventurous, health-minded eaters and travelers, and vibrant stories designed to inspire you to enjoy your food while nurturing your body. 
 
For more tasty insights and glimpses into my daily life, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter! 😃
Find the link below.  
  

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of your Brain's Coach podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your Brain's Coach and it is my job here to bring to you all the best recent, cutting-edge, most interesting, useful and applicable to your life brain-body tools so you could take better control of your thoughts, of your emotions, of your brain and, most importantly, of your actions, so you shape the exact life experience, or as close to it as possible, as you imagine, dream and wish for Today. Folks, it's a fun episode about Russian cuisine my plate back home, which is half meat tradition plus some spices around the world. So what's on my plate? Mom's cooking Russian traditional food, which also mixes well with nutrition trends that I always bring from scientific realms and different traditions all over the world. What else Also gonna tell you my stats, what I track, how I track them all to give you some ideas and inspirations, what to try, how to keep your plate healthy and also on trend and with your goal in mind. For me personally, my goal with nutrition is experiment. Enjoy my food for sure. It's joy of living. I want to live and experience and enjoy my life as well, and food is one of life's biggest pleasures. So I mix that with my goal to stay healthy, live long. I always have this joke that I tell people my goal is, at 70 and 80, be the healthiest, fittest motherfucker out there. Sorry for my French which is, besides the cursing, close to zero. So today we're going to talk about health and nutrition again, to inspire your thinking, to give you some latest nutrition trends and stats put in the context of my plate.

Speaker 1 2:33

Back home in Russian Siberia, when my friends ask me, angela, where are you from? And I always tell them imagine Russia, in the middle, to the north, somewhere there you'll find me closer to polar circle. That's why right now we have kind of like white nights experience, where the sun rises around 3 am at the end of July and it sets around 10 pm and in June we actually have almost 24 hours of sunlight. Can you imagine? Not exactly like in places in Norway where they have like six months of daylight and six months of night. Not exactly that. But in winter we also get like three, four hours of daylight and the rest is night. So back to nutrition.

Speaker 1 3:24

So one of my goals is to enjoy my food, to experiment and get creative with it, learn about the world and different traditions and how it affected our genetics. Well, by our, I mean people around the world, and why certain people or nations have certain diseases or certain benefits, like, for example, dutch are super tall, almost like all of them, and they happen to love their daily meals a lot of daily in Russia but we somehow did not grow up that tall, probably lack of vitamin D or something else. Still something to explore. So for me it's also exploration and then also, obviously, to support my life goals, like my consistent productivity, focus, ability to learn fast, ability to change fast. Did you know that your learning ability, your ability to stay cognitively flexible, depends on what you put on your plate, things like the amount of omega-3s you eat? Also, they say that Japanese actually have the highest omega-3 index in their cell membranes and they are, as far as I know, the most innovative nation out there, the most developed Maybe a coincidence, maybe not. We are in Russia kind of average on omega-3s, I think higher than the rest of the world, because we have so much local, all kinds of local salmon varieties. Did you know that there is not just one salmon, there is like a whole family with different kinds or different percentages of fatness of omega-3s, and in the Russian Far East, closer to Japan, we have a ton of it, and now they say it's a season, so it's super cheap. I'm eating it every day, almost every day. You know something that I've been missing, and here I'm just on a salmon kick, and also toric and kefir, which you'll learn more about in a moment. And so back to my goals.

Speaker 1 5:34

So another one of my goals is using food for my productivity, my mental performance and, obviously, health, longevity and looks. Short-term goals, long-term goals. The food on your plate influences your mood, your ability again to learn to focus, to be energetic, to stay motivated, to stay productive, to sleep well, to have this cognitive flexibility that allows you to be empathetic and build the greater relationships and change and learn from your life experience, instead of being resistant to it. If food can lower the inflammation in your body, which has a host of benefits and cognitive enhancements or downgrades your gut health and we still are learning about how trillions of gut bacteria influence our brain and how we behave and what we do it's fascinating how many aspects of you, your life, your work food influences, and you're built of what's on your plate Like, literally, brick by brick, cell by cell. You are built from what's on your plate, and if that's what's on your plate is poor quality, imagine building a house from poor quality materials it's going to break, it's going to collapse and it's definitely not going to keep you warm and comfy in winter. So build yourself from high quality materials, use food to upgrade yourself and you'll be astonished how your life quality, your work quality, the quality of your relationship to yourself and with others can flourish and just skyrocket.

Speaker 1 7:30

So back to my plate back home. By the way, by signing up to my daily now newsletter that's been daily for, I think, close to three months now I started the challenge and then I decided to make the challenge at least year long. Maybe I'm going to become a little bit like Seth Godin. That's the hope. So sign up for my daily newsletter where, in details, you can read and see a lot of pictures from my home, for example, and what it looks like for me to be eating back home, my plate and stats, et cetera. So the link to sign up for your best newsletter is in the show notes somewhere there. So sign up and get a daily bit of wisdom body, mind, work, a combination of science, my explorations, my practice with clients and different stories from my travels back home to living my life, upgrading my work and improving the world by working with people and helping them grow and become better versions of self. So your best newsletter.

Speaker 1 8:53

Now back again to my point. As I mentioned somewhere, maybe not. Well, let's actually start with what usually happens for a lot of folks visiting home, visiting moms. If you are lucky enough to still have your parents intact, living and breathing, do visit them Because, let's be honest, nobody's going to stick around forever and not having your caregivers, your ancestors, with you anymore it's very sad. And while they're still alive, take some time, spend time with them and invest in that quality time and you'll be very happy. You did Make some memories, be meaningful and deep ones. So, back home in Russia, that's where I am spending time with my parents, my ancestors and, um. What happens to a lot of people when they visit home is they put on a couple of kilos, months cooking and, all right, missing all the uh loved in the childhood, foods, etc. But for me, it's always been a little bit different.

Speaker 1 10:13

When it comes to food, nutrition and health, I've been a trendsetter in my family, I believe. Somewhere when I was a teen, I got really interested in what's on my plate. I was very introspective and curious about food. All this, I'm not sure why maybe my sensitive gut microbiome, maybe some autoimmunity issues that I struggled as a teen. By the way, I reversed my autoimmune condition through lifestyle and nutrition and that's why I know it's so powerful. So battling with that and learning early that food, nutrition, lifestyle can change many things about you and very often it's the only thing that can change you With all the modern medicine, some things are fundamental. What you put on your plate will define, by a large, what kind of health you have. So a combination of that struggle as a teen and then my natural curiosity, the way my gut and brain are wired.

Speaker 1 11:28

I've always been interested in nutrition and health and I've always been very stubborn, and so when I would explore some nutrition aspects, some healthy eating aspect, I would decide that this is my new plan, and then there was no way you could convince me to do anything bad. That's how I spent five years of my life being vegan, quite a few years of that being raw vegan, and I explored keto diet and zone diet and all kinds of diets there are. I used to be in competing and fitness world. So I was in this like bodybuilding, a lot of protein, not knowing a lot about nutrition world. I explored like I always have this joke I even tried living on juice for 60 days, which I succeeded, but then it kind of, you know, just doesn't work long term. Anyhow, if there is a diet, I tried it. So that's how explorative and all in and stubborn I was. Thanks God, my mom is always, always and has always been open-minded.

Speaker 1 12:32

But so what happened is our household eating traditions changed and evolved and we started eating healthier and healthier and healthier. And the more I educated myself about the science of nutrition, of health, how to eat for longevity, for health, for performance, for health at different stages in life, like for myself, for my sister, for my sister's kids or for my parents, so as I educated myself, as I educated myself, I would bring something home and then explain it to my family, what it is, why I did that, and I would get greater results. And so I would also inspire, because I have this energy, this vitality, always seemingly getting better and better. And so in my family we adopted all these different eating habits that combine tradition, the what's available, that combine cutting-edge nutrition science, the best practices around the world, different curiosities that each of us have and, through my mom, as kind of like connecting link, the whole family would change. And again, I would always open to explain why I do certain things, what I do, not really making anyone to eat like I do, but just showing and explaining why I do what I do. By the way, one of the best strategies to coach others, to help others, is to lead by example and be a radiant result of your teaching. And if you are not radiant, so why are you teaching this? If that's not making you better, at least?

Speaker 1 14:17

So anyhow, my home eating is different because of that. It's a combination again of local traditions, healthy fight through a mix with nutrition science, plus all my curiosities and experiments and mixes from different traditions that I picked up while living in 15 different countries in 15 years of my life. So all of that I would bring back home. While visiting from time to time, like, for example, through pandemic, I stayed for half a year back home and would cook almost every single dinner for my parents and they got to learn a lot and kind of rewire their eating habits a lot, and so I would bring up upgrades to family, nutrition and lifestyle and everyone would get on this new kick, new wagon, so to speak, and that's why, for me, going back home is actually bringing new knowledge and trying it all together and eating, if anything, healthier and adding more variety. Also getting ideas ideas from my mom, who does a lot of cooking, most of the cooking and so for me, again, getting back home is all about actually eating even better and being even more inspired and uh, and usually even well. Sometimes I do pick up one kilo if I start also eating home-baked cakes, which my mom is great at but doesn't do that often anymore, because we understand, you know, that's not exactly the best healthy food you can be eating, and we also know how our brain wants to eat everything that it sees, so we don't usually cook a lot of it, except for holidays, family celebrations, like we do right now. But anyhow, so I stay in shape, we all get healthy, experiment and enjoy foods of the tradition, the nutrition science and all the experiments from around the world that are also all around us. These days, everyone and everything is connected, right.

Speaker 1 16:28

So what my plate looks back home? A combination of tradition, health and macronutrients that I'm experimenting with for looks, focus and longevity. So my breakfast usually looks like well, what it looks like you can see by subscribing to my daily newsletter. But what it sounds like is a couple of eggs, this Russian tuvaruk, which is kind of like cottage cheese, but not really. The grain is smaller, it's sour, it's fermented, it's boiled and then fermented and you usually would eat it with kefir or sour cream with sugar. But I mix it with either kefir, which is also a fermented drink, a sour fermented drink made with different kind of bacteria, they say like the best kind of fermented drink out there. So plain kefir, also very sour.

Speaker 1 17:38

I would add to tvorak that is also sour, plain, grainy. It's kind of like cottage cheese, consistency a little bit different, and then I would mix that with kefir. I would mix that Instead of sugar. I would add frozen berries that add this juicy juice and color, so usually locally grown blueberries or cranberries or linga berries or sometimes not that local cherries somewhere from the south of Russia, and I would mix it all and have about 200 grams of tuareg, 200 grams of kefir, the totaling with about 40 grams of protein per that dish, additional 12 or so grams of protein from a couple of eggs that I would have for breakfast.

Speaker 1 18:28

Very often I would also have 100 grams of salmon, which is so abundant here in Russia, especially now it's season. It's brought mostly from far eastern regions of Russia and there are all different kinds of salmon, not just, you know, salmon that you would find in most supermarkets outside of regions. Where you can get it, you can fish it, but there are different kinds with different omega-3s percentages and different colors and sizes. They have different names. It's all one family of salmon but with different sub-families or kinds Anyhow. So a lot of that I would have for breakfast, some omega-3s in my salmon, and then I would have my favorite banana for potassium sweetness and some vitamins like B6, important for energy, and some local summer fruit. Now it's summer, so we have at the end of July a lot of stone fruit like nectarines or peaches, which also have a lot of vitamins and minerals and added fiber. So that would conclude my breakfast. So that would conclude my breakfast, which I would usually have about four hours after my waking time, because in the morning I usually go for a walk, I do my writing, I do my podcasting and then after I feel like I'm hungry enough and deserve my breakfast. So that's breakfast, my lunch and and again the pictures you can see, uh, by signing up to my daily newsletter. Also on my instagram there is a link to read this newsletter and see the pictures and read all the details and stats macros, micronutrients Well, actually micro is not so much, but how much protein, what it looks like, right? So you can see that by following me and watching my stories on Instagram Angela Brain Body Coach. Angela Brain Body Coach See what I do and eat daily there. And you can read this newsletter that I wrote today about my eating back home, russian Siberia. So that's going to be my breakfast and then lunch. I always try to keep it light because there is this thing, midday slump, where we naturally feel not as alert, not as focused, and therefore you don't want to divert your blood flow, the little that you have left in that midday slump. You don't want to divert that blood flow to your stomach, from your brain, feeling even more sleepier, even sleepier. And so I usually have a combination of some carbohydrate not a lot coming from whole foods. I usually do not eat any other carbohydrates, only whole foods. So it's going to be a combination of some carbs, about 30 grams of protein from whole foods, from things like tuna or salmon and so and what else, and very little to no fat. So the lunch that I had yesterday was a couple of buckwheat cakes. Buckwheat yeah, look up what buckwheat is. It's an ancient seed. Like it looks like grain. It's traditionally used in cuisine in Russia that people eat it as hot porridge, as a side carbohydrate for main dishes. All kinds of stuff is made from buckwheat. It's something that's everywhere in Russia that's traditionally grown in huge amounts. We are not rice kind of people. Buckwheat is one of our traditional grains and that's why rice cakes those round usually things with puffed rice. So instead of that in Russia we have our own version. We also have rice cakes, but this is made specifically from buckwheat, and buckwheat has this also distinct taste, not like rice. It's more interesting and nuanced and that's why I love it. So I had a couple of rice cakes slash buckwheat cakes. So made entirely of buckwheat, puffed, also nothing else added, and on top of that I spreaded a can of tuna. For that lunch and I also had about maybe 50, 80 grams or maybe 100 grams of gooseberries, one of the local berries Also. Look it up, it's traditionally green, for whichever reason. Now it's red. Maybe it's a new variety, I've never tried, but it was really good. Very distinct flavor, obviously vitamins, minerals. Distinct flavor, obviously vitamins, minerals. It looks kind of like cranberries but tastes slightly sweeter. Vitamin C a lot of it there. So again 30 grams of proteins there, some carbohydrates and almost no fat for that lunch and then my dinner. That usually is about two to three hours before my bedtime. Here it's around five, between four slash six, somewhere usually around five. I finish my dinner and I start every one of my dinners everywhere in the world. Actually always some sauerkraut, if I find it, or kimchi. Here in Russia, sauerkraut is our traditional fermented vegetable, that sauerkraut accompanied by fresh vegetables, some greens we have a lot of different lettuces, some greens we have a lot of different lettuces. Also a lot of rucola rocket that's how it is in English, so fresh. Then some tomatoes. Mushrooms are my favorite. I like to just mix it all, eat it before dinner while I cook my dinner and then for dinner. For example, yesterday I had some beef liver Liver any kind of liver is nature's multivitamin. So I have it once a week, no matter where I am. Sometimes most of the time I have chicken liver, just because it's easier to cook, but my mom helped me to cook beef liver so I had that with some pumpkin, some broccoli, some squash, like vegetable that is green I don't even know what it is in English. I added some of my favorite spices, like paprika or curry. In Russia we actually don't use much of spices or herbs at all, like salt and black pepper, and that's about it. So I had that. I added more cabbage and about 200 grams of that liver, adding additional 60 or so grams of protein. And that was it. And I also have a cup of rooibos tea, something I love from South Africa, my new home, where it's local grown, and everywhere I usually add a splash of whole milk and that concludes my dinner and eating for the day. After that I go for a walk and then start doing some studies and work-related stuff that I have not finished yet. And yes, and my stats Per day I eat about 130-160 grams of protein, never going below 130. The formula is to multiply by your body weight in kilograms. I'm 53-54 kilograms somewhere there. Calories on daily basis usually 1,500-1,700. But on the weekends I add up additional $4,000 or $5,000 from whole foods, nuts and seeds and that kind of make an even spread of probably $2,000, $2,300. That actually allows me to stay in my current weight with a lot of energy and a lot of health. My current weight with a lot of energy and a lot of health. Then we have a fat about 30-40 grams per day, coming entirely from whole foods like eggs or liver or fatty fish I don't use cooking oils and then fiber about 800 grams to 1 kilo. 1 kilo, 200 grams of fruit and vegetables and I get my 30 to 50 grams of fiber daily. On my surplus days my fiber skyrockets to like 70 grams from whole foods. Nuts have a lot of fiber besides the fat. And that concludes my daily plate. A couple of other things about Russian cuisine. Russian cuisine in general traditionally has always been very simple. There is the saying that basically translates as cabbage soups and hot porridge are our food and that reflects Russian cuisine very closely, plus addition of meats, chicken, fish and then some salt pepper pickles in winter to keep our veggies intake high. What else we love high? What else we love? Pancakes to burn the long winter away and celebrate coming of spring. Pancakes because they look like the sun. And then to that you would add butter, hot butter, honey, very often sour cream, some berries or jam made of berries, sometimes caviar if you're feeling like something salty or savory, and especially red caviar very popular, obviously, we have a lot of salmon which gives the birth to red caviar, so also very popular in Russia, everywhere. It's also very popular in Russia everywhere. But besides that, again, very simple Meat potatoes, cabbages, carrots like tomatoes in summer salt pepper. When it comes to drinks besides vodka by the way, I'm alcohol-free, so tried it once in my life. Never really understood what it was about, since it didn't have any flavor we have non-alcoholic beverages besides kefir that's fermented, made out of dairy traditional milk. We have morse, which is you can Google it on Wikipedia which is cranberry drink, served hot and cold, usually with addition of honey or some sort of sweetener. Very popular, especially in summer. And we have kvass, that is a fermented drink made out of ripe flour or bread, malt, sugar and yeast, and there are also now varieties sugar-free, and it's also quite tasty and very refreshing in summer. And that's about it, guys. I think I've been rambling for quite a while and if you have any questions or again, if you'd like to see everything visually and read it, check out my Instagram. You'll find the link there which leads you directly to my daily newsletter. No need to sign up. If you'd like to sign up and never miss my newsletters dedicated to body, mind and work, science, practice, my coaching, clients, experiments and results as well, and what I read and from people I interview, different experts from around the world. So all of that in my newsletter. If you want to be a person 360, dedicated to personal growth and development, your body, your mindset, your work, your productivity, then check out your best newsletter, either in the show notes link to sign up or check it out. Read it, try it before signing up on my Instagram. Angela Brain Body Coach. All one word, and that concludes our episode today. Folks, don't forget, if you like to give me my birthday present and have no other means to do so, then please do invite other people to my podcast. Share that with as many people as you possibly can, or at least with one person as a birthday gift to me. Angelaurina, the host of this six-year-old podcast that's been out at least a couple of times per week, started with five days a week weekly and then transitioned to now three a day. That's where I plan to keep it, so share it as a birthday gift to me and, yeah, happy birthday to me tomorrow. And we'll just keep going, keep growing, keep doing our best to create a better world for all of us. That's what I believe is the meaning of life for every human being. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for your attention, thank you for your time. Keep growing and you'll talk. We'll talk very, very soon.