Sublime

Orange peel

Like pepper-dusted decorations, the lozenges the size of small loaves hanging in Italian salumerie or delis are guanciale, whole pig cheeks cured in salt. Look at a cross-section and you will see guanciale is mostly fat, streaked with pink meat. But what gorgeous, seasoned fat! That renders into sweet, rounded melted fat and a nugget of meat.

Fiber and fat, key ingredients, are removed in the refining process: fiber, to change the texture and make food taste “better,” and natural fats, to extend shelf life, since fats tend to go rancid with time. And so we ingest the “poison” without the “antidote”—the protective effects of fiber is removed from much of our food.

bad; they’re Darth Vader–meets–Lord Voldemort bad. They begin life as polyunsaturated oils (which can freely pass the blood-brain barrier), and are pumped with hydrogen. You can see these on food packages if you look for hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils. This process makes them behave more like saturated fats, becoming solid at room temp

Legumes: Beans, lentils, peas, chickpeas, hummus, peanuts. Sweeteners: Stevia, non-GMO sugar alcohols (erythritol is best to use, followed by xylitol, which is naturally harvested from birch trees), monk fruit (luo han guo).

First, the skins of almonds have been shown to provide a prebiotic effect, which as you may recall is important for nurturing the mass of bacteria in your large intestine.