By Joel Marion, CISSN
Do you love french fries? Me too! I mean, who doesn’t… french fries are one of those amazingly delicious foods that satisfy all kinds of cravings.
Unfortunately, if you’re reaching for the typical french fries deep fried in vegetable shortening, your health and waistline are going to pay a VERY costly price to satisfy that craving. In fact, a modest 200 gram serving (equivalent to 1 potato) contains:
638 calories
76g of high glycemic carbs
34g of fat
And without a doubt the worst stat of all: 16g of trans fat! Yikes!
Fortunately, you can still satisfy that french fry craving with this healthy and delicious alternative.
Baked Sweet Potato Fries
Ingredients
*3 large sweet potatoes (each peeled and sliced into 8 wedges)
*1 tbsp of olive oil
*1/2 tsp of sea salt
*1/2 – 1 tsp of cinnamon
*1/4 tsp paprika
Directions
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
In a mixing bowl, toss all ingredients (except the cinnamon) until the potato wedges are evenly coated with oil and spices.
Place on a baking sheet, separated evenly, and then sprinkle cinnamon on top as desired. Bake for 30 minutes or until done.
Nutrition facts per 200 grams:
274 calories
39g of lower glycemic carbs
9g of fat
And best of all: ZERO grams of trans fat!
Next time you’re in the mood for french fries, give this healthy and delicious alternative a try. You’ll save more than 350 calories while completely avoiding the health-derailing trans fats found in deep fried french fries.
Now, if you’re someone who is generally sensitive to carbs (i.e. all the carbs you eat, like pasta and potatoes, tend to get stored around your waist or seemingly attach themself directly to your butt, hips, and thighs), then you’ll be happy to know that I personally had an incredible solution developed to solve this very problem. It’s called IC-5™.
You see, IC-5™ is a truly revolutionary formula whose ingredients are research-proven to help you shuttle the carbohydrates you eat to muscle (to be used as energy) instead of being stored as stomach flab like you’re probably used to.
Specifically, IC-5™ helps you:
*automatically lower the glycemic index of the foods you eat
*significantly increase insulin sensitivity so you can burn more fat
*considerably decrease fat storage from carb intake
*dramatically increase carbohydrate tolerance up to 10 fold
Again, IC-5™ is the exact formula I had created for my personal use, and now you can experience its effectiveness, too. Just take two (2) capsules before any carbohydrate-containing meal and let science do the rest.
See our IC-5™ specials here:
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To your results!
Even with sweet potatoes, this is a high carb food. Can you do this same recipe with turnips? Carrots? Parsnips? I’m just thinking that another root might be lower carb overall.
Hi Lila,
Great question about other root vegetables. A great way to prepare other root vegetables is to mash them. You can use sweet potatoes with chiles and extra virgin olive oil. Or, you could try a combo of carrots and rutabaga in a 50/50 mash. Tim Ferriss discusses this in his book “The 4-Hour Chef.”
He gives a recipe for mashed cauliflower that uses the following ingredients:
1 head cauliflower
1/4 cup cashews
1/2 can unsweetened coconut milk
3 pinches curry powder
salt and pepper to taste
The recipe is simple. Just put the cauliflower florets in a pot (uncovered) with the coconut milk and cashews and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and cover, cooking for about 20 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the seasonings, and mash with a fork. You could easily do the same with the other root vegetables, substituting extra virgin olive oil, ghee, grass-fed butter, or coconut oil (about 2 T).
Tim Skwiat
BT Head Trainer
How do you know if you do or do not have insulin sensitivity?
Hi Tom,
Great question! Unless you’re an insulin-dependent diabetic, you produce insulin. Generally speaking, insulin’s job is to tightly regulate blood sugar levels. As a result, the number one nutrient that affects insulin levels is carbohydrates. When blood sugar rises in response to eating a carbohydrate-based food or meal, insulin is secreted from the pancreas to help shuttle the sugar to cells.
The less insulin that the pancreas needs to secrete, the better. Insulin can both blunt fat burning, as well as promote fat storage. In the presence of insulin, fat-burning hormones and enzymes can essentially be shut down.
The fate of blood sugar is dependent on the amount of room in your storage tanks. Essentially, you have a limited capacity in your muscles and your liver for glucose, but you have an unlimited tank in your fat tissue. Insulin can also increase the enzymes that convert sugar to fat to be stored in those tissues.
For all of these reasons, it’s very important to maintain good insulin sensitivity. You can actually do some diagnostic testing to determine your level of insulin sensitivity/resistance. Insulin resistance is characterized by the body needing to produce excess insulin to process blood sugar properly. A good example of this is a type 2 diabetic.
Your doctor can run a test on both fasting blood sugar and insulin levels to give you gauge of where you are at. There’s a good chance, however, if you don’t exercise regularly, don’t eat super clean all of the time, and have weight/fat to lose that your insulin sensitivity is impaired.
It’s a great idea to look into our all-star nutrient partitioning supplement IC-5, which is a blend of five research-proven ingredients that can significantly improve blood sugar management and insulin sensitivity.
Tim Skwiat
BT Head Trainer