, I do believe in holistic recovery.
Supporting your mind, body, and spirit is what will encourage long-term recovery and a positive lifestyle. You will be filled with love and joy.
That is why I was so fascinated with the Dopamine for Dinner cookbook. It is a reminder that healthy food is the fuel that brings one back to feeling better after suffering from substance abuse issues.
In this interview, Chef Licia Jaccard explains why a natural, healthy diet is so important to early recovery.
Can you briefly share your background and how you came to be a chef at Malibu Beach Recovery Center?
I’m part American and part French. My father was an American. My mother was French and came from a chef background. I have always been interested in cooking because of the kinds of food we had at home. In Europe, in general, you are never far away from the next country. You are never far away from England, Germany, even Portugal or Greece. It’s always very easy when you are in Europe to hop on the train and go and visit a different culture.
Cooking, for me, was a way to experience all those different cultures and enjoy them, because you can reproduce them at home. That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to learn how to cook. I was always hanging out with people who knew how to cook or were restaurant chefs, and trying to really grasp what made what you ate in restaurants better than what you made at home.
I attended law school during the day and a traditional cooking school at night. My mother had experienced all of that in her life, and she discouraged me from going into the business, but I was very strong-headed. I always kept that very present in my life, either by doing catering or by teaching people how to cook.
Joan Borsten
I’ve known Joan Borsten, the Chief Executive Officer of the Malibu Beach Recovery Center, for about 12 years, and we share a similar approach to cooking. Food from other cookbooks, or diet cookbooks, specifically, was very bland. We started a blog together called The Cooking Light Critics. We would take regular recipes, reduce the calories and fat, reconfigure them, and add spices so we could enjoy foods that were more in line with what we liked, while also being lower in calories and fat.
In 2007, Joan co-founded the Malibu Beach Recovery Center, a cutting-edge alcohol and drug treatment center based on neuroscience. The holistic approach included an innovative food plan based on the diet of French nutritionist Michel Montignac. Being French, Joan asked me to translate his books into English and, from that, derive a series of rules and recipes that we could teach the chefs and rotate.
That required me to become completely familiar with the low-Glycemic Index, which was first developed by Michel Montignac as part of the movement that began in the late ’50s and early ’60s. of trying to get away from processed foods and coming back to foods that are more generous in natural products, natural fibers and minerals, high in antioxidants, and overall healthier.
Go back to the farm
We found all those common denominators, and, when you look at it, the Malibu Beach Recovery Diet is very close to what Whole Foods has been trying to teach us for the past 25 years: go back to the farm. Alice Waters is a huge proponent of that culture. She is a moving force in the initial farm-to-table movement. We just went back to that.
We use products that don’t raise your blood sugar, help increase dopamine during meals, and make you feel full, healthy, and satisfied. It prevents people in recovery from the sugar imbalance that generates mood swings. When you are having a mood swing, right in the middle, you are not ill, you are not good, you are just iffy.
At the beginning of recovery, something is missing. “I’m not feeling right. I don’t know if I’m hungry. What do I want to do? I don’t like this.” That is a mood swing that can lead them to grab something to make them feel comfortable, and that is their drug of choice.
By enhancing their blood sugar stability, you allow them to choose not to return to their previous dependence and enable them to find proactive solutions for themselves. Really, I’m taking care of my health, and I want great food in my body. I’m walking away from processed food.” That’s the whole path to nutritional recovery through the diet.
How does the “Dopamine for Dinner” diet help someone in early recovery?
The recovery process is extremely difficult. That is the first thing that we have to acknowledge. Diet-wise, it is even more difficult, because a lot of times addicts don’t have a regular food schedule. You learn never to skip breakfast. It just runs havoc in your system. It’s something that’s really bad to do.
But just imagine that you are a heroin addict, you eat when you wake up from your high, you binge on whatever is accessible, the cheaper the better, because you use your money to buy more drugs. So you come to a recovery center like ours, and we are already weaning you off of your drug of choice, but we’re also going to try to teach you how to eat like a human being.
On the Malibu Beach Recovery Diet, you have breakfast, a snack, lunch, a snack, and you have dinner. Sometimes, even healthy people don’t eat this way. This is something that we teach them. We enroll them in a program that will nourish them and, through a specific structure, help their bodies heal faster.
Nourishment
One reason this is so important is that, if you want your body to recuperate and be rejuvenated so you can walk out of treatment in good health, you need to give it nourishment, and nourishment is a big part of the whole process. Through this nourishment, you are going to get fiber that you need to eliminate, the antioxidants, the vitamins, and minerals that your body needs to be able to heal itself and start working for you again.
When you introduce any type of chemical substance into your body, your body is able to process it, but while it is processing something that is chemically generated, it can’t focus on something else. It is like when you are in a state of disease, your body is going to focus on turning out the invader and the germs and the bacteria, and in the meantime, it is really feeble at doing other things. It weakens its normal processes.
By giving our patients a healthy, systematic diet, you help them recover faster and support the healing process. You enable the liver to filter the bloodstream, the lungs to function more effectively, and the digestive system to be cleansed by fiber. When your vital organs are functioning as they should, it promotes healing and recovery.
When your body is in balance and it has the right nutrients, it heals itself instantly. If you’ve ever been sick or injured and seen the mechanisms your body starts promoting for healing, it’s amazing how much capacity we have to heal ourselves. After three days of this diet, you see patients’ skin become rosier, their eyes become more vivid, they have better energy, and it allows them to sustain as well the very intense yoga program that is affiliated with the Malibu Beach Recovery System for recovery from alcohol and drug addiction.
Do patients follow this diet after they leave the clinic and are on their own? We teach them how to nourish themselves and encourage them to develop an interest so they are knowledgeable about what to put in their bodies. They always retain something, and even if they introduce one or two of the elements that are not normally allowed on this diet, it’s perfectly okay, because they have the knowledge of what they should be doing, even if, by choice, they decide sometimes to do otherwise.
What foods are best for clients to stay away from?
When you look at the whole diet, and when you look at the amount of foods that are allowed on this diet, it’s just really all about choices. There are very few ingredients that you cannot have. There is a distinction between what you cannot have while you are at the clinic or in treatment, and what you cannot have if you want to follow the glycemic index diet. At home, we recommend avoiding these foods.
Potatoes and corn:
Potatoes turn into starch that turns into sugar during the digestive process. So does corn. Corn is genetically modified, and we’re looking to put natural products in your body rather than genetically modified ones.
This is one of the hardest things to teach people because corn syrup has so infiltrated our food supply. It’s really sad to see how it is disguised in our food, and it is everywhere. There is corn syrup everywhere. It’s very hard to get rid of it, and I looked at quinoa pasta, thinking that it was healthy, and it’s made out of corn flour, so it’s everywhere. It all comes down to reading labels and making good judgment calls.
Cooked root vegetables:
Something that is interesting is that when you are eating raw carrots or root vegetables, they have a different glycemic index when they are raw than when they are cooked. At Thanksgiving, that casserole of cooked carrots is so sweet because carrots develop a high sugar content during the cooking process. Cooked carrots, beets, or root vegetables are ingredients that are not allowed on the diet
Some fruits:
As far as fruits are concerned, you cannot have any bananas, for the above-mentioned reason about starch converting into sugar. Also, any type of melon is just water and sugar, so that will elevate your blood sugar in an instant, and so will grapes. Before, we would have had seeded grapes, which are a source of fiber and therefore lower the glycemic index, but most grapes you can find on the market are seedless, so they’re basically just pure water and sugar.
Pork:
You can have any type of fish that you want, meats, anything is allowed except for pork products and the reason for that is that the liver cannot process pork fat, so it has a tendency of storing it in the liver and will diminish the possibilities for your liver to get healthy, if you eat only pork and in that respect you have to be wise about it. At the clinic, we don’t allow pork products because of that. Many of our clients arrive with damaged livers, especially for alcoholics whose liver has already been strained by the processing of alcohol. They need a liver functioning at its optimal rate, and pork would impair it.
White pasta, white rice, white bread:
All of that is completely forbidden, and we encourage people to replace those ingredients with whole wheat products or whole grain breads. Anything that is complete, where the grain hasn’t been stripped of all its natural elements, put into chlorine to whiten it, and then given to us as something that is supposed to make us feel good, is not allowed. Anything that is whole is really the way to go, so brown rice, whole wheat bread. All these old-fashioned grains that we have learned to discover now, like farro, barley, rolled oats, and things like that, are absolutely fabulous for your health.
No sugar, no corn, no rice, no molasses, no glucose. Honey, unfortunately, is off the map because of its high GI content.
Otherwise, everything else is allowed. French fries can nowadays be easily replaced by sweet potato fries, as most restaurants offer them as a main item. It’s very easy to organize your pantry to make the diet work for you.
Coffee:
Through diet, you will start to notice your energy levels; through the yoga program, unfortunately, coffee masks that effect. We’re looking for an all-natural way of feeling good. Coffee is also an addictive substance.
We want to give our patients the most natural diet possible, and that includes eliminating caffeine in all its forms.
What would be an example of meals for one day on the diet?
In the morning, we start our clients off with a fruit smoothie. You just throw in whatever types of fruits and vegetables that are allowed, and that will make a great smoothie. That kind of fills you up so you can go into a one- or two-hour yoga session.
They start their morning with a yoga session. That heightens your dopamine levels and, according to clinical studies, expedites the repair of a brain damaged by drugs and alcohol. When you are doing it at that time, you still need to have something in your body that will sustain the exercise.
Breakfast
At breakfast, they will have tea or juice, whichever they prefer, and typically a quiche or frittata with a fruit salad and steel-cut oatmeal. Those are great choices, but you can also have French toast as long as it’s whole wheat. Agave is our sweetener of choice. We can also serve vegetables or mushrooms with the frittata. They always have access to toast or sugar-free jams if we have them. There is always fresh fruit.
We have snacks that are available to clients all the time, so a snack can be either string cheese or it can be nuts, or we have trail mixes that we have made to offer them a variety, because nuts are so important in the regeneration of the body as well, because they contain a lot of antioxidants and a lot of natural oils that are absolutely necessary to the body. Depending on what they are looking for, clients tend to go toward that or fresh fruit.
Of course, some fear gaining weight, and nuts naturally contain more calories, so that is one reason we always offer alternatives. Another snack option is whole-wheat crackers, cheese, or hummus with whole-wheat pita bread. Something to munch on and tide you over.
Lunch
After process groups and another hour of yoga, clients come to lunch. Lunch would traditionally be a salad, and we serve everything buffet style. We have a mix of different clients. Some have very big appetites, some have smaller ones, so we just make it available to them and accommodate any dietary restrictions, whether lactose intolerance or gluten-free. We always take specific dietary restrictions and allergies into account.
Traditionally, they will have a sandwich or a meat protein with a salad. We particularly recommend with this diet, whenever you are making a salad, don’t make it boring, just mix in together fruits like cranberries or pomegranate seeds within the salad to make it really appetizing, like firewood to your palate every time you take a bite. It’s very important to keep your palate very interested in the food that you are eating; otherwise, you go back to your traditional routine, where you are always eating the same thing, and you get bored with it, and then you relapse.
Put some nuts in your salad, some cooked vegetables, fruits, protein, something that will perk your food up and make it really fun to eat, and visually interesting. When food satisfies the five senses, it is a great source of pleasure as well as a satisfying experience.
Then, they can have fruit. I’m very big on pastry, so I usually make something they can eat the fruit with, either vanilla cream sauce or cookies. There are certain types of ice cream or sorbet that we can make.
Afternoon snacks will be the same as in the morning because we offer them regularly.
Dinner
Dinner follows more process groups, individual therapy, and a final hour of yoga. It is usually a little lighter, so it would probably be a soup with a salad or grilled vegetables. We also make a point of having sweets, like an olive oil cake, so they don’t feel deprived. Also, we like to showcase that there are many dessert recipes that do not involve sugar or any ingredients not allowed on the diet.
We also recommend certain types of food that we are very big on because they enhance dopamine production. Eggs because they produce enzymes that encourage dopamine production in the brain. Any type of green vegetable, like broccoli, kale, all leafy greens, deep greens, and collard greens. Some of them, we didn’t use to have a few years ago, and have become fashionable all over again, of a sudden. It is really great.
Dark Chocolate
One of the things that I’m really thankful for is chocolate, especially dark chocolate. Chocolate contains the amino acid tyrosine that encourages the production of dopamine in the brain. You have to eat very dark chocolate, 70% or higher. We had a gathering at the clinic yesterday, and I made chocolate mousse. You don’t need to put in sugar. The taste of the chocolate is intense, it is right there in your mouth and it doesn’t make you crave sugar and it really enhances the good mood and for me it’s the perfect solution, and no one needs encouragement to eat chocolate mousse, so that is something that I do pretty regularly also.
If you are talking about a diet that suppresses sweets, and you serve them chocolate mousse, they are much more able to go with the flow and accept the limitations when you can give them something like that.
Once you get people in the kitchen, show them how easy it is to cook for themselves, and explain how food affects their livelihood and how they can get the fuel they need from natural ingredients, it is extremely rewarding. We also take our clients on shopping trips to the farmer’s market and to Whole Foods because you want to teach them how to read labels.
If they become interested in feeding themselves, they’ll never have that problem; they won’t resort to eating fast food as their only source of nourishment.
They’ll have the option and familiarity with the kitchen, buying, and transforming those ingredients into something they really like. Personal involvement in their health starts there.
Dopamine for Dinner is available on Amazon.com.
Chef Licia Jaccard teaches cooking classes at both Malibu Beach Recovery Centers: The flagship treatment Center in Malibu and the Brentwood House which is located in West Los Angeles and for women only. She writes monthly cooking articles for blogs of both treatment centers. She was born in Kansas and grew up in France. Her mother was French, from a traditional line of restaurateurs. She went to law school during the day and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu’s evening class program.
After graduating from law school, she worked in the corporate world, at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, and then for varied U.S. corporations. For Licia, cooking is a way of life — a way to experience ingredients at their source and transform them to fit specific needs. She loves going to the market and thinking up recipes or ways to adapt them while she has the raw ingredients in her hands. She also thinks that to be able to cook and control what goes into your food is paramount to good health.
