Dopamine for Dinner: An Interview with Chef Licia

I do believe in the idea of 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 cook book. 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 back ground 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. My mother comes from a chef background. I have always been interested in cooking, because of the type of food that we experienced 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 of experiencing all those different cultures and enjoying them because then 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 chefs in restaurants and trying to really grasp what it was that made what you eat in restaurants better than what you made at home.

I went to law school during the day and went to a traditional cooking school at night. My mother had experienced all of that in her life, 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.

I’ve known Joan Borsten, the Chief Executive Officer of the Malibu Beach Recovery Center for about twelve years and we have the same type of approach to cooking. Food from other cookbooks, or diet cookbooks, specifically was very bland. We started a blog together which was called, The Cooking Light Critics. We would take regular recipes and just lower the number of calories, lower the amount of fat, reconfigure them, add spices so that we could enjoy some types of food that were more in conformity with the type of food we liked, but also that was lower in calories and in 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 approach to food to be based on the diet of a French nutritionist, Michel Montignac.  Being French, Joan asked me to translate his books into English and to derive from that a series of rules and recipes that we could teach the chefs and rotate in a way.

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 came in the late ’50s, beginning of the ’60s. of trying to get away from processed foods, and coming back to foods that were more generous in natural products, natural fibers and minerals, high antioxidants and eating overall healthier food.

We found all those common denominators and basically 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, which to 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 elevate your blood sugar, that facilitates the increase of dopamine in your meals and make you feel full, healthy and satisfied.  It prevents people in recovery the sugar imbalance that generates mood swings. When you are having a mood swing, when you are right in the middle, you are not ill, you are not good, you are just like 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 mood swing that can bring to grabbing something that will make them feel comfortable and that is their drug of choice.

So by enhancing the stability of their blood sugar, then you allow them to exercise that choice of not going back to their dependency from before and also you enable them to find solutions for themselves that are proactive. The really “I’m taking care of my health, 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 is a really bad thing 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 and 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 into a program that is going to nourish them and through a certain structure, make their body heal faster.

One of the reasons why this is so important is because if you want your body to recuperate and to be rejuvenated to walk out of treatment in good health, you need to give it nourishment and the nourishment is a really 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 in 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.

So by giving our patients a very healthy and systematic diet, you allow them to recuperate faster and you enable the healing process to go faster for them. You enable the liver to be able to filter the bloodstream, you enable the lungs to function at a better capacity, you enable the digestive system to get cleansed through fiber. When your vital organs are functioning like they primarily 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 you see the mechanisms that your body starts promoting for healing, it’s just amazing that capacity that we have of healing ourselves. After three days of this diet, you see patient’s 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 once they are out of the clinic and once they are on their own? The reason that we teach them how to nourish themselves and we try to give them an interest, we try to give them all the reasoning behind the diet, is so that they become knowledgeable about what to put in their body. They always retain something and even if they introduce one or two of the elements that is 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 differentiation between what you cannot have while you are at the clinic, while you are in treatment and what you cannot have if you want to follow the glycemic index diet, but if you are at home, this is what we recommend you stay away from.

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 at putting natural products in your body and not genetically modified products.

This is one of the hardest things to teach people, because there has been such an infiltration in our food bank of corn syrup. It’s really sad to see how it is dissimulated 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 is 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 variety of grapes, which were a source of fiber and therefore lowered the glycemic index content, but most of the grapes that you can find on the market are seedless, so basically it’s 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 that is functioning at its optimum 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 their 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 very easily replaced by sweet potato fries, because most restaurants have it as a prime product. It’s very easy to organize your pantry to make the diet work for you.

Coffee: Through the diet, you are going to start feeling your energy levels and through the yoga program and unfortunately coffee masks that effect. We’re looking for the all-natural way of feeling good. Coffee is also an addictive substance.

We want to give our patients as natural a diet as possible and that includes taking away 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 so that you can go into a one 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.

When they come to breakfast, they will have tea or they will have juices, whichever one they prefer and they will typically a quiche or frittata with a fruit salad and steel-cut oatmeal. Those are great choices  but that can also have french toast as long as it’s whole wheat. Agave is our sweetener of choice. We can make vegetables also to go with the frittata, or mushrooms. 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. The clients themselves, depending on what they are looking for tend will to go towards that or toward fresh fruit.

Of course, some have a fear of gain weight and of course, nuts naturally contain more calories so that is one of the reasons that we always offer alternatives as well. Another alternative for a snack is some whole wheat crackers, cheese or humus with whole wheat pita bread. Something to munch on and tide you over.

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 of them have smaller appetites, so we just make it available for them and we do accommodate whatever food restrictions they have if it is lactose intolerance or gluten free. We always make sure that specific food restrictions and allergies are taken into account as well.

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 of it and then you relapse.

Put some nuts in your salad, some cooked vegetables, fruits, protein, something that 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 after that, they can either have fruits. I’m very big on pastry, so I usually always make something that they can eat the fruits with, either vanilla cream sauce or cookies. There are certain types of ice cream or sorbet that we can make.

Snacks in the afternoon are going to be the same as in the morning, because we offer that on a regular basis.

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 it a point to have sweets, to have something like an olive oil cake, so that they don’t feel deprived. We also like to showcase that there are many recipes for desserts that do not involve sugar or any of the ingredients that are not allowed on the diet.

We also recommend certain types of food that we are very big on, because it enhances the Dopamine production. Eggs because they produces enzymes that encourage the 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 used to have a few years ago and have become in fashion all over again of a sudden. It is really great.

One of the things that I’m really thankful for is chocolate, especially the dark chocolate.  Chocolate contains the amino acid tyrosine that encourage the production of dopamine in the brain.  You have to eat chocolate that is very dark, 70% or over. 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 and you show them how easy it is to cook for themselves and you show them how food affects their livelihood and how they can get the fuel that 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 they’ll have familiarity with the kitchen with buying and with transforming those ingredients into something that 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 and 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 of recipes, or ways of adapting recipes while she have 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.