No matter how we eat, the way we participate in the food cycle in the most ethical, sustainable, and healthy way is a really important conversation to have. Joining me to talk about cooking what you hunt is Bri Van Scotter, a true renaissance woman with degrees in art, communications, and cuisine – and the force behind Wilderness to Table, through which she teaches people about making, enjoying, and also sourcing delicious and healthy food. We chat with Bri about her journey to becoming a self-sustained food maker through harvesting and hunting, hearing about how she felt unfulfilled with her initial education and career before learning about cuisine and becoming fascinated with self-sourced ingredients.
She talks about how she learned to hunt and reconcile her hesitance to kill with her belief that it’s more humane than mass farmed approaches, recounting the story of her first kill and how she overcome the initial shock. We consider the contrasts between factory farms, slaughterhouses, and sustainable harvesting, and Bri weighs in on our culture's damaging eating habits, how organic food helped her health journey, and that self-harvesting results in a more meaningful cooking process. Bri speaks about the contrast between Instagram’s culture of trophy hunting and her approach, according to which the whole hunt is geared toward the meal, and the work she is doing to advocate it with women's hunting groups and a course in the pipeline. Bri’s current career also takes center stage, and we chat about her show, the hunts she goes on, her favorite game meat, the new recipe book she is working on, and the nose-to-tail message behind all her projects. For this and a whole lot more on the topic of self-sustained cooking, tune in today!
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Want to connect, ask questions for the podcast, or offer feedback? Drop me a note on Instagram @themusclemaven, send me an email at ashleighvanhouten@gmail.com, and sign up for my weekly newsletter at ashleighvanhouten.com
Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“I need to pay respect to these animals and if I had my hands on them since the beginning, I need to have only my hands on them in the end.” — @Chefbrivs [0:06:19]
“Even when I hunt, if I can’t get a good shot, I am not going to take it, because the last thing I want is for that animal to suffer.” — @Chefbrivs [0:10:46]
“It’s been my dream to have a cookbook. As a chef, that’s my goal, but I never thought I was going to have a wild game cookbook.” — @Chefbrivs [0:43:35]
“Farming could be transformed into something really amazing.” — @Chefbrivs [0:54:18]
“You have to know what to cook before you harvest your animal because that determines how you butcher in the field.” — @Chefbrivs [1:00:37]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
The Culinary Institute of America
Discovering the intricacy of the female body is a beautiful process. Our delicate hormonal balance affects all aspects of our health and wellbeing, from the condition of our skin to the quality of our sleep and sex lives. In this episode, I interview Dr. Anna Cabeca who is board certified in genealogy and obstetrics, integrative medicine, and anti-aging and regenerative medicine and who is also an authoritative voice in the realm of functional medicine, menopause, and women’s sexual health. Dr. Cabeca unpacks the three major hormones and how an increase or decrease in their levels affect us and explains how they can be managed and even optimized for healing. We get into the variables that affect the efficacy of oxytocin supplementation, the use of exogenous hormones such as melatonin, and the relationship between adiponectin and weight loss resistance. Turning our attention to her newly released book Keto-Green 16, Dr. Cabeca explains how her approach to the ketogenic diet differs from the mainstream understanding, highlighting her views on alkalizing foods, the need for digestive enzymes, consuming greens versus proteins, intermittent fasting, and much more.
Want to connect, ask questions for the podcast, or offer feedback? Drop me a note on Instagram @themusclemaven, send me an email at ashleighvanhouten.com, and sign up for my weekly newsletter at ashleighvanhouten.com
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Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“It takes more than hormones to fix our hormones. That’s where lifestyle medicine becomes really powerful.” — @AnnaCabeca [0:05:18]
“We really need to look at the major hormones and for me, those are insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin. Those three hormones are the most powerful hormones in our body, with oxytocin being the crowing hormone.” — @AnnaCabeca [0:05:57]
“It is our own activities and our perceptions and our lifestyle practices that increase our own natural oxytocin. We manage cortisol and do practices that increase oxytocin.” — @AnnaCabeca [0:18:25]
“Increasing your digestive enzymes is one of the key things that we need to do and focus on, especially as we get older.” — @AnnaCabeca [0:43:06]
“These low-calorie days that we have, destroy our metabolism. We are better to fast than eat small meals.” — @AnnaCabeca [0:59:42]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
A lot has happened since the last time I published a podcast episode, so I want to thank all of you for sticking around despite all the chaos in the world right now. I hope that you guys missed me as much as I missed talking to you. Today I’m introducing you to the new name and brand of the show and explain to listeners the reasons for all these changes.
In short, Paleo Magazine is undergoing some big transformations and part of their restructuring resulted in much uncertainty about the future of the podcast. But loving this show and the community we’ve created, I jumped in and purchased the podcast, and decided to rebrand it as Muscle Maven Radio! This is an exciting journey that I hope to take all the current listeners on with me and hopefully gain a whole lot more as we continue building out the community. In this episode, I walk you through the aspects that will stay the same, and those that—I’m certain—will be even better than before!
Key Points From This Episode:
Tweetables:
“I have purchased the Paleo Magazine Radio podcast and I have rebranded it under my own name aka the Muscle Maven, which is my nickname.” — Ashleigh VanHouten [0:01:01]
“All I knew was that putting the podcast on hold or permanently getting rid of it was just too sad for me to bear.” — Ashleigh VanHouten [0:01:58]
“I wanted to make a space that is for everybody who is a health and fitness and food nerd and just likes to learn.” — Ashleigh VanHouten [0:04:26]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: