Desserts That Won’t Destroy You

Here at Gut Geek, healthy eating isn’t all about boring, green salad and fat-free yoghurt. Hell no! It’s about loving food while making conscious meal choices.

When I say ‘conscious’, I mean that we give some thought to what we put in our mouth, and we follow deliberate strategies to get the health results we want.

So for example, we are against low-fat products because they tend to be more processed and full of artificial crap like chemical additives and preservatives.

In fact, the idea that low-fat foods are good for us is a total myth.

We are also against products that have sugar added to them. If you start looking at ingredient labels on food, you’ll notice that a LOT of the products on supermarket shelves have sugar added. Avoid them like the plague!

That also means we never add refined sugar to desserts we make at home. Instead we use honey because – unlike refined sugar – it contains valuable minerals, vitamins and amino acids. It’s also been used to treat digestive and other ailments for thousands of years.

Also, we never use artificial sweeteners, because they harm our good gut bugs, in the process throwing our microbiome out of balance.

Our goal here is to eat clean, getting away from putting harmful chemicals into our body, and that’s what artificial sweeteners are.

If we’re going to have dessert, why not have one that actually makes us healthier, like these three below? You’ll see I’ve made a short list below each one of the reasons why they are so good ‘n healthy.

1. Raw Red Velvet Cake

This recipe is by Mark at My Healthy Desserts and you can find the full recipe here.

I love this recipe because:

• The sweetness comes from dates, raisins, coconut, beetroot and honey. No table sugar is added.
• Honey is Gut Geek-approved! One reason for this special honour is that, like fruit, honey is made up of fructose and glucose. These are mono sugars that are easily absorbed through the gut lining. Compare this with table sugar, which is made of sucrose, a double sugar.

When our gut is out of balance, it struggles to break down and absorb so-called double sugars like the sucrose in table sugar. The sugars end up hanging around in our gut, where they become fuel for bad bacteria, viruses and funguses like Candida – yiiiikes!

• Beetroot is packed with nutrients and has been shown to enhance performance in sports

2. Apple Crisp

This recipe is by Amanda Torres at The Curious Coconut and you can find the full recipe here

 This is a great recipe because

• It’s made without grains, dairy, eggs, nuts or seeds, but is still super-tasty!
• Because it’s made without these things, it fits with the Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) diet. AIP is a dietary system for the super-sensitive bodies of people with autoimmune conditions like Type 2 Diabetes, Lupus, Crohns, Rhumatoid Arthritis etc. It’s strict but can be very effective!

3. Blueberry Cream Cheese Dessert

This recipe is by Melanie Christner at Honest Body and you find the full recipe here

This is a kick-ass healthy dessert because:

• It’s made without wheat. When we’re healing our gut, many people find it helpful to cut out wheat, as it’s known to be a major contributor to leaky gut.
• The cream cheese is made from live, homemade yoghurt so it contains lots of the friendly bacteria that your gut needs to function properly
• The sweetness comes from honey not refined sugar

So the good news is that we can eat desserts that taste fabulous without sacrificing our health. There is a world of difference between these beauties and a typical shop-bought dessert that contains tons of sugar and artificial additives!