A 'Good Fat' Guide From the Moon Juice Guru
Amanda Chantal Bacon and her son. Photo: Moon Juice/Facebook
"My diet is more than 60 percent fat," says Amanda Chantal Bacon. "On Sundays, it’s 70 percent." This may sound shocking coming from Bacon, who owns Moon Juice, three raw 100% organic juice shops in Los Angeles (as well as a bustling online business), but she believes she needs those fats for energy. ”I work 12 to 14 hours a day and I have a three-year-old (and I don’t have a nanny); I am nonstop, seven days a week, go go go. I couldn’t keep up with my life if I were a waifish, size-two-jeans raw food juicer. Getting good fats into my diet powers my energy and nourishes the nervous system.”
So what are good fats in Bacon’s book? Most important to her is that they’re raw. “Heat changes the fatty acid chain and oxidizes them, so you’re dealing with a degenerated fat,” says Bacon. Second, she prefers plant-based fats: Bacon eats lots of avocados and sprouted nuts and seeds, and she cooks with coconut oil and ghee.
Here’s what a typical day of eating this way might look like:
Breakfast: Bacon starts the day with warm nut milk, which she makes by blending raw nut butter and spring water. (“I’m a single working mom. If I can blast out this nut milk, so can you.”) She throws in some hemp seeds “for brain power” and raw vanilla for flavor, and sometimes she adds 1 teaspoon of ghee to the mixture.
Snack: Bacon travels around with sprouted pumpkin seeds and almonds.
Lunch: “I have an avocado a day,” says Bacon, and she eats it with a bowl of grains or vegetables. She might have some fish, cooked with ghee. “I’m a huge proponent of raw fat, but there’s really beneficial stuff in fish and ghee and both of those are cooked.” If she has a brothy soup, she might add some olive oil.
Snack: “If I need a pick-me-up, a chai blended with some ghee and almond butter would be a good, energizing snack.”
Dinner: For dinner, Bacon goes straight for olive oil, tossed into a bowl of vegetables or grains. “I don’t cook with olive oil, I just drizzle it on at the end,” she says. “Or if I lightly warm it—sometimes it’s nice to bring out the fragrance of garlic—I’ll gently heat and very slowly cook it.”
If you want to follow Bacon’s lead, with a diet heavy in raw fats, she says you’ll need to be judicious about sugar and carbohydrate intake. “Don’t think you can have a standard American diet that’s high in sweets and carbs and cooked animals fat and then dump a bunch of raw fat onto it and you’ll lose weight. It’s not a cure-all.”
For More on Moon Juice’s Amanda Chantal Bacon:
The juice guru who wants to save the world!
Is your diet in need of an overhaul? What’s the last “good fat” you had?
