Dr McDougall’s Fluffy Pancakes

Whole Food Plant Based by Dr. McDougall

Vegans seem to embody healthy, skinny, glowing and happy beings making kinder life choices. Having been a vegan for over a decade now and vegetarian before that, there has been a large shift in the market. When I first started to practice veganism for ethical and health reasons, the market share allocated to vegan products was rather small. Fruits & vegetables along with whole grains and seeds were the main options perhaps with a few accidentally vegan products in the market. Today, the vegan market is an estimated $12.7 Billion U.S. Dollars with vegan speciality stores & restaurants dotted all along.

The trouble is there are many more processed vegan foods out there mimicking their dairy and meat counterparts. Adding flavours comes at the cost of more processing, higher fat, greater amounts of sugar and salt and other additives. As a long term vegan I was excited when these products flooded the markets, but found that this came at a cost to the environment in the form of all the plastic, packaging and deteriorating health.

In the process of finding answers I discovered Dr. McDougall’ s program. It promised to prevent certain lifestyle-related conditions and manage my weight which had been creeping upwards. I loved Dr McDougall’s wisdom because he supports eating whole starches as a path to healing (very, very important to my Indian foodie roots). He also recommends that a large portion of daily food should be based on whole grains, legumes, vegetables (starchy & non- starchy) and to eliminate oil…. completely!

Dr McDougall has published The Starch Solution: Eat the Foods You Love, Regain Your Health, and Lose the Weight for Good! describing how this lifestyle is beneficial and recipes following these concepts. I did go ahead and buy the e-book however, the McDougall website has free resources, articles, hundreds of recipes in the newsletter archives. Dr McDougall genuinely wants to help and has successfully done for decades by offering the detailed meal plans and recipes online completely free.

The recipes I’ve tried from the book and the website have all turned out delicious, when experimenting on my unsuspecting friends, they haven’t been able to tell the difference between oil free Indian food, though they did admit feeling lighter and satiated with the whole grains. Now, it has been well proven that there is no “one size fits all” with dietary plans, however making healthier lifestyle changes has been a proven winner for my family.

We tried Dr McDougall’s Fluffy Pancakes from the recipe here, as fruit seems to ripen extra fast in summer. A great activity for little cooks and is made with wholemeal flour, sparkling water and bananas. We left out the egg replacer as I find bananas work well as one and the wonderslim fat replacer as I couldn’t find any. The sparkling water is highly recommended as we have made the pancakes since and did not have any sparkling water which makes the pancakes not as light and fluffy.