Low-Carb Lemon Tart Dessert (High Citrate & Choline)

Doctor Rhonda Patrick here. Today I'm going to share with you a Rhonda recipe, my low carb lemon tart. Everyone needs a little sweet in their lives, and this is my recipe for sweetened tart that may be healthier than most. I'm going to share with you some fun, nerdy facts in a little bit, some of which make me think it may even improve learning and memory. But first, lemon tart. First, let's make the crust. You'll need 3/4 a cup of coconut flour, 4 tablespoons of olive oil or coconut oil, One tablespoon of melted butter, One teaspoon of stevia, Two eggs. Time to get your mix on. You want it to look about like. Now it's time to pack our crust into an oiled pie tin. Let's harden the crust by heating it for five minutes in the oven.

After it's been preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, it's time to make the lemon tart filling. You'll need around five or six lemons and an apple peeler for zesting. We've zested all five lemons. Now let's dump what we've got into the blender. At this point, we try to get around three quarters of a cup of lemon juice from our zested lemons. Now we add our lemon juice to the blender, but we filter out any seeds first. The filling gets a little more stevia than the crust. This time we add four teaspoons, And it's time for a little blend action. Time to thicken our lemon tart filling. We set the stovetop to a medium burn. You'll also notice the oven is already preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is important because we'll want to add the filling to the crust and begin baking right afterward. We'll need to add around 2 tablespoons of butter, Two tablespoons of olive oil or coconut oil. We're going to need a thickening agent. So while our lemon juice and oil concoction is heating up, we'll whisk and then add two whole eggs and then two egg yolks without egg white. Leaving out some of the egg white keeps the lemon tart from tasting like egg tart. From this point on, we'll stir until we see an appropriate level of thickness that should be somewhat reminiscent of pudding. This usually takes around six minutes at medium temperature. And now, six minutes later, we have something that kind of looks like pudding.

Time to lay our tart filling on top of the coconut flour crust we made earlier. We stick the whole tart crust, filling and all into the oven and bake for 10 minutes. Now let it spend some time in the fridge cooling down and in a couple of hours or so it's ready to serve. This delicious recipe has three things that I want to tell you about the flavonoids, the citrate and the choline. The main ingredient in lemon tart are lemons. Lemons are a citrus fruit that contain over 60 different flavonoid compounds including naringen, apigenin and luteolin. These compounds have anti inflammatory and antioxidant properties that have been shown to decrease the risk of cancer several different neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular disease and coronary heart disease.

Lemons are also very high in citric acid which is converted into citrate at physiological ph and is what gives lemons their tart taste. Citrate is ordinarily a metabolite that's generated from the carbohydrates or fat that you eat and is ultimately converted into energy. This means that citrate from lemons may be a shortcut past these other metabolically wasteful intermediary steps and is a highly available form of energy. In other words, citrate is a form of energy that skips to the front of the line. Citrate from lemons has also been shown to prevent and improve kidney stones in several different clinical studies because citrate is able to prevent calcium oxalate from forming crystals.

Finally, citrate is converted into two important metabolites, oxaloacetate and acetyl COA oxaloacetate has recently been shown to extend the lifespan of worms and suggests that citrate from lemons may be a great source of oxaloacetate, though that doesn't necessarily mean that eating a bunch of lemons is going to allow you to become a centenarian. What's a little more interesting in my mind is that citrate gets converted into acetyl CoA, which among other things is one of the two precursors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. While there are many different sodium dependent citrate transporters across several regions of the brain, it is unclear whether citrate directly gets transported across the blood brain barrier.

However, at the very least we know that citrate gets converted into pyruvate which does cross the blood brain barrier in the brain. Acetylcholine is important for REM sleep, learning, memory, attention and more. What's Also interesting is that as Alzheimer's disease progresses, the progress the brains of Alzheimer's patients make less and less acetylcholine. In fact, one of the first line of treatments for Alzheimer's disease is inhibition of an enzyme that degrades acetylcholine in the brain. This enzyme is known as acetylcholinesterase. The other important precursor for acetylcholine is, well, choline. This is also relatively abundant in lemon tart because egg yolk is high in choline.

The Institute of Medicine has set the adequate intake for choline for women at 425mg a day and for men at 550mg. A one large egg yolk has around 125mg of choline. Choline and acetyl COA catalyzed by the enzyme acetylcholine transferase produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. In fact, it's been shown if you add acetyl COA and choline to brain homogenate, otherwise known as mushed up brains, acetylcholine is produced from these two precursors. It's also been shown that citrate in the brain is a source of acetyl COA that is also used for acetylcholine synthesis. If you're reading between the lines, you may have figured this out already. This recipe was originally designed to try and juice up the acetylcholine pathway.

When I created this recipe, I was looking for precursors that could give me acetylcholine through my diet. Now getting back to the citrate blood brain barrier issue. Maybe this works, maybe it doesn't, but choline does cross the blood brain barrier. In addition to being a precursor for acetylcholine, choline from eggs is also a very important source of methyl groups which are used in epigenetics. Epigenetics is a process by which genes are turned on and off and is regulated by environmental factors such as diet and lifestyle. This is a very important fact because the other source of methyl groups, the folate pathway, is often disrupted due to gene variation in an enzyme called mthfr.

Finally, choline from eggs and is also a precursor for phosphatidylcholine, the major component of all cell membranes, which is important for its structure, function and permeability of all cells. This is particularly important in neurons as it regulates general neurotransmission. Phosphatidylcholine is hugely important in the liver because it's required for the liver to secrete triglycerides into very low density lipoproteins or vldl cholesterol. Decreased phosphatidylcholine can lead to decreased fat removal from the liver and increased fatty liver. The liver is able to produce phosphatidylcholine without the use of dietary choline.

However, as much as 50% of the population carry a genetic variation that does not allow them to do this well, and these people require a higher intake of dietary choline, even higher than the recommended daily intake. In summary, this recipe for lemon tart is low carb and is packed with a variety of compounds including flavonoids, citrate and choline, which have positive health benefits and if taken with a grain of salt, may improve learning and memory too. But if nothing else, it's a tasty treat that I happen to like and I hope you do too. I'm Dr. Rhonda Patrick and I hope you love this lemon tart.