Protective Diet makes healthy living fun, delicious, and sustainable! The recipes are designed as weekly educational bites to achieve and maintain optimal health with a sustainable diet incorporating plant-based functional foods based on advances in phytochemical research. This high-fiber, whole fruit treat was created to make your resident microbiota produce anti-inflammatory, short-chain fatty acids to heal your epithelium (gut wall) and prevent disease. The Hot Banana Split is our favorite way to finish our daily feast. Enjoying one solo or serving a crowd Banana Splits are easy to assemble and a novelty to eat. My job is to create recipes incorporating cancer-inhibiting, disease-reversing, protective ingredients that offer you a lean-body advantage. Yours is to follow protective recipes and share your excitement about every satisfying bite and meal that healed you. Please share this recipe with a friend if you enjoy a Protective Diet.

Pin

Ingredients for one banana split:

• 1 organic banana, washed
• 1 teaspoon cacao nibs
• 2 teaspoons cocoa, cacao or carob powder
• 3 to 4 pineapple chunks, frozen or fresh
• 3 to 4 dark sweet cherries, frozen or fresh

Directions:

1. Watch video, read all Directions, Notes and Pro Tips
2. Line toaster oven, baking pan, or air fryer baking pan with parchment paper
3. Assemble as shown in the video or follow directions
4. Slice stem off banana
5. Slice banana lengthwise
6. Push inward with both hands to open, (similar to a baked potato before topping)
7. Sprinkle inside with cacao nibs and measured cacao powder, (nibs offer a nut-free nutty texture when baked)
8. Top with frozen or fresh pineapple and cherries
9. Place pan in the center of a toaster oven set to 400-degrees or an air fryer set to 350 degrees, (no preheating necessary)
10. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes or until skin is blackened, tender and pineapple is caramelized
11. Grab a spoon, stir together, and enjoy eating your all fruit, protective banana split
12. If you are a fiber eating champion and ready to treat your microbiota with protective insoluble fiber pick up that tender roasted peel and chew it up with delight
13. Jerry and I love the peel when it is cooked tender
14. We set our Banana Splits in the oven at the start of dinner, helping us keep track of our eating window and giving us a warm all fruit dessert to look forward to

Notes & Pro Tips:

• The use of more cacao powder than suggested will be bitter in this unsweetened recipe
• The frozen or fresh fruit will create a chocolate sauce when baking
• The cacao nibs should be placed under the pineapple and cherries, becoming tender when baked
• If you can’t have chocolate, use carob powder and carob nibs as a substitute
• Skip cacao if you are hypersensitive to caffeine
• Do not use Dutch-processed cocoa; chemicals are used in this process

Serving Suggestions:

• Start baking 45 minutes before desired serving time and enjoy warm
• Make one banana for each person dining with you, or make extra to enjoy cold the next day
• Served cold the chocolate becomes custard-like
• I find this all fruit dessert the perfect finish when I’m full, but require a sweet treat to complete my meal
• As we dig in with fun little dessert spoons I remind Jerry how protective this anti-angiogenetic, pro-epithelium Banana Split is and squeal with delight about delicious PD Living

Science:

• Unsweetened Organic Cacao is in my protective pantry:
  Cacao exhibits potent antiangiogenic bioactivity that has the potential to suppress tumor angiogenesis through dietary intake. In addition, cacao inhibited the growth of lymphoma cells. Different cacao varieties possess different levels of bioactivity. This study is one of the first to directly test cacao rather than individual cacao bioactive compounds. Whole food preparations may contain greater bioactivity than individual components.
  https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Comparative-Antiproliferative-and-Antiangiogenic-of-Li-Li/9cc5f0b6d4d88bdc1719006ae900503c0212bd83
• Cancer protective Bananas and their high-fiber peels are incorporated in my recipes:
  Cancer, the second most frequent cause of mortality, is a hyper-proliferative disorder that involves cellular transformation, deregulation of apoptosis, and excessive proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis (1). Despite innovative therapeutic approaches and newer technological developments, cancer continues to be amongst the most fatal disorders (2, 3). According to the 2020 Global Cancer Observatory report provided by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (World Health Organization), there were 18.1 million new cases of cancer and 9.5 million cancer-related deaths that occurred globally in 2018. They also stated that the number of newly diagnosed cancer cases is projected to increase to 29.5 million per year, and projected cancer-related deaths are expected to increase to16.4 million per year by 2040 (www.cancer.gov). While the precise cause for cancer initiation is still unclear, the most important contributing variables for this condition are toxins, pollution, radioactive substances, oncogenic viruses (4, 5), and epigenetic abnormalities (6). Many anticancer medications currently in use not only destroy cancer cells, but also healthy cells too. The major obstacles involved with cancer chemotherapy are non-specific targeting and the evolution of drug resistance. The need for more effective anticancer medications with improved safety profiles has become an urgent need to defeat this dreaded disease, despite significant advances in cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. For most of the world, modern medicine has replaced traditional medicine as means of therapy for human illnesses (7). Nevertheless, the use of medicinal plants for health promotion and disease prevention has increased in recent decades (8). Phytochemicals are being extensively investigated, and they have demonstrated promising anticarcinogenic properties by interfering with cancer initiation and modulating various pathways, including cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, invasion, and metastasis (9–12).
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8294041/
• Be The Boss of your Body:
  With Protective Diet lifestyle suggestions and recipes you can eliminate life-threatening toxins, combat pollution, and radioactive substances with oxidative stress blasting phytochemicals and antioxidants. Plant-fiber diversity on a full-time Protective Diet tightens and strengthens the epithelium (gut wall), protecting us from oncogenic viruses. We are not victims of cancer. We are victims of our diet and lifestyle choices. We can win the war against cancer if we prevent rather than treat. Protective Diet recipes are your road map to become the boss of your body. Your body is designed to heal and maintain homeostasis. Using pharmicuticle plant research to incorporate plant ingredients that have demonstrated promising anticarcinogenic properties by interfering with cancer initiation and modulating various pathways, including cell proliferation, differentiation, apoptosis, angiogenesis, invasion, and metastasis cellular protection and healing. Pharmicuticle companies are doing their best to create cancer and degenerative disease treatments from extracts of these plants. I’m inviting you to jump to the front of the healthy living line and eat them every day for optimal health and longevity.
• Pineapple In My Protective Freezer:
  Tops The Banana Split, blends into Sugar-Free Sweet & Sour Duck Sauce, and completes our Pineapple Upside Down Cake. Jump to the front of the healthy living line and eat delicious organic pineapple!
• Bromelain is a major sulfhydryl proteolytic enzyme found in pineapple, having multiple activities in many areas of medicine. Due to its low toxicity, high efficiency, high availability, and relative simplicity of acquisition, it is the object of inexhaustible interest of scientists. This review summarizes scientific reports concerning the possible application of bromelain in treating cardiovascular diseases, blood coagulation and fibrinolysis disorders, infectious diseases, inflammation-associated diseases, and many types of cancer. However, for the proper application of such multi-action activities of bromelain, further exploration of the mechanism of its action is needed. It is supposed that the anti-viral, anti-inflammatory, cardioprotective, and anti-coagulatory activity of bromelain may become a complementary therapy for COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 patients. During the irrepressible spread of novel variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, such beneficial properties of this biomolecule might help prevent escalation and the progression of the COVID-19 disease.
  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34959865/
• Dark Sweet Cherries in my Protective Freezer:
  They complete my banana split and make my Yogi Bowls something special
• Get out of the healthy living waiting room and eat delicious organic cherries!
• Sweet cherries (Prunus avium L.) are among the most appreciated fruits worldwide because of their organoleptic properties and nutritional value. The accurate phytochemical composition and nutritional value of sweet cherries depends on the climatic region, cultivar, and bioaccessibility, and bioavailability of specific compounds. Nevertheless, sweet cherry extracts are highly enriched in several phenolic compounds with relevant bioactivity. Over the years, technological advances in chemical analysis and fields as varied as proteomics, genomics, and bioinformatics have allowed the detailed characterization of the sweet cherry bioactive phytonutrients and their biological function. In this context, the effect of sweet cherries on suppressing important events in the carcinogenic process, such as oxidative stress and inflammation, was widely documented. Interestingly, results from our research group and others have widened the action of sweet cherries to many hallmarks of cancer, namely metabolic reprogramming. The present review discusses the anticarcinogenic potential of sweet cherries by addressing their phytochemical composition, the bioaccessibility and bioavailability of specific bioactive compounds, and the existing knowledge concerning the effects against oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, deregulated cell proliferation and apoptosis, invasion and metastization, and metabolic alterations. Globally, this review highlights the prospective use of sweet cherries as a dietary supplement or in cancer treatment. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34063349/