Posts by Marlene
Celebrity Spotlight: Louise Hay
Posted By Marlene on 2012-01-20 18:38
A late bloomer, Louise did not begin her work as a healer and author until middle age. Louise started by counselling parishioners in her church, and began noticing the connections between their physical ailments and their emotional and mental states. She began taking notes and from these notes Louise wrote Heal Your Body in 1976. Perhaps her best-known work was You Can Heal Your Life, which was published in 1984 and shot her to fame. More books followed: The Power is Within You (1991) and I Can Do It (2004).
The main theme running through Louise's affirmations is one of self-acceptance, of loving and approving oneself regardless of all the negative messages that one may have heard in childhood.
Louise not only wrote about the power of positive affirmations, she lived them; diagnosed with cervical cancer, Louise added mind-body healing and powerful affirmations to alternative treatments, and claims to have cured herself completely of cancer. Louise's childhood was marked by poverty and abuse, which she believes contributed to developing cancer. Louise drew upon the experiences she gained from overcoming an unhappy childhood, to develop compassion in her work with others.
Louise Hay is not only an author and healer but also a motivational speaker. She has even founded her own publishing company, Hay House, which publishes books by over 100 authors, amongst them Wayne Dyer and Esther and Jerry Hicks.
For more information, please visit Louise's website: www.louisehay.com
Breaking Medical News: Outdoor Exercise Burns More Calories in the Winter
Posted By Marlene on 2012-01-20 18:21
This month's edition of Women's Health Magazine has provided winter-weather exercise tips:
1. Always warm up indoors first.
2. Make sure your running or walking route is plowed and free of ice.
3. Go easy - since working out in the cold is harder on your body, start off by going for less time and distance than you would do for a warm-weather workout.
4. Wear layers, so you can peel off the top as your body warms up, and put back on as you finish exercising.
5. If the weather is very cold, breathe through a scarf to avoid the shock of bitterly cold air going down your airways.
6. Don't forget your water. It is just as important to keep your body hydrated in the winter as it is in the summer. As winter air can be drying, you may notice yourself becoming just as thirsty as you do in the summer.
7. Cool down before coming back indoors.
For more information, please visit Women's Health magazine www.womenshealthmag.com/fitness/workout-in-the-cold
Happy, Healthy New Year from MedMacro!!
Posted By Marlene on 2012-01-14 14:48
Look out for the next edition of our Rays of Hope Newsletter, coming out this week.
Nutrition: The Future of Medicine by T Colin Campbell
Posted By Marlene on 2010-11-04 04:31
I doubt that few would disagree with the observation that nutrition is one of the most confusing words or concepts in the English language. What we choose to eat also is one of the most emotionally intense topics of human discourse, ranking up there with sex, religion and politics. Yet, properly practiced nutrition, as a dietary lifestyle, can do more to create health and save health care costs than all the contemporary medical interventions put together.
I know well this story. Having started a research and teaching career in nutrition over 50 years ago, I have seen the passion, the frivolity and the arrogance over and over and over when people talk about their food choices. This topic is very, very personal. It's sad because I do not see very much progress over these last four to five decades. Lots of shouting and not much constructive thought.
It is true that we have discovered a tremendous amount of information but this does not mean discovering what it all means. Indeed, our focus on details has created an enormous pile of contradictory observations--permitting too many people to construct ideas that please their palates and wallets more than educate their brains.
I don't care to pass personal blame or pose conspiracies, for we are all participants in this great war of words of what nutrition really means. Nonetheless, somewhere there is an origin and it is fostered by our professions, my nutrition and medical research community and my clinical colleagues' medical practice community. This is not surprising. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the most influential research funding agency in the world, is comprised of 27 institutes, centers and programs and not one is named the Institute of Nutrition. Research funding is a mere pittance in a couple of the institutes and most of this is dedicated to the study of individual nutrients that I consider pharmacology, not nutrition.
Further, there is not a single medical school in the country that teaches nutrition as a basic medical science. At best, a few may have an elective course that treats the subject in a most superficial manner.
Public citizens, therefore, are left to fend for themselves against the hyped up claims of the food and drug industries.
If we are to understand the true value of nutrition, we must begin by considering the health value of whole foods, not the nutrient parts extracted from them. In that context it is whole, plant-based foods that express an effect that is far more then the sum of its parts. When done right, advanced heart disease can be cured, type 2 diabetes stopped and reversed, cancer can be prevented and, with some newer evidence, controlled after it appears. The range of diseases that can be prevented is more than impressive. The breadth and rapidity of the nutritional effect not only prevents disease but actually treats many of these diseases while restoring and maintaining health. The totality of these health effects are far more than almost anyone knows.
It is terribly frustrating when I know these effects, I know the savings in health care costs that can be had and I know the personal responses that virtually everyone experiences when they try this for a week or so. I also know that, historically, we have been slaves to a nutrition-less health information system that, in effect, is designed to keep us in mental chains, thus to maintain the status quo.
But there is light at the end of this tunnel. Former President Clinton recently discovered and used this information and, much to his credit, told his truly impressive results on "CNN" to Wolf Blitzer.
I am not sure he knows how far reaching is his contribution. It is time for the rest of the public to get to know this as well. This information is on the right side of history! Mark my word.
To all who are reading this blog posting: Please share this article with your contacts so that we can start to make a difference weith real healthcare reform and transforming the curriculum in medical schools. Thank you so much! Marlene M Marcello
INTERVIEW WITH SANAE SUZUKI, AUTHOR, EDUCATOR AND ENTREPRENEUR
Posted By Marlene on 2010-04-11 02:57
INTERVIEW WITH GORDON SAXE, M.D., MPH
Posted By Marlene on 2009-12-28 22:20
Marlene Marcello: Good morning. I am with Dr. Gordon Saxe at the Health Classics Conference in beautiful Santa Barbara, California. This is November of 2009. Welcome, Dr. Saxe, and I loved your lecture last night, and really enjoy sharing this time with you, interviewing you, and please tell my readers for my newsletter how you got involved in the practice of medicine, and how long you’ve been doing it, and then how you learned about the role of nutrition.
Dr. Saxe: Thanks, Marlene, it was sort of an unusual and somewhat circuitous route that started with, I would say, shortly after college, about 1981. My dad was diagnosed with cancer at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where I had grown up, and he was told by his doctor, Patrick Walsh, who was considered perhaps the world’s foremost urologist, that his urinary tract cancer had already spread beyond the primary location, it was in the lymph nodes, and that essentially meant that it had probably spread elsewhere in the body, and therefore the prognosis was not very good. Dr. Walsh told us that he might live for a year, something like that! I was a brash young man, and I wasn’t going to take that sitting down. So I started investigating everything I could find out about my dad’s cancer, and about cancer in general, about conventional approaches and alternative approaches. And I spent a lot of time in the bowels of the Johns Hopkins medical library just reading and reading, and going through microfilm – this is before they had desktop computers – and just getting my hands on anything I could to help me have a better understanding of something that could help my dad. One thing I came across that really struck me, was an article in the Baltimore newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, about a doctor who – a strange story about a doctor who had in the course of picking up some hitchhikers on the New Jersey Turnpike, had stumbled across these guys, and at their recommendation, had allowed them to help him with the cancer that he was suffering from. His name was Tony Sattilaro, and he was the president of Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia, and he had Stage 4 prostate cancer, had already had treatment for it, and nothing was helping and it had spread throughout his bones, and he had it in his ribs, his sternum, and it was also in the brain. And his prognosis was very, very poor and he knew that. And he was in great pain at the time that he picked up these hitchhikers on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. And it turns out that these weren’t any old hitchhikers, they were chefs at a natural food restaurant in Boston, and when they observed the pain that he was in, and they asked about his- what was going on with him, he told them, very matter-of-factly, “I’m dying of prostate cancer”, to which they rather flippantly replied, “Well, you don’t have to die, Doc. Cancer is easy to cure”. And he went on to explain to them that no, in fact it was the second leading cause of death and a very difficult and intractable disease in many cases. But there was something that was infectious about their optimism, and they dragged him into a health food store in downtown Philadelphia, and told him about a few things to buy, brown rice and this and that, and he uh – I’m not sure whether to give you the short version or the long version. In fifteen minutes I guess it will be the short version. And he basically got directed by them to start taking meals with a family in Philadelphia who cooked this way, and the family prepared- had him come to dinner, and then would prepare a lunch for him the next day. So he started changing his diet, figuring he really had nothing to lose, and nothing else was going to get him better, no conventional treatment would work for him anymore. So a few weeks after starting to take meals with this family – and they were cooking macrobiotic food – a few weeks after starting to take meals with them, in the middle of the night he was reaching over for his pain medication and he realised he didn’t need it! He wasn’t having pain, and he had been on narcotic medication round the clock for some time before that. So it was quite a surprise to him.
Dr. Saxe: So Dr. Sattilaro was taking meals with this family, the Waxman family in Philadelphia, and eating macrobiotically, and he noticed that his pain had seemed to clear up, and he continued taking meals with them, and he made jokes about the food, because it wasn’t his, probably his favorite food, and he sat there seemingly enjoying it, and they all turned to him one day and asked him “So are you enjoying your seaweed?” And he, with a big smile on his face, he said, “It takes like unrefined sewage!” But nonetheless he convinced himself that it was probably a good thing, and since then we’ve discovered that seaweed has a number of anti-cancer compounds and does wonders on experimental tumors in lab animals. But that’s another story! It turns out that two months later Dr. Sattilaro went back for a bone scan, because he was fine, he wasn’t dying. And this is about nine months after starting the diet, he went back for a repeat bone scan, and it was completely clear. And this shouldn’t have been. He had a number of hot spots, a number of tumors show up on the earlier one, and this one was completely clear. A few years later he was still doing well and had another bone scan, and again, no sign of the cancer. So it appears that he had a spontaneous remission of the cancer on the diet. Anyway, while my dad was recovering from cancer surgery at Hopkins, I had heard that Dr. Sattilaro was going to be speaking at a conference in the Poconos. And with my dad’s blessing, I went up there to explore and find out about it. So I got up to the Poconos and went to this camp where they were having him speak, and I met him. And he was the picture of health. He was- I think he was about 50 at the time, and his face was clear and he was a very joyous-looking guy, radiant. And I told him about my dad and he encouraged me to get my dad on this same kind of diet. While I was there I started to change my diet, I just started eating the food that was being prepared and served at the camp, and I noticed within maybe a day or two, I was up in the morning, I was looking in the mirror, and I was looking at my eyelids. I noticed that there was no crud on my eyelids, and I thought, “that’s weird, interesting”, because I was the guy who always woke up in the morning with crud on his eyelids, and I would wipe it off, you know, the crusty stuff, and get on with the day. But that’s who I was, and now here it is, that wasn’t appearing. And I also noticed that I was feeling, that kind of an achy low back pain that I had been living with for a long time, cleared up, just disappeared, that I was just- my skin color looked better and I was just thinking more clearly, and this happened in two or three days at this camp. And I didn’t go there with this expectation in mind, I went there trying to find out about an anti-cancer program that might be of help to my dad.
So while I was there I met a number of other people who had similar stories as Dr. Sattilaro, but because they weren’t the president of hospitals, and physicians or whatever, their stories hadn’t gotten out into the press the way his had. Some of their stories were actually medically documented, others were not. But nonetheless, there was a consistent theme in their stories that was really compelling. So I went back to the hospital where my dad was, to Hopkins, and told him about what I had observed, and he was intrigued, and open, or so it seemed, but unfortunately my mom just really didn’t want to change her style of cooking, and my dad was just going to eat whatever was served to him, so I really wasn’t able to get them, get my dad or my parents to change in a dramatic way, at least not at that point. And one of the things they asked me, which resonated, was “Gordon, if this is really so, how come it’s not known about? Where is the evidence? Where is the scientific evidence for it, and how come our doctors don’t know about it?” Well, the second question is probably easier to answer – doctors get almost no training in nutrition and very little in, you know, in nutrition and almost nothing in any kind of alternative theory of healing or cancer or anything like that. As to where the scientific evidence was? Well, I wanted to see that too, so I went back to the library and did a lot of research, and admittedly the things I found were selected evidence, but nonetheless, it wasn’t hard to find – there was so much of it. Even in the very beginning of the 1980’s a lot of information had accumulated about the role of diet and cancer. And for decades before the 1980’s it had already been observed that simply by taking mice that had experimentally-induced tumors, whether by radiation or by chemical carcinogens, or transplanted, if you then took those mice, with growing tumors, and calorically restricted them, to about 2/3 of the calories that they would eat if they were unrestricted in their diets, you could stop the cancers from growing, very consistently. So this finding, by a doctor by the name of Tanenbaum, had been made back in the 1940’s, and had been repeated with different models of cancer, different tumor models, different lab animals, so it made sense that changing diet could have an impact on the progression of the cancer. So at this point, it was time for me to get on with my career, and I decided to go to Tulane School of Public Health for my Master’s degree. I needed to get some kind of additional education, because up until this point all I had was a Bachelor’s degree in History and Sociology, and when I looked in the Baltimore Sun in the Help Wanted ads for somebody looking for a historian or a sociologist, the jobs were, well, few and far between, to put it mildly. So I needed to get some additional training, something, and I was fascinated by nutrition and had already started doing kind of seat-of-the-pants, what you would call barefoot epidemiology, gathering cases and collecting information, so it kind of made sense for me to go to a program where I would be able to work with the head of the department, and actually carry out a study. The doctor who was the head of the Department of Nutrition at Tulane School of Public Health, James Carter, actually had gotten funding to do a study of macrobiotics and cancer. And so, with his support, I did my master’s degree there, got my MPH, and for my master’s thesis I did a project on macrobiotics and cancer of the pancreas. We chose pancreatic cancer because we had heard in the literature of a few cases of individuals who had had apparent spontaneous remissions of pancreatic cancer on macrobiotic diets. Plus, the fact that pancreatic cancer has a very, very poor prognosis, and most people only live a few years. So the thought was- and it’s also a relatively common cancer – so the thought was, “Well gee, we could probably get enough cases of a cancer where we could see a survival difference between a macrobiotic group and a conventional control group in a relatively short period of time”. It was a doable study for a master’s thesis. So to undertake this, I contacted macrobiotic counsellors that I had gotten to know in my own journey with macrobiotics, at about, I think it was, fourteen sites around the country, and asked them to go through their counselling records, and pull out all cases that they had counselled, of primary adenocarcinoma of the pancreas. And we contacted these individuals, asked them- got information about their diagnosis, the date of diagnosis, whether they were still alive and at what date, or if they had died, the date of death, contacted their next of kin for that information, we asked them or their next of kin about their diets, and we looked at their survival as a group, and compared them to patients from a national tumor registry, the largest one which is called SEER, Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results. What we saw was that after one year, one year from diagnosis, over 50% of the macrobiotic patients were still alive, whereas only 10% of the SEER comparison group were still alive, and that survival advantage persisted even when we followed them years longer. So there seemed to be something to it, and this is, you know, in a very difficult, intractable cancer, pancreatic cancer. So I kind of thought, “you know, if it’s that good for the worst, it can’t help but be good for some of the easier ones”. And from there, after I finished my master’s degree, I had gotten bitten by the research bug, but I felt that I didn’t really have proper training as a researcher, so I went to the University of Michigan, and I got my Ph.D. in Epidemiology. So I went from the ranks of being a barefoot epidemiologist to being a proper, professional epidemiologist, and I did my dissertation at University of Michigan on diet and breast cancer, and found some rather interesting and striking things there, about how the tumor characteristics of a woman with breast cancer seem to be very much linked to the diet that she had been following before she was diagnosed, things such as whether or not it was positive for estrogen receptors, or a more advanced stage of disease, things like that, were indeed linked. One thing in particular that struck me was that having an estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer – and if you have to have breast cancer, it’s better to have one that is receptor positive than receptor negative. They tend to behave better and have a better prognosis. And it turned out that women who had a higher intake of green vegetables were four times as likely as women with a low intake, or no intake, to have receptor-positive breast cancer. So things like that were jumping out left and right. It wasn’t hard to find any, probably because diet is much more than we have come to think conventionally, interwoven with the biology of cancer.
While I was at the University of Michigan, I noticed that I was the token grad student, Ph.D. grad student, working amidst a sea of physicians. I was working in the Department of Surgery and the Breast Care Center, and hanging out with surgeons and medical oncologists, and with radiation oncologists, and radiologists and pathologists, and learning their lingo and learning to feel comfortable, ingratiating myself with them, and so I thought, “you know, here it is, I’m able to interview patients but I’m not able to really work with them or guide them in any way”. And I felt, I’m doing this with one hand tied behind my back. And I was fascinated by medical sciences, so I thought, “you know, it’s time for this macrobiotically-oriented young man to become a physician”. So I went back to finish up my pre-med, the last of my pre-med classes, and got those done with, and applied to med school, and got in, and went to Michigan State University, just up the street from Ann Arbor, and finished there, and after medical school, went on to do my residency, starting in internal medicine and then finishing up in preventative medicine at University of Massachusetts. And then from there, somewhere along the line I had done an elective rotation in sunny San Diego, and I just fell in love with the beauty of the area and the sunshine, it did wonders for my Michigan-induced seasonal affective disorder, and moved to San Diego, and since being out there, I’ve joined the faculty at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, I’m in the Department of Family and Preventative Medicine, and I’m doing mostly research these days. Shall I tell you about the research project that we-
Marlene Marcello: Thank you so much, that was wonderful. Doctor, tell me a little bit about- highlight one of the research projects you’re involved in, and then, if you don’t mind, I hear great things about this new Center for Integrative Medicine, and let us know a little bit about what might be going on with that and how that’s going to affect the people in Southern California.
Dr. Gordon Saxe: While I was at the University of Massachusetts, I did a study that I had wanted to do for a number of years, and I did it as a residency project, and then I repeated it in California, and the results were similar both times. What it was, was after seeing Dr. Sattilaro and his recovery from prostate cancer, and hearing through the grapevine about a number of other men who had had great results, and in some cases remissions, documented remissions, of metastatic prostate cancer, thought this is perhaps a cancer that is particularly amenable to a macrobiotic diet, and one which is also very, very common. Prostate cancer is the most commonly-diagnosed male malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer death in men. And it may also be, as I thought, one that’s very diet-linked, very, very diet sensitive. So there’s a blood test, where you can monitor what’s going on with prostate cancer, it’s called PSA – Prostate Specific Antigen, and PSA is used as a screening test for the general public, for men in the general public, to see if they have prostate cancer. Unfortunately it can’t distinguish that well between normal prostate and malignant prostate cells. PSA is produced by cells of prostatic origin. So the more of those cells you have, the higher your blood level of PSA will be. And if a man has his prostate, if it hasn’t been removed surgically to treat the prostate cancer, and he still has it, a PSA level could be elevated because the man has benign enlargement of the prostate, or because of prostate cancer. And you can’t tell for sure which it is. But if a man has been diagnosed, pathologically confirmed as having prostate cancer, and the primary treatment, surgical removal of the prostate, has taken place, then there should be no cells of prostatic origin left in the body, and what’s then observed is that the PSA level goes to zero. It’s undetectable, because only prostatic cells can produce PSA. Okay, well, if a man has a relapse and the cancer comes back in spite of the surgery, what you’ll see is that the PSA, which had gone to zero, now starts to become detectable and starts creeping up and up and up. And it’s reflecting the inexorable growth of the cancer, and not just of any cancer, it’s metastatic prostate cancer, because we’re only looking at those cells that have gone beyond the prostate, which by definition is metastacy, metastatic prostate cancer, and we can monitor how quickly it increases by looking at the rate at which the PSA blood level goes up. So in this setting, of men who have had their surgery and removal of the prostate, this becomes an excellent, non-invasive marker that we can track what’s happening to the cancer throughout their body. And it correlates with the rate of increase in the volume of cancer in their body, of metastatic cancer. So what we did was, we took a group of men, and their spouses, and these men all had, had previously undergone surgical removal for prostate cancer, and their PSA levels, after initially going to zero, had become detectable, and then over a period of time we charted them and saw the rate at which their PSA levels were going up for each man, and then we enrolled them in a six-month intervention, where we taught them cooking classes along the lines of macrobiotics. We didn’t call it macrobiotics, we called it a plant-based diet, and we taught them stress reduction, and for that we taught them yoga, meditation – like seated and breathing meditation, and standing Qi Gong exercises, and we encouraged these men to make pretty dramatic dietary changes, and six months after this program, after we had them coming in every week for cooking classes and stress-reduction classes and support for one another. Six months later we re-measured their PSA. And what we saw was that over the six month interval, nine out of the ten men in the program had a reduction in the rate of increase in their PSA, and this is very similar to the result that we saw at University of Massachusetts, where we had another group of ten men, and in that group, eight out of the ten had a reduction in their PSA rates. So in seventeen out of twenty, between the two studies, 85% had some stabilisation or improvement intheir PSA. This was accompanied by other health benefits, men saw drops in their cholesterol, some of the men went off blood pressure medication, one man went on and on about the quality of his bowel movements – he couldn’t believe just how smoothly things could go, just saw a number of things. One man had what appeared to actually be possibly the remission of either what’s called an actinic keratosis – sun-damaged skin that seemed to clear up while he was on the diet. So we saw a number of these changes, these health improvements, and this has left me with the feeling that there is really something profound about what you can do with diet, even after the onset of the cancer and even after it has spread. So this fills me with optimism and it has helped me to get a sense of where I want to go from this point on.
Marlene Marcello: And Doctor, please tell us about the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California San Diego?
Dr. Saxe: Yes. About two years ago, the chief of staff of the medical center, Gene Kallenberg, who’s also the division head of the Division of Family Medicine at UC San Diego, took it upon himself, because of his fascination with this area, to initiate, to spearhead the development of a Center for Integrative Medicine, that would combine the best of conventional and alternative approaches. And it’s something that a number of patients have been wanting and asking for, and a number of practitioners across the university are deeply interested in. And for whatever reason, here in Southern California, where we should be ahead of the curve, we’re actually behind it. Harvard has had a Center for Integrative Medicine since the late 1990’s, and a number of our sister campuses in the University of California system – UC San Francisco, UCLA, UC Irvine, all with medical centers, have had full-blown centers for integrative medicine, but we did not. So as soon as I heard that Dr. Kallenberg was going to be doing this, leading this effort, I jumped in with both feet and I volunteered to help, and so we’ve been working very closely for the last year or two, setting in motion plans for what this is going to look like. And we’re getting awfully close to opening the doors. We have a few more operational details to take care of, but at this point we’ve developed a list of services that we’re going to be providing, we’ve identified a number of practitioners who are going to be working with us, and we’ve secured pilot funding from the university to launch the endeavor. One of the hallmarks of the program is going to be the role of group-based programs, because my feeling is this is a very efficient way to deliver health care in an environment in which healthcare costs are screaming out of sight, we could teach patients who are at risk or actually have certain illnesses, whether prostate cancer or diabetes or heart disease, or you name it, most of these chronic condition have very strong linkages to diet and stress and lack of exercise. So if we could actually motivate people and deliver education to them in groups – and not just pussyfoot around with “Oh, here’s a slightly more prudent version of the standard American diet”, but actually teach them a deeply-healing diet, largely plant-based diet – whole grains, vegetables, beans, legumes, seeds, nuts, fruits, and so forth – if we could teach them this, I think we could really make a big difference in terms of both preventing and even helping to manage or treat better the diseases that people are developing. So we’re going to be putting a big emphasis on those group programs and deliver this to, you know, ten, twenty or more people in a group so that we can deliver to more people at lower cost, and it will also develop, we believe, a group dynamic, a group support between the people, that will encourage them to make the changes. So that’s going to be an important component of our program. And then we’ll also offer individual counselling, tailored to the individual, treatments such as acupuncture, massage therapy, osteopathic manipulation and so forth, and natural medicine counselling, of course. And along with this, I also have two other research projects. This is, of course, a clinical program that will be offered to the general public, and beyond this there are two other research projects, both having to do with prostate cancer, that I’m going to be involved with. One of them is a study that’s now ongoing, and we’ve already recruited a few hundred patients to this one. This is a program which is supported by a non-profit foundation called the Cancer Project, which is an offshoot of Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, headed by a wonderful man by the name of Neil Barnard, who’s a real leader in promoting the use of plant-based diets for health conditions. And in the study that they’re supporting, we’re looking at the role of dietary intakes that men with prostate cancer have reported to us that they’ve been following prior to the development of their cancer. We’re getting a snippet of their tumors, and examining them for the expression of about 20,000 gene segments that correlate pretty closely with genes in the body. So we’re going to look at the expression of these genes and see whether dietary factors are associated with whether certain genes get turned on or turned off, and then we’re going to follow these men forward and see whether diet predicts whether they have a progression or relapse of their cancer, and whether diet and genes together interact to alter the natural history of the disease. So that’s an observational study that’s ongoing now.
Marlene Marcello: Thank you so much, Dr. Saxe. It’s a wonderful interview.
INTERVIEW WITH VICTOR CARSRUD, D.C., AUSTIN, TEXAS
Posted By Marlene on 2009-12-07 07:32
Interviewer: It was a pleasure to meet 
you on my trip to Austin TX in October. Dr. Carsrud, when did you begin your medical practice, and what led you into the practice of chiropractic medicine and natural health, first of all?
Dr Carsrud: It's kind of a perfect storm of eventualities. I was always exposed to alternative medicine as a child. My mother, being a product of the Sixties, introduced me to the idea of accupressure, and I remember, some of my earliest memories -when I was about five, maybe seven years old, Mama was showing me how to do various accupressure points for headache release and things like that.
I never thought much of it at the time. I actually started down the path of conventional medicine, and went to grad school and was looking very seriously at going back to medical school after that, but I sustained an injury, actually, and tore my shoulders, and I went to an physician who said , "Well, you're going to need surgery". And I said to myself, "I don't think I like that idea". And I went and checked out the statistics on it. The statistics said that the rate of recovery, the rate of repeat of a lot of shoulder surgery, is actually fairly high. And my mother, being the good Sixties child that she was, said "Go talk to your chiropractor about it".
So I went and talked to the chiropractor, and I said, "It is the rotator cuff" and he said "Yes!". "Well, I'm going to need surgery", and he goes, "No! I don't care what they said. Give me two weeks, and if it's not better in two weeks, you still have the option". It made a lot of sense to me, so he worked on me for two weeks, and two weeks later the shoulder was better, and there was no need for surgery! And as I progressed down this path, I met some really phenomenal mentors, like Dr. Jack Kester in Missouri , and Dr. Frank Stroll in Chicago , and Dr. Klieber in Colorado , who kind of expanded on the idea that chiropractic philosophy says that "the powers that made the body should heal the body".
And this not only applies to physical manipulation of the spine and the extremities and the muscles, but also applies to the underlying biochemistry, so you can apply that to nutrition, to herbalism, to homeopathy, and the idea of bringing the body back into balance by using the natural means, is the underlying philosophy that drives forward not only chiropractic but also most natural healing arts.
Interviewer: Dr Carsrud, why is osteoporosis so prevalent in our society?
Dr Carsrud: We’re the most overfed and under-nourished country on the planet, and that’s what it boils down to. We have very poor nutritional choices, in our environment and in our in our diet; a lot of our nutrition has been leached out, we’ve got a lot of overprocessed foods, we’ve got a diet in the United States that’s very heavy in protein and saturated fats, which are terrible for the osteoporotic patients. We’ve got a society which tends to keep people more inactive, which also degrades bones. And then we pile all these pharmaceuticals on top, which lowers stomach acid, which inhibits the body’s ability to absorb calcium. We’ve over-medicated, a lot of the side effects of these medications are to deplete the very vitamins and nutrients we need to stave off osteoporosis. And then on top of this, we have a complete disrespect – this maybe a little strong, but we have a total disrespect for the natural way that ideally a woman’s body is supposed to operate. The natural balance of estrogens and progesterones, the fluctuations over time, is very important to stimulate the bones for this growth and repair process, the balance between what we call osteoblast and osteoplast. And as- we live in a country that has a rate ten times any other country for radical hysterectomies, and this lack of understanding of the minutiae of a woman’s endocrine system, has led to a lot of women who are either hypothyroid or don’t have adequate balances of progesterones and estrogens, who’ve been doing the wrong hormone replacement therapies or have been inadequately dosed. There’s a consequence of signals to the bone to keep its density up that have been let go. So you have a mixture of a lack of proper hormonal balance, very bad digestion, overlay of side effects of medication, maybe inactivity, and you’ve got the perfect storm to basically continue to deplete the bones in our elderly population.
INTERVIEWER: Now, let's discuss post-menopausal women. I’ve been reading two strains of thought: one strain says, well, just because you’re post-menopausal, that doesn’t mean that you have to go into this bone deterioration syndrome. But what are your thoughts on that?
Dr. Carsrud: Well, menopause is a natural transition later in a woman’s life, and I don’t think that there is- if you look at the way that menopause is handled in a lot of the other cultures around the world, they don’t have nearly the health issues that accompany menopause in the American population. In certain parts of Okinawa and in the Far East, where a lot of the cultures that have a more active lifestyle, they have a more balanced diet, and they have a little bit more respect for, (and I’m using this term a little more aggressively than perhaps I should), they have a little more understanding of the natural way that a body’s supposed to keep itself active, and they don’t have nearly the problems with menopause that we do. I think that it’s a natural transition point, it should not be looked at as the deterioration of the body, it’s a biochemical change.
INTERVIEWER: What happens to a lot of women, is they are pretty much bought and sold on this concept of the, of hormone replacement is going to fix their situation. Do you hear that a lot?
Dr. Carsrud: I do hear that a lot, and I’m not entirely opposed to hormone replacement therapy. I feel, as we’ve talked before, that you’re going to have hormone replacement therapy it is absolutely essential that it be done with bio-identical hormones, by a practitioner who is amenable to the idea of balancing that out with natural factors as well. The hormones are part of the issue but not all of it. Hormonal supplementation needs to be done, and whether that’s by bio-identical hormones or phyto-progesterones, any of these need to be balanced out with proper lifestyle changes. It’s not a single magic bullet. It is part of a multi-faceted approach to be able to deal with hormonal issues, menopause, osteoporosis and lifestyle changes. It’s not the magic bullet, everybody’s who’s looking for a magic bullet is gonna get sold the Brooklyn Bridge. Beware anybody who says it’s a cure-all because it’s not gonna be!
Interviewer: Exactly. All right, let’s talk about diabetes now, and what’s the problem in America? Why is it so rampant?
Dr. Carsrud: Like osteoporosis, it goes back to ‘you are what you eat’, or in this case, you are what you digest or fail to digest. We have a sedentary society that is not moving, so it’s not burning off a lot of the calories that it’s bringing in. Most of the calories that are in the standard American diet are empty calories, and the body doesn’t know what to do with that, and it’s getting saturated with all this extra sugar and all these extra simple carbohydrates. We have the Standard American Diet on top of which we add these extra chemicals – the big insidious one for me is high-fructose corn syrup – that saturate the body, with all these, you know, these simple sugars and simple carbohydrates, and that eventually the poor pancreas says, “Look, I give up, you’re eating these large meals, you’re giving me stuff that burns very quickly and degrades very quickly”. The pancreas eventually gives up trying to produce enough insulin to deal with it, the body becomes insensitive to insulin and goes into diabetes. And we’re seeing- and you combine this with people not exercising, kids sitting on the couch and playing video games as opposed to going outside and playing, and you end up with a society where “adult-onset diabetes” is now occurring in populations as young as ten and eleven. It goes back to how we are eating and how we are exercising that off! Like energy that goes into the machine, energy that’s used by the machine. If we’re not utilising that energy and we’re continually feeding in a lot of bad things, diabetes is the natural way that the body starts breaking down. How you treat it, it’s very easy. You start eating right. You start eating a diet that’s what we call low-glycemic index, or a mixed-glycemic index, the fundamentals of which are in diets like the Mediterranean Diet and the Paleolithic Diet. We’re mixing in fats and proteins and complex carbohydrates like vegetables, as opposed to doing entirely simple carbohydrates like grains and starches, potatoes, and sugars. Certainly there’s a component of that, you can have it but at a much lower level than we’ve got. This low-glycemic index eating kind of allows for a longer burn, so sugar is delivered over a much longer time period, so it’s an even distribution between meals, and then you supplement that with having small mid-meal snacks, so instead of eating actually less, you’re having breakfast, small mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack, dinner. This allows a long continuous burn of glucose throughout the day, the body is not overly stressed, it’s not dealing with too much sugar in their diet, and that even burn over the day is a lot less strain on the pancreas, and you have an even distribution of insulin throughout the day and this is the basis that you use for treating cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and honestly, a lot of ADHD, because the kids are reacting to too much sugar and then a crash afterwards, The underlying part of this diet goes back to, we’re designed to be hunter-gatherers. We kind of have this low-grade, graze throughout the day, we never have any large meals but multiple small meals throughout the day that burn that give us that natural energy, as opposed to the high, fast burn that we get through a lot of these carbohydrates. The traditional American breakfast of sitting down to a bowl of sugar-frosted cocoa bombs, the cereal with the glass of orange juice on the side, all that’s carbs. That’s all it is, it’s pure carbs, and all we’re doing is loading ourselves up on a lot of sugars that eventually crash afterwards.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the role of whole foods (wholegrains) and vegetables in our diet?
Dr. Carsrud: We need whole grains in our diet I don’t even mean whole grain breads, because those aren’t complex enough, doesn’t have enough of the native fiber left in them. I certainly think that when it comes to those grains, the ones you mention, the long grain rice, the millet and the quinoa – being from Texas we have difficulty pronouncing . These are all much healthier alternatives, because they not only give you complex forms of carbohydrates , not the simple forms, but these also allow for an increase of fiber, which helps stave off things like colon cancer. But I do think that they need to be balanced out. We were never designed to eat a meal that was entirely just carbohydrates, which is why when you have the quinoa, you always have some salmon to go with it, you always have some avocado to go with that whole-grain rice, maybe you’ve got some olives, you know, some good healthy sources of fats and proteins to help balance those out. And then of course you have your vegetables on the side. You always make sure you’ve got- in my opinion the rawer the better – you know, spinach and broccoli, cauliflower. All of these, you know, if they’re going to be cooked, just steam them very lightly, make sure you’re not steaming out all those good vegetables, but a good, balanced meal has got all those things in it, complex carbohydrates, fats and proteins. I don’t mean a burger, I mean good, healthy sources of fats and proteins.
INTERVIEWER: And tell me your typical- we’ll wrap up by talking about your patients. Give us a profile of who they are, and are they mostly baby boomers, and what is the majority of the issues that you see in your practice, Doctor?
Dr. Carsrud: Well, I’ve got kind of a bi-faced practice. I’ve got the two ends of the spectrum. On the one end of the spectrum I have people that are very well-informed, they do a lot of reading, and are very proactive about their health and understand the idea of wellness and preventative health. These are people that come in, they take their vitamins, they’re well-read on it, they need some fine-tuning, and they run the gambit – anywhere from people in their eighties who have been following this all their life. I see a lot of baby boomers, most of them have been raised on this idea of being more preventative in their health. I’ll do a little bit of nutritional counselling with them, I’ll do a bit of chiropractic, a little acupuncture. It’s basically, it’s a tune-up, it’s a wellness process, trying to keep their bodies operating optimally. These are people that typically don’t like vaccines, they typically- and even if they do, they’re very well-informed and they’re very selective about the ones they get. They tend to watch their diet, they tend to understand a lot of these things. And a lot of this is where ideal healthcare needs to be – this is the preventative measures, this is keeping people as healthy as possible so they don’t develop these issues. And that’s where I really operate more as a family practitioner, you know. I’ll see entire families, from, you know, the newborn all the way up to Grandma, and everybody in between, trying to keep them operating well. And seeing them as families is actually very important, because families support each other in terms of their diet and lifestyle. And you can’t treat an individual if their family is totally against the healthy lifestyle, which is why, you know, the families that I see that are coming in, they’re eating right together, they’re exercising together, are really much healthier in the long run. The other group that I see are the people that have been disenfranchised by the conventional medical establishment, that are tired of being through the wringer, that have either decided they are going to leave on their own, because they’re tired of getting worse and worse and worse, or they’ve been misdiagnosed and mishandled, and they’ve been essentially kicked out because they’ve got no other options. And these are people that we have to handle, to some extent, with kid gloves, because they’re already disenfranchised, they’re already a little depressed, they’re already have health issues, and we’re having to rebuild their idea that there is help on the horizon. Now these are the people that we really get some dramatic effects from, these are the people that- the stakes are a lot higher, we’ve got a lot further to go.
INTERVIEWER: To conclude our interview, Doctor, do you think healthcare reform is heading in the right direction?
Dr. Carsrud: I really don’t. I think most of the healthcare reform we’ve seen so far has been mostly concerned with the underlying issue of who’s paying. Who’s paying and how often they’re going to pay and how much we’re going to get paid for, it’s all about the money. And I think the underlying problem is not one of economics, I think the underlying problem is one of overall philosophy. We have been more reactive than proactive, the idea of wellness that I have seen in the program so far has been more screenings, as opposed to actual prevention. We have to focus on prevention and preventative measures to reverse the major health issues facing Americans today!
visit: www.excelonhealth.com
Interview with George W Yu, MD on Nutrition
Posted By Marlene on 2009-07-28 14:11
Dr Yu: My interest stems from surgical hyperalimentation, at the time when Jonathan Rhoades at the University of Pennsylvania finally formulated intravenous feeding without using the intestinal tract. So digestion is a very important thing, more than nutrition, because it is about what the body needs as the end product.
Marlene: How do we better educate our physicians and all medical professionals about proper nutrition, so they can help their patients understand diet and lifestyle changes?
Dr Yu: Your habits start at home! Your parents teach you how to eat. Then you learn as you go through grade school, and high school and college, whether you are interested in eating properly. Eating properly means what makes you feel good. It is not easy to teach nutrition but it is getting easier with more and more literature and increased awareness. When I was in medical school, it was difficult enough to get through the curriculum within the first two years. (Some medical schools have integrated nutrition in their curriculums or provided CEU credit seminars for medical professionals). Most doctors are so stressed with time and obligations that they can barely keep up with their own specialty, let alone reading inter-disciplinary literature on nutrition, digestion, etc. I believe that it will come and I am impressed by some of my colleagues already who are becoming more aware of nutrition. For example, instead of saying Vitamin D is nothing, everybody is saying it is something. That is a big 180 degrees from 10 years ago!
Winning The War On Obesity
Posted By Marlene on 2009-07-13 09:41
Obesity is the major cause of disease and death in America today! It is so extreme that this crisis is upsetting both our personal and our financial health. Yet, Americans still continue to eat unhealthy foods. In fact, we are so focused on eating these foods, we've become "obesigenic." By that I mean, we've created an environment that promotes both the increased intake of non-healthy foods and the added incident of physical inactivity. When you have two out of three Americans either overweight or obese—including many children—it's clear something must be done.
While poor eating habits, genetics, and physical inactivity are the key factors contributing to obesity in America, other factors also help create the problem. The need to "supersize" everything is one. For example, McDonald's recently introduced a new line of "super burgers" with more beef than ever. Sales of the new burgers are taking off. Other factors contributing to obesity in America are stress, low self-esteem, and more medications. Americans often eat to boost their self-esteem or relieve stress. And they take enormous amounts of medications, which increase fluid intake/retention and add pounds.
Obesity Has A Ripple Effect
But what is really frightening is that experts have now realized that obesity has a ripple effect on our health and our lifestyles. Obesity contributes to major diseases like coronary heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, and liver and gall bladder problems. It contributes to some cancers (breast cancer and colon cancer). And it contributes to osteoarthritis—a deterioration of the cartilage and the underlying bone within a joint—as well as the early onset of menses. These are all major medical problems for Americans.
In addition, obesity puts enormous stress on our economy, something most Americans don't realize. Obesity doesn't just increase our personal out-of-pocket costs, it also impacts the cost of our medical insurance system, Medicare, and Medicaid, among other healthcare areas. As of 1998, the most recent statistics available, medical expenditures directly attributable to obesity totaled more than $78 billion, according to private insurance sources. This number includes both private and public expenditures. That's a financial burden that falls directly on each of us.
What's The Solution
What's the solution? The government recognized the problem in the 1990s and attempted to meet it head on.. Some government agencies, like the Center for Disease Control, have stepped up their attacks on obesity. The CDC introduced a program in 1999 focused on improving nutrition and increasing physical activity as one way to combat the problem of obesity in this country. This program educates people on why they should be eating healthy foods and has expanded throughout the country. Overall, the CDC is working with 23 state health departments on the obesity problem.
Private organizations have also joined the fray. The Food Studies Institute (FSI) is devoted to changing the health of children through proper nutrition and education. This effort is the life-long work of Dr. Antonia Demas, whose groundbreaking curriculum, Food is Elementary, educates children about nutrition by providing a positive experience of food and food preparation that is fun, hands-on and sensory-based.
These organizations are having an impact. While more can be done in this area, for example, many schools have completely changed their menus. They are now offering more healthful food selections than they were just a few years ago. So are hospitals. You can get a good salad or more vegetables options at most hospitals—not the case 10 years ago. And while it would be nice to see more public and private programs attack the problem of obesity in America, it's clear that both government agencies and private institutions are doing what they can.
Meeting The Challenge of Obesity
But if we are going to meet the obesity challenge, we change our diets and our lifestyles. For one thing we must eat more fruits and vegetables. The keys to good health, they contain the essential vitamins, minerals, and fibers we need daily. Fruits and vegetables are also natural sources of energy. They give the body many of the nutrients it needs to get through the day. More importantly, fruits and vegetables reduce the risk of chronic disease including strokes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers.
But eating more fruits and vegetables is just one tactic in the war on obesity. We also must also make other changes as well, like using meat substitutes or eating more beans to meet our daily protein needs. Whatever steps we take, one thing is certain: If we are going to win the war on obesity, we must radically change both our diets and our lifestyles. It's a war we can't afford to lose.
Interview with T. Colin Campbell, PhD
Posted By Marlene on 2009-06-11 11:30
Interviewer: What do you know about President Obama’s Health Initiatives? Dr. Campbell: As a doctor I am a supporter of Obama’s interest in preventive medicine. There are two core elements of his preventive measures that are supported by the legislators. The first is “The Gene Array Analysis” which allows people to analyze their gene profiles. I disagree with this approach because no matter what genes you have, nutrition can control and enhance these genes. The second initiative is “Personalized Health Integrated Medicine”. This would allow people to analyze the clinical biomarkers they have so that a physician would come up with a drug for this, a drug for that, a whole cocktail to create for an individual who may get sick. This does not deliver health to the masses and is very expensive and this does not deliver health and is not about preventive medicine. I am not happy with what the president is doing because I don’t believe that he really understands what nutrition can do. Interviewer: How do you think we could get to the president and get our voices heard about nutrition and plant based nutrition? Dr. Campbell: What we need is serious publicity, senate or house hearings. I have given testimonials on the health committee in the past. When the opportunity arises I would like to give a testimony in a 3 to 5 minute prepared statement that we are on the wrong tract and that western medicine has gone down the wrong tract. It (western medicine) is very expensive and is not delivering health. I would also like to talk about what nutrition can do, because nutrition is out of the equation, and nutrition is the most powerful thing that can be used to cure the diseases can prevent. After being in business 50 years I know that nutrition not only can prevent but CURE! Interviewer: Can you give us highlights about your book “The China Study” and tell us what you have discovered? Did your book stir up stuff with your colleagues? Dr. Campbell: I have been in this business for over 50 years as a biomedical researcher not as a clinician. As a biomedical researcher I did a lot of basic research in China on why cancer was so prominent in some areas but not in others and analyzed what kinds of things would lead into the prospect of getting cancer. This was also my basic research back in the lab, studding the cancer process in some detail, understanding how does cancer start, how does it progress, and how does it get diagnosed. It was all about cancer for the most part then it gradually took on how nutrition related. I discovered that nutrition has a huge relation to disease and health in general. I see a whole new perspective on health that creates more health for less expense when our current system is more expense for less health. Interviewer: One last question on the health insurance industry. Do you see any possibility of a partnership with the holistic health community because prevention would certainly help lower the run-away costs of healthcare? Dr. Campbell: It is an expensive system but they (health insurance companies) are making a lot of money! They are not as serious as they seem to be in regards to converting over to wellness and prevention. If we were to reduce the total health care costs in this country by half that means that all the industries associated with that are going to have to live with a half the size of the industry and that is not attractive to an industry that wants to keep growing and making more wealth for themselves! This is so they don’t have all the claims, a short term gain so they can get more money. I am talking about something larger than the healthcare system itself, the health insurance companies! Working with my foundation I am now having in play a model system that I can use to hopefully easily demonstrate a clinic concept. A clinic concept is where people have a month to experience the clinic, they will be able to monitor their own health, and be able to see what happens to themselves (health wise). When people become aware of something it is not always enough to cause behavior changes but being aware and being able to experience the benefits makes it better. We need to find a way for people to sustain what they have learned in everyday lives. That’s where health insurances come into play; it has to be affordable, convenient, and people should be able to independently monitor their own health. We are now better able to do this because of the intranet, communications, etc.. There are exceptions and individuals within the healthcare industry that will argue and say that we need to bring prevention under control. With healthcare reform of any kind, the delivery system has to be affordable, convenient, and people should be able to independently monitor their own health. Interviewer: Could you describe for the readers of my e-newsletter your foundation and what you plan to do with it? You also have an online course. What do you plan to do with that? Dr. Campbell: My foundation is twofold; educational/research working in collaboration with Cornell to put educational courses online. There are courses online now! Online is better than listening in person because you can pause, fast forward, rewind, and listen in groups and participating in discussions with others online. It is the kind of learning environment that has a lot to offer. The program is going to build courses onto what’s already on and enable people to receive certificates. Research is just now getting the opportunity to amp up. I have a blog “Saved by Nutrition” for survivors who can meet others and can share their experiences. This is a way that these survivors can build relationships and it will be an index that people can see (interactions will occur).
The Power of Words by Bernie Siegel, MD
Posted By Marlene on 2009-04-19 19:33
The Power of Words
by Bernie Siegel, MD
Most doctors are not trained to communicate and understand the power of their words as they relate to a patient’s ability and desire to survive. Doctors are not the only authority figures who impact patients’ lives and their ability to survive a diagnosis of a disease. Parents, teachers, clergy and physicians also have the ability to change lives with their words. It can be hypnotic for a child or patient to hear an authority figure’s words. As I am fond of saying, “wordswordswords” can become “swordswordswords,” and doctors have the ability to cure with either “words” or kill with “swords.”
Up to the age of six, a child’s brain wave pattern is similar to that of a hypnotized individual. To quote a woman I know, whose mother gave her only failure messages and dressed her in dark colors, and who as an adult has more trouble with her mother’s words than she does with cancer, “My mother’s words were eating away at me and maybe gave me cancer.” We know from recent studies that loneliness affects the genes which control the immune system. So it is incumbent upon doctors to ask the right questions and know what patients have experienced and are experiencing in their lives.
I recently received two emails; one from a woman who had a recurrence of her cancer and had decided to not undergo chemotherapy again. Her doctor told her, “Then you might as well go home and commit suicide.” The other email came from a woman who asked her doctor if they could become a team. He told her no and that he was the doctor and in charge of her care. She packed her belongings, walked out of the hospital, and has found a caring oncologist with which to work. She is a survivor and not a submissive, sufferer, or from the doctor’s perspective, a “so-called” good patient.
Doctors need to listen to their patients’ words and treat their experiences. Helen Keller said it very well when she stated, “Deafness is darker by far than blindness.” Doctors also need to understand that patients do not live a disease -- they live an experience. Doctors need to ask how patients would describe their experience and then treat them accordingly. The words patients use, like draining, failure, denial, pressure, gift and wake-up call are always about what is happening in their lives. So doctors can help patients to heal their lives and improve the chances of curing their disease.
I did a great deal of children’s surgery earlier in my career. When I meet many of these children today, as young adults, I am amazed at how vivid their memories are. It is obvious how important this event was to them and the details they recall. I learned how powerful my words were when I began to notice children falling asleep as we wheeled them into the operating room. One boy turned onto his stomach and fell asleep as we entered the O.R. I turned him over on the operating table and he said, “What are you doing? -----You told me I would go to sleep in the operating room and I sleep on my stomach.” I replied, "I needed to operate on his stomach to get to his appendix." So we reached a compromise.
Often I would rub an alcohol sponge on a child’s arm and tell them it would numb his or her skin. A third of the children would not feel the needle and ask why other doctors didn’t do that. I called it deceiving people into health. Give someone who has faith in you a placebo and call it a hair growing pill, anti-nausea pill, or whatever, and you will be amazed at how many respond to your therapy.
Dr. Milton Erickson, from his childhood experience with polio and hearing his doctor’s dire predictions to his mother that he wouldn’t see the sun rise, knew how important words were. As a child his anger led him to defy the doctor’s predictions. As a psychiatrist, and hypnotherapist, he knew how to talk to patients to achieve the best outcome. There are many books about his work. One by Dr. Sidney Rosen is entitled My Voice Will Go With You. And our voices do. At the conclusion of an operation, while patients were still under anesthesia, a time when they hear their surgeon’s words, I would say, “You will awaken comfortable, thirsty and hungry.” I did that until I noticed many of my patients were gaining weight and so I added these words, “but you won’t finish everything on your plate.”
One last story. Erickson would write in a patient’s chart and then excuse himself and leave the room. Of course he expected the patient would get up and go look at what he had written, so he would write, “Doing well.”
So give your family mottoes to live by such as “Do what makes you happy” so they pay attention to their feelings and keep an open mind about the future. And don’t be afraid to remind your doctor that his or her words have the ability to hurt, but also more importantly, to heal.
Macrobiotics of New England and Warren Kramer, Sr. Macrobiotic Educator and Counselor
Posted By Marlene on 2009-02-14 20:56
Warren Kramer and his Center in Boston, Macrobiotics of New England is located in Brighton MA.
Warren is an internationally recognized senior macrobiotic educator and health counselor.
With first hand knowledge of his positive impact on the many who have sought his counsel and support, I herald all the good work that he and his lovely wife Fatim do. It is most definitely a labor of love and devotion-- they tirelessly give of themselves. Their Center offers cooking classes, health counseling, weekend dinners, lectures and menu planning and more. The Center's website is www.macrobioticsnewengland.com and Warren's contact number is 617-562-1110. Warren travels extensively throughout the country so if you have family or friends who may want to attend his lectures, please look at his travel schedule on his website.
Medical Research on a Vegan Diet and Yoga as Cancer Fighters
Posted By Marlene on 2009-02-14 20:52
Vegan diet and yoga fight cancer
A vegan low fat diet combined with yoga and exercise can help fight prostate cancer, new findings show.
Researchers found that combining a diet low in fat and rich in fruit and vegetables with regular moderate exercise seems to switch on genes that fight disease, while effectively turning off others that can promote cancer.
This is according to Dr Dean Ornish, founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute and clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Inspired by studies that show prostate cancer is rarer in parts of the world where people eat a predominantly low-fat plant-based diet, he devised a vegan diet for patients, along with exercise, and a resulting "striking" effect on the way genes are used in the body is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Prof Ornish, working with Dr Christopher Haqq and Prof Peter Carroll.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH JOEL FUHRMAN, MD
Posted By Marlene on 2009-02-14 20:48
Joel Fuhrman, MD is a board certified family physician and nutritional researcher who specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional methods. He is one of the nation’s leading experts in nutritional medicine and has appeared on the Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN and the Discovery Channel. Dr Fuhrman is the author of the best selling book Eat To Live and his latest book, Eat for Health. Visit his website at: www.DrFuhrman.com.
QUESTION: You make some dramatic claims about weight loss and reversing disease through your scientifically-tested nutritional program in your book Eat for Health. Please tell us what medical documentation or research supports your claims.
Dr. Fuhrman: I coined the new word, “nutritarian” to represent my recommended diet-style as explained in my Eat For Health book. Simply put, a nutritarian is a person who strives for more micronutrients per calorie in their diet-style. A nutritarian understands that food has powerful disease–protecting and therapeutic effects and seeks to consume a broad array of micronutrients via their food choices. The foods with the highest micronutrient per calorie scores are green vegetables, colorful vegetables, and fresh fruits. For optimal health and to combat disease, it is necessary to consume enough of these foods.
The quality of a diet can be based on three simple criteria:
1) Levels of micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals) per calorie.
2) Amounts of macronutrients (fat, carbohydrate, protein) to meet individual needs, without excessive calories that may lead to weight gain or health compromise.
3) Avoidance of potentially toxic substances (such as trans fats) and limited amounts of other potentially harmful substances (such as sodium).
The is scientific literature over the last 50 years has demonstrated that a high calorie, low nutrient diet leads to illness and disease. and overeating leads to a shortened lifespan. Now the American diet is composed of 35% animal products and 65% processed foods and less than 5 percent of calories from fruits, vegetables, beans nuts and seeds.
When my high micronutrient diet-style was reviewed in a retrospective study it has been shown to be the most effective weight loss method ever recorded.
Sarter B, Campbell TC, Fuhrman J. Effect of a high-nutrient density diet on long-term weight loss: a retrospective chart review. Alternative Therapies Health Med 2008:14:3;48-51.
When my high micronutrient diet-styel was studied in a interventional trial it was shown to lower cholesterol, more powerfully than cholesterol-lowering drugs and offer dramatic protection against colon cancer.
Jenkins DJ ; Kendall CW ; Popovich DG ; Vidgen E ; et al. Effect of a very-high-fiber vegetable, fruit, and nut diet on serum lipids and colonic function. Metabolism. 2001; 50(4):494-503.
Generally speaking the most recent and best nutritional studies of the last decade show that we can win the war on cancer, we do not have to develop heart attacks and strokes or get dementia and that food is our greatest weapon against disease. My books and teachings are not just about weight loss; they are about reversing disease and protecting our long term health so we can live longer, with better health and more happiness than ever before possible.
Hu FB Plant-based foods and prevention of cardiovascular disease: an overview. Am J Clin Nutr. 2003; 78(3 Suppl):544S-551S.
Finley JW The antioxidant responsive element (ARE) may explain the protective effects of cruciferous vegetables on cancer. Nutr Rev. 2003; 61(7):250-4.
QUESTION: I understand that you have a DVD called “Osteoporosis Protection for Life.” Tell us a little about we can expect to learn from watching this video.
Dr. Fuhrman: This DVD is a valuable resource for strengthening your bones as part of a healthy lifestyle. We know that exercise, diet and vitamin D are essential to prevent the onset of osteoporosis. I demonstrate recommend dietary adjustments and 10 simple exercises you can do in your home that will improve your muscle strength and balance and dramatically reduce the risk of a hip fracture without drugs.
- Get the Best Bone Building Exercises to do Anywhere
- Build Strong Muscles
- Avoid High Risk Medications
- Learn Common Dietary Causes of Bone Loss
Hope, Faith and Service: America in 2009
Posted By Marlene on 2009-01-21 23:24
The dawning of a new era for America!
We can no longer believe we are helpless as we face massive joblessness and a weakened economy! We must seize this situation as an opportunity to work hard ourselves and to demand fiscal accountability and corporate reforms ! We must work hard at regaining our financial and economic stature, both personally and as a society!
We are aware that too many Americans have NO health insurance! And NOW is our time to demand major reforms on our new President and our representatives on Capital Hill. Healthcare needs refoming so that every American can have access to medical professionals. We need to ensure access to alternative practitioners as well,because we deserve to have choices and options on how we approach our illnesses and how we prevent disease.
We have to give back even more now while so many face losing their homes and jobs.We need to join with many others in public service projects and encourage other Americans to join us. The rewards to us as individuals and as a society can not be quantified...it can only be measured by the rebirth of our core economic and political system that has been so badly tarnished!
Let us move forward in a fundamental belief that America is a society of great opportunity, great strengths and great core values. We have to come together, make selfless demands on all elected officials and regain our incredible stature as a nation. Our collective actions can resonate to the world that we want cooperation and a peaceful approach to conflicts in the future.
AMAZING RECOVERY STORIES Marlene Marcello-McKenna, featured in The Macrobiotic Guide, England
Posted By Marlene on 2009-01-18 21:39
I am a 23 year terminal cancer survivor, being diagnosed with Stage 4 malignant melanoma in 1986. Between 1983 and 1986, I went through 3 rounds of surgery and visited many medical establishments looking for answers and for "hope".
My younger brother learned about the macrobiotic approach and shared the information with me. He and I went to visit Dr Marc VanCauwenberghe in Boston, MA and
Dr VanCauwenberghe recommended a strict macrobiotic diet.
Hesitant at first and doubtful that anything would help, I embarked on the diet May 1, 1986 and never looked back. My condition began improving within months and I started to regain my strength and my overall health within a year.
I have, over the years, been very vocal and public about my support for a macrobiotic way to health and I was selected to be one of the 6 Best Cases presented to the National Cancer Institute, Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
Q: How did you find out about macrobiotics?
Marlene: My younger brother actually went to a psychic in RI to learn what healing method he could use with his son's ear infection. He asked this woman at the end of their meeting what he could do to help me and she very adamantly said "Macrobiotics". He did not know what that was, did his research and brought me Michio Kushi's book, The Cancer Prevention Diet Book.
He took me to a local health food store, we bought many organic vegetables and grains and beans, and started cooking! My brother and I went to have a consultation with Dr Van Cauwenberghe in Brookline and we came back to RI with a program to follow. I found a wonderful group of macrobiotic cooks and we had weekly meals, cooking classes and invited the senior counselors to come to lecture in RI.
Q: How has the macrobiotic approach to healing helped you recover?
Marlene: After three surgeries-one in 1983, one in 1984 and the last one in 1986, I did not have any radiation or chemotherapy. Almost two months after my last surgery I started the macrobiotic diet. I engaged in no other form of therapy or healing modality.
Exercise, yoga, meditation, spirituality and changing my lifestyle were integrated into the macrobiotic way to health. I learned to slow down, and to change my fast-paced, negative thinking lifestyle. I give enormous credit to the diet, the support-both emotional and spiritual-of family and friends.
Q What challenges did you have to go through?
Marlene: I went through many, many challenges. My doctors thought I was crazy to give so much credence to this method of alternative healing. Some of my friends and some family members discouraged me from following this macrobiotic approach.
It was difficult enough to totally change your cooking methods and introduce new foods into your household; but I had the additional burden of defending what I was doing to those around me.
Q: How important is it to have family and community support?
Marlene: It is very important to have the support of family and community! The small but active East-West Center of RI was so central to my staying on course. We had dinners on Friday nights, we had many counselors come to RI to lecture and give consultations. I found the comfort of those who encouraged me to stay on the diet and who believed in my recovery.
Q How did your doctor react to your turnaround in health.?
Marlene: My doctors never really acknowledged the tremendous effect that Macrobiotics had on
my total recovery! They called it spontaneous remission and only after many years, did some of them start looking at holistic medicine and nutrition as a possible resource for those afflicted with cancer.
Q: What one piece of advice would you give to new people approaching macrobiotics
for the first time?
Marlene: Stay the course-never give up and believe in the totality of the macrobiotic way to health. Believing in your body's ability to heal itself is key!
- For the past twenty years, Marlene has been very public in promoting Macrobiotics. She has appeared on national radio and TV talk shows; She was featured in articles in national magazines, such as Ladies Home Journal, Your Health, Miracles. She introduced macrobiotics to President Clinton when he was in office-by giving him a copy of Marlene's book to read which you can order at www.medmacro.com
Breaking Medical News on Diet and Hormone-Related Cancer
Posted By Marlene on 2009-01-04 23:08
RECENT RESEARCH STUDY RESULTS: More Fruits and Vegetables and Less Fat Help Reduce Hormone-Related Cancer
High-fiber, low-fat diets reduce recurrence of breast cancer by 31 percent in women with higher estrogen levels, according to a new report from the Women's Healthy Living and Eating Lifestyle Study. Almost 3,000 breast cancer survivors were randomly assigned to either a special high-fiber diet including five vegetable servings, 16 ounces of vegetable juice, and three fruit servings daily, or a comparison diet based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's five-a-day guidelines - a total of five servings of fruits and vegetables daily.
The study entitled "Dietary Pattern Influences Breast Cancer Prognosis in Women Without Hot Flashes: The Women's Healthy Eating and Living Trial". was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Dec 15 2008.
We must encourage more government funded research into nutrition and diet to further impact the way Western Medicine looks at the role of diet and disease.
Video Clip of My Story on Cable Show
Posted By Marlene on 2009-01-04 21:31
Michio Kushi on Cancer, Diet and Macrobiotics
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-19 18:05
In treating illness with dietary methods, it is important that the sickness be properly classified as predominantly yin or yang, or sometimes as a combination of both extremes. This is especially true with a life-threatening disease such as cancer. Yin, or outward centrifugal movement, results in expansion, while yang, or inward centripetal movement, produces contraction. We can see these universal tendencies in the human body as the alternating expansion and contraction of the heart and lungs, for example, or in the stomach and intestines during the natural process of digestion. Once the yin or yang determination is made, dietary recommendations can be more specifically aimed at alleviating the particular condition of excess. Location of the tumor in the body generally determines whether a cancer is more yin or yang. However, in some cases, cancer in a specific organ can take either a yin or yang form.
A failure to understand the distinction between the general tendencies of yin and yang illnesses explains why some people experience serious side effects from certain medications and others do not. It also explains why so many nutritional therapies and popular health diets produce mixed results or fail entirely. Vitamin C, for instance, is a yin substance that can benefit people with a cold caused by over consumption of contractive yang foods. However, vitamin C taken in supplement form rather than in daily whole foods can further weaken persons with a cold caused by intake of excessive yin because it contributes further expansive energy to their system.
Across-the-board recommendations to take vitamin X, drug Y or food Z to prevent or relieve cancer do not take into account the two opposite forms that illness may take. Nor do they always make room for differing human constitutions and conditions and varying geographical, social and personal factors. Modern science is justified in rejecting alternative cancer remedies that ignore these variables.
On the other hand, holistic medicine is correct in questioning modern science for focusing on quantity rather than quality. Eating whole foods containing vitamin C, such as broccoli, produces a different effect on the body than taking vitamin C pills, even though the actual amount of the nutrient may be the same.
On the whole, dietary suggestions should be directed primarily toward restoring the individual's excessively yin or yang condition to one that is less extreme. Signs of an overly yin condition include passivity, negativity and shyness, while signs of an overly yang condition include hyperactivity, aggression and loudness. Once a more natural, balanced condition has been established and stabilized, the person's body will no longer need to accumulate toxic excess in the form of cancer. If we keep this holistic view in mind, we can avoid being caught up in an endless maze of symptoms.
If there is any uncertainty about whether the cause of a cancer is more yin or yang, we can safely recommend the Central Diet outlined in our book The Cancer Prevention Diet, which minimizes both tendencies.
Since cancer is a disease of excess, someone with cancer should be careful not to overeat. To prevent this, two important practices are advised. The first is to chew very well, at least 50 and preferably 100 times per mouthful, until the food becomes liquefied. A person may eat as much food as he or she wants, provided it is well chewed and thoroughly mixed with saliva. Proper chewing releases an important enzyme in the mouth, which is essential for digestion. The second point of caution is not to eat for a least three hours before going to bed. Food eaten during that time often becomes surplus and will serve to accelerate indigestion, gas, mucous and fat formation, and enhance the development of cancer. Regarding liquid intake, the individual should drink moderately and only when thirsty.
For both yin and yang cancers, all intake of fatty animal foods, including meat, eggs, poultry, dairy food and other oily, greasy foods (including those of vegetable quality) should be strictly avoided. A person with more yin cancer, however, may have a very small quantity of fish once or twice a week if he or she craves it. In such instances, cooking a small portion of dried fish in a soup may be appropriate.
A person with yang cancer should stay away from all animal food, including fish, at least for the initial period of a few months. In both cases, nuts and nut butters should be avoided or limited because they are very oily and contain excess protein. It is also advisable for an individual with a more yin cancer to avoid or limit fruit and dessert completely. A person with a more yang cancer may occasionally have small amounts of cooked, dried and some cases fresh fruit, but only when craved.
The cooking of vegetables is slightly different for yin and yang cancers. In the case of yang cancer, one advisable method is to chop the vegetables while bringing water to a boil. Add the vegetables to the boiling water for a few minutes or even one minute, then remove. A small amount of shoyu may be added for taste. Another method is to sauté the vegetables quickly for about two to three minutes on a high flame, adding a pinch of sea salt. These styles of cooking will preserve the crispness, freshness and slightly more yin qualities of the vegetables. For yin cancer, vegetables should be cooked in a slower, longer and more thorough manner, and shoyu or miso seasoning may be a little stronger.
An emphasis on green leafy vegetables such as watercress or kale produces a slightly more yin effect; an emphasis on root vegetables such as carrots or turnips will produce a slightly more yang effect. An emphasis on round vegetables such as onions or acorn squash will result in a slightly more centered effect.
As for daily beverages, there are now several varieties of bancha tea available in natural foods stores, including green tea, usual bancha tea, and bancha stem tea, also commonly known as kukicha tea. More yin green tea contains plenty of vitamin C and can be used to help offset the toxic effects resulting from the over consumption of animal foods, while more yang bancha stem tea contains less vitamin C but plenty of calcium and minerals. It is advisable for all cancer patients to use bancha stem tea (kukicha) as their usual beverage. However, persons with more yang cancers may occasionally use the green tea from time. Green tea is not recommended for other types of cancer.
Excerpted from The Cancer Prevention Diet ©1993 by Michio Kushi with Alex Jack. Published by St. Martin's Griffin, New York, NY. Available in stores or visit www.stmartins.com
Where in the World Are? Lino and Jane Stanchich
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-18 23:21
LINO STANCHICH AND JANE QUINCANNON STANCHICH
Lino and Jane, two very prominent internationally recognized licensed nutritionists, authors, and lecturers moved from the Northeast in 1997 to the “idyllic” Blue Ridge Mountains and settled in Asheville, North Carolina! Asheville has traditionally been a destination where people go to get well, so a very sizeable holistic community along with fine organic cuisine has flourished.
Lino and Jane have many invitations to travel throughout Europe and all over the United States. Lino has been a powerful multilingual educator with a focus on macrobiotic diet, philosophy, and lifestyle for over 40 years. Lino is the author of popular books, Power Eating Program: You Are How You Eat, Macrobiotic Healing Secrets, and The Natural Bladder Control Program. He has developed CDs and DVDs on healing mealtime music, self-massage and exercise, and laughter. Jane herself is a recognized counselor, noted chef and is an international teacher of natural health principles with over 25 years experience. Jane served as principal consultant with the highly successful Ritz Carlton Hotel's Macrobiotic Culinary Program and the Kellogg School of Public Health's Dining Program at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
In addition to their busy travel schedules, Jane and Lino several times a year offer healing retreats in the Blue Ridge Mountains. On October 20-26, 2008 at the Bend of Ivy Lodge in Marshall, NC (just north of Asheville), Lino and Jane will offer healing classes, group consultations, meditation, yoga, guest speakers, cooking instruction, and delicious meals.
This retreat is currently at capacity. Look for future retreats by visiting www.greatlifeglobal.com
East Coast to West Coast Connection for Healthy Dining, Education and More
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-18 23:19
MAKING CONNECTIONS, EAST COAST, WEST COAST: VEGETARIAN-MACROBIOTIC COOKING, EDUCATION AND MORE
EAST COAST-STYLE: THE B&K HOUSE: Brian Kahn and Karen Melanson of Westport MA have truly energized the macrobiotic, holistic community in Southern New England by offering outstanding meals, private or group cooking classes and bodywork on a consistent basis for over a year and a half! After moving to the South Shore of Boston, Brian met Karen while she was cooking class assistant chef at the East-West Center of New Bedford. Brian has been interested in food since childhood and has practiced many cooking styles, macrobiotics being the focus for the past 15 years. Karen has practiced macrobiotics for 7 years and completed The Strengthening Health Institute of Philadelphia’s Comprehensive Certification Program. They decided to “join forces” to produce inspiring meals, gatherings and services that encourage and support health and happiness. Their joint venture is now named B&K House! B&K House offers gourmet vegan and macrobiotic dinners monthly, daily healing meals following a standard macrobiotic diet tailored to specific health needs and shiatsu-based bodywork utilizing a variety of forms. All are welcome to attend The B&K House gatherings or programs. For more information, visit www.bandkhouse.com, email info@bandkhouse.com, or call 508-230-9100.
WEST COAST-STYLE: The Peninsula Macrobiotic Community has been a solid community effort since 1987! Their primary goal is to offer gourmet, vegetarian meals every Monday evening in the First Baptist Church in Palo Alto CA. Besides healthful and delicious food, each gourmet vegetarian dinner provides networking in a vibrant community, support for those seeking a healthier lifestyle or dealing with a serious condition, education in macrobiotics and other health areas and a first-hand taste of the Great Life. Reservations for these dinners are requested and the phone number is 650-599-3320. Chef Gary Alinder has been the chef since the inception of this community effort. The Community’s newsletter lists holistic practitioners along with places to eat and shop in the Peninsula area. I found a “Community Connection” section of their newsletter very interesting where an author is inspired to produce an interview or profile for publication. Visit www.peninsulamacro.org.
A Personal Story of Hope and Survival: Thom Souza
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-18 23:13
A PERSONAL STORY: THOM SOUZA
My name is Thom, I'm 66 years old, and have always been in good health, until I was diagnosed with Squamous Cell Carcinoma in February 2008. After tests and biopsies, a spot of the primary cancer was found on the base of my tongue, and it traveled to my lymph nodes on the right side of my neck.
When I found out about all this, I was in temporary shock. I had a lot of questions, and my first one was where do I find out what I need to do. The doctors gave me only the options they use. I was looking for other options.
I needed a plan, and I realized I had a lot of investigating to do. With my computer, I had all the information I needed at my fingertips. The more information I (and my wife) found, the more confident I felt that I could beat this cancer, and get through treatment, no matter what kind of treatment I needed. We searched for natural cures, and decided that because of the advanced stage of my cancer, I needed both avenues of treatment. I contacted friends who had been involved with people who had cancers, and contacted Marlene Marcello, who gave me a wealth of information which helped me make the right decisions in my method of beating this disease.
If anyone reading this would like to contact Thom, he has consented to giving out his email address: thom@thomsouza.com.
Book Review, The Great Life Diet by Denny Waxman
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-18 23:11
BOOK REVIEW
Review of "The Great Life Diet" by Denny Waxman
-Ms Melanson is a contributing writer
At a time where so many people are looking for a way to become more healthy, Denny Waxman's book called "The Great Life Diet" has provided a common sense guide to achieving better health. His goal is to simplify the principles of healthful eating and living, so that they can be easily incorporated into one's daily life.
I am grateful life to have had the opportunity to study extensively with Denny and to have experienced first hand the life changing effects the information in this book has had on my life. By following the recommendations that Denny outlines, you too can strengthen your health, nourish your spirit, find peace, joy and happiness. Please visit www.medmacro.com, and click on the “store” tab to order your copy of this wonderful book!
- by Karen Melanson
Complementary and Alternative Medicine introduced to American Medical Schools
Posted By Marlene on 2008-10-18 23:08
In recognizing the importance of prevention, medical student well-being, and humanistic medicine, AMSA (the American Medical Student Association) recently set out to bring CAM (COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE) education to medical schools. Efforts culminated in the AMSA Foundation securing a $1.2 million grant from the NIH-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The EDCAM project, as it's now known, will pilot a comprehensive CAM curriculum at six MD/DO programs over the next four years. The curriculum was designed by experts in the field and includes modules on self-care and stress reduction; CAM therapeutics; holistic interviewing techniques; and CAM research, mentorships, and international electives. Congratulations to the six schools who have been selected:
CYCLE I
University of Connecticut School of Medicine
University of Massachusetts School of Medicine
University of California at Irvine School of Medicine
CYCLE II
Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine
A Story of Challenge, Survival and Hope: Stacey from Vegas!
Posted By Marlene on 2008-09-22 21:03
A PERSONAL STORY
Stacey from Nevada called me about a macrobiotic diet. Stacey is a warm, charming, bright and beautiful dance instructor who was diagnosed with "possible" thyroid cancer. Her father who lives in Southern California told her about my cancer recovery, so she connected with me immediately. Stacey was fearful about the possibility of having cancer and was searching for answers.
Stacey, now 39 years old, was recently tested for hypothyroidism. After a biopsy of her thyroid gland, her doctor found atypical follicular cells suspicious for papillary and thyroid carcinoma. Her doctor's advice was immediate removal of her thyroid when the prognosis was "suspicious" activity.
Panicking, Stacey began exploring alternative medicine and took her father's advice about macrobiotics. She did not want to take the dramatic step of removing her thyroid gland. She had an extensive dietary consultation and adopted a macrobiotic way of life. Keeping physically active, she has committed to continuing her yoga while maintaining her full dance instruction classes. She began her program for wellness less than a month ago and will be retested in November. Stacey showed much courage and conviction to take the course "less travelled by".
We will update this blog posting about Stacey and give all her "progress report!
When Traveling, How Do You Eat Well?
Posted By Marlene on 2008-09-22 20:54
WHEN TRAVELING, HOW DO YOU EAT WELL?
Eating healthy while traveling is truly a challenge, but it does need not to be impossible. If you plan ahead and control the situation, rather than be at the mercy of airport/airline food (or non-food), you will be far better off!
It is important to know that while traveling, you should eat light, drink plenty of water and skip alcohol and caffeine.
Hint: Bring your own food! I like to take along some of my favorite healthy snacks - easy to fit in a carry-on or in my purse - like brown rice crackers, almonds, dried fruit, high quality meal replacement bars, fresh cut veggies, etc. I drink plenty of bottled water. Then, when I arrive at my destination, depending on the time of course, I may go to a restaurant and eat the most nutritious meal I can find on the menu. Or, I might make a healthy shake in my hotel room with my little portable blender that I travel with - I add bottled water and a packet of nutritious shake mix I've packed. I even add some flax seed that I brought along in a zip lock baggie.
You don't need to sacrifice good nutrition to have a good time! It is a choice to eat healthy when you travel.
Email me at info@medmacro.com for an informational sheet on "How To Travel and Not Forego Healthy Eating".
Where In The World Is? Mina Milenka Dobic
Posted By Marlene on 2008-09-22 20:47
Mina Dobic, originally from Yugoslavia where she was a prominent professor and radio and TV personality, is now living in Los Angeles, CA with her wonderful family. Mina's recovery from ovarian cancer is quite astonishing to say the least! In 1987 Mina was diagnosed with ovarian cancer stage IV with metastases to the liver and lymph system and given two months to live. She declined the doctor's recommendation for chemotherapy and radiation, and after researching other possibilities, decided to adopt the macrobiotic way of life and healing diet. Six and a half months later she was cancer free. In 1990, Mina decided moved to the US and studied macrobiotics. She has made an incredible commitment to give back to others struggling with illness and disease. Besides her certification as a Macrobiotic educator and counselor, she is certified by the state of California through The School of Healing Arts, in San Diego, CA - Nutritional Sciences, Food Sciences and Human Nutrition. Counseling many individuals in Hollywood has been one of Mina's missions: Madonna, singer and actress said: "Mina's counseling and wisdom have improved my health and the health of my family immensely. She has shown us how healing and how destructive food can be. She has been a great inspiration." (Visit www.madonna.com) Other celebrities she has seen are Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman, and others.
I have had the honor of being on a recovery panel with Mina during a macrobiotic summer conference and I admire all her good work! For more information on Mina Dobic, please visit her website, www.minadobic.org and read her book, My Beautiful Life, How I Conquered Cancer Naturally, published by Square One Publishers.
Food and Growing Up Italian
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-31 19:33
I grew up in a traditional Italian-American household where food and mealtime translated into love and family! On Sundays and holidays in particular, I remember the wonderful smells of fresh basil, garlic, onions and homemade everything from pasta, to pizza to spinach pies, to tomato sauce (gravy, as it is referred to!). Everything was fresh, grown mostly in gardens and made in family kitchens!
My grandfather who lived with my family until he passed away made homemade wine in our basement. And we had a second kitchen in the basement with a gas stove for my mother and my aunts to cook roasted peppers and a big lasagna that did not fit in the upstairs kitchen.
During the summers, we had "weekend parties" that lasted all day into the night with my cousins and my aunts bringing all their homemade dishes and desserts so that everyone (sometimes numbering 40 people or more)could share in the Italian regional cuisine of our clan. I never heard a complaint about running out of anything or someone being too tired to clean up and do the dishes!!
FOOD was central to our happy family gatherings! Food brought us together and kept us nourished and happy!
I am proud to be a second generation Italian American who grew up understanding the wonders of foods that are tirelessly prepared from "scratch", from pure, natural ingredients with a labor of love.
I am so thankful to have been introduced to the many cooks, chefs in the macrobiotic community since my cancer because they taught me the benefits of a vegetarian lifestyle based on the principles that surrounded me during my youth-fresh, organic, homemade and with LOVE.
I encourage anyone reading this who is an Italian-American to share their stories of food and eating with others!
Channel 17, Cape Cod Public Access TV, features the author of When Hope Never Dies
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-13 22:57
Since the fall of 1990, the Cape Cod Community Media Center www.capemedia.org has served as the media education and technology resource for the seven villages of Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Harwich and Chatham on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
This "gem" of a media center focuses on the interests of the community on Cape Cod.There is a regular program produced by Barbara Bird, named IMPACT. Barbara, a former Registered Nurse, asked me to come on her show and discuss my recovery from terminal cancer.I humbly accepted the invitation to be a part of her feature on Holistic Medicine.
I gave an a shorter version of my cancer journey from 1983 to 2006: with all the struggles within our family, with all the painful medical decisions and the natural healing program that saved my life.I discussed the spiritual side of healing and how the body, mind and spirit are all connected. Please visit the store section of this website to review this book on my miraculous cancer recovery in more detail and to purchase a copy.
Taking Woodstock
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-13 22:42
A wonderful thing happened to my co-author, Tom Monte! I had the great fortune back some ten years ago of having Tom Monte co-author my book, "When Hope Neve Dies". Tom has written at this point over thirty books and is known as one of the most prolific authors and teachers of natural healing in the world.
His latest book,“Taking Woodstock" which is the funny, touching and true story of the man who enabled Woodstock to take place.The man was Elliot Tiber, who took stock of his life, his lifestyle and his future: a story behind the Woodstock Festival that we have never read before.
By some interesting twist of fate, the Hollywood director, Ang Lee, got a hold of the book, and liked it so much that he’s turning it into a major Hollywood motion picture! Shooting starts in upstate New York this summer and the movie will be released in 2009, in time for the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. For more information on the movie and casting, just Google Taking Woodstock and get the whole scoop.
In the meantime, while we are waiting for the movie to come, why don't we pick up a copy of his book at a local bookstore or on his website, http://TomMonte.com/books.html.
Holistic Holiday at Sea, a Voyage to Well-Being, March 1-8, 2009
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-13 00:05
What is your definition of the ultimate gift for your mind, body and spirit?
Would it be an escape on a seven night cruise to exotic islands in the Western Caribbean from Ft Lauderdale, Florida, while you bask in warm, gracious Italian hospitality on Costa Cruise Lines, while you eat delicious, incredibly prepared vegan (macrobiotic) meals, and participate in daily relaxation exercises along with holistic lectures, workshops and cooking classes!
Well, this experience of a Holistic Holiday at Sea has been going on for five very successful years and was the inspiration of a wonderful gentleman in Southern Florida named Sandy Pukel. Sandy Pukel is widely known not just in Florida but nationally for his work in spreading holistic health and macrobiotics. He opened a natural foods store, Oak Feed, in the 1970's, he founded the Macrobiotic Foundation of Miami and opened others in Florida cities. He hosted lectures and workshops to include nationally recognized speakers. For more information on Sandy Pukel and the Holistic Holiday ar Sea, please visit www.atasteofhealth.org.
The 2009 Cruise will have Dr Neal Barnard, Dr Sherry Rogers, Dirk Benedict (actor), and Dr T Colin Campbell as some of the powerful presenters and lecturers.
In 2008, Marilu Henner, famous actress, was one of the presenters on the cruise, and following the cruise, she went on the Jay Leno Show and discussed The Taste of Health Cruise while she promoted her new book, Wear Your Life Well. Marilu Henner has starred on stage, in several hit TV series, films, commercials, television movies and specials.She believes that with good health you can do it all. She has an incredible amount of energy, replenished constantly with good health and compatible habits. For more information on Marilu Henner, visit www. marilu.com
Buying Local
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-10 13:46
I spent a wonderful, Saturday morning at a farmer's market not far from my home. Because of busy weekends, I sometimes have to make a conscious effort to spend an hour there! I am so thankful that I did go and found the benefits above and beyond waht I expected.
1) Fresh vegetables. sweet corn, squash, lettuce, cucumbers, onions
2) The most delicious fruit, which you can often sample
3) Aromatic fresh basil and mint, which can "double" as an air freshener in your kitchen
4)The opportunity to connect with local farmers to get their great suggestions for simple summer dishes
When I got home that day I was inspired to research some of the benefits of buying local. Here are some of the facts that I learned and want to share:
Most produce in the US is picked 4-7 days before being placed on the supermarket shelves. Sometimes it is shipped over 1500 miles before it is sold, and this is taking into account US grown products. The distance is substantially longer when you consider produce from Mexico, Asia, Canada, South America and other places.
So next time we read a sign in the supermarket that says "fresh"...we will have to think twice about how fresh it really is, and how much of the money is going to oil that was used to ship the product, how much is going to the retailer to sell the product and VERY IMPORTANTLY, how the taste does not compare to the produce from a local, farmers market.
Just think of the impact we could all have if everyone reading this made at least one or two visits to a local farmers market in the summer, fall and spring seasons!
On this website's Resources Section, please read Michael Pollan's article on Understanding What Is At The Other End of Your Food Chain. (see www.michaelpollan.com)
2008 Natural Living Expo, Sturbridge, MA
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-07 13:03
I am honored to have a booth and to be a guest speaker at The 2008 Natural Living Expo in Sturbridge MA, www.spiritofchange.org/expo-2008 This is an annual event sponsored by Spirit of Change Magazine of New England, New England's alternative health resource since 1987!
My topic for the event will be, "The Power of Food and Healing". Learning from oriental medicine that used foods, herbs and plants to heal illness and disease, the lecture will offer insights into various nutritional approaches that can improve one's physical and mental state. An interactive post lecture period will involve all participants as they are guided on a "how to begin" phase: how to change their eating habits, how to convert their kitchen and how to help their family move in the same direction.
The keynote speaker will be Bernie Siegel, MD famous retired physician, author, guest lecturer who became internationally known through his work with patients on mind, body and spiritual healing (www.berniesiegelmd.com) I have great admiration for Dr Siegel because he left his medical practice to help many afflicted with cancer by empowering them to learn more about themselves through their illness. During my healing in 1986 and 1987, I read his first book, "Love,Medicine and Miracles". His words helped me through some difficult times and taught me that some physicians actually put an emotional "side" on a person's illness and disease. Dr Siegel also helped my friend and co-worker Gail with her cancer diagnosis when he was still a surgeon at Yale-New Haven Hospital. Before he operated on her, he had her change her diet and visualize her tumor shrinking (and she did!).
Bernie's lecture at this Expo is entitled, "The Art of Healing and the Psychology of Illness". Bernie Siegel, MD outlines survival behavior patterns, as well as the role of love, hope, humor, spirituality, desire and intention in living a longer, happier life.
Johns Hopkins Makes Fundamental Shift
Posted By Marlene on 2008-08-06 00:47
Johns Hopkins Hospital recently sent out a powerful update on their position on cancer and cancer treatment. We have taken excerpts from the newsletter that was disseminated to not only Johns Hopkins but also to Walter Reed Army Medical Center.The following is the exact wording; it has not been embellished in any way!
"An effective way to battle cancer is to starve the cancer cells by not feeding it foods it needs to multiply": avoid sugar (sugar feeds cancer cells), avoid milk because it causes the body to produce mucus and cancer feeds on mucus; avoid eating meat because a meat-based diet is acidic and cancer grows in an acidic environment; avoid coffee, tea and chocolate which have high caffeine and is an unnatural stimulant.
Meat protein is difficult to digest and requires a lot of digestive enzymes.Cancer cell walls have a tough protein covering; by refraining from or eating less meat, it frees more enzymes to attack the protein walls of cancer cells and allows the body's killer cells to destroy the cancer cells.
A diet made up of 80% fresh vegetables and juice, whole grains, seeds, nuts and a little fruit helps the body into an alkaline environment. An 20% of the diet can be from cooked foods, including beans.
Cancer cells can not thrive in an oxygenated environment. Exercising daily and deep breathing help to get more oxygen down to the cellular level. Cancer is a disease of the mind, body and spirit. A positive, proactive spirit will help the cancer warrior become a survivor. ANGER, UNFORGIVING ATTITUDE AND BITTERNESS put the body into a stressful and acidic environment. Learn to have a loving, forgiving spirit."
Look at the RESOURCES section of this website under "articles" for a more complete version of the newsletter.
Forgiveness and Healing
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-31 19:58
Like many diseases cancer is initiated (caused) by ill thought (especially guilt feelings) about yourself. Every time you create a thought form that emotionally harms or hurts you by bringing painful thoughts and feelings into your system, you are creating dis-ease in your mental and emotional energetic system. The more you dwell on these hurtful thoughts and feelings the more you energize the dis-ease. Carrying guilt for many years is a typical scenario that builds the dis-ease.
When you come to understand that every situation, every scenario you go through with other people, your reaction to the scene at play is the key to your growth or downfall. The key lesson for all beings on this planet is to project love for others and themselves under all situations and conditions. When you are able to do this, you will graduate from the hardest lesson on this planet. Love is the key to all existence. Love is also the key to heal all dis-ease. With love forgiveness for self and others comes naturally.
With all diseases including cancer the first objective is to understand that the cause is through your own guilt or harmful thoughts and feelings created by you upon yourself. Accepting this and forgiving yourself and all involved in the creation of this scenario has a powerful healing effect. Acceptance and forgiveness with love has to be done over and over until you can feel absolute acceptance and forgiveness from the mental, emotional and physical layers. Since this is a build up from many years healing the cause requires clearing all the negative energy blocks created by the harmful thoughts and feelings. Holistic work helps achieve this.
Diet and Cancer, Macrobiotics survivors before the National Cancer Institute Panel
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:37
In 2002, the Cancer Advisory Panel on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAPCAM) within the National Institute of Cancer (NCI) studied six cases of macrobiotic survivors presented by the Kushi Institute of MA. All six indivduals had been in Stage IV metastatic cancer. The CAPCAM review included viewing medical records, hearing expert testimony and answering questions from the medical and scientific panelists of CAPCAM. The panel agreed unanimously that the research was impressive and the macrobiotic approach was worthy of further study.
Unfortunately, due to certain circumstances, the studies were not funded and did not commence. Currently,A group of macrobiotic researchers are looking again at forming a foundation and applying for the government grants.
Marlene Marcello-McKenna was one of the six cases and was present at the CAPCAM meeting. She also attended the Congressional hearing where Michio Kushi presented macrobiotics to a government panel.
Personal Stories
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:36
I received a call from a lovely woman who lives in Southern California a week ago. She had a mother who had metastic cancer living in India. She was already aware of macrobiotics and she needed to speak to a cancer survivor to give her hope for her mother’s condition. She found me through the use of search engines. She wanted to learn about my recovery and the use of a macrobiotic regimen for her ailing mother. We talked on the phone and I tried to give her some strength to face her mother’s situation when she went to visit her in India the following day.
Caregivers have a difficult role because they are searching for answers from the medical world where there are usually in cases of cancer only limited answers; caregivers have to be positive when negatives are thrown at them every minute about their loved one; and many times, they look to complementary therapies and have to sift through all the research and studies before they settle on which one they believe will work.
My compassion for all who reach out to me never lessens as the years go on. I feel their pain; I understand what an illness can do not only to the afflicted person but to their family. Please write me on this blog and let me know your stories or one you can share with us.
“Let Food Be Thy Medicine, Medicine Thy Foodâ€
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:34
Hippocrates said this! The father of Modern Medicine as we know it! Physicians in the US take the Hippocratic Oath when they formally enter the profession. It is disheartening that many doctors in this country do not study nutrition and do not understand the effects that foods actually have on human health. According to the classical Hippocratic oath, one section reads: “I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.”
Foods can continually heal our bodies, rebalancing them when they go slightly off-balance. For example, foods for thousands of years in China and Japan were used as medicine.We now know that many Chinese and Japanese foods, such as tofu, miso, burdock root, aduki beans, seaweed has served as healing agents combating many illnesses and conditions. Dr Earl Mindell (author of over 50 books on nutrition, to name a few, The Vitamin Bible and The Herbal Bible) researched for 7 years in the Himalayan mountains in China a small red berry that was rich in antioxidants and had amazing effects on the body’s immune system. Dr Mindell formulated a powerful supplement in the form of a juice. For more information, please email info@medmacro.com and reference Himalayan Goji.
The Power of Natural Healing Conference (Wellesley MA), JULY 28 - AUGUST 3
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:33
“The Power of Natural Healing” was the title of the Kushi Macrobiotic Summer Conference this year. It was held at Babson College in Wellesley MA from July 28 to August 3. There were over 100 lectures, cooking classes, workshops and events to learn practical, and natural ways to achieve health, vitality and well-being.
The Summer Conference brought together 45 leading experts, doctors and chefs in natural health and healing fields. There were exercise classes, bodywork and private wellness sessions.
Dr Neal Barnard who founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and author of many books on nutrition gave two lectures during the week, "Foods that Fight Pain" and "A New Diet for Diabetes and Hypoglycemia". "Foods that Fight Pain" lecture centered on the various foods that can cool down inflammation, ease digestion and help with menstrual pains; he also discussed foods that clear away artery blockages and restore circulation to oxygen-starved tissues. His second lecture, "A New Diet for Diabetes and Hypoglycemia" unveiled the new research in the relationship between dietary fat and diabetes. Dr Barnard stated that a low-fat, vegetarian diet, combined with exercise can be more effective in reversing Type 2 diabetes than other diets studied.
I participated with ten other "remarkable" survivors on the Celebrate Life Recovery Panel! Many of the healings from almost irreversible illness and disease were recounted by the men and women selected for the panel. Our goal was to inspire and empower the audience so that they would understand that a healing diet could truly affect the direction of an individual's health.
And, the Aveline Kushi awards were given to many who truly embodied the spirit of macrobiotics. One individual who received a post-humous award was a wonderful inspiration to me, Christine Akbar, who gave unselfishly and tirelessly to the outstanding medical research that went into "The Best Case Series" that was presented to The National Cancer Institute (NCI), Cancer Advisory Panel of the Office of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAPCAM).
If you or someone you know attended the Summer Conference this year, please give us your feedback! What did you like best? Which speaker or workshop influenced you the most?
US Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, attends past Macrobiotic Summer Conference
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:32
Congressman Dennis Kuchinich (who ran for President this year) at a Macrobiotic Summer Conference with Marlene and her friend, Ann Shaw. Ann is a certified macrobiotic cook and feng shui expert living in Rhode Island.
Who is Michio Kushi?
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:31
Michio Kushi (along with his wife Aveline) introduced macrobiotics and the natural foods movement to this country nearly five decades ago! They talked about diet and lifestyle; and eating organic fruits and vegetables; eating locally grown; the value of eating sea vegetables; chewing your food well and wrapped up a spiritual practice of creating inner peace and gratitude in one’s life.
This may have been “novel†back 40 or 50 years ago, but now many Americans are “listening†and watching the foods they eat and are more conscious of stress and emotions on human health.
Mr Kushi who is now in his early 80’s, still lectures around the world about world peace. Many macrobiotic counselors who studied his philosophy are helping people and speaking to groups in many regions of America and in Europe and Asia.
There is a “Kushi Exhibit†at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.
He was and is a catalyst and a teacher and a healer. Many of Mr Kushi’s books can be found online on Google.
Hollywood goes Macro!
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:30
We have to mention some celebrities who have in the past and are practicing macrobiotics! Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna (who has a live-in macrobiotic cook), Dirk Benedict (who was the handsome blonde gentleman on the A-Team) and Dirk wrote a book entitled The Kamakaze Cowboy about his recovery from cancer. Dr Benjamin Spock, Livingston Taylor and John Lennon have practiced macrobiotics and visited the Kushi home in Brookline MA.
Celebrities find the macrobiotic lifestyle energizing, and one that provides a delicious plant-based dietary regimen filled with anti-oxidants to keep them healthy while on rigorous assignments while filming, singing or on a national tour.
The Incurables
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:29
On Satellite Dish, the Veria Network (dedicated to living well,naturally) created a series called The Incurables (www.veria.com). The Incurables has 26 episodes, one features the Marlene Marcello-McKenna cancer recovery story. The Incurables series was produced by a Hollywood production company with the focus on individuals that used alternative healing methods to improve their condition and/or reverse their illness. Marlene’s survival story involves physician interviews along with the warmth and humor of her family’s recollections of their mother’s struggles to regain her health. This amazing, medically-documented story ends with a miraculous birth of a child only two years after a terminal prognosis. For more information on how to view this, please email info@medmacro.com. The road to recovery, the struggle back to “normalcy†is explored in detail.
The Macrobiotic Minute
Posted By Marlene on 2008-07-19 19:27
The Macrobiotic Minute, a series of audio podcasts by Edward Esko, available for download at www.eskoterra.com
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