Last week a couple of people replied to Ann Corson's recommendations, as they had been posted at a lively blog/forum, with the "Not everyone CAN do that" argument.
One development of the argument was especially helpful, although the person thought I wouldn't find it helpful. This was someone who'd been in the same situation I was when I started having to consider health concerns in the grocery store. I started shopping for health in my twenties, and I had the fantabulous blessing of being a foster mother, or adoptive sister, to a teenager who was eager to show how competent and responsible she could be, rather than to a baby, or babies, who have to be fed according to their own special needs. This respondent was approaching the question in per sixties, as an empty-nest landowner who was accustomed to producing and preserving healthy food but wasn't up to doing that alone.
This is the respondent's comment in the discussion of the Corson article. I hope Blogspot displays it in a different font, because otherwise it looks very similar to what I said to my mother and to my doctor when both of them concurred: "You need to try Jethro Kloss's 'elimination' diet."
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Now, Jethro Kloss's audience were recovering from the Victorian Era. Not all of them had modern or even water-flush toilets, and some of them lived in cold climates. So it seems that a lot of them would happily avoid as many trips out to the old cold outhouse as possible, and Dr. Kloss spent a lot of his time telling them about the benefits of "elimination" of bodywastes. For just about every disease he mentioned in Back to Eden, his plan of treatment began with "Give the patient an enema." The "elimination" diet aims at flushing the toxins out of the body, too. But it's about "eliminating" foods that impede the flushing process. Basically you eat fruits and vegetables, raw if possible, and drink water...
"In the city? In winter? The fruit and vegetables in the stores aren't any good and they're so expensive, and I won't have time to cook once I go back to working fourteen hours a day, which is the goal after all. Jethro Kloss's patients were in a hospital. The special foods and herbal medicines were brought to them on trays. I can't afford to go to a hospital, even if even the Seventh-Day Adventists did the Kloss program any more..."
Anyway I wouldn't have been likely to be admitted to a hospital. I wasn't healthy but I wasn't yet sick enough to spend days in bed. Well, one day, one 24-hour period, with flu. After having mononucleosis for most of two years, I was too ill to work on one day in the rest of the 1980s.
It was an especially nasty strain of flu. Washington doesn't have enough senior citizens at best and we lost many of the ones we had to complications of that virus. It seemed to come with all sorts of complications. After the flu passed people could be divided into groups based on their complications. My slightly older housemate had bronchitis. I had viral arthritis, the kind that occurs when a virus causes inflammation in the joint tissues. If you look up the symptoms of viral arthritis in a book, they're just like the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, which is enough to make anyone consider the benefits of euthanasia. There is a clear consensus on what viral arthritis feels like--it feels like having red-hot wires run through your thumbs, or whichever other joint is affected that day--and when you think about its being chronic and carrying on until your fingers shrivel up into horrid twisted claws you can't even use to roll your own wheelchair...
Well, the thought was horrible enough to make me think that trying the immunity-boosting diet had to be preferable to being crippled by arthritis or calling Dr. Kevorkian, so I tried it.
The fruits and veg weren't good by Scott County, Virginia, standards. And also that was my rationale for having slipped into a habit of buying pre-packaged, over-processed, novelty-and-convenience-type food. I did always buy some fruits and vegetables: the cheap and easy ones--oranges or canned pineapple, iceberg lettuces, radishes, parsley, cans of beans and vegetable soup. I was a vegan at the time, and ate nuts as a protein food. But it was sort of fun to try all the different simple-carb pastries instead of baking bread or cooking rice. After all, doughnuts and Danish and cookies and cakes baked from packaged mixes and sugary cereals were grain products just like boring old sliced bread, and sandwich bread from the supermarket wasn't very healthy either. And there was, at the time, a local specialty brand of gumdrop-type candies made with real fruit juice, and a couple of brands of odd-flavored soda pop ditto, that I liked. \
Well, on the elimination diet, you don't eat baked goods. You eventually get to phase zwieback bread back in, if it's whole-grain, cut thin, baked hard as a brick, and eaten without any kind of lubricant like butter or jam, but no fresh, spongy, yeasty bread, and no sweet baked goods whatsoever.
My first healthy shopping excursion was something my adoptive siblings didn't want to miss. Celery was recommended. I bought celery, wailing amusingly all the way. Carrots were coming into season, and radishes. I bought carrots and radishes. I bought parsley because I like it. I bought cans of supermarket corn, peas, beans, and tomatoes. Rice was on the list of things I could have once a day, preferably for breakfast, along with oatmeal. Rice-a-Roni was on sale. I did not actually buy rice, as either Dr. Kloss or my own Dr. Okon understood the word. I bought ten different flavors of Rice-a-Roni. I didn't buy any leafy green vegetables except an iceberg lettuce. Oranges and tangerines were past their peak; I bought canned pineapple, although back then the "juice pack" pineapple was packed when it was ripe and tasted as sweet as the sugary version. Pineapple juice was affordable back then, and V-8 was safe in those pre-glyphosate days, but my diet plan specified whole fruits and vegetables, no juices or soups.
The diet started with a 48-hour fast on water only, to get the flushing process started. Then for the first week I could eat one plant product per meal, three meals per day. The diet plan did not allow snacks between meals but my doctor, anticipating that I'd have snack cravings because I was cutting out all that refined sugar, said I could always eat a celery stick. I must have gone through three or four whole celery stalks that week. Celery really does contain a phytochemical that helps reduce inflammation and pain. Worked for me.
I was not eating anything like a balanced diet. I was also cheating; Rice-a-Roni is a mix of white rice, white-flour pasta--mostly pasta--and monosodium glutamate. And after the first week, when the plan allowed an egg or a handful of nuts early in the morning, I also sneaked back to soybean sausages. The best ones were made and bought by Seventh-Day Adventists; I was living in the Adventist neighborhood, where the whole collection of soybean sausages were in all the stores. They were full of wheat gluten and monosodium glutamate. I had them for breakfast, often, with my definitely-not-health-food "rice."
But it worked. It wasn't even a gluten-free diet, yet--but it was better for me than the diet I'd been eating, with all those cookies and pretzels and overprocessed wheat flour products.
The results were spectacular. I was still growing, as most people in their twenties are; after reaching our full heights we take a few more years to reach our full healthy weights. In eight weeks of immunity-boosting, I gained one pound, but everyone could see the flab melting away as the bones and muscles grew. At the end of those eight weeks my measurements were 35-19-32. My face lost the haggard, jaundiced look that I considered really ugly and merely looked juvenile. Energy and joie de vivre came back, to a degree other people found positively annoying. I really was bounding out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to have time to run a mile before breakfast.
The arthritis basically disappeared in the first week. During the second week I relapsed, ate some of those fruity gumdrops, and had another flare of pain. After that I stuck to the diet, flushed out the virus, and, after the eight weeks were over, could even eat sugary stuff again without having more pain--though, oddly enough, I'd got through the sugar cravings and didn't want sugary stuff any more. I felt better than I could remember having felt in my lifetime.
One thing I've always liked about the McDougalls is that, while they recommend a best-case health-food diet that's not going to be an easy transition for most people, they emphasize that eating a healthier diet is not all or nothing.
In my twenties, I would have done much better to have gone gluten-free, but I didn''t yet realize that that was necessary or believe it was feasible. Just cutting back on the refined flour and sugar--not even cutting either of them completely out--was enough, at the time, to yield results that the whole neighborhood noticed. Youth was on my side. I wouldn't get equally good results from the same diet as an adult///but I would have got some benefit.
If you do the McDougall diet, which is basically vegan, or the Corson plan, which encourages using animal-derived foods of a quality most people aren't going to get every week, or even the Sinatra diet, which is a normal balanced diet of tasty food that involves a lot of cooking time and freezer storage space, going all the way with it is likely to yield the best results in the least time. Of course.
If you can't go all the way? You go as far as you can.
One of the reasons why people hire private nurses is to have someone cooking the food on a special diet plan--most often a diabetic diet, sometimes a gluten-free or vegan diet, or something more unusual. When I met my husband, I cooked McDougall meals, which are low in protein and high in complex carbs, because his brother had Parkinson's Disease and a low-protein diet is important in treating that disease. Just as I'd had a flare-up of pain when I went off the immune-boosting diet, my future brother-in-law would have more tiresome "parkinsonisms" when he treated himself to a hamburger or a bowl of chili...but when he ate the diet the doctor recommended, he had better control of his hands and feet.
Will any diet cure cancer? That seems very unlikely. Will a healthy diet improve the health and spirits of a person who has cancer, whether the person's case is terminal, or will go into full remission and allow the patient to die old from something else? For most patients it will. If you have cancer, by all means do what works. I'd hesitate to say that a diet cured cancer but I've certainly seen people, like George Malkmus, for whom the right diet certainly fed a long, healthy, happy remission. How many days in remission people can get by working their health program, nobody knows.
My husband switched from McDougall to Sinatra plans, after his brother died. We had ten very good years in between what, in hindsight, had to have been the initial flare-up of multiple myeloma, and the final one. Would we have had more good years if he'd stayed with the McDougall diet, or if the neighbor hadn't used "Roundup" on his garden and persuaded my husband to use it just once? May never be known. I remember my husband began to notice something badly wrong, but kept working through it, for four or five months after using "Roundup" on the stubborn weeds at the edges of the lawn. The neighbor was an old man, a great-grandfather. He died the summer after my husband did.
There will always be a mix of pro-cancer and anti-cancer, pro-health and anti-health, factors working on us, all through life. When we're young the balance is usually on the side of health. After age 80 the balance is usually on the side of illness and death. We are mortal. This is not likely to change.
But meanwhile, every pro-health factor we can add is likely to do us some small amount of good.
Although the McDougalls can sound a bit evangelical on Twitter, in their books they and Dr. Sinatra recommend not making your healing diet a burden to yourself and others. If you eat with other people every single day you may have to learn to sit at the same table eating a different meal, though at least your meal can be one that the other people will want to share. If you see someone once in six months and they want to take you to a great restaurant, really great restaurants have salad bars, but you don't have to pick and whine the way some "dieters" do. Think of yourself as a primitive hunter-gatherer, the McDougalls advise. They ate the way nature intended us to eat. Mostly they gathered edible plant material, and when they trapped an animal they feasted. If your visiting relatives want to treat you to a steak dinner, enjoy a steak (you can order a small lean one) with your veg.
How well the occasional lapses work depends on what you're trying to recover from. Nobody has to stay on the "elimination diet" forever, and many people are able to recover tolerance for foods they have to stop eating for a few years. If you work the McDougall Plan for a few years you'll be eating mostly vegan meals with a "feast" of animal protein once a month--we do need some animal protein, though it can come from eggs or yeast instead of a living animal who had feelings, if you have a special concern about the animals.
If you can work with either the Sinatra or the McDougall diet, you have it made, really. Both diets give specific menu and recipe plans that really walk you through the first few weeks. Both involve a fair bit of cooking with raw unprocessed produce, but you can get into the habit of cooking on weekends and freezing portions of food to eat during the week. The recipes are almost idiot-proof and reliably delicious. If you offer those dishes for the vegetarian or health-conscious people at a church or family gathering, you will need to prepare enough for the carnivores who will wander over to the vegetarian and/or health-conscious table.
There are more rarefied refinements of the Sinatra and McDougall diet plans for people with special needs. Both plans leave abundant room for options like gluten-free, purine-free, or low-sodium. You can cook delicious meals, and notice major improvements in health, if you follow either diet's shopping lists at Kroger, Safeway, Giant, and probably even at the cheap chains.
Actually, when people start seeking for what they can no longer just run out and pick out of the garden, they tend to find it. I found a real 1960s-granola-style health food store in Hyattsville, later, and got onto the long lists of some farmers in rural Maryland who delivered unsprayed veg, and even met someone who used to drive down to "the markets" for deals on meat and fresh fish. But my own amazing results came from eating a pathetic, additive-laden approximation of a healing diet, shopping at Giant, and buying the fresh fruit instead of the pretzels or candy from the streetcorner vendors to whom I wanted to show due respect.
Speaking of Giant reminds me of a wonderful idea more of the "upscale" supermarkets can and should be using. I'll blog about that next week.
Meanwhile, the more comments people care to share about their experience of shopping for clean food, the merrier.
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