Alternative med magazine Sept 2004 issue

[osirus226]

There is a nice story on a survivor of stage IV lung cancer in the September 2004 issue of Alternative Medecine. The story is about the use of a macrobiotic diet and lifestyle. I have purchased a few books online that have recipes I would like to try out with my mom. If anyone has ever tried macrobiotics please let me know what your thoughts are on it.

Kelly

[Ry]

Kelly,

I believe this is right up Cat's (bean-si) alley. She follows a macrobiotic diet. I am sure she has lot's of information on it and will be interested in the article you found.

Wishing your mom the best.

Rochelle

[Guest bean_si (Not Active)]

I've read that article. It should also have listed the following who survived by following a strict macro diet:

Brian Bonaventura - Malignant Brain Tumor

Christine Abkar - Breast Cancer (works at Kushi Macro Institute)

Osborn Woodford - Metastatic Colon Cancer (cancer free last 10 years)

Christina Pirello - Terminal Leukemia

Hilda Sorhagen - Liver Tumor

Janet Vitt - Metastatic Lung Cancer (cancer free last 5 years)

Judy MacKenney - Incurable Lymphoma (cancer free last 9 years)

Marlene McKenna - Melanoma

Mina Dobic - Metastatic Ovarian Cancer

Norman Arnold - Pancreatic Cancer spread to liver (20 yr survivor)

Dirk Benedict (Battlsheip Galactica) - Prostrate Cancer

Anthony Sattilaro - Metastatic Prostrate Cancer (7 years cancer free - he then went off diet completely. Cancer came back)

Katsuhide Kitatani (UN Secretary) - Terminal Stomach Cancer (16 yr survivor)

Elaine Nussbaum - Incurable Ovarian Cancer Mets to spine and lungs (16 yr. survivor)

A very good book to read is: The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health by Kushi who is the definitive authority on macrobiotics. http://www.kushiinstitute.org They have an online store but it's not fully functional yet. Ask for a catalogue. They have everything in that.

To get you started, if you don't have a good health food store nearby:

I buy sea vegetables here http://www.seaweed.net/ or Maine Coast organic sea vegetables at health food stores.

Maine Coast has an online store http://www.seaveg.com/ but are closed until after September 6th!!

I get most of my macro products here: www.qualitynaturalfoods.com

For cookbooks I have Christina Pirello's Cooking the Whole Foods Way

Aveline Kushi Complete Guide to Macrobiotic Cooking

Kristina Turner The Self Healing Cookbook. This is the one I like the most. It makes cooking almost fun and lets you be creative. In fact, after reading it and garnering basic info, I started to create my own recipes. Christina Pirello's book has great recipes but the problem is they're not strict macrobiotic and she focuses too much on deep frying. If you read The Macrobiotic Path to Total Health you'll find a diet fitted to lung cancer patients. Frying is not recommended on a regular basis.

All in all, once you get stocked, you'll find this is not an expensive diet. It is, however, difficult to follow. I know I'm not helping myself by stilling drinking 2 to 3 cans of coke a day and once a week I have a splurge day. I guess it's okay since I just started and hopefully I'll eventually wean myself off the bad stuff (like Sinfully Chocolate Ice Cream Cake).

Somehow I know that to get better I need to follow the diet strictly, especially considering my cancer is inoperable and locally advanced. I did start to wonder if it could work but then after reading an article on apoptosis (cell suicide) I began to see how it could work. I think it starves cancer of the food those cell to keep growing. The cancer cells can't get the (mostly) toxic food they need and start to die.

I also take Paw Paw - a kinda natural chemo - inexpensive - about $35/month. I get that here: http://www.healthy-sunshine.com/paw-paw-cell-reg.htm

Video from scientist who discovered it's use against cancer: http://pawpaw.tv/science.asp

I HIGHLY recommend getting the Kushi Path to Health book or at least the cookbook by his wife (above). They give info on basics you should know.

Detractors of the diet will point out that Aveline Kushi died of cancer. True but she was living outside of Hiroshima went the Atomic bomb was dropped. She was almost 80 at her death and she survived 7 years after dx.

Hope that helps. You can e-mail me if you have other questions. I haven't been posting much lately. I'm feeling very sad and lost lately and don't want to spread it around.

Cat

[Hebbie]

It is such a fantastic article, and I keep searching their website to see if they posted it on line yet (they usually do) but it's not there. It's so inspiriational and a true testiment to the fact that what we put into our bodies really CAN make a difference!

[Hebbie]

I found the article on line. I was going to just paste the link, but thought it was worth pasting the entire article!

A Triumph Over Cancer

Facing a terminal diagnosis, one woman beat the odds with a deceptively simple eating plan.

By Portland Helmich

"She's healthier than anybody I've seen in my office in the last 12 months," says Dennis Grossman, an internist in Cleveland, Ohio. Out of context, this isn't a remarkable statement. Meeting his patient, though, one realizes Grossman's assertion is nothing less than astonishing.

Sitting in the afternoon sunlight on an early spring day, Janet Vitt looks like a normal 54-year-old woman. Thin, but not sickly. And yet nine years ago, this divorced mother of two then-teenage sons was worse than sickly--she was terminal.

Stage IV lung cancer was the diagnosis. A dull pain in the center of her chest had led to a CAT scan, revealing three tumors in her left lung and seven in her right--and the disease had spread. Her liver housed three tumors, she had another in her pancreas, and yet another was causing her abdomen to swell. A registered nurse since 1971, the soft-spoken Midwesterner understood the gravity of her diagnosis. "When cancer is above and below the dia-phragm," she explains, "we say people aren't going to make it."

Though her mother had died of lung cancer at 42, Vitt had thought her fate would be different. She worked out three times a week and had what she assumed was a fairly healthy lifestyle. Okay, so she held two part-time teaching jobs in addition to working full-time as a nurse manager at a local hospital. ("I foolishly thought being stressed-out was exciting," she admits.) But so what? Unlike her mother, she never smoked.

She didn't have time, though, to rethink her lifestyle in the beginning. When her abdominal tumor was removed eight days after her diagnosis, it had ballooned from the size of a nickel to an 8- by 11-centimeter mass. One oncologist gave her three to six weeks to live; another suggested three to six months. She grabbed onto the more promising prognosis and agreed to participate in an experimental chemotherapy trial, hoping to extend her life by a month.

But just three weeks after receiving the first dose, she dropped 46 pounds from her already slender 118-pound frame. "During those three weeks," she recalls, "if I had even a sip of tea, I'd puke for a half hour."

Realizing that a second dose would kill her, Grossman suggested something that sounded outlandish: alternative healing. "I thought that was for hippies," Vitt says. "But I asked him what he thought I should try and he said,'macrobiotics.'"

Through a chance meeting with a macrobiotic counselor, Grossman had begun reading about and taking classes in this highly specialized diet. "I knew there was no harm in it," he says. "The oncologists had nothing for her, and I thought it might help to change her immune system and enhance her quality of life."

Macrobiotics (meaning "great" or "large life" in Greek) is much more than just a diet; it's a way of living in balance. Exercise and rest, socializing and solitude, sensible sleep habits, even keeping a tidy home, are all part of a macrobiotic life. But most people associate macrobiotics with the nutritional regimen developed by Japanese writer-philosopher George Ohsawa in the early 20th century. Popularized in America by Michio Kushi in the sixties and seventies, the macrobiotic diet is a far cry from its trendy, contemporary counterparts, like the low-carb, antiaging, or raw-food diets.

There's nothing flashy about it. Emphasizing whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables, and beans, and largely restricting intake of meat (fish is an occasional staple), dairy products, refined sugars, and processed foods, macrobiotics aims to provide the body with essential nutrients while limiting the accumulation of toxins.

It's based on the Eastern concepts of yin and yang, two contrasting universal energies believed to be present in all things, including food. By consuming foods with the least pronounced yin and yang qualities (like whole grains and vegetables), one can supposedly achieve a more balanced condition and initiate a healing process. It's thought that the standard American diet, with its emphasis on red meat (overly yang) and sugary foods (overly yin), can throw the body out of balance and lead to disease.

"I would have done anything at this point to live," Vitt says, so her sister proceeded to search the Cleveland phone book for macrobiotic counselors. The one she found arrived to meet a 72-pound fragment of a woman gasping for air. "I was on oxygen," she recalls. "I was bald, my nails were blue, and my color was gray." By that point, she was relying on hospice workers and had signed her do-not-resuscitate papers.

Observing her face and hands, Vitt's macrobiotic counselor uttered a statement no doctor had ever made: "You could be healed," he said.

"That was the first positive thing anybody had said to me," she recalls. Too weak to cook for herself, she enlisted the help of friends and her ex-husband. After learning the principles of macrobiotic cooking, they signed up for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or overnight shifts. "Basically," she says, "they gave up an entire year of their lives to save me."

Gasping for air made swallowing difficult, so Vitt eased her way into the diet with very small portions. After two days of meals consisting of just two tablespoons of pressure-cooked brown rice, a half cup of miso soup, and some steamed kale and bok choy, her vomiting stopped. After only one week on the diet, she got rid of her medications, which included painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs. "I decided if I wanted to clean out my body," she says, "I couldn't be putting drugs into it."

To address her pain, a massage therapist came three times a week. After a few weeks on the regimen, Vitt began emitting a horrible odor from her skin and was convinced she was dying, but her macrobiotic counselor assured her she was just detoxing.

Months passed and she began to feel better. No longer in need of oxygen around the clock, and able to get to the supermarket with help, Vitt had become cautiously optimistic. "I thought I might have some quality of life before I died," she says.

Although she was relying on an alternative therapy, she continued seeing her internist. "I told him, 'No more scans; no more Western medicine.' Our agreement was that he would support me as long as I came to see him once a week," she explains. "Mostly he listened to my lungs, and we talked about sadness and death."

But one year after her diagnosis, and ten months after she began the macrobiotic diet, Vitt turned the corner. "I was still weak, but I could feel that I was getting better." And soon she got proof. The CAT scan that had delivered a deadly diagnosis one year earlier now brought miraculous news: The tumors were gone.

Usually that's where stories like this end. The patient walks away, mainstream docs scratch their heads in wonder and disbelief, and life goes on. But this one is different.

In 2002, the Kushi Institute, the world's leading macrobiotic educational center, in Becket, Massachusetts, presented Vitt's case and five others like it to the Cancer Advisory Panel for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAPCAM) at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. A panel of 15 physicians and scientists reviewed all the evidence and unanimously recommended that the Kushi Institute receive government funding for a clinical study on macrobiotics and cancer.

The study is not yet under way, but George Yu, clinical professor of urology at George Washington University Medical Center and the person who presented the cases on behalf of the Kushi Institute, offers one explanation of why macrobiotics might help: the diet's reliance on fermented foods like miso. "They have good bacteria, which produce many enzymes," he explains. "Those enzymes may have some way of keeping the body in balance, breaking food down, preventing inflammation, and decreasing toxic accumulation." The simplicity of the diet also improves elimination, Yu adds, which contributes to its detoxing effect.

Yu says approximately one-third of people who adopt a macrobiotic way of life recover from their illness after three to six months on the diet. "Why it doesn't work for the other two-thirds, I don't know," he admits.

Vitt is just happy she was one of the lucky ones. Nearly a decade after her life came dangerously close to ending, she's still cancer-free. Now a certified macrobiotic counselor herself, she still follows the diet; these days, food is her medicine.

Gone is her habit of eating without thought and working without rest. These days she rises at dawn and goes to bed at 10. She makes room for quiet time, takes daily walks, and has intimate conversations with God.

There have been other positive side effects of eating and living in a more balanced manner. "I used to have migraines, joint pain, and restless sleep," she says, "but not anymore." The biggest changes in her life, though, are less tangible. "I'm no longer afraid," she says. "I don't care about impressing others, and I don't judge myself.

"All the cells in my body are different," she adds. "I'm really not the same person I was before."

Portland Helmich is a writer and TV host in Maynard, Mass., who specializes in alternative medicine

[Karel]

Bean-si,

I was so glad to see a post from you, and to see you composed and still willing to help. You have been missed here, and not just by me.

All the best in dealing with your predicament, but please share it so that the rest of us can try to help you cope.

Best wishes, Karel.

[kdaru]

Many thanks for posting the article; Alternative Medicine told me two weeks to ship the back issue (thbbt).

[betplace]

Heather,

Thanks for posting that article. It made for fascinating reading. Could you do me a favor? Could you post a link to the website for the magazine? I am researching ways right now to change my diet over to one better for me, but it is hard as I am severly addicted to lots of bad stuff like butter, refined sugars and chocolate! LOL Yet it must be done if I am to be fully cured.

Blessings

Betty

[Hebbie]

My pleasure!

http://www.alternativemedicine.com/

As for your diet change, I would also suggest checking out this site:

http://www.christinacooks.com/

[betplace]

Thanks Heather,

I have bookmarked them for further study!

Blessings

Betty