Seven

Since Dave arrived about a week ago I haven't done much blogging. He's keeping me busy. Today, August 27, is our tenth anniversary! It's sometimes hard to believe that it's been so long. They have been good years, with lots accomplished, some challenges, and lots of good times and companionship. We'll be flying home together Saturday, Sept. 4, at the end of my seventh week at An Oasis of Healing www.anoasisofhealing.com.

A couple of you have asked about the food we eat to stop our bodies from making cancer. As you know, I've had a strong interest in nutrition my entire adult life, and I always tried to feed my family well to enhance our health. I first learned about how we could be healthier from Adelle Davis back in the early 1960s, and there is so much new research and information available since those days.

The trouble is, so much of the information is conflicting, which makes it terribly hard to know what to believe. I've finally come to realize you cannot take any nutrition information seriously if it comes from any publication or TV show that advertises either food or drugs. Well, you ask, where do you get information, then? There are lots and lots of books out there, but most of the authors have an agenda, just as the magazines do. They want to sell you on their diet.

The solution seems to be to consider this: Is it really food? I know that sounds funny, but if your great grandmother wouldn't have recognized it, it isn't food. If she wouldn't have known it as food, neither will your body. You have to realize that every bite you put into your mouth is either helping you heal, be healthy, and strong, or it is contributing to your early demise. Period. If it is food, it came from nature. It isn't cloned, sprayed, laced with chemicals, or denatured by being extruded through a machine to give it a fanciful shape to appeal to the kids. It hasn't had its nutrition removed and replaced with artificial colors, chemical flavors, or weird fats not found in the natural world. Every bite of those things you eat helps make you one of the sick, fat or sick skinny Americans you see every time you step outside the door.

So now we've eliminated practically everything in the entire supermarket. And, when you realize that even the fresh looking produce, unless it has been organically grown, has likely been doused with chemicals from its seed origins to its trip to the store, you know it's time to make a commitment to eat only foods that are actually real and that have not been poisoned. Makes sense, doesn't it, not to spray poison on something you're going to eat?

OK, so now we've got the produce covered. What about bread, milk, eggs, meat? As most of you know, I went back to school a few years ago to study nutrition in greater depth and became a nutritional therapy practitioner. I learned a lot during that intensive year of reading and study. The core of my education was based on the research of Weston A. Price, who traveled to the far corners of our round world to find people who had not begun eating what he referred to as the foods of commerce. He found healthy people in remote areas eating extremely varied diets. They didn't have any of our modern killer diseases. No heart disease, cancer, diabetes, or doctor-caused ailments. They didn't even have rotten teeth. Their teeth were perfectly aligned, not crowded, and their bone structures allowed for easy birthing of babies. These people were about as perfect specimens as you could find, and far healthier than their offspring who moved to town and started eating canned pork and beans, white bread, margarine, shortening, and lots of sugar.

While they ate widely varying diets, they all had some things in common. For one thing, they all ate fermented foods daily, foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, yogurt and poi. They all ate animal protein, and all ate some of it raw. They all got lots more of the fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and K than most of us do today. There were lots of other things they did in common. If you're interested in knowing about them, check out www.westonaprice.org. This is just a little background to tell you where I was coming from before I decided to come to the Oasis.

But, when I began looking for results, that is, for programs where they were actually talking about healing cancer, not just shrinking tumors, I found that they were all either vegan or near-vegan. No animal protein, no animal anything. A few of them use some milk products, such as yogurt or cottage cheese, and that's about it. But now there is compelling evidence that dairy products strongly promote the growth of cancer. Nobody is talking about whether the studies showing this use raw or pasteurized milk, but the milk protein, casein, turns the cancer button on. Remove it and other animal proteins, and you can turn the cancer button off.

The China Study by T Colin Campbell, talks a lot about how they discovered this, and the mechanisms involved, including the fact that cultures eating more than 10% of their food from animal sources have much higher rates of all the killer diseases we are so familiar with today. That includes the biggies: heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, as well as the autoimmune diseases that are so prevalent nowadays. And you can see on the charts in his book, the more animal protein they eat, the more the disease rates spike. And I had to realize that I, too, had been eating more beef, because I found a source for well raised, pastured local beef.

So I've been a bit conflicted about this 180 degree turnaround in dietary thought, but when I came here I saw right away they were getting results. People were being healed of cancer. I also found the staff to be professional, busy, slim, vibrant and healthy. When I had to go to the hospital for a little procedure I saw nurses who were nice but seemed to be a bit foggy about the details, moving slowly, and carrying a lot of extra poundage. You sure can't say that about the nurses at Oasis! They are attentive and on top of things. They know what they're doing and they do it in friendly good grace.

If a raw vegan diet heals cancer, then count me in! The food here is interesting, tasty, varied, full of lush veggies, berries and a little fruit (not much, since cancer thrives on sugar), nuts and seeds. The only sweet treats we get are to bring our blood sugar back up into a normal range following IPT, where it has been artificially lowered with insulin in order to feed poison to the hungry cancer cells. Even then, our treats are sweetened not with sugar, but with fruit. The raw brownies are a special delight everybody looks forward to. They are made from only five ingredients, and that includes the icing! They are sweetened with dates and there is a tiny bit of agave in the icing. Mmmmm, delicious! Maybe next time I write I'll give you the recipe.

But for now, it's after midnight and time to hit the sack!