Day 191, Year 11: You Are What You Eat
Date: Saturday, April 30, 2016
Weather: Partly Sunny, High in the 60’s F
Location: At Home in Evergreen Preserve, Lowell, MA
I seem to spend a lot of time these days watching and listening to various web-based programs about the food we eat. Recently we watched the Total Wellness Summit hosted by Food Matters (FMTV) and today we started listening to a series of interviews called The Food Revolution. Both of these series bring forward research that indicates that eating more plants and less meat is the healthy way to go. Of today’s interviews, I found the information from Dr. Michael Greger the most interesting. He is the author of a popular book entitled, “How Not To Die”—not quite a threat, but almost! His recommended ‘daily dozen’ things to eat or drink includes lots of vegetables (especially veggies in the cruciferous family that includes broccoli, kale, and cabbage), dark leafy green veggies, beans, berries, other fruits, nuts, flax seeds, specific spices like turmeric, whole grains, and water. Add exercise to that and you have Greger’s winning combination. I am impressed that these web programs are challenging the current ‘standard’ American diet with loads of scientific research that shows that what you eat really matters. And when I am not watching or listening to these programs, I seem to spend almost all of my time shopping for food and preparing food. I am convinced that ‘you are what you eat’ and that the quality of the food you buy and prepare really matters. Okay, that’s my soap box pitch for tonight, and since my entire day revolved about food in one way or another, that just about wraps it up for today.
I’ll just add a little update on how Mark is doing. He has stopped taking nausea medications around the clock, but he is finding that he still needs to take something just before he takes his chemo pills at 10 am. If he does not, he can make it through the afternoon with the help of the diffuser with peppermint oil, but he really can’t eat as much as he needs to. So for now he takes one pill for nausea and that seems to do it for the 24 hour period. We still don’t have a complete handle on this as he never seems to have two days in row that are the same. But things are MUCH better than they were when he started this trial. So day by day, we are making progress.
