Day 96, Year 7: The Food We Eat
Date: Sunday, February 12, 2012
Weather: Sunny, Windy, and COLD
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, MA
We’re not used to this cold weather, so when the temperature plunged to the mid-teens during the night and didn’t rise above the mid-twenties today, it felt very COLD. It didn’t help that the wind was blowing, but at least the sun was shining.
Friday night we watched a DVD sent to us by a faithful blog reader, Cheryl Fraunhauser (Cheryl, please let me know if I have the spelling of your last name correct.). We met her as ‘Cheryl in Maine’ when she sent her first email to our blog site. We have never met her in person, but we feel a true connection and friendship. The DVD Cheryl sent is entitled ‘Forks Over Knives.” This is a documentary that “examines the profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods.” Those are very bold words, but the personal journeys of the two men featured in the film put the research behind the statement. Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutritional biochemist from Cornell University, and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, formerly a top surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic and currently the head of The Wellness Institute at the same renowned institution, make a very convincing argument. The content of this film has had a profound effect on Cheryl and when she read of Mark’s cancer she wanted to share it with us. The information is not new to us, but over the course of our voyage around the world, we have strayed from our commitment to healthy eating. When you don’t visit a supermarket for six months at a time, you eat what you can find or store and unfortunately that includes a lot of processed and canned foods. Due to our son’s commitment to being a vegetarian for many years, we ate a basically vegetarian diet for those years as well. But gradually meat re-entered our diet. Seeing this film gave us a wake-up call that is time to return to a more plant-based diet. It also gave us a great incentive to do more research to find the best diet for Mark during the six-months of chemo and then the best sustaining diet to continue afterwards. Cheryl, thank you so very much for sending us the DVD. The timing was perfect and we promise to send the DVD on to others to spread the word.
I talked to my sister briefly tonight and found out that the memorial service yesterday in West Virginia for my sister-in-law Conda was beautiful, despite the cold and snowy weather there. There is another memorial service tomorrow (Monday) in Little River, South Carolina. Our thoughts are with Conda’s children, my nephews, and their families.
