What should I eat? Healthy or sick, it’s a question that plagues us all. It’s so confusing, and fad diets and best seller lists pull us in different directions. Why doesn’t one diet just take care of it all? Instead of looking directly at the picture, look at the negative space around it. The one thing most reputable diets have in common isn’t what they tell you to eat, it’s what they tell you not to eat.
The body is phenomenally mysterious, and yet the answer to the diet conundrum is actually quite straightforward: Eat food. “Well of course I eat food,” you say. But do you? Food isn’t made in a laboratory. Food comes from nature, from the garden. Food is easily pronounced and doesn’t come with warning labels. When we make the connection between what we consume and how we feel, a great transformational shift can occur. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: No one knows more about you than you. Really listen to what your body is telling you. She does speak, but you have to fermez la bouche (that’s “shut up” in French—sounds more polite) so you can hear her!
Lots of folks ask me what I eat. Here goes: I am a vegan and I follow a mostly raw-food diet. But I must say it took a lot of transitioning to get to a place where basic foods felt really satisfying. In the beginning I experienced many detox symptoms and sugar cravings. Over time I have learned how to set a doable pace for changing my diet and upgrading my lifestyle. Now I thoroughly enjoy my healthy diet. My average day is pretty simple. I start each day with a cup or two of warm water with lemon (highly alkalizing and flushes the liver), followed by 16 to 32 ounces of freshly juiced greens and veggies. This usually holds me till noon. After that 70 to 80 percent of each meal is raw, while the remaining 20 to 30 percent is cooked and properly combined. (For more on food combining, read the nutrition chapter in Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips.) You may need more food or find a better combination for your lifestyle needs.
Look at your plate and break it down like a pie. The vast majority of space should be taken up by fresh and organic salads and veggies. Make sense? Follow this ratio to better health, but start slowly. Maybe 50/50 is where you need to be at first. Or, if you are in a healing crisis, perhaps 100 percent raw is best for you. Since I changed the way I eat post-diagnosis, I have seen massive improvements in my overall health. That doesn’t mean I’m “cured” but it does mean I feel much better. It’s important to do your homework and understand how to eat this way. You can be what I call a “muffin vegetarian” and still feel pretty tired and lousy. In my experience, a vibrant and effective vegan or vegetarian diet means that the majority of your food comes from vegetables!
Remember high school science class? Well, if you don’t, here’s a little refresher course. The body maintains a delicate pH balance. Neutral pH is 7. The higher the pH (greater than 7) the more alkaline; while a pH lower than 7 is acidic. For good health our bodies need to be slightly alkaline (with a pH of between 7.365 and 7.45). By eating a more alkaline diet (leafy greens, wheatgrass, veggies, sprouts, juicing) as opposed to an acidic diet (high in animal products, processed foods, sugar, and starch), we flood our bodies with oxygen, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and chlorophyll. Chlorophyll contains a powerful blood builder that’s said to increase red blood cells, improve circulation, ease inflammation, oxygenate the body, and counteract harmful free radicals. By eating a diet high in chlorophyll we dine on liquid oxygen and sunlight. Mama Earth helps us to thrive and heal our bodies.
Healthy food creates healthy cells and healthy thoughts. Conversely, junk goes in and junk comes out. If it’s invented in a laboratory, it’ll take a laboratory to digest it. If it has a shelf life longer than yours, wake up, don’t eat it! Look at your plate, peek in your glass. What direction are you moving in? On the pH scale, Soda = 2. Coffee = 4. Cucumber = 7. Get the picture? Burger, fries, Diet Coke, muffin, candy bar, booze? Acid bath! Green drinks, salads, sprouts, wheatgrass? Alkaline super disco! Your goal is to make energy deposits instead of constant withdrawals.
One of the biggest causalities of the SAD—standard American diet—is the toll it takes on the body, especially the digestive system, liver, and kidneys. When we feed our bodies nutrient-deficient foods, we exhaust our enzymatic reserves and mine minerals like potassium, calcium, and magnesium from our bones, teeth, and organs to neutralize the acids. We create free radicals that damage our cells and rob electrons from healthy tissue. As a result, our system weakens and basic functions begin to break down. In a nutshell, I have just described the aging process. It is also a fertile ground for the seeds of degenerative illnesses. How can we press stop, rewind, and restart? Pull a garbage can up to your fridge and cupboards and treat yourself to a lifestyle makeover!
Many people have chewed and sipped their way to being cancer-free after adopting a vegan/vegetarian diet consisting of 70 to 100 percent raw foods with the emphasis on vegetables, some fruits, seeds, nuts, seaweeds, and daily juicing. Whether it will happen for you (or me), I cannot promise. But one thing I know for certain: Other physical ailments will vanish. You will feel fantastic energy and you will strengthen your immune system. Aches, pains, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, sinus and allergy problems, constipation, fatigue, and even arthritis and other degenerative diseases can all be reversed. Your skin will clear up and your breath will be sweet. You can slow the aging process. Whoa, now I’ve got your attention!
Raw foods clear a path for regeneration, but healing takes time, and at first we may find it difficult. When peristalsis (the contraction of smooth muscles that propels stuff through the digestive tract) is weak, stagnation backs up our delicate system. Waste pollutes our body and fogs our thinking. The introduction of a better diet loaded with fiber kicks our lazy and aloof intestines into high gear. It’s like taking a junk-food sloth to the gym and expecting him to bench press his own weight on day one. Oftentimes, the more sick a person is, the more taxed their digestive system has become.
Enter juicing! By removing the fiber through the process of squeezing the pulp, we instantly lighten our digestive load. Nutrients pass directly into the bloodstream, and within minutes our bodies receive optimum fuel to feed our cells and help restore our immune systems. This doesn’t mean we don’t eat certain sprouted and cooked grains, salads, and other intestinal brooms—we do. If you follow these dietary guidelines you will get plenty of fiber. However, juicing gives our bodies a much needed rest and boosts our pH. It’s a critical part of our healing game plan. If our bodies spend less energy on digestion, they will spend more on repair. Smoothies are great too, but remember, smoothies have fiber. Love them, make them, rely on them for a change, but make sure that juice is your staple.
Dr. Ginger and I spend many hours on the phone gabbing about diet, changing the world, and race car drivers. It’s really important to have and make friends who are into the same revolutionary ideas as you. Ginger and I constantly educate ourselves in order to share what we’ve learned with our friends and family. After one of our powwows, I asked her to write an article for this book. The guidelines I gave were simple: “The title is Fight Cancer with Your Fork. Go for it.” If food is your passion and you believe that knowledge is power, read the next section with an open and curious mind. Thank you, Ginger, my wonderful teacher!
Despite what your doc may tell you, there are plenty of things you can do to take control of your health destiny. Right after ridding yourself of all mental constipation by putting your mind in the right space for healing, your fork is your next best anti-cancer defense weapon.
Here is my list of top strategies to get your immune system hummin’ “Happy Days Are Here Again.” These may be big chow changes for many of you, so if you’re not ready to fully loosen your grip on your standard American diet (SAD) vittles, simply pick out a few from the list to get rolling. And remember, your body is constantly churning over new cells. If the building blocks for those new cells are garbage, you will by default only produce garbage cells.
Here are some of the bad apples to keep out of your healthy, cancer-free kitchen:
Caffeine. Caffeine is in reality a legal drug, and like many drugs it can become highly addictive. If you’ve ever quit your morning cup-o’-joe cold turkey and experienced those mind-blowing withdrawal headaches, you know what I mean. You need to be in control of your body, not some drug in your grub. Eliminate coffee, soda, diet soda, energy drinks, caffeinated water, and caffeinated teas, including black, green, and oolong teas. Also, no “decaffeinated” teas; they can still amp you up. Most still have some caffeine left in them, as well as solvent residues from the chemical decaffeination process. Consume only teas that are naturally decaffeinated and organic. Go get wired from green juices instead, and remember that chocolate also contains caffeine (and dairy).
Processed, packaged, refined, canned, microwavable, non-organic or frozen foods. Eliminate bagels, unsprouted breads, cakes, candy bars, cereals, fried and processed chips, conventional condiments, cookies, crackers, jellies, jams, microwave popcorn (air pop instead), canned and roasted nuts (raw nuts only), white pretzels, processed granola/trail mix, protein bars (unless they’re raw), store-bought salad dressings, conventional jarred sauces and dips, packaged or canned soups, toaster pastries, and TV dinners. This includes all “diet” products: diet shakes and sodas, diet frozen TV dinners, and anything labeled “sugar-free,” “fat-free,” or “light.” Have you read or even tried to pronounce the ingredients in these things? Also avoid processed whey, casein or soy protein powders, and anything made with white sugar, white flour, white rice, and white table salt. Yes, this is a long list (and I’m sure I’ve left out a few things). It may, in fact, be all the foods you currently eat, but these foods are highly processed, nutrient-defunct, acidic, and toxic, and they do nothing but take away from your health. As ninety-four-year-old fitness guru Jack LaLanne says, “If man made it, don’t eat it.” Live by that motto.
Animal products. As if number 2 wasn’t shocking enough, yep, elimination of acidic animal protein is another golden nugget in the treasure chest of radical reversal and prevention of diseases, including cancer. I recommend that you read The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell, to understand and drive home the many reasons why it is so important to eliminate animal protein. Here’s one for ya: Studies have shown that animal protein accelerates cancer’s growth. This is one reason why many healing centers around the world, like the Hippocrates Health Institute, immediately ban all animal products from their clients’ diets. So forgo meat of any kind: beef, chicken, turkey, wild game, all fish including shellfish and sushi, and all processed deli meats, hot dogs, and prepackaged meats. In addition, cut out dairy, including butter, margarine spreads, cheese, cream cheese, yogurt, milk, and ice cream. Eliminate eggs, including egg whites and egg substitutes. The bottom-line philosophy: Don’t eat anything with a face, a liver, or a mother.
Artificial sweeteners. Many have said that artificial sweeteners should be added to the FDA’s Hall of Shame, for they are potent nerve toxins and never should have been approved as safe for human consumption. They have the potential to freak out and damage your nervous system—your brain and nerves—leading to a variety of symptoms from migraine headaches to unexplained seizures, dizziness, depression, and vision problems. There are even links to cancer, obesity, and diabetes. I bet you didn’t realize how many of these human-made tasty toxins you gobble up on a daily basis. They hide out in thousands of your favorite foods, including diet meals, flavored waters, popular drink mixes such as Crystal Light, many commercial salad dressings, and—ready for this?—even over-the-counter medicines like Alka-Seltzer, toothpastes, gum, vitamins, and those Listerine breath strips! The use of chemical sweeteners of any kind—aspartame, NutraSweet, Equal, Sweet’N Low, saccharin, Canderel, and even Splenda—is not advised. Don’t go there. And don’t be duped by their sugarcoated advertising. The commercials may say, “Tastes like sugar because it’s made from sugar,” but that particular product is highly processed and has been laced with chlorine. And get this: Sugar is not even one of the ingredients on its product label! Huh? The answer: raw organic agave or, even better, stevia. Both can be picked up at your local health food store.
Soy. Okay, close your gaping mouth. I know, you thought soy was a health food—after all, that’s what is plastered all over every media outlet. Keep in mind that Big Food makes big bucks from advertising their highly processed (and oftentimes genetically modified) soy milk, soy cheese, soy ice cream, soy chips, and soy protein bars as “health” foods. There are so many of these foods on the market today, you literally could go through an entire day and eat nothing but highly processed soy products. Here’s the deal: The studies performed on Asian communities showing the positive health benefits of soy involved fermented soy products, like tempeh, miso, and natto (foods most people in this country have never even heard of, much less eaten), in condiment portions. Get it? That’s fermented soy in condiment portions. A far cry from the fake health foods made with preservatives and other chemicals advertised ad nauseam as cure-alls that are consumed by unsuspecting consumers in this country. Don’t be bamboozled!
Chow time! Bust a grub on all these good eats every single day:
Drink green juice daily. Nothing is going to send those cancer devils to their death more effectively than boosting your immune system by saturating your body with fresh-made, organic, raw green juices and green smoothies. It’s like opening a big can of whoop-ass. Utilize your basic organic green veggies such as cucumber and celery, add some dark leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables, throw in some pea and sunflower sprouts, and even work a few ounces of wheatgrass into your daily routine. Not only will you be amazed at the highly charged energy you have, but your body will be thanking you for the super-nourishment, the balancing of blood sugars, the plant protein, and the loads of toxins being purged from their hiding places. Consume a minimum of thirty-six ounces of green juice per day. Oh, and store-bought juices don’t count; they are not raw, unless they are made fresh in front of you.
Note: Consult your doctor if you are taking blood thinners such as Coumadin (warfarin) before green juicing. Ironically, you will be instructed not to consume healthy greens or life-giving green veggie juices. When you’re consuming a healthy diet of greens such as broccoli, kale, spinach, and collard greens, ingestion of a variety of nutrients with vitamins E and K naturally balances the blood-clotting mechanisms so you don’t bleed to death or, conversely, develop a deadly clot. But if you are prescribed blood-thinning medications, you are usually firmly instructed by your doctor to avoid all greens and green juices: The vitamin K in greens decreases the effectiveness of the drug, so you will need more medication. Blood thinners are a very dangerous class of medications and must be monitored very closely with frequent, often weekly, blood tests. You cannot stop taking blood thinners or alter the doses yourself without working with your doctor, or you will risk bleeding to death. Some doctors will work closely with you on your drug doses while you eat greens, as long as the amount of vitamin K from greens consumed is consistent each day; others will forbid all greens, and still others will forgo blood thinners altogether and balance blood-clotting abilities through foods and supplements containing vitamins K and E. Find a doctor who will work with your choice.
Eat real food. Chomp only on a variety of real food: fresh, raw, organic whole fruits, vegetables, and soaked nuts and seeds. Don’t let this short list deceive you. There are hundreds of choices within these food categories and literally thousands of tasty recipes you can make with nature’s chow. In particular, focus on vegetable juices, dark leafy greens, cruciferous veggies, sea vegetables (dulse, kelp, nori, arame, and so on), and loads of sprouts—which are cheap and very easy to grow yourself. These are highly nutritious, alkaline plant proteins that will throw your healing gear into full throttle and your nutritional deficiencies out the window.
Note: Limit sweet fruit while you’re healing from cancer, diabetes, or bacterial and yeast infections. Modern fruit is so hybridized, it is estimated to be up to thirty times sweeter than wild, natural fruit. The human body was not meant to handle this volume of sugar, especially when battling a health challenge.
Add more raw food. When you cook your food, you literally cook the life and the “magic” out of it—and dangerous, toxic carcinogens in. So eat almost all, if not all, of your food in its natural, raw form. Eating raw ensures that you get the food’s mother lode of oxygen, chlorophyll, and alkaline nutrients (all destroyed in cooking) and none of the nasty toxins—like acrylamides, heterocyclic amines, or free radicals—that are produced by cooking. Pick up a raw-food recipe book to learn how to make pasta, pizza, and even yumptious desserts using only plant protein: fruits, veggies, nuts, and seeds. Your temple will bow in praise.
Drink clean, filtered water. Clean, filtered water is essential to good health but darn hard to find, for it doesn’t just stream right out of the tap that way these days. Common toxins such as chlorine (which kills off the good bacteria in your intestines and creates cancer-causing agents when it comes into contact with organic material already present in the water) and fluoride (which causes fluorosis, or mottling of the tooth enamel, and has been linked to thyroid dysfunction) abound. Other not-so-well-known nasty carcinogenic toxins such as industrial contaminants, heavy metals, pesticides, rocket fuel, and factory farm wastes discharged into streams and rivers are also finding their way into our drinking water. Even prescription meds flushed down the toilet and toxic personal body care products washed away in the shower have been detected in our municipal water. According to the Environmental Working Group’s (www.ewg.org) National Assessment of Tap Water Quality Report of 2005, 260 contaminants were found in our nation’s tap water (and this was only what was tested for), more than half of which have no health-based safety standards whatsoever. You can lessen what’s lurking in your water by consuming only water that has been filtered. Keep in mind that you want to think about bathing, showering, and swimming in filtered water, too, as your skin is your body’s large absorptive (and eliminative) organ, so everything that touches it is absorbed. Rinse your fruits and veggies and soak your nuts and seeds in filtered water as well.
Take food-based supplements daily. Although it is estimated that about 70 percent of adults use supplements, with at least 50 percent of those using a general multivitamin, I totally agree with Kris when she says, “Supplements are just that, supplements to our diet, not the main course.”
You should derive most of your nutrients from organic, raw, whole food, but keep in mind that our water, air, and entire environment are more toxic today than ever before and our produce, due to chemically depleted soil, is also nutritionally inferior. Processing, storage, and cooking of food significantly deplete vital nutrients as well, so in addition to eating more raw, organic, uncooked food, some basic supplements are in order for most.
It might surprise you to know that not all vitamin supplements are created equal. There are essentially two kinds: synthetic, chemical supplements and whole-food supplements.
Whole-food supplements are food concentrates made by taking nature’s bounty of organically grown whole foods, drying them in a dehydrator, grinding them up into powders, and then encapsulating or compressing them into pills or tablets. As with organic, raw whole foods like fruits and veggies, whole-food supplements have a very complex bundle of “living” nutrients, phytochemicals, bioflavonoids, enzymes, co-enzymes, and thousands of other plant chemicals yet to be discovered by scientists that must work synergistically together to produce their “magic” in your body.
Synthetic, chemical supplements, on the other hand, are isolated chemical compounds created by a pharmaceutical scientist in a lab. “Let’s put some vitamin A, B, C, D, E, and K together with some minerals and voilà, we have a best-selling supplement to be taken once a day by millions and can be sold at every grocery store, wholesale club, and corner pharmacy.” Nature, however, doesn’t work that way. Studies in journals such as The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and publications of the Royal Society of Chemistry show that nutrients in isolation are not utilized properly by the body. Both nutrient integrity and bioavailability is lacking in “dead,” synthetic, chemical supplements. You can’t just pop an isolated synthetic nutrient and expect it to work like Mother Nature. As Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutrition at Cornell University, says, “Isolating nutrients and trying to get the benefits equal to those in whole foods reveals an ignorance of how nutrition operates in the body.”
For example, scurvy, the classic sailor’s disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin C, cannot be cured by taking chemically synthesized ascorbic acid, the isolated nutrient found in many popular synthetic vitamin C tablets. To prevent or reverse scurvy, you need additional plant compounds like quercetin, rutin, bioflavonoids, and many other phytochemicals.
Synthetic, chemical supplements are in fact quite toxic to the body. Some manufacturers of soft gel supplements use hydrogenated oils (trans fats)—including partially hydrogenated soybean oils—as fillers. This makes no sense to me. How can a company selling a supplement touted as good for health be using a commonly known toxic ingredient? Even the National Academy of Sciences states that there is no safe level of trans fat intake.
Make sure your daily multivitamin says “whole-food supplement” on the label.
Here are some other food-based basic supplements to have in your arsenal:
- Digestive enzymes.
- Superfoods like chlorella and blue-green algae.
- Probiotics.
- Vitamin B12.
- Organic green powders. (Great for travel!)
Work with a holistic doctor on other items you may need for your specific health challenges.
If you now feel like you are drowning in the Nutritional Bermuda Triangle, let me throw you a great big life preserver to help you ride the current and stay afloat: These changes don’t all have to be made overnight, although if you are facing a serious health challenge, you may want to step up the pace . . . pretty quickly. It takes more intensity and effort to reverse a disease than to prevent one. In the end, it is essential to have a new relationship with food and to eat as cleanly as possible if you hope to give your temple all the tools and fuels it needs to put your condition into reverse and stay super healthy. There is, however, a way to tiptoe into it, if you will.
I call it “Worst, Better, Best Transitioning.” It involves transitioning from the worst choice in a category of food to the better choice, and then to the best. If you are ready to move from worst to best right away, a big high five to you, but if you’re not, this can be a great way to ease yourself in. If you are presently eating in the better food categories, it’s time right now to hightail yourself into the best. One thing everyone should be doing is green juicing every day!
Here are some more tips to make your ride to heavenly health a little smoother:
Get off caffeine. Coffee, soda, and energy drinks are in the worst category, no doubt about it. You can wean yourself off them by consuming green tea, which I consider a better caffeine source. The best, of course, is to be on your own natural high and consume no caffeine, especially if a health challenge is looking you square in the face. Turn your green juice into your new coffee in the morning and throughout the day. Here is what one client of mine said: “I really love the stimulation I get from the [green] drink. You were right, it is ten times better than caffeine.”
Improve your pasta. Regular pasta made from white flour with a store-bought traditional marinara sauce is the worst choice when it comes to pasta. The better choice would be an organic quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah) pasta (no gluten, no pesticides) and an organic jarred pasta sauce (with no cheese) from your local health food store. But the absolute healthiest option is a raw pasta made from zucchini in a spiralizer or Saladacco, served with raw marinara sauce and topped with a raw-nut cheese (you can mix this up in no time in a blender). Yum! This dish also doesn’t make you feel like you need to sleep for a week after you eat.
The chips are down. Regular potato chips are the worst. Health-food-store-bought veggie chips are better—although they still use canola oil and contain acrylamides and other toxic by-products of cooking. Veggie chips sprinkled with cayenne pepper and sea vegetables like dulse and kelp made in a dehydrator are totally best.
Find better meat, chicken, and fish choices. If you insist on eating animal products, at the very least make sure they are organic. This ensures that they are free of antibiotics and hormones. Still, remember that these are animal products, which are not healing foods. The best choice, of course, is a plant-protein-based diet, especially for those with cancer.
There is a better chocolate. Regular milk chocolate, as in a candy bar or chocolate syrup, is in the worst category. Raw cacao is better (if it’s not made with milk), and raw carob (which has no dairy or caffeine) is the best.
Isn’t Dr. Ginger cool? I’m lucky she joined my posse. It’s important to understand what food does for and to your body. But as Dr. Ginger says, don’t expect massive changes overnight. Baby steps. Remember, think transition, not perfection. This is about improving your life, not ruining it. The stress of change can be just as acidic as a hunk of milk chocolate–coated no-no. The goal is healthy cells and we need to do our best to put one foot in front of the other in order to break our old patterns and reach our end point: health. You are on the train. Some days you are the conductor, other days you hang on to the caboose. But guess what? We’re all on the 5:08 and by God we’re moving forward. Life is sweet. Enjoy the process of waking up.
FIND YOUR JOY AND KNOW THAT YOU ARE A WHITE LIGHT DISCO WITH NO CEILINGS AND NO LIMITATIONS. NOW GO MAKE A SALAD.
