Hang On To Your Fats: Further Travels of the Thin One

In which I stop the progression of my pre-diabetes and discover a whole new world of food as medicine at the Weston Price Foundation conference.

Doctor's Orders

In order to reverse my pre-diabetes diagnosis I had to openly defy my doctor's orders of the previous year to lower my cholesterol. 

"They just can't have it both ways," I said to myself. Between cautionary advice regarding heart disease and my new understanding of the role of carbohydrates in raising blood sugar levels there would be nothing left to eat. This is the realization a diabetic is forced to come to given the parameters of the medical establishment and that is how the pharmaceutical companies get you. They already got us with the fear of cardiac arrest putting so many people on statin drugs. And blood pressure medicine. And Lipitor to lower cholesterol. And Prevacid for heartburn. But I was onto them. I had uncovered the Big Fat Lie. Saturated fats, providing they were derived in nature and not by industrial processes, did not make you fat or cause clogged arteries. And cholesterol was necessary for repair to the body especially for women as they aged. But high insulin; now there was a marker for deteriorating health. Not just diabetes, but high blood pressure and Alzheimer's (which was now known as type 3 diabetes because of the role of insulin). 

My continuing pre-diabetes status would be revealed at my next blood test by the HA1C test. It came back at 5.9 down from 6.0. I had stopped the progression and reversed it, though not by much. I was disappointed given how hard I had worked, but later saw it as a triumph. Considering that I had not yet mastered cortisol levels triggered by flight or flight response, I still had room for improvement. Especially with my public speaking appearances. The three minutes on stage at the conference in Chicago had shot my blood sugar reading 100 points over normal and kept it high most of the weekend. I would learn to master that.

The speed at which I had been reading in the last three months had taken a toll on my sleep patterns too, which hadn't helped. And I had spent so much psychic energy building up my case that I had become argumentative at a drop of the hat. But I had diligently monitored my blood sugars and ferreted out the offending foods—toast, oatmeal, potatoes, and the crust on chicken pot pie that rushed into my veins so quickly I felt slightly drunk. I replaced those foods with daily rations of bacon, eggs and avocado.

My doctor was noticeably impressed by my work with the blood glucose readings and the food diaries. But my cholesterol was indeed high at 243, up from 189.

"Is that what you wanted?" she asked once I had told her why I had taken a high fat approach.

"Yes, yes," I said clapping my hands like a child awaiting a treat. High cholesterol was my act of defiance though it still made me nervous, so intense was the propaganda.

"But your bad cholesterol is high too," she cautioned. The LDL reading was at 133, up from 102. 

"Well, according to my reading," I said prepared for this moment of truth, "there are two parts to the bad cholesterol." I waited for her to get it. She agreed that there was and admitted that there was a test to determine whether it was the big, fluffy LDL that protected the arteries or the small, dense LDL that caused damage to the artery.

"But there's no point to it," she said about the test, "because there is no treatment for high LDL except diet."

"Okay then," I agreed. Diet was, after all, what I was after, not some drug. And so she conceded to prescribe, so that my insurance would pay for it, what I knew to be an expensive test. And would require another fasting blood draw.

The test came back in favor of the fluffy protective LDL and Dr. V wrote me a note that I had made my point, but she was still concerned with other factors of my lipid profile. I did not take the bait. I was done with this battle with conventional medicine. 

Foundation to Preserve the Sacredness of Food

After reading Gary Taubes book Good Calories, Bad Calories, I began to hear references to the Weston A. Price Foundation, first from a breast cancer survivor friend of Catherine's, then in the DVD I bought featuring Gary Taubes and finally on the KQED Health Quest show. Weston Price was the dentist, who went around the world documenting the diets and health of indigenous people. The foundation was set up to preserve his findings. 

As it happened, the annual conference was to be held in Santa Clara, a half hour from home not two months after I discovered them. They had never been to the Bay Area before. This was so fortuitous that I felt giddy with the divine providence of it all. 

The theme of the conference was "Nutrition and Behavior" a rather fitting choice for California's therapy rich culture and would cover ADHD, depression, insomnia and a host of other mental disorders normally relegated to psychology (and often affecting my chronically disorganized clients). 

I enlisted the support of Joan, the breast cancer survivor friend of Catherine's, who was equally interested in attending. We made our way into the crowded Convention Center, squeezing past displays by vendors of natural health products. There were hundreds of people, possibly 800 attendees, mostly women, a bit younger than us looking fit and healthy in a  radiant way. They were also friendly in a family sort of way—the Weston Price family. I was soon to find out that most were practicing nutritionists in a holistic tradition such as Chinese medicine or homeopathy. Also attending were quite a number of psychotherapists, Paleo eaters, an astrologist and a host of farmers and food producers. 

The atmosphere of progressiveness was not unlike Bioneers, the environmental solutions organization in Marin County that Catherine and I attended every year. Except for one thing; it was not dominated by the vegetarian paradigm. The Green Festival, too, had nothing but vegan options in their workshops on food this year. Not a single reference to grass-fed beef being an environmentally tenable solution. This difference at the Weston Price conference created a climate of subversiveness that came up repeatedly in speaker's references to what was held by the public to be healthy, but was understood by the group to fall far short of nourishing and would inevitably lead to failed health. Just the word "low-fat" sent ripples of laughter throughout the room. I laughed too, with relief. It was from one of these speakers that I would learn how coming off a vegetarian diet and onto the Weston Price way of eating would likely send your cholesterol levels high, but it would stabilize over time.

Witches of Health

These were modern witches, I realized. As subject to patriarchal suppression as the midwives and wise women of the 18th century who were burned at the stake, to be replaced by predominantly male, Church sanctioned doctors. There was no need to burn their modern counterparts, though, for it could be taken for granted that there was little chance people would emerge from the low-fat mantra of conventional wisdom long enough to listen to the heretical message of eating a high-fat diet that included red meat. When I first looked at the Weston Price website I thought it was bizarre and queer in a fetishistic sense with all the articles about organ meats and animal fats. But as I became more educated, I was attracted to the very otherness of entering into this world. I was following the path of ancient knowledge. A path that would completely subvert the dominant paradigm of processed foods and factory farmed products.

I, of course, wanted to hear Sally Fallon, the reining goddess of the foundation, though she more reminded me of a head mistress, very calmly presenting what were known facts, had been known for longer than gravity had been discovered so no need to invent new diets when there were tried and true methods of eating throughout the world. Certainly there were differences from culture to culture and individual to individual, but certain facts were universal. Humans were meant to eat what appeared in nature, mostly fats found in animal products, some plants, properly prepared grains and legumes, if available, and little or no sugar in the form of honey and plant syrups. (And no, a vegetarian or vegan indigenous culture had never existed. In fact the more plant based the diet the more cavities and lesser overall health of the population.)

What our industrial food system had done, Sally pointed out, was replace real foods with ersatz foods; foods that had been manipulated by extremes of heat and mechanized processes that so distorted the very molecules of the food that it was no longer recognizable by the body. This included homogenized and pasteurized milk which distorted fat molecules and destroyed beneficial bacteria. Low fat and non fat milk was even worse being ultra-pasteurized. And breakfast cereal was extruded through a machine at such high pressure it rearranged the protein bonds. And factory farmed, nutrient depleted grains stuffed with gluten, causing celiac disease, as referenced in the book Wheat Belly, now a New York Times bestseller. What we once thought of as nutrtitious building blocks of the body, could not be used properly and ended up as unwanted deposits that would cause joint pain, autoimmune diseases, allergies or gastrointestinal disorders. The body no longer recognized what was friend or foe and was attacking these foods and itself. No wonder GMO's were so dangerous. It would just further this process of making foods unrecognizable to the body. 

It was this unmasking of the food industry that probably gave the Weston Price Foundation the reputation of being extremists, so threatening was it to industrial food suppliers. Weston Price scientists were accused of having far fetched ideas, though they had revealed the dangers of trans fat, long before anyone else realized and were now emphasizing the dangers of polyunsaturated fats. Not to mention the even more contentious subject of unsafe soy—soy that was not prepared in the traditional manner through fermentation to neutralize the harmful phytates and trypsin inhibitors.

Practically speaking the Foundation's approach was extreme simply because, in order to eat in this traditional manner, you would very likely have to cook everything from scratch. Such home making skills had begun to disappear from American society just about the time that Home Economics was no longer offered as a degree in college, taking with it the nutrition science behind the cooking skills. 

It was the mission of the foundation, Sally told us, to make sure that young women who would become mothers had enough knowledge to support good nutrition in themselves and their children. Otherwise, she feared, it would be too late. Entire generations would be born unable to fend off the slightest pathogen and burdened with a long list of allergies. Not to mention being cranky, depressed and mentally unteachable.

One of the first observations of Weston Price, the dentist, was that good nutrition resulted in happy, easy going people. His photos often showed people laughing. He made the point that healthy eating was the key to full expression of one's genetic heritage. Thus the women were beautiful with high cheekbones, the men strong with noble faces and the children content, alert and well behaved. They also had perfect teeth without the benefit of either dental care or doctors. He also had pictures of the same tribal people after they had been exposed to modern diets of refined flour and sugar. Their faces had narrowed, their jaws crowding the teeth which were grown in crooked, their demeanor troubled. This was the proof of the pudding as it were. Too much pudding. But the medical establishment put the findings of a dentist and likewise anthropology somewhere so out in left field it was probably viewed more as a quaint hobby, much like history and literature. 

I already knew that Shamans had brought forth the knowledge of healing plant medicine from communication with the plant spirits themselves; they likely had done the same for the health supporting effects of food. Which would account for how each tribe had their sacred food as Sally was describing. For the little Swiss village isolated in the mountains it was the first butter of Spring, when the cows were returned to pasture after wintering on hay.

Good Bugs, Bad Bugs

Internal medicine, by its own admission, was all about bugs and drugs. The body as an entity to be defended from terrorist pathogens with increasingly high tech weapons and the sterilizing of food. Western medicine was to the body what the military was to diplomacy, competent in meeting its objectives, but in an extremely destructive way full of unintended consequences. 

In the world of Western Price, the body was an organism that was host to billions of micro organisms and the key to health was to boost immunity by keeping good relations with these beneficial bacteria and exposing them to a broad range of more good bacteria. It was also important to insure lots of fat intake to keep the body in good repair. Sally told us she ate 70% of her calories in fats. Her picture of half a stick of butter on a short stack of pancakes made us laugh. 

Indigenous people ate animals in reverse order to modern people we learned. The muscle meat we moderns were so fond of was left until last and often fed to the dogs. The most important part of the animal was the head, the internal organs and the bones. This was the world of bone broths and liver for strong bones and cell structure, while fermented vegetables and raw milk provided good bacteria. Probiotics was the word of the day.

Hang On To Your Fats

A colleague introduced me to raw milk a few weeks before I got to the conference. She told me how, even though I was lactose intolerant I might very well be able to consume raw milk just fine, because the enzyme lactase is destroyed by pasteurization and this is the very enzyme needed to help digest the lactose sugars in milk. Thus raw milk helped you digest it. How brilliant is that? That unpasteurized milk was known for food born pathogens like e-coli made me slightly nervous, so she went with me to Rainbow Grocery to help me buy my first pint of whole fat, raw milk. It was deliciously sweet and full bodied. She also recommended the book The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights, in which an investigative journalist ferrets out the real story behind the harassment of raw milk suppliers. Now I drank my raw milk with impunity as an activist supporting food rights, but I was also curious to see what health benefits it might offer. And yes, it did not give me gas like regular milk did. 

Raw milk enthusiasts claimed that it cured asthma, Asperger's symptoms, ADHD, sent cancer into remission and fixed digestion problems. Like good chicken broth it had the power to boost the immune system and fight off colds. The connection between raw milk and less asthma in children had been documented, but science on the whole, was bent to serve the bias against raw milk and other unpasteurized foods. I recalled from earlier readings on globalization how Raj Patel, in his book Stuffed and Starved, had pointed out that the most profit to be had in the food supply was at the point where it went through the most expensive processing because of the industrial machinery involved. Farmers couldn't afford such machinery, but investors could profit intensely from owning such machines. Unpasteurized foods meant more direct access to farmers and like the Church and God, it simply wouldn't do to make it so easy for ordinary people to have such access to fresh foods or the Divine. It cut out the profits of the middle man and diminished the self-importance of the medical establishment and its dogma against pathogens. Destroying bacteria was also necessary for longer shelf life so served the food processing industry as well.

So important was raw milk to the Weston Price ethic, that it had started the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund to protect the raw milk farmers from this constant harassment from food authorities. They also founded the Raw Milk Institute to help farmers establish uniformity of standards. 

Mind The Gut

The support of good gut flora was one of the pillars of the Western Price approach. A Russian educated doctor, Natasha Campell-MacBride had devised a nutrition cure after giving birth to an autistic son. She had made the connection between the digestive system and brain and had used her findings to bring her son off the autism spectrum. Now she spoke every year about the connection between a failed digestive system and a myriad of psychological problems from ADD to Schizophrenia. She called this GAPS, or Gut And Psychology Syndrome. Her cure included removing toxins, adding missing nutrients and adopting a gut friendly diet. Pathogens created the gut environment it preferred, Dr. Natasha told us which was what made us feel bad. It was from this theory that I understood why the body could become alkaline. So often had I been hearing that cancer grows in alkaline bodies. (11/23/12: Correction: I mixed that up with the alkaline diet. Cancer actually creates an acid environment. Weston Price has an article on the holistic treatment of cancer that recommends eating more fat to change the bodies metabolism to prevent the build-up of lactic acids.)

A vigorous two week restorative diet was prescribed that restricted all starches and complex carbohydrates. Bone broth ensued to heal the gut lining. Other animal products were enlisted for nourishment. After which you could begin to introduce diary and other more challenging foods. I would never look at a mental disorder again without thinking of gut flora.

In another room Julia Ross, a psychotherapist and author of The Diet Cure and The Mood Cure, also mentioned GAPS syndrome in her talk on the connection between body and sugar. She linked the onset of not only obesity and diabetes with an increase in sugar in the American diet, but also depression, anxiety, ADHD and insomnia. In combination with the low-fat obsession of our culture we were being severely undernourished. Sugar (and chocolate) was a form of self-medication for low levels of serotonin and hypoglycemia to prevent the brain from crashing. But it also rewarded the dopamine pathways which made sugar four times more addictive than cocaine. In combination with casein in milk products it created an opiate response. Thus the comfort foods like mac and cheese. Such a high sugar diet led to nutrient depletion. But amazingly a cupful of amino acids could correct the neurotransmitter deficits and stop the cravings in about ten minutes. Supplements of tryptophan and another amino acid—5-htp would help the body make serotonin. An appropriate diet would restore the natural body chemistry. These stories offered hopeful alternatives to the pharmaceutical bandaid.

In my travels food was seldom connected with mental health. People wanted quick fixes, but now more were fed up with pharmaceuticals and side effects so slowly these homeopathic methods were gaining in popularity. The nutritionists and homeopaths were reporting that they needed to do less outreach since more people were coming to them.

I also attended a talk on diabetes. This disease was so much a part of the health and diet spectrum that they had a session on it every year.  The speaker was a medical doctor who had adopted the homeopathic approach. I was intrigued to find that there were homeopathic remedies and missing ingredients like glutathione and glutamine to look into. She advised liver twice a week and a high fat, starch free diet. In fact 60 to 80% of the diabetic diet was to be from fats. I was vindicated. And forget about those wheat grass green drinks and raw food diet which had been recommended to me more than a few times. It might lower blood sugar impressively, but the diet just didn't offer the necessary nourishment.

Before I received this pre-diabetes diagnosis, I had often said I wanted to know more about nutrition to obtain optimal health. I just didn't know where to begin. Having been pulled into this research through an insulin related disease, I couldn't have asked for a better portal. Probably had asked for it given how these things worked. I left the conference with my brain turned inside out. The whole world was going to look very different through this lens.

Returning To The Hearth of Health: Further Travels of the Thin One

In which Catherine undergoes a ritual shearing and I consult with a Buddhist Priest and my Shamanic guides regarding my diet.

The Shearing

By the third week of Catherine's Taxol chemo treatment her hair began to come out in handfuls when she showered. It was unexpected; this particular chemo wasn't supposed to cause such hair loss and she found it alarming. Though hair loss was one of the passages of the cancer journey that she had been preparing for, it still brought up so much. She had had enviable hair all her life. It fell in waves of blond tresses and looked great no matter what length she wore it. To be bald was to become unmistakably a cancer patient. But this in between stage of thinning hair was problematic as well. It never could look right.

By the third handful of hair in the shower, she put in a call to Gil, our Buddhist dharma teacher. She had already been in touch with Gil about her cancer journey and he had offered to shave her head when the time came in a ceremony that would renew her Buddhist vows much as one does when becoming a monk. 

Catherine had often spoken of a desire to retreat from her life and would ask me how I felt if she shaved her head and entered a monastery to live as a monk. In this scenario I saw myself following her to take up a position as the gardner. 

"You always wanted to be a monk," I said when she made the appointment with Gil.

I did not aspire to attain enlightenment through my meditation practice and was content to be a slacker Buddhist next to my more serious American Buddhist practitioners with whom I sat with at our meditation center. 

I had great respect for Gil and his ability to explain the concepts of the Buddhist teachings. He gave me language, in English, for a perspective on life that I had understood innately from living in Thailand and speaking Thai as a child. I found the translations invaluable for it showed me that my natural perspective was a viable one in the face of a culture that often valued just the opposite.

It was integrated into the Thai language this Buddha nature. The way we experienced time, the way we asserted ourselves or more likely did not. The way we accepted ourselves as a given in time and place, a part of something rather than striving to make something of ourselves. 

This making something of myself is how I am mocked by my adopted American culture. I continually arm myself with opinions and convictions so that I might defend who it is I am.

On the appointed Sunday, I  put on my blue Thai farmer's shirt and welcomed Gil into our home. He had on his usual jeans and a plaid shirt. I became the assistant to the event, minding the dogs while he and Catherine talked about this conundrum of being forced by serious illness to face one's death. 

Catherine had set up an altar in the sun room with her Buddha, her small brass bowl for ringing and a pink rose from our garden in a vase. Gil added a string of wooden beads and a tablet with the Buddha image in relief. Suitable for holding in the hand, he said. I joined them as they stood at the altar and began with a memorized Pali chant. 

They then reviewed the Five Precepts andTriple gem vows which includes aspects of right living and a pledge to do no harm. (It is this pledge to do no harm that prompts a vegetarian diet in a monk's life.) Catherine repeated, after him, the vows of the precepts. Then Gil invited me to tie a red string around her wrist.

And then the shearing began. Gil had brought his electric shaver with him in a plastic shopping bag. Catherine sat in a kitchen chair looking at her reflection in the window glass of the sunroom, as slowly the remaining hair came off in strips. She was moved seeing herself transformed. The effect was somehow uplifting and liberating. Gone was the worrisome hair. This was a look that was complete in itself. Nothing needed to be done with it or about it. A truly carefree style.

As Gil took his leave he told Catherine to call him anytime if she wanted to talk to him. "And you too", he said to me recognizing that the caretaker is just as much under stress. I appreciated this acknowledgement and inclusion. 

Both Steven and I were taken by Catherine's new look. She had worried about how we would react. Would we be repelled by such baldness? But the novelty of it appealed to us. It was unambiguous and thug like, but her petite head was so even and beautiful it contradicted itself. Steven took pictures with his phone to show to their other brother. I sewed her a white cap from a t-shirt and later a black one. The white one made her look like an inmate from the futuristic setting in THX1138. The black one like a drug dealer. I was startled every time I did see her naked head and was reminded again of a monk. 

Once she had taken this unambiguous step into the identity of a cancer patient, she seemed to own it, become more confident about fighting the disease. Between watching episodes of Judge Judy and the antique dealers hunting collectibles on American Pickers, she researched the promise of a cure and how to prevent a recurrence. She also continued her meditation practice daily. When she was feeling energetic (especially after the steroids from the infusions) she listened to lectures for her studies with The Diamond Approach, a spiritual inquiry practice.

The Path of Non-Harming

Shortly after this hair sheering ceremony I found myself confronting the ethical aspects of eating animals. The leftist, social activists, environmentalists and Buddhists, who were part of my context and community, heavily supported the vegetarian ethics of not killing what you ate. It felt urgent to me to answer to this ethic. 

I came across a book by a recovered vegan who laid out for me, in neat categories, all the arguments put forth by the vegetarian camp, from the moral issues to the environmental issues, to the health claims. 

I also felt betrayed by the claims that such a diet was healthy. It was not as I was finding out. It was nutrient depleting and metabolically troublesome, possibly energy draining. Plus the high heat of industrial processing all but destroyed what nutrients were left in the supposedly healthier-for-you veggie burgers and other meatless soy wonders, filled, as I found out from the book The Whole Soy Story, with secret toxins, rancid vegetable oils, mystery fillers and other dubious unknown ingredients. 

From my reading of Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myths, it became clear to me that the planet would not benefit at all from humans choosing a vegetarian diet. The very grains that would have to be grown to sustain so many vegetarians was already colonizing the land in a distinctly imperialist manner. Industrial agricultural methods rendered the land infertile, stripping the soil of nutrients which led to desertification, thus more clearing of forests and natural habitats for farmland. Factory farming of meat adding insult to this equation by pushing grains into animals. Animals that normally fed off the land itself and were designed to add to the fertility of the soil with their manure. 

I was still left with the moral concept of killing what one ate. The up close, human to animal responsibility of it. No argument could persuade those who were unable to kill. It was as immoral as the death penalty. And so it was that I took Gil up on his invitation to contact him. 

He responded right away and I met with him a few days later at the meditation center. He took me on a walk into the neighborhood leaving me to guide our talk. I offered a little of my own history with Buddhism and how it had been my home base, but more recently I had felt more drawn by a Shamanic practice. I told him, too, how I appreciated that American Buddhism was saving the dharma with the individual practitioners giving their full attention to it in the characteristic, driven, American way. But the Buddhist practice in America embraced vegetarianism in such a way that I was led to believe it was healthy. "I felt misled," I said simply. (This was understating my feelings of rage at being so misled by every sector of society concerning food plus the concern I suddenly had for the health of the people in our Buddhist community.) 

Gil gave his response. There were two reasons people became vegetarians in the '70s, he began. One was for the moral aspect and the other was for the environmental aspect. 

"We knew a vegetarian diet wasn't healthy," he said. It was a relief to hear this because no one in our Buddhist community ever discussed the health aspects. As a newcomer to the community I thought those who ate vegetarian as part of their practice were purifying their bodies to compliment their spiritual path.

Gil then told me a story about Frances Moore Lappe, my hero of the Diet For A Small Planet fame. In the '70s, Gil lived at the zen monastery in San Francisco. The monastery had invited Ms. Lappe to come to dinner and speak to them about vegetarianism. She lived in Berkeley at the time and arrived bearing a rabbit stew made from her own rabbit. This shocked them all, but she explained to them that feeding a rabbit kitchen scraps was the most ecological way to bring food to the table. The whole point of her book had not been vegetarianism, but that feeding grains to animals was wasteful.

I was thrilled by this story. She got it; she wasn't just a hippie chic proselytizing a vegetarian diet. She understood the underlying math. It was the public, then, that wanted to embrace such vegetarian deprivation to do their part. She would be repeatedly quoted for her ardent explanation of how there was enough protein in beans and rice to sustain humans and that's how we should eat on a finite planet rather than fattening cattle with food while humans starved. Too bad she wasn't able to flesh out her equation so to speak. It would take another thirty years before Novella Carpenter would write her book Farm City and reintroduce the idea of growing your own meat with her backyard farming in Oakland and her pig.

But that still left me with the ethics of killing. I confessed to Gil, that I was also the family rat killer.

"That's because you can," he said with no judgement either way, "I can't. I can't kill. If someone else goes fishing and kills a fish I will eat it, but I can't kill a fish myself. If I do need to eat meat for health reasons I eat some chicken or fish." 

He told me about killing gophers when he was a gardner at Tassajara, a zen monastery we had stayed at ourselves. There was no policy about the gophers; it was left up to the gardner to decide. Gil gave it a great deal of thought and watched the garden carefully. In the end he decided that, given how much damage the gophers did to the food crops, he would trap them for the greater good of the community. But over time he had become less able to kill. Someone else would have to catch his rats.

He hoped he had answered my questions. I offerd that it was even more complex and nuanced than I had thought. Then suggested that I might consult my spirit guides and power animals in a Shamanic journey on the topic. He encouraged me to do so and was as intrigued as I was by what they might say.

Returning to the Hearth

The crucial part of journeying to ask a question is what exactly do I ask. The wording of a question would bias the answer. I formed in my mind a nuanced request. What were the ethical considerations of eating meat? How did I reconcile killing another being in order to eat it?

I put on my ten minute drumming segment on my iPod and followed the urgent rhythms into the theta state of my mind and entered the Dream Time. I chose to go to the upper world first to meet my spirit guide Grandmother because she often gave an answer that was an overview.

When I arrived in the sky place, I found myself running across a field of grain, the imperialist colonizing kind, and I was eager to be free of its vast dry yellowness. The cottage of the Grandmother was at the edge of the field over a stone wall. She was in her garden. I entered it and went to her. She hugged me a long time before taking me into her cottage where I sat at her kitchen table and she put before me a hot bowl of bone broth soup. 

I asked her my question about the ethics of eating animals. She gave a sigh and told me that the whole purpose of my incarnating in human form was to integrate fully into my body, the cells of plant life and of animal life so that I could fully realize health in this incarnate, human form. As she mentioned plant life and animal life, I saw their essence in my mind and noted that the plant essence was by far the more powerful and intelligent.

"What about the vegetarians? I asked.

"Forget about them," she said impatiently, "that is not your path."

"What about the killing of animals for me to eat," I asked.

"You must see it as an ecstatic experience for the animal. The ecstasy of being released from the incarnate form. The birth and return home to the spirit world." 

I then ask about the slaughter of the animal.

"The faster and more skillfully it is done, the better the ecstatic release."

"Should I kill my own meat?"

"We'll talk about that when you are serious about doing so," she said, calling my bluff.

I gazed into my soup and saw chunks of liver. I was not sure about them, but I ate and contemplated her words. (Later I would read that bone broth and liver were good foods for regulating blood sugars.)

The drums began the call sequence before I could finish the soup. I got up and hugged her goodbye, sobbing a little. She comforted me and welcomed me back to health, back to the hearth of my health.

The Hunter

Comforted by her reassuring presence, I wrote my notes from the journey. Then I began another to visit the lower world to ask about the killing of animals for eating. As I descend I heard my power animal Mongoose announcing my arrival. I was dressed like Mowgli in a loin cloth. My feet bare and I am in a young body. I was also young in the upper world.

"Here she comes," says Mongoose, "the Hunter." We greet, but we do not hug. Then he does hug me, but rather stiff and formally. He was creating distance between us.

"Your task is to kill me," he said simply.

"I can't do that you're my power animal," I protest and I know that I really can't.

"Okay then you can kill my young,"  he says and there is no arguing with him. The young mongoose are clearly much smaller, more realistic in size than the god-like human size in which he has appeared to me today so I agreed to it. I manifested my own bow and quiver of arrows and followed him into the jungle.

"I will instruct you," said Mongoose when we came to a clearing. Meanwhile all the little mongoose came out into the clearing to greet me, then scampered back into hiding again.

"This reminds me of seeing Island of The Blue Dolphins when I was little," I said, I had been entranced by the girl with her bow and arrow, but then she shot the wolf. I kept watching as if my own life depended on it. Was life intrinsically cruel or not? I was much comforted when the wolf was nursed back to life and became her companion.

"That was a recognition of your path," said Mongoose. "These mongoose will also come back alive, but they must die first by your hand." I agreed to play the game and manifested a crossbow instead for better stalking. Mongoose told me how to find the mongoose. "You will need bait," he says and he handed me a cat carrier with a cobra in it. I took it to the clearing and let the snake out. At first the snake wanted to bite me, but I shoo it off. He entered the clearing and the mongoose came out to prepare to kill the cobra.

"So I am to kill the mongoose as it prepares to kill the cobra?" I asked him perplexed.

"Yes it is the same. The same ecstasy to kill or be killed," he explained.

I concentrated on making a good killing. Only one mongoose had stayed to fight the cobra. I shot it in the throat. Mongoose, my teacher, hurried to its side and caught the blood in a wooden cup which he bid me drink. "This will nourish you," he says, "And then you must skin it and roast it."

I drink from the cup. Then I cut the skin of the slain animal down the middle and down each limb to the feet and hands. Mongoose handed me a hatchet to take off the feet and hands, then helped me put the carcass on a spit. He manifested a fire and I roasted it. When it was cooked, he bid me eat of the flesh.

"It tastes like chicken," I said. Mongoose knows that I am making a joke.

"No," he says, "more like rabbit." I remember the taste of rabbit from a restaurant in San Francisco. I noticed that he did not eat of the mongoose meal. It was for me.

"You are hungry," he says, "eat before the drum calls you back." And I did, letting the juices drip down my chin. I smeared the grease on my face and body like war paint.

"You are trained to be a hunter," he says, "your are wiry and strong; don't' worry about being so thin. The meat will feed you." I ate until the call back of the drum. We walked away together. I was still holding the roasted mongoose. I handed it to him. At the mouth of the tunnel I saw Bear my other power animal. I gave him a hug and rubbed his fury chest. He hugged me back warmly and I scampered up the large tunnel, taking my leave.

The journey left me feeling exposed for my hunter nature. It was not a story I could tell easily, but at the same time I felt integrated into the cycle of life. I could now stand confidently before the meat case at the butchers counter and own my meat eating life.

Travels Of The Thin One

My journey in search of health takes me through the jungle of nutrition advice where the going gets thick with much conflicting information, some startling revelations and a surprising food choice to mitigate global warming.

The Skinny Diabetic Paradigm

The reaction to my diagnosis as a pre-diabetic struck my friends as puzzling. How could I, a paragon of fitness and healthy living, have succumbed to a condition associated with poor diet and obesity? The novelty of being a thin diabetic was entertaining, but not entirely unusual. The two diabetic women I knew, outfitted with insulin pumps and diagnosed at a young age, were both fit and thin. One was my sparring partner in karate class.

Here in the States a poor diet is associated with sodas and hamburgers, fast food and poverty. I loved a good hamburger on occasion and the fries with it, but I never drank sodas, only water. No, my diet was the highly regarded low fat diet of the thin and elite, "mostly plants" to quote Michael Pollan. 

I had not been concerned with our protein intake, but when Catherine was advised by her doctors to lay on the protein in order to survive surgery and various other treatments for her cancer diagnosis, we could see that our diet fell short of the required 57 to 70 grams a day, especially our vegetarian diet which got us by on 45 grams a day.

A return to a vegetarian diet was our first response to Catherine's diagnosis. Two learned men in our lives, a doctor and an economist, recommended we watch Forks Over Knives and read The China Study. Catherine had been berating herself for all the rich food she had been eating over the last year, along with all the wine pairings and after dinner port that she and her brother so enjoyed at our bi-weekly dinners out. After watching Forks Over Knives we were convinced that salvation lay in a diet of vegetables and legumes. The carton of organic, cage free, Omega 3 enriched eggs languished in our fridge until I had to throw them in the compost. 

Next In Line

On her second day of chemotherapy treatment Catherine befriended the man in the next chair who had cancer of the kidneys. He was so upbeat he infused the room with the positive chatter of a life coach as he rooted for his chemotherapy drugs to heal him. His wife was with him. When I heard that she too had undergone chemotherapy for her colon cancer the year before, it put me on notice. 

"We're completive that way," he joked. 

"There's no relationship between our cancers," said the wife to reassure us. How do you know? I wondered. Presumably they lived in the same house and shared the same lifestyle.

In the past we had adopted a vegetarian diet after watching a movie about factory farmed animals. As a Buddhist Catherine also did not want to harm sentient beings. Our Buddhist community served vegetarian meals at retreats and potlucks. I also believed that eating lower on the food chain would help world hunger and the environment. It was one of the original "50 Ways To Save The Earth". 

I had been a convert to "Diet For A Small Planet" since 1990. The author, Frances Moore Lappe, was one of my heroes. That her organization, Food First, no longer advocated eating low on the food chain, but now embraced grass fed beef and local foods had somehow escaped me. Our meal plan included burritos once a week using fake meat—the soy and wheat based vegetarian product. There were also fake sausages. The rest was vegetables in soups and casseroles. A diet high in carbohydrates.

The Diet Makeover

When I cracked open my first book on diabetes, four months into Catherine's cancer treatment, I became convinced that it was our high carbohydrate diet that had brought us down this road to these diseases of civilization. And that I was next in line for a cancer diagnosis. One report showed that a high number of cancer patients were also glucose intolerant as I was. I saw my diagnosis of pre-diabetes as a nudge from the universe to rectify both of our diets. 

Most cancer survivors do take a hard look at their lifestyle and especially their eating habits. A high number of breast cancer survivors go the route of the detoxifying, "clean eating", alkaline diet made popular by "crazy sexy cancer" diva, Kris Carr, a model turned glam, cancer-preneur with books, movies and diet advice. 

If you already believe that the low fat diet is the cornerstone of health (as most people do), then it makes sense that a diet of organic fruits and vegetables (and vitamins and supplements) is even better. And so easy when all you have to do is make a shake. It was the direction Catherine wanted to take especially because fruits and vegetables were her favorite food.

Detoxing was okay for a week or two, but would lead to insulin resistance, I told her. After all, if you pulverize fruits and vegetables into a shake you make what was a perfectly good carbohydrate that the body took time to digest, and broke it down directly into sugar. Exactly what I was trying to avoid. I knew Catherine had issues with insulin resistance too; she had already been in and out of the pre-diabetes status herself not too long ago and her father had just begun insulin injections for diabetes (should there be a genetic disposition involved; both my parents had blood sugar issues too).

Wrong Oil, Right Oil

When my chiropractor first told me he suspected that polyunsaturated vegetable oils were the cause of many chronic diseases and that it was healthier to cook with lard and palm oil, I thought he was on glue. When my own research led me to the same conclusion, he told me about coconut oil. I then noticed all the coconut oil that had suddenly appeared at Whole Foods and found a variety of brands to choose from, solid and snow white in their jars. 

What a delightful oil to cook with. And eat by the spoonful! I made a grass-fed beef chili with it. Bacon lard was equally satisfying. Olive oil, a monounsaturated fat, was still okay if not oxidized by too high heat.

Saturated fats never go rancid. They are solid at room temperature because their molecular structure is fully saturated with hydrogen. Polyunsaturated fats are not, their un-partnered bonds have unstable electrons. These electrons can wander off to join other molecules resulting in free radicals. Free radicals are created in the body with the digestion of these cooked oils. Free radicals can cause cancerous mutations and damage tissue. Antioxidants help combat free radicals. 

We got the antioxidant part right, thus the consumption of green tea every time cancer is mentioned, but no one had mentioned that the cause of free radicals was associated with polyunsaturated fats. Trans fats and hydrogenated oils were poison. Yes, we got that, but we still see vegetable oils as natural and beyond reproof. After all, low fat anything was good for you. We had been indoctrinated for over 30 years to believe this was so. 

The Lipid Hypothesis

Plenty of studies had been done to attempt to prove that lowering your cholesterol by lowering your intake of saturated fat and red meat was the key to preventing heart disease, cancer and the like. This is what is known as the Lipid Hypothesis. None of these studies were conclusive. In fact low cholesterol was associated with increased risk of cancer especially in women (although women were rarely studied). 

Cholesterol is needed to patch up the damage done by free radicals, which is why it clings to the walls of the arteries where damage has been done. Thus at first observation, cholesterol appears to be the culprit in heart disease, but the appearance of cholesterol is akin to paramedics appearing at the scene of an accident. This was the science offered for refuting the Lipid Hypothesis.

In 1984 a "consensus development" conference was held to decide what was actually the truth since no studies had proven anything definitive. A panel of 14 experts were handpicked to review the studies; all but three were already predisposed to the Lipid Hypothesis as was the researcher who picked them. They issued a statement that the Lipid Hypothesis was correct (based on two tenths of one percent of improved mortality in one study). For the next 25 years any study that showed the opposite was largely ignored because, after all, the issue had been decided. Which is why most people, including our doctors, believe it to be true. 

Nutrition gurus continue to write books that base their recommendations on the Lipid Hypothesis, heartily denouncing saturated fat, especially animal fat, as the devil incarnate. The prevailing wisdom welcomes these rants, but I no longer believed these fit or fat gurus. The body needed saturated fats to repair itself, I learned, and specifically animal fat to absorb vitamins and provide Vitamin D and A and B12. That much we know. Both Catherine and I were low on Vitamin D, especially Catherine who was now taking prescription level doses of it. A recent study just came out that associates the cancer cluster in Marin County to deficiency of Vitamin D. All those fit elite with their sunblock and low fat diet gurus perhaps.

Catherine saw one on Dr. Oz, whose book she wanted to check out. Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman. I picked it up at the library, spent half an hour with it and told her it was just another pro-vegetarian agenda denouncing saturated fats. My extreme attitude was beginning to make her nervous. When was this obsession going to be over, she wanted to know. She preferred to be a vegetarian, had been one as a child too, out of empathy for the cows that surrounded her childhood home. It was a moral issue she reminded me.

Brain Food

Unlike fat diabetics, I had no public oppression to go along with any diet that left me hungry and indifferent about food. I needed serious feedings. My new research was not only nurturing my body, but also gave my brain something to chew on. Both had been hungry for a while. The rich food was not easy to eat. It did not make me feel light and energetic. It made me want to sit for a while at the table and digest (much like the reading I'd been doing). It took time to eat, but then I was good for hours on end instead of two or three. And I no longer needed a nap in the afternoon. My hypoglycemia cured in one fell swoop. 

I found a DVD to explain this research to Catherine. I had to buy it because, unlike the 13 copies of Forks Over Knives in our library system, it was not yet available; it was too new. Called The Search For The Perfect Human Diet, it featured Weston Price, a dentist, who traveled the world in 1939 photographing indigenous people of exemplary health who ate traditional foods with their straight white teeth. The film also showed the results of diet on evolution. Once homo sapiens started eating animal meat they grew a bigger brain. Once we started growing crops and eating predominantly carbohydrates, our skulls got too small for a full set of teeth. Contrary to what I was told, wisdom teeth were not extracted because they were superfluous like the appendix. We were simply devolving.

Catherine was not sold on my nutrition campaign. The conflicting information left her dumbfounded; she didn't know what to eat. 

You're too thin, she added. Friends who hadn't seen me in a while also commented that I had gotten too thin. They could feel my ribs under their hands when they hugged me. Not only did I need more holes in my belt, but my underwear needed a belt. My ears looked bigger as my face got thinner. Since I no longer ate potatoes or bread and very little rice and pasta because of my too high blood sugars, my weight had dropped a few more pounds to rest at just under 100. I hadn't weighed this little since high school. I didn't weigh much more than that in my twenties, but I was so sure I was meant to be ten pounds heavier as I had been over the last 20 years, that I gave away my black leather, custom tailored, motorcycle pants from 1984.

As instructed by her doctors, Catherine was fattening up for her final chemo regime, known among cancer patients as the Red Death because it made your sweat red and your tears red as well as making you nauseous. She wanted to know if there was going to be food she could eat during that time. She did not think she would be able to eat meat (especially not exotic meats like bison or lamb. The furrier the pelt the less she felt comfortable eating it, I noted.) I assured her that I would run out and get anything she felt like eating whether it was mac and cheese or fried rice. Meanwhile I stashed grass-fed beef hotdogs in the freezer. Hold the nitrites.

Chicago

At the end of September, I left Catherine in the care of her brother and took my thin self to Chicago for a conference with my fellow organizers. I packed trail mix, a can of sardines and two cupcake frittatas with sausage and bell pepper that I had baked the night of my flight out. I felt great to be traveling again, trundling my luggage down the sidewalk of The Magnificent Mile as commuters were coming in to work. Chicago was enjoying stunning weather, just cool enough to keep from breaking a sweat.

In the weeks after I dropped the carbs from my diet, I felt my head clear and my memory improve. I could think so much more clearly as I surveyed the terrain of my many thoughts. I wondered if I could still consider myself ADD. Probably not, I realized as I found myself at the wrong Hilton hotel. I called a friend who had arrived the day before and was alerted to my mistake then jumped on a bus to arrive at the right hotel in time for a second breakfast. My colleagues and I walked to The Yolk where I ordered a bacon, avocado and three cheese frittata topped with salsa and sour cream. Hold the potatoes and toast. 

Better Living Through Science

"You only need to go to Europe to know it's not true," said my conference roommate Kim, about the Lipid Hypothesis. Her mother was German. The German diet was notoriously heavy yet no one in Germany is fat, she told me. Europe is also the home of the Slow Food movement and the preservation of traditional foods. I'm not sure Americans have a traditional food culture. It has science and industry.

Chicago had a museum of science and industry. I set out to visit it. It was huge. Part exploratorium for kids, part warehouse for space vehicles, trains, planes and a submarine, a showcase of American industrial and military power. In the section called Farm Tech, the miracles of industrial agriculture were displayed with a comforting, retro design. 

Our food comes from all over the globe, isn't that great? Look at what we feed our cows! Around the room photographs and text mentioned local foods and organic farming, but a John Deere combine  dwarfed it all. Set up to simulate the experience of harvesting a typical corn field, it plowed into a film clip projected on a screen to show movement down a field; a sound system in the cab offered an accompanying midwestern farmer's patter.

It was all very friendly, but off in a corner there was one display that was downright eery. It was staged to be an ordinary kitchen. In every cupboard and on every shelf were products made from soy. From the cleaning products under the sink, to the paint on the walls to the food in the cupboards and fridge. All soy. On the wall a world map showing that the US was the biggest grower of soy beans. Like the final scene in a sci-fi horror film, I had the sudden revelation that our food supply had been unmasked like the cannibalism in Soylent Green. (Funny that this 1973 movie has soy in the title.) Real food replaced by a non food. That Big Ag had such a stake in soy production made me suspicious. 

A few days later, I would come across a passage in a book by a recovering vegan, that revealed the dangers of soy. How had I never heard of these dangers? I double checked the information on the internet and got a Dr. Mercola article listing the same warnings. Soy was not only an estrogen mimicker, but it interfered with the functioning of the thyroid. And there was the troubling part about how soy has phytates in it that prevent the body from absorbing essential minerals and a Trypsin inhibitor that prevented the body from digesting protein. Talk about a food that was working against nourishment. And I'm not even going to mention the unknown dangers of GMO soy.

(Fermented soy such as in Miso soup and Tempeh prepared in the traditional manner was okay. Our Asian ancestors knew what they were doing; they only ate tofu when they were starving. In Thailand, however, I had never seen it.) 

I immediately persuaded Catherine to stop using soy milk and she told me about the story of a friend whose 8 year old had started growing breasts because of drinking soy milk every day. (I had occasionally used soy milk on my cereal, then opted for rice milk which only added to my high starch pre-diabetic inducing diet. So I switched to almond milk.) After checking ingredient labels for everything in our kitchen, it was true, nearly every processed food had soy in it. Every bread baked in soy oil, every chocolate bar contained an emulsifier made from soy, nearly every mayonnaise made with soy oil. It was like having x-ray eyes into the food supply. I knew too, that growing soy was hard on the soil; a monocrop that was degrading the land and sucking up water from rivers for irrigation. Soon more land would have to be cleared of natural habitat, to grow more fake food.

The Weston Price soy alert page mentioned that Oprah, a big drinker of soy milk, had now blown out her thyroid. If the two were indeed connected, how ironic that the woman who fought so hard to preserve her right to tell the world she would never eat a hamburger, would harm herself with a much more dangerous food choice. 

Redemption

That same week I attended a film being shown by the Transition Town movement in Palo Alto. Called First Millimeter: Healing The Earth, it convinced me that grass fed beef would save the planet. 

In the drought ridden landscape of California, cattle helps to cultivate and fertilize the land, making it more able to hold rainwater, which would in turn allow more vegetation to grow and more beef to be raised thus more profit for the ranch. When land was abandoned or had too few cattle on it, it just sat there drying out which led to erosion and loss of top soil resulting in degraded land. This was happening wherever dry grasslands existed including Australia, Africa, New Mexico and Mexico. 

A new method of managing cattle was not only bringing the land back to health faster in all these parts of the world, but the increased vegetation was sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. 

Here's how it worked. Plants grow, pulling carbon dioxide out of the air as plants are wont to do, and sending it into the growth of the plant and most notably the roots. Cattle eat half the plant and the roots die back as well, leaving compost in the soil. The cattle also tread dried up vegetation into the soil along with their manure. The plant grows back and the cycle is repeated. Eventually perennial grasses return. As long as the cattle came back at the right time and no sooner and at the right density of hoofs per acre, the land could produce an inch of topsoil a year with the bonus of removing CO2 from the warming planet at a rate that had the potential of cooling the planet completely. It was brilliant.  

Sallie Calhoun, a rancher and chair of Holistic Management International was on hand to answer questions. The only investment was additional fencing and more laying of pipes for water troughs for the cattle, plus training for the ranchers. The entrepreneurial component would take it forward once ranchers were willing to try it. 

I was elated. My life had come full circle. I could eat grass fed beef and stop global warming at the same time. I was betting my next blood work on it. It was the only way I would find out. 

A Disease of One's Own

Apologies for the gallows humor in the title, but it does rather suit my state of mind. Diabetes doesn't have quite the stature of cancer, and pre-diabetes even less so—more a storm in a tea cup— but it did give me an idea of what I would be like as a patient. Plus it opened the door to a wealth of information that would convince me that carbohydrates were the cause of the "diseases of civilization", the ones that frighten us the most—cancer, coronary heart disease, Alzheimer's. 

As we sat in the waiting room of the infusion lab, the cheerful volunteer lady came around pushing her cart of snacks, asking if we'd like some saltine crackers or apple juice.

"Have you got any medical marijuana brownies in that cart?" Catherine asked her wryly from under her rakish fedora. The lady burst out laughing and a woman waiting with her sick husband looked around appreciatively. (Just about everyone we asked, who had been through chemo, said that they couldn't have gotten through it without marijuana. I suspect it's a huge underground movement, one the medical establishment has chosen to ignore.)

At lunch time when I asked Catherine if she'd like me to bring her anything, she asked for a grilled cheese sandwich. Then she ate it while sitting in the infusion chair. We marveled at what a difference her experience was this time and hoped the clear sailing would hold. Her oncologist had been pleased with how well she had tolerated the first round of this chemo. Everyone who had cared for her remembered the wretched time she had with the first chemo. It had even had an impact on my health as well. I had lost 12 lbs (down from 115). Adrenaline, I would learn, forced fat from your body plus we had been on a starvation diet for six weeks.

Blood Work

The week before Catherine's surgery I went in for blood work as follow-up to my annual physical. The results came back with the news that my blood sugars were worse and the doctor wanted to see me. When I picked up the message on my cell phone after my morning client, the lovely in-the-moment high I was enjoying crashed spectacularly. I was seething, the beautiful day forgotten. How could this be happening to me? I was fit and skinny. I felt like my inheritance had been taken away from me.

Luckily, I was headed to a friend's house. She hadn't had lunch yet. Was I hungry? I was hungry all right. I hadn't stopped being hungry since Catherine's chemo regime started two months ago and I had already eaten the sandwich I packed. I told my friend of my news about being pre-diabetic and now even more so — (6.0 on my A1C test up from 5.7 in six months. 6.5 was officially diabetes). She told me she was in the same boat with the diabetes/pre-diabetes thing. 

This was such a serendipitous coincidence that my mood was immediately mollified. She offered me a pork chop with refried beans. I cheered up considerably and, after lunch, began to accept my new status.

I did not call my doctor; I had no intention of coming in. I had heard enough discussion with doctors in the last month that I couldn't bear the thought of it. Of being so clueless about what was happening and being talked down to in that way that doctors have when they assume you wouldn't understand anything technical and only want to give you orders based on facts that only they can confidently assert. 

All my doctor could tell me, at my physical in November, was to avoid white foods. The year before she had told me my cholesterol was too high. I offered to give up ice cream. She also wanted me to eat less cheese. We ate vegetarian at home; if we gave up cheese, what would be left? Besides that would mean changing Catherine's diet as well. I gave up my egg for breakfast and replaced it with an English muffin. That turned out to be the wrong thing to do. 

"I'd rather you had stayed with the egg," she had said. Now I was suspicious. Why did I have to care about cholesterol when it made things so much worse for my blood sugars? 

"Don't eat white rice", she advised me, "especially Jasmine rice". 

"So why do all the recipes call for Jasmine rice?" I asked her. 

"Because it tastes good, " she said slightly exasperated. This was fast becoming the most ridiculous conversation I had had in a medical context, especially with a doctor who was so nicely plump, her long frizzy hair giving her the silhouette of a persian cat. Her Indian heritage called for loads of Jasmine rice as did mine. 

"There's a higher incidence of diabetes in the Asian population now," she said as if that explained everything. 

I'm only half Asian I wanted to say, but decided not to quibble. I liked Dr. V. I liked her quite a lot. She was only half Asian herself, had a white mother just like me. She and a colleague had opened a private practice so they could offer their patients much more than the five minutes the HMO system would allow. Catherine had found her and persuaded me to see her as well. That was over a decade ago. We had seen quite a lot of her lately and she had been so caring and helpful during this cancer ordeal of Catherine's. In fact I was feeling rather neglected, but I was damned if I was going to let her reprimand me for eating too much "white food". 

I had turned to brown rice and replaced the English muffin with whole wheat bread. Then when Catherine was too sick to eat, Dr. V suggested white rice with broth. On days when she felt up to it, she sent me out for mac and cheese or pork fried rice. She ate just a little, so I ate the rest. I stopped cooking much, made a baked potato, at most, and veggie sausages (wheat based). I ate a lot of toast with marmite and English muffins because Catherine wanted them, but wouldn't eat them if they were a week old. I had no time to worry about feeding myself and I was hungry all the time. I was the human garbage can. I ate everything. The weeks I took her to the infusion lab every day, I packed sandwiches. It was painfully obvious to me why my blood work was worse. It was nearly all carbs.

The Friday that I got the news, I spent the evening on the internet reading about diabetes. A book was referenced—Dr. Bernstein's Diabetic Solution. By Saturday I had it from the library. My obsession had begun; similar to the cancer one that blots out every other interest because you've just been given a life threatening diagnosis. 

The following Monday, on the day of Catherine's surgery, I called Dr. V's office from the hospital, to report that she had come through the surgery and was doing well. The receptionist, recognizing me, asked if I would like to schedule my appointment to see the doctor myself about the results of my blood work.

"No," I said, not even "no thank-you"; I was already mad again.

"But Dr. V wants you to come in," she said.

"Every time I come in the situation deteriorates," I said, which was as diplomatic a statement as I could muster. "So I'm going to do my own research," I declared having already gained confidence from Dr. Bernstein's story of being a medical outsider. (He had started his career as an engineer, but after discovering an improved treatment for his type 1 diabetes had become a doctor.)

"Can you hold a minute?" said the receptionist and put the nurse on. It took me 15 minutes to get around the nurse interviewing me, my cellphone warming in my hand. I assured her I was on the right track, I was cutting rice out altogether. She would report our discussion to my doctor, she said. When I got home there was a message saying the doctor had approved my not scheduling a visit. Smart doctor. I wouldn't have to fire her after all.

The Big Fat Lie

When I told Catherine how much I weighed now she, too, was stunned. She had guessed that I had lost 5 pounds max not 12. I had no intention of losing weight. Being thin was not the sort of attention I wanted. I designed my clothes to make me look bigger in the hopes of beefing up my presence, so to speak. And a skinny hug offered so little I felt naked and preferred padding. Plus I already had so little weight with which to pin my opponent to the floor in jujitsu. Soon I would be no match for even the 12 year olds. 

I read the nutrition chart on the side of every cereal box in the house. I recorded everything I ate and added up my daily carb intake. But it wasn't until I got my own glucose meter that these numbers became meaningful. (My chiropractor, who turned out to be diabetic, after many years of keeping his levels down to pre-diabetic with this device, told me which one to get, and to order the test strips on e-bay where I'd get the best deal.) 

"You're going to test your own blood?" said Catherine slightly horrified when I showed her my nifty pocket size kit. Even the nurse had thought a glucose meter was jumping the gun a bit since I wasn't officially diabetic.

"Yes, I'm the doctor now," I said defiantly. This was my idea of Do-It-Yourself authority. Obviously the medical establishment knew nothing about me, I told myself (not to mention my own ignorance). But with my handy truth-o-meter I would find out. Toast was definitely out I decided. It shot my readings up and toast was what I had been eating the most. So much for whole grain, I thought. It wasn't even a white food. Hah.

In Dr. Bernstein's book I read about the medical establishments misguided obsession with fat and cholesterol. That was the answer to my question. The doctors had it wrong. It was actually okay to eat saturated fat, even bacon because fat had no effect on cholesterol. It had just been a theory and no one had managed to prove that eating cholesterol or fat made your cholesterol higher. But did they give it up? No, for years more research money was thrown at it and when contrary evidence came up implicating carbohydrates was the problem, they chose to ignore it, said those results were too ambiguous. It conflicted too much with what had, for years, been taken as gospel.

Meanwhile, in response to public demand based on the fat-is-bad prophecy, all sorts of man made fats were put in food as substitutes, that could then be labeled as non-fat. Thus margarine. These trans fats even made food less likely to spoil, a plus for industry. The industry created fats would cause havoc in the body because the molecules were too big to be digested and bonded chaotically to proteins, creating large floating junk in the bloodstream—much more likely to cause heart attacks.

This was my introduction to The Big Fat Lie as the science and health writer, Gary Taubes, put it. It took me three weeks of serious reading to get through his dense 600 page book Good Calorie, Bad Calories, (460 actual pages, 140 pages of footnotes and index). Once I slogged through it, I had the science I needed, along with the story of bias in the medical hierarchy obfuscating the science and making Western medicine into a faith-based religion. 

The Paleo diet people were right, humans were not meant to consume huge quantities of grain because we had evolved as hunter gatherers and agriculture was a mere 10,000 years old. Grains—carbohydrates, simple or not,—turned so quickly to sugar once in the stomach, that it raised blood sugar to toxic levels—hard on the kidney and liver to process. The body was smart though. It had a hormone, produced by the pancreas, to get rid of the sugar. This hormone, called insulin, was the heavyweight body guard that expelled blood sugars. It knocked at the door of muscles and the liver, and facilitated the transference of sugar to these tissues. Once satiated, the tissues refused to open the door and became "insulin resistant", but there was always the fat tissues, the last to turn Mr. Insulin away.  And that is how carbs make people fat. Obviously not working for me, unless I was 15 lbs overweight and no one noticed. (This is actually a claim of researchers regarding Asian diabetics.)

Once I learned about insulin, I understood the adage I had been hearing from several sources that "sugar feeds cancer". This had even been explored on 60 minutes recently (on April Fools Day, heh) with that handsome Indian fellow Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Nearly a third of cancer cells, including breast cancer cells, have six or seven times more receptors for insulin. This means when the insulin body guard comes knocking he gets a good reception at the cancer cell hotel. Lots of sugar molecules are allowed into the cancer cell, a big party ensues and it grows and grows into a block party, a tumor, producing insulin of its own even. 

Cancer cells are an ongoing mutation event in the body, what researchers now believe to be errors in the replication of DNA, but the body has ways of policing and getting rid of them. Excess insulin, as I could now see, doesn't help. In fact just the very presence of insulin, gets in the way of other hormones doing their work to regulate the body such as allowing fat to exit fat tissue and the brain to clear away amyloid protein, the build-up of which causes Alzheimer's. 

Insulin levels could not be detected in the body until late in the game, long after the scientist, Ancel Keys, initiated a crusade to persuade the country that eating fat was the cause of an alarming increase in coronary heart disease. President Eisenhower had just had a heart attack, so must be true, reasoned the public. 

During World War II, farmed meat wasn't available in some European countries and mortality rates there dropped which led Keys to believe that animal fat was the cause of heart disease. Sugar was also rationed, but that was overlooked. And not enough petrol for cars, so more people walked, but that was beside the point, at least his point. He was so convinced of the evils of fat that he didn't wait for the research to back his theory and his crusade. The thinking of his era, that he generated, was frozen in time by Senator George McGovern and his government campaign to create Dietary Goals for the nation. This, in turn, gave us the famous food pyramid and our current low fat, complex carbohydrate, government sanctioned diet!

Fighting Cancer: The Warfare Model

After reading this story I was convinced that the medical establishment would be the last to find a humane way to treat cancer, let alone find a real cure or learn how to detect it soon enough to reverse it. Western medicine was determined to do battle with cancer as though it were an invading enemy and not a part of the daily life of the body. Focused on warfare to obliterate cancer, such treatment would in turn kill off a lot of body function, not to mention grossly disfiguring it. So proud they were of saving lives, that it didn't even cross their minds that their approach was so barbaric that it nearly wasn't worth doing. Sure they said it was temporary, but not completely. They took your body, occupied it for close to a year and gave it back to you in worse condition. I would as soon have a tribe of cockatoos rent my house.

The following weekend, on my camping trip with 13 lesbians, I met a breast cancer survivor who had walked away from chemotherapy. Briahn was a friend of my long time friend Stacy, and was a practitioner of Chinese Medicine. When it came her turn to run the gauntlet of treatments for cancer, she opted for surgery and refused chemo. As it turned out she had the same aggressive triple negative cancer as Catherine had. Her oncologist warned her that it would be back within 18 months. 

"Well, if it did, I would just do surgery again", she reasoned. Then she got herself a Chinese medicine doctor specializing in cancer, started on a regime of herbs, exercise and diet and had been cancer free for three years. Not quite long enough to prove herself cured, but still impressive. I envied her her confidence and good health. She was happy to share with me her story, but warned me that the medical establishment would fight such a decision every step of the way. I could see she was an inspiration to everyone who knew her story. Such examples were ignored by Western medicine, not even recorded.

Catherine's doctors told her that if there was a recurrence of this triple negative cancer there would be no cure. Her only option would be to do chemotherapy for the rest of her life. So even though she could very well be cancer free now, with the removal of her tumor, they could't know for sure. So it was best to obliterate any chance of a recurrence with 12 weeks of Taxol and likely more treatment after that. 

Taxol had all sorts of debilitating side effects documented on the net by patients. Catherine made me read up on it; accounts of chronic joint pain, neuropathy (numbness) in the feet and hands and impaired cognitive ability; symptoms that hadn't gone away for years. It just made me angry. But Catherine was not one to risk walking away; she would do this regime because she had no other choice. The parallel universe of alternative medicine was used only to clean up the damage. We were lucky to have that much with acupuncture.

Catherine asked that we do a ceremony for the Yew tree from which the Taxol drug was obtained. I read up on it. The tree was a conifer from the Pacific Northwest. The drug was made from a substance under the bark of the tree. It had been discovered in the '80s. Scientists had nearly obliterated the tree population in their eagerness to harvest all they could for research. Now I felt sorry for the tree. (Later the drug was synthesized from cultivations grown for the purpose.) I had new appreciation for the forests of the Pacific Northwest and for forests in general for what cures to cancer that might be hidden within.

I walked around the neighborhood looking for yew bushes and clipped a few small boughs to represent the yew tree. In our ceremony we asked the Taxus Brevifolia to be gentle and effective. I acknowledged its plight as an endangered species and we thanked it for its contribution. I no longer felt angry and was on board for the treatment.

The drug made her incredibly fatigued after the first day and she slept day and night, but there was no pain and only slight nausea that came and went. We were so grateful for that. The second week, the oncologist dialed back the accompanying steroid and that gave her a little more energy. A little pain was creeping in and the usual chemo brain. He said it was in the first two weeks that we would know what level of pain she would have. So far so good. We also knew that these drugs were cumulative. She still had tinnitus, ringing of the ears, from Carboplatin in the first chemo regime. 

A Diet Of One's Own

On a sunny day at high noon I took out the oven rack and put it in my extra large solar oven, over a cookie sheet. Then I proceeded to lay out a whole package of bacon in a nice row across the rack. (Uncured bacon so no nitrites.) Just doing so made me feel sinful—so deeply ingrained was the notion that this was heart attack food. I felt the same way about the heavy cream I began to use in the recipes I was learning from The Primal Blueprint Cookbook, part of the trendy Paleo way of eating; the book serendipitously introduced to me by a friend. It basically resurrected lots of hearty European foods—cabbage and sausages, pot roast, boiled chicken as well as favorites from Asia rich in coconut milk and lemon juice.

Both the heavy cream and bacon reminded me of England in an unexpected, deeply emotional way that I identified as grief. I was back in my grandmother's kitchen eating bacon for breakfast. I loved my grandmother and remembered how she cared for me. I had never smelled bacon cooking until visiting England that summer of my eighth year. But even more luscious was eating the bread dipped in hot bacon grease.

And cream teas with chocolate biscuits. What could be more English? My grandfather, by the way, lived until he was 94. (My grandmother had a head injury and dementia after that so didn't quite make it to her 90s.) This longevity was what made me skeptical of the health foods and fad diets of California. In adulthood I had never felt much enthusiasm for food one way or the other, and assumed I didn't care. I was a social eater, an assimilationist. I ate what people offered me in order to appear to be worldly. Now that I was on a fat-seeking food quest, I could eat such an array of subversive food. This new diet obsession made Catherine a little nervous.

"What is this food?", she asked, "you're eating like you're in Nova Scotia." This in response to the sardines I had laid on a pair of rye krisp crackers.

"Shall I make a veggie stir fry or do you want to eat the cabbage and Keilbasa sausage I made last night?" I asked. She opted for the cabbage dish, said she had developed a hankering for it. 

Every new dish I made from the cookbook was equally well received. Catherine hadn't been able to cook since her illness. She had been the reigning foodie in the house. With this breakthrough I was the new chef in town. Hah.