Eating to live

     I recently read the biography of Dr. Walter Kempner.  He was one of the brilliant German researchers that our country allowed to immigrate to the USA prior to WWII in the 1930s.  He was employed at Duke University.  He did research as well as treated patients with renal disease and malignant hypertension with a rice diet: mainly grains, fruit, vegetables, and beans.  This was a very low sodium, low fat diet.  He discovered he could heal people of these diseases, and also treat high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and congestive heart failure.  Incidentally he discovered that this diet also enhanced weight loss.  He did this successfully from the 1930's until the 1990's when he retired.  His program continues, now separate from Duke University, as a weight loss program.
     He found that salt as well as refined sugar promote an increase in appetite, and that without them, his patients did not feel hungry.   Also, salty foods cause a higher rise in blood glucose and insulin response.
     It is interesting to me that no one promotes diet as a way to heal disease now that pharmaceutical companies have drugs to control symptoms.  Dr Kempner offered a way to cure the disease.  Now in this country we just pop pills to treat symptoms with drugs that have serious side effects of their own.  No one even tries for a cure.
     Dr. Kempner's "Rice Diet" is a very rigid program, and would be difficult to follow, but he deserves much credit in showing the way. 
    
     I also re-read  "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease" by Dr.  Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr.   Dr. Esselstyn is a former surgeon, researcher, and clinician at the Cleveland Clinic Hospital.  Based on his twenty year research study on a group of patients with advanced coronary heart disease, he showed that a plant-based, low sodium, low fat diet can not only halt, but reverse heart disease.   You will recall in the news within the past year that former President Bill Clinton started Dr. Esselstyn's program to reverse his own heart disease. 
     Dr. Esselstyn's program is plant based, no oil, low fat, and low sodium.  It is a less rigid program to follow than the Rice Diet, although similar. 

     You may not recall, I mentioned in a previous blog that my husband's chemo was possibly the cause of his newly diagnosed diastolic congestive heart failure back in Febr. of this year.  We are hoping that following Dr. Esselstyn's diet, along with his getting back to exercise to strengthen his heart muscle, will help him to get off of some of the many drugs he is on at present.  We are hoping for a reversal, not just treatment of symptoms, and also to prevent a recurrence of his cancer. (See "The China Study" by Dr. T. Colin Campbell).
     Not a single Doctor has ever talked to my husband about diet or exercise, not after his cancer diagnosis or during chemo or radiation, not even after having been diagnosed with heart failure.  That says a lot about American medicine today, doesn't it?

"The doctor of the future will give no medicines, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and the prevention of disease."
                                                Thomas Edison