Food Over Medicine (12 page)

Cut to twenty years later. My old literature professor was retiring, and I flew back to Sarasota to speak at his retirement dinner. I’m hanging around the campus and I meet a young woman from China who is a new student at the college. She tells me she’s studying international relations with Dr. Bates. I say, “Oh, is she still here? How’s she doing?”

She says, “Great. She’s just the greatest professor. But she makes the worst friggin’ coffee.”

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GM:
Pam, let’s discuss how the dietary program that you recommend has worked in practice, with specific individuals. I know that, in the view of science, every individual is just an anecdote, but after a while the anecdotes begin to add up.

PP:
Okay, let’s start with a young lady by the name of Darcy (her name has been changed), who came to us after her condition caused her to drop out of college. She had started her menstrual period at about the average time for American girls, sometime around eleven or twelve, but from the very beginning this was just a torturous experience for her. Her periods were irregular and heavy, sometimes bleeding three weeks out of four. Then she developed severe acne and the beginnings of polycystic ovary syndrome, which is a horrific condition for a teenager to have. She graduated from high school and went off to college, but the condition worsened so much that she had to drop out of college and come back home.

Her parents found The Wellness Forum. They called and said their daughter was nineteen years old and effectively can’t do anything—can’t leave the house, go to school, get a job. This is quite a young age to essentially have your life be pretty much over with, so we started teaching her the diet. We cut the dairy out and got her on a low-fat, plant-based nutritional program. Within six weeks, her menstrual periods started to become regular, the horrible bleeding and the cramping started to go away, her skin cleared up, and she returned to school. She’s back in nursing school now and has had a complete and total recovery. She takes no medication. So, just diet—complete and total recovery using our diet.

GM:
Did she experience any other changes? Did she lose weight?

PP:
Yes. She lost fifteen or twenty pounds. It’s hard to know if her original weight gain had been caused by the fact that her life had come to a halt and she couldn’t do anything, but now she runs, she exercises, and her skin’s cleared up. She’s a normal college student.

GM:
Now, do you suspect that dairy had been the main culprit, or do you think it was just somehow the overall diet, all the fat and everything in the standard American diet?

PP:
I think it’s both. First of all, dairy foods are the worst for women with menstrual problems because dairy products by their very nature contain estrogen. Most women who have problems with hormones ranging from irregular periods to infertility are having those problems because their estrogen levels are too high. Taking in more estrogen metabolites in a glass of milk or a slice of cheese just makes the problem worse. In the case of this young lady, her entire dietary pattern was horrific. She lived on the typical college kid fare and, before that, the typical high school kid fare. The whole family, by the way, was in a similar condition. Her mother has also had a miraculous health recovery. After seeing what happened with her daughter, the mother adopted the diet and her health has turned around also. The whole family now eats this way. So a whole family of sick people became a whole family of active people eating a health-promoting diet all because their daughter had reached a crisis point.

GM:
And was Darcy resistant at all, or did she immediately take to the diet?

PP:
She was so anxious to have this behind her that if we had told her to graze on grass in the side yard of her house, she would have gone and done it. When people are really sick, they’re really compliant because they want to heal. Somehow we’ve got to reach people who aren’t so sick and get them to take it just as seriously. If you can make them see their choice, they’d much rather be well than become sick and have to recover.

GM:
Now, most people come to The Wellness Forum only when they’re sick.

PP:
Yes. Maureen Yatwa actually came to me through my work with Rip Esselstyn and Whole Foods Market. She showed up at one of the Immersion programs last fall.

GM:
That’s the program that Whole Foods funds for employees with weight problems or health challenges, right?

PP:
Right. Maureen, from Jacksonville, Florida, is in her forties and she had Crohn’s disease—that’s past tense. She qualified for the program because she also had high cholesterol and was overweight.

At the first night of Immersion, during the introductions, she stood up and said, “I’m overweight, I have high cholesterol, and I also have Crohn’s disease. My daughter, who’s a teenager, also has Crohn’s disease, and I want both of us to get better.” So I went up to her after the opening-night dinner, introduced myself, and said, “In order to fix the Crohn’s disease, you’ll have to accept a little bit more dietary restriction than the others because gluten is contraindicative for Crohn’s. So the oats and some of the other things we have here, you’re not going to be able to eat. But there’s plenty of food here; you’re not going to starve. There are just some things you can’t have.” Everybody at the Immersion is on a whole food, low-fat, plant-based diet, but she would have just a little bit more restriction.

There are all kinds of activities planned at the Immersion, canoeing and field trips and so forth. Maureen didn’t sign up for any of it because if you’re a Crohn’s patient, your disease is not under control. You can’t go anywhere because you have to be by the bathroom. It’s a debilitating disease. The forty-five-minute bus ride into town—you can’t do that. You can’t be out on a canoe. Life revolves around locating the nearest bathroom.

By the time the midweek came, she was well enough to do those things. She showed significant improvement within in a matter of days. Today, she not only doesn’t have Crohn’s disease but she doesn’t take medication for it, she’s lost the weight, and her cholesterol is down. And her daughter, who was on her way to duplicating mom at the age of seventeen or eighteen, also no longer has Crohn’s disease.

GM:
So in just a few days the Crohn’s was gone? Crohn’s often stays with people for how long?

PP:
Their whole lives. The trajectory of Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis and these inflammatory bowel diseases is discouraging. There may be periods of some remission, where it gets a little bit better, but it always progresses, and the drugs get stronger. It’s not unusual to use Remicade infusions, which are immunosuppressants, very strong drugs. And when that fails, they start taking portions of the bowel out; they remove the inflamed portion. And obviously, there’s an end point to that; there’s only so much you can take out before you don’t have a GI tract or intestines anymore. That’s where Maureen was headed, and her situation was obviously pretty acute. If you’re afraid of a forty-five-minute bus ride because you’re not going to be near a bathroom, you’re pretty far down the road. So she totally recovered. She talks about it very openly, as she should since she can be a real inspiration to others who have this condition.

GM:
I take it that The Wellness Forum attracts a lot of people with digestive or bowel disorders?

PP:
We do. Jill Collett is a yoga teacher at our studio who had ulcerative colitis. She’d been on and off medication for it. Her ulcerative colitis had progressed to the place where the inflammation in the bowel started to affect other parts of the body; she developed some inflammation in her eyes and her vision became a bit impaired, something that can’t be fixed. Jill had been a student at our yoga studio for a long time, but I didn’t know, until she started our yoga-training program and spoke with me about it, that she had been suffering for twenty years with ulcerative colitis.

Jill didn’t eat a terrible diet, but it wasn’t perfect. Remember the combination lock theory; you know, you’ve got to get all four numbers right. You can’t do 75 percent. We helped her make that additional 25 percent of dietary improvement; it took only three weeks for her stools to become solid and for her to stop suffering from ulcerative colitis—off the meds and everything’s fine. And she’s been fine ever since. She actually made the comment that her energy level was so high that she was starting to scare her husband. This had been a twenty-year problem for her; after only twenty-one days on the diet, she was in great shape. You could really see the difference, too. Her face, her complexion changed a lot after this period of time; now she just looks phenomenally great.