AT AGE 74, after an adventurous life that has been--and I hope will continue to be--most enjoyable, but which has not always included eating and drinking wisely, I have decided to spend the next year forsaking my omnivorous nature in favor of eating alkaline. This decision has been long in the making, dating back to the 1970s when I developed a "health calendar" written with advice of the dietitians at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and published by the then-Holt, Rinehart & Winston. We called it Eat & Run. Over its ten-year life under my compilations, I became passionately interested in anything to do with food. Well, to be truthful, I've always been excited by anything to do with food, but not until then did the excitement extend to food's potential role in human health.
After that decade, I became bored with the whole subject because there didn't seem to be anything new, certainly not in terms of encompassing theory. I earned a master's degree in psychology, later another master's in public health with graduate certification in gerontology, and worked for another twenty years in these fields, until I retired two years ago to my small lavender farm. However the subject of food and its effects on human health continued to intrigue me. In the 1980s I first read Herman Aihara's Acid & Alkaline, but it was not until the early 2000s that I found Robert and Shelly Young's book, The pH Miracle, then a book by a contemporary of Louis Pasteur, Professor Antoine Bechamp, who is so seminal to what has become acid-alkaline theory that I'll do more than one day's writing on HIM. I don't want to get overly technical this early in the game, but that will come into it, I promise.
Back to the question of why a 74-year-old woman would choose to eat alkaline at all, let alone to employ the discipline for a whole year, I can only say: It's Julia Child's fault.
Last night, after a wonderful dinner (crab cakes with aioli, an excellent Oregon pinot gris, and chocolate mousse pie, all while watching the first half of a hard-fought football game with my husband), we went to see Nora Ephron's movie, Julie & Julia. I laughed and cried at Meryl Streep's portrayal of Mme. Child, noting the poignant undertones of her inability to conceive a child which, distressing as it must have been, led to her becoming a beloved Tante Julia to the American people. The movie brought back scenes of my own culinary history, such as the time I attempted the complex sauce of filet de sole Marguerie at 10 PM with a household of wine-filled, hungry guests. Ah, the foods I've enjoyed in this and other countries! Julie, of course, is the young woman who decides to cook all the dishes from Julia's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, over a one-year period and to write a blog about her experiences.
Why not try the same thing with what I've come to know as healthy cuisine? There are, of course, important differences between Julie, Julia and myself. I will be 75 by the time this experience is over. Julie and Julia were younger, bolstered by their passions and by loving husbands and friends. At my time of life, even if one is still lucky enough to have a mate, one faces crises such as the illnesses and deaths of friends, former lovers, husband and ex-husband. My dear Jack faces heart surgery tomorrow, for clogged up conditions that he cheerfully admits are brought on by decades of over-eating the Standard American Meals (hf. SAM). My ex-husband suffers from depression and Parkinson's for which in his passion for definitive scientific answers, he would completely exclude his favorite salami, pastrami and other preservative, acid-inducing foods as causative factors.
For many years now, I've become increasingly convinced that my own aches and pains were--are--due to what I ate and drank. Experiences such as eating alkaline for three weeks have reinforced this conviction: headaches disappeared, rashes likewise. Take coffee, for instance. Both drinking it and quitting it brought on headaches. I've been conditioned to drink it as a beloved social custom. When I was eight years old, I used to get up early to make coffee and cinnamon toast for my parents and their guests, serving it to them in their bedrooms on a tray with cloth napkins. My mother, in turn, would bring the same to me and my small pals when they slept over, putting lots of cream in our mugs along with Kona's best.
Eating alkaline eliminates the on-off syndrome with coffee because you don't drink it in the first place. Same with sugars, starches, and such fungi as mushrooms. If anybody's interested, I can provide a list of foods that are alkaline or alkaline-inducing in the human body, together with references. I've never given myself the chance to test it for more than a few weeks at a time because this would mean many changes in social activities such as church coffee hours, restaurant eating, traveling, plus all these ghosts of past "happy" meals pointing at me and shouting, "You can't possibly DO this!" My only countering answer is that every time I've done it, my energy improves, weight goes down, headaches disappear.
Like Julia, I'm inspired to do this because I think it would improve the nutrition of the American people. I'm only one person but it's got to start somewhere. Statistics show that a great amount of our Gross National Product is spent to control obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even certain kinds of cancer for which links to our SAM are becoming well-documented. Our national health debates often ignore a most important aspect: individual responsibility. Even back in my Eat & Run days, I knew that. So this blog will explore what it means to eat alkaline in an acid-happy society, how to meet the kinds of SAM-inducers that normally happen in daily life. I'm giving a birthday party for a friend next week at a Mexican restaurant; how will I handle my own eating under those circumstances? Or will I? I think so.
Surely this is enough for one blog! Tune in tomorrow for a more complete explanation of what eating alkaline means. HINT: it's mostly vegetarian, but much more than that.
