October 31, 2017
by theplantbasednurse Leave a comment

Aware

I rarely, if ever, have reblogged someone else’s post, however I felt this post by my friend Michelle Orrson, a two time cancer survivor and plant -based eating advocate, deserved a shout out. This post is from her blog,

lights cancer action!

My journey with breast cancer ~ and beyond

Well, I made it to the end of October without talking about Pinktober, aka breast cancer awareness month. I have to admit that this month didn’t bother me as much as in other years. Were the pink ribbons not that noticeable, or have I become immune?

I fully understand the point of Pinktober, but many survivors get frustrated that the message has been pink-washed. I mean, how much “awareness” does one need? Is there anyone out there who isn’t “aware” that breast cancer exists? And what of those companies that don the pink ribbons, and yet, sell products that contribute to cancer? I won’t even get into all of the awareness messages that are all about “saving the ta-tas” and what not. Shouldn’t we be focusing on saving the person? I just ask that you be sensitive to survivors on some of these awareness campaigns. While good intentioned, just consider them from the point of view of survivor… who may not actually have been able to save her ta-tas…

Anyway, soapbox done.

Instead of continuing my rant, I thought I would share some facts to help improve your awareness. You know breast cancer exists, but do you know….

We lump (pun intended) all breast cancer into one category, but there are actually many different types, depending on where they are located (ductal versus lobular), sensitivity to hormones (estrogen/progesterone positive/negative), genetic makeup, etc. Some have better success rates than others, so be mindful of this when talking to your BC friends. For example: I had invasive lobular carcinoma, ER & PR positive.
There are multiple stages of breast cancerdevelopment, depending on size, lymph node invasion and metastasis. I was Stage IIIA, T3 N1 M0.
There are ways to reduce your risk of breast cancer! (Wouldn’t you rather prevent it in the first place? Or at least try?) These include: nutrition, exercise, weight management, not smoking, watching alcohol intake, and avoiding environmental toxins).
The best foods to stave off cancer? Greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries and seeds. (Known as “G-BOMBS” by Dr Fuhrman).
Mammograms do not find 1 in 5 cancers and do not improve mortality. (I went faithfully and mammograms completely missed my tumor, which was stage III / 8 cm at removal.) Read: Limitations of Mammograms
There are alternatives to mammograms, such as ultrasounds (it was an ultrasound that eventually found my tumor), MRIs, and thermograms. Do your homework to determine which is best/safest for you, what your insurance will pay for, and the benefits/risks of each.
Men can get breast cancer, too — about 2100 cases a year, with almost 500 deaths.
There are also alternatives to breast reconstruction. More and more women are opting to “go flat”, but many women are not presented with this as an option at diagnosis and regret it later. I’ve been lucky to connect with women across the country as part of the My Flat Friends Facebook group. Here are a few articles about how many women are trying to spread the word about this option!
CBS News: A Matter of Choice
NBC Today: Living Flat and Fabulous

Hopefully you learned something new and are more aware as we close out Pinktober!

Peace!

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Love you Michelle!

Taking the Die out of Diet!

Free lecture coming up Thursday, October 5th at 5:30 p.m. at the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine followed by dinner with The Scranton Beets at Thai Rak Thai in Scranton. Seating at lecture is first come, first serve at the lecture and registration link is below. Please e-mail Jean @ buzzrn@epix.net if you would like to be included in the dinner reservations for 7 p.m. at Thai Rak Thai. Hope to see you there!

If you are in or near Northeastern PA, this is a great opportunity!

ALL ARE WELCOME!!
“Taking the die out of diet”
Kim Williams, MD
Chief of Cardiology, Rush University Medical Center
Past President of the American College of Cardiology
https://tcmc.edu/events/preventive-medicine-lecture-series-kim-williams-md/

March 22, 2017
by theplantbasednurse Leave a comment

Winter kale salad with walnuts and raw root vegetables

This salad was an experiment for my Rouxbe cooking course that was a success. I learned that even vegetables that we don’t traditionally eat raw are crisp, fresh tasting, and surprisingly delicious with little to no fuss. This was not a dish I would normally prepare and it may push me to try more raw food dishes in the future. It was much more colorful and beautiful in person then I could capture in the photo even though I went outside to use the natural light. As a bonus, root vegetables are loaded with vitamins and minerals, folic acid, and are high in fiber, and low in calories!

Ingredients:

Kale, about 6 cups, stripped, rinsed, and roughly chopped

juice of 2 lemons

About 1/2 cup ground walnuts

About 2 tsp stone ground Dijon mustard

2 small carrots or 1 large carrot, julienne cut with knife or mandolin or shred in food processor

1 golden carrot, julienne or shred

Celeriac root, fine julienne cut, I used about 1\2 cup and roasted the rest for a snack

About 1\2 parsnip, julienne cut or shred in food processor.

About 1 tsp chopped garlic

A handful of sliced sun dried tomatoes

A handful of dried berries or raisins (I used golden berries)

A handful of raw pumpkin seeds

*Feel free to substitute away with ingredients as I made this dish from what I had in my fridge and cupboard*

Directions:

Grind or finely chop the walnuts , mix with lemon juice, mustard, and a pinch of salt if desired and set aside while you prep the veggies.

Prep your veggies, sun dried tomatoes, and berries.

Place the kale into a large bowl and add the lemon walnut mixture and massage the kale with your hands for a couple of minutes until the kale starts to soften.

Toss the veggies, garlic, and berries with the kale, plate your dish and top with pumpkin seeds or whatever seeds you have or like.

All of the veggies in this dish were from my weekly CSA from Lackawaxen Farm Company. It has been a great adventure getting new vegetables every week and finding ways to incorporate them into our meals. It is coaxing us to eat more seasonally, is a great value, and is a lot of fun!

veggies

Remember to have fun with your food and enjoy!

March 16, 2017
by theplantbasednurse 2 Comments

Stuffed sweet peppers with spicy cashew almond cilantro filling and lime salsa

This recipe was a raw foods assignment for my Rouxbe Plant-Based Professional Certification Course. It was a challenge for me as most of my raw dishes are simple salads. I love Mexican flavors and also love cashew spreads and wanted to see if they would go together well. I wanted a dish that was spicy but not overpowering and I thought that the sweet peppers would be a good contrast. Since the cashew filling was fairly smooth, the textural contrast of the crunchy peppers was also excellent. My taste testers loved it, and I hope you do, too!

poppers5

Ingredients:

2 c. raw cashews (I used a small handful of raw almonds with the cashews for a total of 2 cups)

1 large clove of garlic or 2-3 small cloves

Juice of one lime

Ground cumin

Chili powder

Chipotle powder

About 2 tablespoons of fresh cilantro, roughly chopped

1 bag of mini sweet peppers or 18-20 jalapeno peppers if you prefer some spice

Soak the nuts in warm water for about 2 hrs. I chose to add the almonds to add some textural interest as I knew that they would not blend as smoothly in my Nutribullet as the cashews.

Drain the nuts and add them to a bullet, high speed blender, or food processor with the garlic, lime juice, a couple of shakes of cumin, a few shakes of chili powder and about 1/4 teaspoon of chipotle powder. You can adjust the spices to your liking. Add a small amount of water and blend and then keep adding water and reblending until mixture is smooth. Add the cilantro the last time you blend the mixture. My goal was a moist mixture that will spread easily and be slightly spicy without being overpowering.

Remove the ends of the peppers and seeds, and stuff the peppers with the cashew filling. You can also cut the peppers lengthwise and fill them. Spoon some salsa on top as desired. The cashew filling is also delicious on whole grain crackers, such as Wasa crackers, which are low calorie and low sodium, or on toasted whole grain bread and topped with the lime salsa. Enjoy!

Lime salsa

Ingredients:

1 chopped tomato

Juice of one lime

1/2 of a purple onion chopped

1-2 tablespoons of chopped cilantro

3-4 turns of a Sea salt grinder or just a pinch of salt (optional)

2-3 shakes of ground cumin.

It is difficult to find ripe delicious tomatoes this time of year in Northeast PA, but even without perfect tomatoes, this simple salsa is very tasty.

salsa

Remember to have fun with your food and enjoy!

January 2, 2017
by theplantbasednurse 4 Comments

Meet Mike: An unintentional self study in health and wellness!

Meet our friend, Mike Vasey! We met Mike and his wife over 30 years ago when my husband was a student at Penn State University. We reconnected recently online and much to our surprise, we had both stumbled upon the news that plant-based eating can not only prevent, but also reverse many chronic illnesses. As a university professor and critical thinker, Mike was attracted to the science behind the positive effects of a plant-based diet.

Hear Mike’s story in his own words:

One problem with the many positive testimonials regarding the health impact of a plant-based diet is that one cannot be completely confident the dietary change was the cause of the improved health. Don’t get me wrong, I find it pretty compelling when longstanding conditions change when diet changes. But one still lacks a hypothetical counter factual – a way of estimating how the person would have done without the dietary change. That’s where controlled experiments come in. One way to add a hypothetical counterfactual is to reverse the change to see if weight, cholesterol, etc. go back to where they were before one started. Then one can re-institute the dietary change and see if things improve again. That is known as an ABAB single-subject research design (A = baseline, B = intervention).

Unintentionally, over the past five years I have done such a reversal study on myself regarding the impact of a plant-based diet with no added oil. Five years ago I chanced upon a local broadcast of a talk by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr. on reversing and preventing heart disease with diet. I have a strong family history of heart disease – my father had at least five heart attacks – so the topic piqued my interest. I found Dr. Esselstyn’s data compelling so I decided to give it a try. At the time my total cholesterol was 200 (it had reached a high of 237 some years earlier, which prompted some improvement in my eating habits [translation: I ate less sausage and similar things]). My weight was about 208. I am about 6′ 2″ so my BMI was 26.7.

With very rare exceptions I was successful in following the Esselstyn diet. It took about six weeks before I found it to no longer be a challenge. By then, I had identified things I liked to eat and had modified recipes to be oil free. It helped that I tend to eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day so once I had those two meals figured out (oatmeal with bananas and dried cranberries for breakfast, a big salad for lunch) only supper was an issue. I tended to cook a few one dish meals (e.g., lots of soups) on the weekend and eat them during the week. Between meals I snacked on fruit and veggies.

Based on Esselstyn’s book , I expected things to change fairly quickly and mostly they did. I was on two blood pressure medicines at the time, mostly to control cluster headaches but also due to mild hypertension. Within two weeks of eliminating oil from my diet my blood pressure dropped to the point that I was light headed when I stood up. With my doctor’s consent I dropped the med that was unrelated to cluster headaches and things went back to normal. Simultaneously I started losing weight. After one month my weight was 196 (BMI = 25.2) but my total cholesterol hadn’t changed much, dropping only to 180. After six months I had lost 27 pounds to 181 (BMI = 23.2) so I expected my cholesterol would follow suit. However, when I completed a biometric screening for work at the six month mark, my cholesterol was still 180. That was a bit discouraging since my goal was to get it below 150, the threshold below which nobody in the Framingham Heart Study had a heart attack. But I kept at it and after a year and a half my total cholesterol was 154, which was very near my goal. And my weight was down to 172 (BMI = 22.1). Eventually my weight bottomed out at 170 (BMI = 21.😎) and my total cholesterol stayed below 130.

Then about 18-months ago, I went through a prolonged stressful period and I got lazy regarding my diet. I essentially went back to baseline in terms of my diet. I tended to eat whatever was easiest and that was often something processed and high in fat. Predictably, my weight went up until it was 196 (BMI = 25.2) at my annual biometric screening on 9/12/16 and my total cholesterol was back up to 198. Added to that, my A1C was 6.1, which is borderline diabetic and diabetes is something else that runs in my family. Needless to say, those numbers got my attention. So I immediately went back to the all plant-based, no added oil diet. After nearly five weeks I had my blood work redone by my doctor. My total cholesterol had dropped by 27 points to 171, my weight was 188 (BMI = 24.1), and my A1C was down to 5.5, which is still high but in the normal range.

Between then and now (12/26/16) I spent a week in Belgium and while eating plant-based was mostly possible (hey, beer is plant-based!), forget the no added oil part. We also had Thanksgiving and Christmas and I must admit to straying a bit with all the holiday goodies around the house (my family does not follow my diet and that can be challenging at times). Nevertheless, my weight is now down to 182 (BMI = 23.4) and I expect it to keep dropping. I’m sure my cholesterol and blood sugar will follow suit. I’m glad to be back on a healthy path.

Mike with the tallest man skeleton at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia

November 20, 2016
by theplantbasednurse Leave a comment

Why is Nutrition Ignored in Medicine?

Free program at TCMC Wed November 30th at 5:30 p.m. “Why is Nutrition Ignored in Medicine?” by T. Colin Campbell. This is part of the Preventive Medicine Lecture Series at The Commonwealth Medical College. There will be continuing Education Credit for medical professionals, too! Open to the public and all are welcome.

For decades, Dr. T. Colin Campbell has been at the forefront of nutrition education and research. Dr. Campbell’s expertise and scientific interests encompass relationships between diet and diseases, particularly the causation of cancer. His legacy, the China Project, is one of the most comprehensive studies of health and nutrition ever conducted. The New York Times has recognized the study as the “Grand Prix of epidemiology.”

For out of towners, Scranton is about two hours away from Philadelphia and NYC.

CALL OR GO TO THE WEBSITE ON THE FLYER BELOW TO REGISTER. YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS THIS GREAT PROGRAM!

Why is Nutrition Ignored in Medicine.png

November 7, 2016
by theplantbasednurse 6 Comments

Soup’s on! Scott Yum Soup, that is…

My husband was craving noodle soup this week and I finally decided to make it for him. Two bowls later, I’m not sure if I really made it for him, or for myself!

One of my favorite soups is the Vegetarian Tom Yum soup at our favorite local Thai restaurant but I have not been able to recreate it. I prefer to make soup at home when I can since the restaurant versions are usually higher in sodium and it’s fun to experiment and have a new soup every time I make it.

The first time I attempted a Thai soup, I used a recipe that a friend shared with me but it didn’t have quite the zing we were looking for. Finally, my husband Scott said he thought some fresh lime juice would give it that missing flavor we were craving. I don’t expect this will be the same soup the next time I make it, and I hope that if you make it, you will play with it and make it your own. You can use whatever veggies you like or have in your fridge, add and subtract ingredients as you like and share it with your friends and family!

Here is my version of Tom Yum Soup which I call “Scott Yum Soup” named for my husband Scott. I finally looked up Tom Yum soup and it appears I am missing lemongrass, so maybe next time!

Ingredients:

64 oz veggie broth

3-4 chopped green onions, white and green parts

1 or 2 thinly sliced carrots

4-5 sliced mushrooms (use whatever variety you prefer)

2-3 tablespoons of fresh ginger, peeled and grated with a ceramic grater or minced in a mini chopper

1-2 cups chopped baby bok choy

1 cup chopped cilantro

1 teaspoon low sodium soy sauce or Braggs Liquid Aminos

1 teaspoon miso

3-4 oz rice noodles or brown rice noodles

Juice and zest of 1 lime

1 teaspoon Sambal Oelek

Optional: Cubed tofu (extra firm) I like to use an 8 oz pkg of already cubed tofu tofu to make the job quicker. You can use the tofu plain, but I like to drain it and add a splash of low sodium soy sauce, sprinkle the tofu with Chinese Five Spice and bake it on parchment paper for about 20 min at 450 degrees in my toaster oven.

Directions:

1. Pour the veggie broth into a nice big pot on medium heat

2. Add the green onions, carrots, mushrooms, fresh ginger, bok choy, soy sauce and miso and bring to a gentle boil and cook for 5-10 minutes.

3. Turn the burner off, then add the tofu and the noodles. The rice vermicelli I use just needs to sit in the hot broth for about 2 min. Be sure to follow the directions for whatever kind of noodles you use.

4. Add fresh cilantro to taste, reserve some for garnish at the table

5. Add the sambal oelek, use less if you don’t like spice and more if you love it!

6. Add the lime juice and zest and serve!

7. Serve with extra Sambal Oelek , cilantro, and fresh lime wedges or slices if desired.

A second bowl? I think I will!

Always remember to– Have fun with your food and enjoy!

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The plant based nurse

My family's excellent adventure to better health!

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