Fighting Cancer Through Macrobiotic Cooking

As I mentioned earlier, I've been researching cancer-fighting foods. I began in my cookbook library, which is quite extensive since I'm a closet foody. To my amazement, I found three outstanding resources. In this article I'll discuss macrobiotic cooking.

Macrobiotic Cooking for Everyone by Edward & Wendy Esko; Japan Publications, Inc. Tokyo; January 1984.

Yes, I've been researching various nutritional modalities for years. Whether I follow them or not, I still like to know how other folks feel about their foods.

In this book, Part One discusses Macrobiotics: Way of life for everyone: the Harmony of Opposites, Anecdotes: East and West; and Food of the Past, for the Present, and Future.

It's quite a comprehensive study of food's relationship with our body in relationship to earth and the heavens. I find the modality to be relatively easy to use and follow as long as you have access to a grocery store or health food store for oriental ingredients. Back in the 80's I had to shop at health food stores; but, today my local grocery store caries most of the ingredients mentioned in this book.

Macrobiotic cooking in a nutshell:

"Macrobiotic cooking is simply the art of balancing those universal forces as they appear on earth and in the biological world so as to achieve harmony with our immediate environment in nature and with the universe as a whole. Biologically, this condition of balance or equilibrium is referred to as health, while psychologically, we refer to it as happiness, (p. 7)."

Reading this book again after so many years reinforced my decision to build our own garden. Almost every day new information becomes available about hidden ingredients or processes in our nation's mass production of food that isn't healthy for us. Edgar Casey introduced me to the notion of eating local foods. He was right -- again.

Part Two: Cooking for Health, Happiness, and Freedom goes into detail about each food-type then offers several recipes. Macrobiotic cooking mostly entails whole grains, soups, vegetables, beans, sea vegetables, and seafood with oriental condiments. Delicious. No fancy cooking processes, just simple, easy recipes but you will need a pressure cooker. Yummm ... .

Over the years as we learn more about how our foods are being grown and processed, growing one's own produce is becoming critically important to health. Perhaps my eating habits are what caused my carcinoid cancer. Who knows. But I do know it was triggered by a hormone imbalance but what caused that anomaly is hard to define. According to my doctors, there is noway of knowing for sure.

But I can tell you that living only eight to eleven more years is not enough time for me. My To Do list is longer than that. You're too, probably. If altering my eating habits will thwart further carcinoid tumor development, then that's a fix that I can do something about.

In the meantime, I'll continue to lose weight for my overall health and to get off my high blood pressure and high cholesterol medicines. Being over weight isn't good for cancers either. So far I've lost over 20 pounds. Only 70 more to go. Piece of cake.