PLANTPURE NATION UPDATE

By

Nelson Campbell

We are getting ready to begin work on our PlantPure Oasis program. We have secured our first partner to help develop, implement and validate strategies for bringing the message of plant-based nutrition into low-income, food desert communities. This partner is the Trinity United Church of Christ in the South Side community of Chicago. 

We also will work with Trinity to develop and validate a version of our PlantPure Pod program that churches, synagogues and other religious institutions can use to bring the message of plant-based nutrition to their members. This Saturday, we are screening our film, PlantPure Nation, in Trinity’s sanctuary to kick off this partnership between our organizations.

A key first step in our PlantPure Oasis program is the development of a 10-day recipe plan that is easy, affordable and flavorful. We need this recipe plan for people who may not have the income to purchase prepared foods.

We could do this ourselves; we have hundreds of recipes to choose from. But we want to go beyond anything we have done to do something even better. Developing recipes that are really, really easy, affordable (even for folks on food stamps), and still bursting with flavor is a tall order. So we have decided to invite our community to participate with us in this project.

Just as we sought input in the production of the final version of our film, we are inviting your participation in this very important culinary project. You can submit your ideas via our website at www.plantpurenation.com.

Once we get an initial version of the 10-day plan put together, we will post this, with costs and preparation times indicated, and will encourage further input. We may end up tweaking this plan over the next 6-12 months, continuously making it better. Not only will this benefit our PlantPure Oasis program, but you also may benefit from having access to these recipes.

The power of many is far greater than the power of any one or small group of people. Let’s use this project to prove that idea!

Nelson

FROM THE EDITOR

By

Lee Fulkerson

AN ANSWER TO REDUCTIONISM, PART 1:

According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, there are at least 120 medical specialties, from addiction psychiatry and dermatopathology to urology and vascular & interventional radiology. In engineering, there are five major branches, chemical, civil, electrical, electronic and mechanical, with some 30 subdisciplines. I could go on almost ad infinitum, but I’m sure you get the idea.

With the mountains of information we’ve accumulated over the eons, this high degree of specialization is unavoidable. One person—no matter how gifted—simply cannot master the totality of contemporary human knowledge, even in one area. (Can you imagine how ticked off Leonardo would be if he lived today?) Broadly speaking, specialization is also beneficial. I mean, wouldn’t you rather have a heart surgeon cracking your chest open than an ear, nose and throat guy?  

But specialization has a downside as well. It tends to fragment our expertise, often to the point where a specialist in one field doesn’t know much (or anything) about the field of another, even if those fields are related (like an oncologist and a podiatrist, both being branches of medicine). This can have disastrous consequences. One particularly tragic example was when the space shuttle’s propulsion engineers and the designers of the spacecraft’s heat-shielding, ceramic tiles, meant to protect the space shuttle on re-entry, didn’t coordinate their efforts thoroughly enough to realize that the ice that formed on the outside of the super-cold fuel tanks under some conditions could break loose during launch with enough force to seriously damage the ship’s heat-shielding tiles.

After reading Dr. T. Colin Campbell’s latest book, Whole, I’m confident he’d identify the tile failure that destroyed the space shuttle Columbia as being the consequences of “reductionist” thinking—and he’d be right! But given the enormous complexity of the space shuttle, could it have been designed without applying considerable amounts of reductionism? I don’t think so. And Dr. Campbell would agree. (I know because I asked him!) 

The same kind of “tunnel vision” or “stovepipe thinking” that contributed to the shuttle disaster applies to numerous other human activities besides aerospace engineering.  And given the ever-accelerating pace of new discoveries, it looks like there’s just no way around it — reductionism is here to stay. We simply must find a better way to shield ourselves from its negative manifestations.      

How? Let me think about it for a couple of weeks and get back to you …

FEATURED PLANTPURE RECIPE

From

Kim Campbell

White Bean Chili

This is a nice alternative to red chili. It has a southwestern flair chock-full of vegetables and beans. A true crowd-pleaser!

Serves 4–6

Prep time: 20 minutes         

Cook time: 30 minutes       

Ingredients  

2 15-ounce cans cannellini beans, rinsed, drained, divided

2 cups vegetable stock, divided

1 celery stalk, diced

1 onion, diced

4 garlic cloves, minced

1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced

1 red bell pepper, seeded and diced

2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

1 cup corn, frozen

1 1/2 cups canned white hominy, rinsed and drained

1/2 teaspoon cumin powder

1/2 teaspoon coriander

1 teaspoon chili powder

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast flakes

2 teaspoons lime juice

1 8-ounce can green chili peppers

3/4 teaspoon sea salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Instructions

Place half of the cannellini beans in a blender with 1 cup of vegetable stock and blend until smooth and creamy.

In a large soup pot over medium-high heat, sauté the celery, onion, garlic, jalapeño, and bell pepper in 1/2 cup of the vegetable stock.

To the pot of vegetables, add the remaining 1/2 cup vegetable stock, the remaining half of the beans, the creamy bean mixture, and the rest of the ingredients. Cook over medium heat for 20–30 minutes or until vegetables are tender and broth is creamy.
 

FROM FRIENDS OF THE NATION

Rekha Chaudhary, M.D.:

Rekha Chaudhary, M.D., is an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the University of Cincinnati in the division of hematology and oncology. She specializes in neuro-oncology. She also is the director of the hematology oncology fellowship program educating young oncologists. Her clinical and research interests are food as medicine in cancer. (Dr. Chaudhary also appeared as an on-camera expert in our film, PlantPure Nation. Ed.)

Contributing Article:

By

Rekha Chaudhary, M.D.

Everybody has a journey with food, even if they don’t know it.

I am an oncology physician, which means I prescribe chemotherapy drugs to treat cancer. When I began this career, people would ask me, “How do you do it? Dealing with all that death and dying.” I would shrug my shoulders and say, “It’s my job.” 

What I didn’t tell them was that I wasn’t affected by all the sickness and dying because my patients were not me. I didn’t relate to them as a patient but rather as a number. I was treating 60-year-old male smokers with lung cancer. That’s not me. I am a 40-year-old female nonsmoker.

Then I met Veronica*, a stunningly beautiful 38-year-old woman who had a big smile and soft voice clipped with a Slavic accent. Veronica had a lovely 8-year-old daughter and a dashing husband who is a policeman and military veteran. Her husband, Tom*, would come into the office in full dress uniform and hold her hand throughout every visit, as if the uniform could protect her from the monster ravaging her brain. Veronica had a brain tumor called glioblastoma. She had a 3% chance of surviving five years. Her daughter would be 13. Suddenly, my patients could be me.

I started to become paranoid as I met more patients like Veronica. The fear took over all the decisions I was making. Should I build an expensive house? Should I take out a bigger life insurance policy? I was living life in fear.

Then I stumbled on a book called The China Study, by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D. As I pored through the pages, my life slowly changed from fear and desperation to hope. In his book, Dr. Campbell presents compelling data that a whole-food, plant-based diet can turn on and off cancer cells like a light switch. Why had I never heard this before?

I invited Dr. Campbell to speak at our oncology division grand rounds. I was again astounded. Dr. Campbell is not like most academic greats that I was used to dealing with in the world of universities. He is a thin man with a simple suit and tennis shoes. He carried himself humbly and spoke quietly, almost in a whisper. What I most admired about him was that he was a scientist first, and every answer he gave to questions started with, “The data shows …” 

I began to explore his research and the research of others, reading anything I could get my hands on. As I read, I was more and more confused. Why don’t we, the medical community, know this? Why haven’t I been told in medical school or residency or fellowship that the right kinds of food can kill cancer cells but that the wrong kinds can help cancer cells grow? I think it is common sense that eating more sugar causes diabetes and eating badly leads to blocked vessels in our hearts and brains. It may not be as intuitive that eating the right foods can prevent cancer cells from growing and actually affect your cancer risk and mortality.

I decided to begin my journey by not only educating my patients about this data but the medical community as a whole. When Dr. Campbell’s son Nelson asked me to be a part of the upcoming documentary PlantPure Nation, I was ecstatic. Nelson and his film team created a provoking look at the way food can change our lives for the better.

It was a sunny and brisk spring day in Cincinnati when we sat down to share some food and company with the PlantPure Nation team at Turner Farm in Indian Hill. We had the most delicious whole-food, plant-based meal from Rooted, a new vegan restaurant opening in Madeira. It was a bucolic setting; spring in Cincinnati with fresh, plant-based food from the Turner Farms harvest. 

My journey with food is one from fear and paranoia into health and happiness. Who doesn’t want that?

START COOKING WHOLE FOOD, PLANT-BASED RECIPES!

As the film’s official companion book, The PlantPure Nation Cookbook brings this powerful, science-based approach to nutrition from the big screen to your kitchen with some of the same mouthwatering recipes that kick-started the film, promoting the health benefits of a whole food, plant-based diet.