Commitment to Nutrition

          I loved your posting, and I love what I read in this site!

          I had fun doing my BSN Capstone on how a great fruit, veggie, nut, berry, non added sugar diet and either exercise/ Physical Theraoy reverses Stage 4 solid tumor cancers (Breast Cancer, GI Cancers & Prostate Cancer). The MSN and Residency Program Preceptors wanted me to narrow down my topic  to only one type of cancer - so it was narrowed down to prostate cancer which runs in my family.  My preceptor(s) felt that diet and exercise was also too broad, so convinced me to narrow down my case to only diet. She and my Mount Sinai Preceptors and Residency Program Directors remembered my excellent verbal presentations, so felt I would be better at running a continuing education than at straight research. She also must have remembered how when I worked at Beth Israel, I contacted my old teachers from my associate degree program for help with my hospice research departmental presentations. Maybe that is how they decided I should create a pro-bono continuing education program for hospice nurses and nutritionists focusing on dietary selection / nutrition that promotes quality of life for terminal prostate cancer patients. I objected numerous times saying that physical therapy is always tied to dietary selection for hospice patient well-being.

          In any case, It was the best thing that she decided on my doing a capstone project based on my hospice work experience (where  patients did not receive any traditional any anti-cancer treatment because it was futile and a waste of government or insurance company money). In addition, hospice forbids these patients from getting any pharmacologic or medical treatment (sometimes they allow range of motion / message /physical therapy) outside of Morphine and Comfort pack items. Any diet the hospice patient wants is permitted, even organic diets. Anecdotally from my personal work experience, because of diet, instead of their cancers growing, spreading everywhere and their dying before seeing their loved ones, hospice patients even partially following delicious vegetarian diets (which they can watch me prepare in the kitchen of  their home or in-patient hospice unit) usually got enough extra time for their loved ones to come over the weekend, and have a "quality / less painful death" a couple days or weeks later. 

          In my topic "Hospice Prostate Cancer: Need for Dietary Education", the focus was a continuing hospice education program for nurses and NPs, and Internal Medicine Grand Rounds for new physicians on nutrition (they called it "fuzzy medicine") related to prostate cancer. Another goal of this project is to develop an original written dietary education tool to help program participants.  

          Because i found so many research articles saying similar things, it made doing a narrative a lot easier. The problem was it worked too well and gave departments that did futile surgery/ chemo/radiation therapy excellent long term longevity results, so they hushed up the project, posted my research on the corporate website for internal use only and got regular Physicans and NPs involved who got their nurses to secretly counsel the adenocarcinoma treated patients to follow their dietary guidelines (my paper's conclusion) which enabled our institution to reach Magnet Status and surpass the other New York City hospitals and prolong and improve the quality of myrad of patient's and their families lives while continuing expensive well-paying futile traditional medical treatments.

          Ann, I am against any wheat-based/soy based or gluten containing whole grains and would use bean based grains, brown rice, mullet, and as much quinoa (actually a vegetable) as you can hold.

          Ann, In other words, by your starting to increase your fruit and vegetable choices by following the reverse of the food pyramid - with as much salads as you can hold followed by fruits, vegetables, calciferous vegetables (contain more body-usable calcium than dairy products), sea vegetables for better source of Iodine, nuts, berries, beans, spices (garlic, onions, and ginger, at least heal lots of diseases and super enhances nutrition), Himalayan Salt instead of regular salt, and stopping all added and artificial sugars. This will cause a couple ounces of daily weight loss, what you are doing with increasing your fruit and vegetable portions is creating a body process that reduces fatigue, reduces many chronic diseases, improves sexual function, improves hospice and long-term care patients lives/quality of life, reduces the advancement of most cancers into higher stages (even non adenocarcinomas), saves thousands of dollars in healthcare costs, decreases fatigue, decreases depressive symptoms, improves memory, improves ejection fraction/ heart health and sometimes even helps against nurse burn-out!

          I wish you lots of success in continuing to increase and increase the amount of fruits, vegetables, legumes, quinoa, nuts, berries, non-flavored water/green teas in your diet!