[annapurna]

Sorry, didn't answer all of your questions. Pollan's are, in my opinion, best checked out of the library. They're thought provoking and, if you buy into the thoughts, life changing but not something that you're going to need at hand to reference once you're read and understood the ideas.

Obviously, we're still in the midst of dietary changes. Laura's knee arthritis hasn't miraculously vanished in response to the better diet. The pain hasn't diminished and it's WAY too early to see if better overall health has resulted in better stem cell growth within the knee. For me, I've had a large number of medical challenges that were minor, a couple major ones like cancer, but most minor. Overall, it added up to a general poor health, poor energy level and poor attitude. Those are changing already and I'd expect that to continue. It wouldn't have fixed a bad spinal disk but it would mean that I'd work out more and be less likely to damage one or recover better after the surgery to fix one that was already bad. It also touches on a topic that Rich and I have discussed in the past: the spine cascade (for the lack of a better term).

On ADRSupport, of the patients that didn't start their spine problems with a single traumatic event, a dismaying number seem to wind up with a whole series of spinal problems. Surgeries to correct one problem succeed only to reveal a second which requires correction to reveal a third and so on. In comparison, others have all of the same problems, and more sometimes, but never develop pain or see any effect on their quality of life. Diet isn't the sole cause but the experiences I'm going through convinced me that it is a base cause for overall poor health that manifests in numerous, apparently unrelated, areas. Laura's comment, "Food is medicine," was true for me.

Pollan's Food Rules book has a number of pithy summarizations of his other books to produce a series of rules to eat by. For example, one is to eat food that ate what it was intended to. Eat grass-fed ruminants instead of grain-fed for instance. I'll add to that eating what your body needs. I turned out to be a mild reactive hypoglycemic during Hauser's tests. He explained that my body obviously should not be fed easy to digest sugars if I wanted to have a stable blood sugar level. For me, fruits needed to be limited even though I could eat vegetables as I wanted. That's why I'm concerned about a one-size-fits-all vegetarian diet. It may not work right for everyone.