COOK EAT LIVE VEGETARIAN
Natalie Ward, a foodie and blogger who lives in Spain, was thirty-seven years
old when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. ‘I had been running my own
successful restaurant for nine years. It definitely took its toll on me as a person
and my body as a whole. Something about the unsociable and very long
hours, not eating regularly, eating badly and always putting on a show wasn’t
good for my health. It took being diagnosed with breast cancer for me to
realise this, although it might have been obvious from the outside.’
Natalie had found a lump in her breast and gone for a precautionary
mammogram, which came back clear. Her doctor then sent her for a biopsy,
which she describes as ‘very painful’. ‘I went back after waiting a week for the
results and I was told that I had cancer in a corridor, yes a corridor. My
feelings were of shock, disbelief and worry about the business failing on top of
everything else. My partner was amazing. I was in denial and shock and kind
of a coma so he took over.’
It was a traumatic time. The staff at the hospital she was referred to were
busy and overworked. ‘The first time I went to the oncology unit, I was
completely unprepared for what I saw. It was packed with people, ill people
with their friends and family and it was loud. It was August at the time,
which is when all the doctors have their annual holidays so my first contact
was with a female student doctor. She was not sympathetic in any way and
had no compassion.’
This set the tone for her treatment, as Natalie began to feel like she was on
a conveyor belt that she was powerless to stop. The doctors did not like to be
questioned, reacting to it as an insult. ‘I came to understand that all doctors
were like that,’ she says, ‘understandably, I suppose, because of the amount of
patients they have to see in a day. There was no time for niceties.’
When it became apparent that she would need chemotherapy, Natalie had
to come to terms with the fact that she might never have children. ‘Before I
was diagnosed at thirty-seven, I still wasn’t thinking of having children. With
the restaurant taking up all of our time, I thought I had a few years left if we
decided we wanted to, but it wasn’t something at the forefront of my mind.
When you find out that you have lost control of that situation and it may
never happen for you, your world collapses. Even though I wasn’t one of
those “natural mothers” who knew they wanted children from an early age, it
still broke me. The doctors avoided the subject completely as if they didn’t
want to go there, in case I got upset.’
Despite the negative aspects, Natalie received every treatment possible for
her kind of breast cancer. Her treatment plan included chemotherapy sessions
every three weeks for six months, as well as taking a clinical trial drug (‘five
huge orange pills every night’), followed by surgery to remove the tumour,
then six weeks of radiation every weekday, then a year of Herceptin
intravenously once every three weeks, then Tamoxifen every day for five
years. She also had to have anti-hormone injections in her stomach to stop
her periods coming back for two years after the chemotherapy was finished.
She describes it quite simply as hell.
It was during her treatment that food and diet began to play a crucial role
in her healing. Natalie and her partner felt so out of control of her medical
treatment that they took control of everything they could outside of that. She
carried on working for a while, but when she developed a fever of 41 degrees
after her first session of chemo, they got such a fright that they decided to sell
the restaurant. For the first time, they had their own space and their own
home, no longer living at the restaurant with no privacy. Natalie’s partner
and her father began researching alternative treatments on the Internet. ‘I
went to see an alternative practitioner and started having regular reiki sessions
once a week. The reiki sessions really helped me to work through a lot of
emotional baggage I was carrying.’ Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress
reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing.
Natalie’s alternative practitioner encouraged her to tackle her diet. She
was told to give up all sugars, including all fruit, for the duration of her
treatment and to avoid cow’s milk completely. ‘Sugar feeds cancer growth
and cow’s milk products are full of unwanted chemicals, including oestrogen.
What really made me angry was that at the hospital in the treatment waiting
rooms, they gave you sugary biscuits, sugary soft drinks and tea or coffee with
milk. It couldn’t be any worse. I wanted to shout at them and tell everyone to
lay off the sugar, but the thinking here is that you must eat what you want to
eat – anything that doesn’t make you feel sick while having treatment. Not
once did they ask me about my diet or recommend any alternative therapies,
in fact they positively discouraged it.’
Even during the clinical trial, Natalie found that no in-depth questions
were asked about her life, the only concern being what the side effects of the
drug might be. It was at this point that she started to become interested in
food and how it affects the body, learning to understand the relationship
between food and health. ‘I felt relatively good throughout my treatment,
compared to how others looked anyway. I’m not saying it wasn’t awful,
because it was, but I felt in control,’ she explains. She began cooking her
meals from scratch, and really enjoying them.
After her surgery to remove the tumour, the doctor told her that when they
had opened her up, the tumour had shrunk to almost nothing. When she was
diagnosed, it had been three by two centimetres.
‘After finishing radiotherapy, I could get back to a relatively normal life,
so we started walking every morning with the dog in the countryside where
we live. There are a lot of farms or smallholdings and I started to take notice
of what was growing. Seeing the seasons change and different fruits and
vegetables growing and being harvested made me feel connected to the earth. I
suppose I wanted to cook with what I had seen that day. That’s how my blog
[Cook Eat Live Vegetarian 49] came about really. I wanted to share the
seasonal recipes and show the ingredients growing. I wanted everyone to
understand what a difference it makes when you live in harmony with what’s
around you rather than in complete obliviousness.’
Natalie visits a local farmers market every Sunday morning, where she
only buys organic produce. She says she gravitates to whatever looks lovely
and plans her meals for the week around that. ‘It is my favourite part of the
week; I love seeing what has been growing in the fields on sale and there is
always something different or surprising. I have introduced a lot of my
friends to this market too. I suppose when you are so passionate about
something people want to share that.’
Natalie believes it was the change in her diet that shrunk the tumour, and
is therefore now more aware than ever that everything you put in your body
should be as pure as possible. ‘I’m not saying that I’m a saint – far from it – I
go out for dinner, get drunk, eat chips and cake occasionally, but the majority
of the time I like to keep my foods whole, organic and free of refined sugar
and cow’s milk.’ Her love of cooking is very important to this process. She
also stopped taking the Tamoxifen two years after chemotherapy rather than
five. ‘I didn’t want to any more,’ she says. ‘I haven’t told my mum though.’
In terms of her experience and her views on meat, Natalie has been a
vegetarian since the age of thirteen, after seeing a television programme where
a family decided to kill and eat their pet lamb. ‘This was the first time I had
connected those facts and I couldn’t bring myself to ever eat meat again.
What I now realise is that it is very easy to be a vegetarian and eat badly. For
years I lived on store-bought hummus, processed cheese and yoghurts. I was
lazy, didn’t like cooking and was exhausted, like most people, after work.’
It was reading The China Study that changed Natalie’s perception of
animal proteins and processed foods. ‘I am convinced that this diet high in
animal protein, particularly casein [a milk protein], contributed to my cancer.
I now follow the findings of The China Study and try to keep to a whole foods,
mainly plant-based, diet. I also try to keep my consumption of animal protein
(eggs and cheese) to below 10 per cent of my diet.’
As mentioned before, Natalie tries to avoid cow’s milk products altogether
because of the link between casein and cancer, as well as what she describes as
‘all of the hormones pumped into cows to keep them producing milk all the
time’. She adds that ‘oestrogen [one of these hormones] is another element
known to encourage cancer growth and I am very passionate about informing
people of the dangers of cow’s milk products even though I can see many of
them glazing over. It makes me so angry that they still encourage children to
drink it by saying it is good for healthy bones; this is all bollocks.’
Her advice for people who have been diagnosed with cancer is to take
control of their lives. ‘Of course you are going to fall apart to start with, but
it’s how you deal with it that affects the outcome. You can give up and go
into denial or you can try and heal yourself.’ She recommends buying Louise
L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life and all others in that series, which she says is
inspiring and positive reading. ‘This is what you need, not people feeling
sorry for you and bringing you biscuits. Get some reiki sessions to deal with
emotions and blockages – it really helps. Then look at diet and lifestyle. If you
don’t believe it can change your life then you are in denial or scared. Don’t be
scared, it is the most positive and beautiful thing you will ever do for yourself
and you deserve it.’
