91: Reversing Leukemia with Holistic Nutrition & A Chef's Healing Journey PART 1 | Christina Pirello

Christina Pirello, an emmy-winning celebrity chef, shares her extraordinary journey from her Italian roots to becoming a renowned authority in holistic health and nutrition. Christina's story is a testament to the power of change in daily nutrition, as a driving force in healing. Christina recounts her family traditions that shaped her culinary passions and how these early experiences influenced her path towards a healthier lifestyle later on.

Christina's life took a dramatic turn when she was faced with a terminal leukemia diagnosis. Refusing to accept the conventional route and medical recommendations to her situation, she turned to macrobiotics, supported by her husband, Robert. Despite initial resistance and skepticism, her commitment to a strict diet brought about a remarkable recovery that left her doctors baffled. Christina opens up about these challenging times and how they propelled her into a career of teaching and inspiring others to embrace the healing power of nutrition.

In this episode, you'll also get an inside look at Christina's transition from pastry chef to a celebrated cooking teacher and TV personality. Learn about HealingStrong, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting individuals with cancer and other diseases, and discover how Christina's heartfelt dedication to holistic health continues to inspire and empower others on their wellness journeys. Join us for an episode filled with inspiration, education, and the undeniable power of healthy cooking, and eating.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

And I said well, you know, you should know. Now that I'm here, you know that I have you all. I'm doing this food thing and I think that that's made the difference, because I didn't take any treatments.

Speaker 2: 0:09

So I think, the difference.

Speaker 1: 0:11

And the one doctor looked at me and he said you're so cute. Nothing that you eat has an impact on your health. Wow. And I said wait a second. When you take an aspirin or an ibuprofen when you have a headache, isn't there a chemical reaction in the body that causes the headache to go away? And he looked at me, he rolled his eyes, he said yes, of course. And I said so. If I eat broccoli, is there not a chemical reaction that changes the pH in my blood, in my intestines, that allows my health to change? Patted me on the hand and said come back in six months for another blood test. I never went back.

Speaker 3: 0:47

You're listening to the I Am Healing Strong podcast, a part of the Healing Strong organization, the number one network of holistic cancer support groups in the world. Each week we bring you stories of hope, real stories that will encourage you as you navigate your way on your own journey to health. Now here's your host stage four cancer thriver, jim Mann.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Welcome to another podcast. I'm excited to bring yet another guest. This one is so much smarter than me, I can tell right away I'm just meeting her and she and I would get along great because I love to eat and she loves to cook and I think that's just a wonderful, wonderful pair right there, christina, is it Pirello?

Speaker 1: 1:34

Pirello yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Look at me just the way it looks.

Speaker 1: 1:36

It's like an Italian.

Speaker 2: 1:38

Yeah, how are you doing?

Speaker 1: 1:39

I'm well, thank you. How are?

Speaker 2: 1:41

you Super. You're a celebrity chef, you have Christina Cooks and you won an Emmy from that right.

Speaker 1: 1:47

Yep, I did yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:49

Let me look at my shelf see if I can find mine. Nope, I don't have an Emmy anywhere.

Speaker 1: 1:54

I don't have mine anywhere in view either.

Speaker 2: 1:57

I'm sure mine's coming somewhere.

Speaker 1: 1:59

Hey man, you got a gold record behind you, so you know.

Speaker 2: 2:02

Yeah, I took that from the radio station. Okay, there you go. They were throwing it away, Anyway. You also have seven cookbooks. You wrote you have a master's in food science and nutrition from the University of Miami. You won the 2020 Philadelphia Award for health food. Wow, that sounds prestigious. You're on a gazillion boards. I came in we don't have the time to go through all the boards that you're on and also you're a professor of culinary arts and nutrition at the restaurant school at Walnut Hill College and you cut grass on the side.

Speaker 1: 2:38

No, I cook and clean on the side.

Speaker 2: 2:41

What did I miss?

Speaker 1: 2:41

There's so much more I mean, I was all over your website and there's so much stuff that you have done Well. Actually, you only made one mistake, which is it's 13 cookbooks, and I'm working on my 14th. But, that's okay. That's okay, I have 13. What's the difference?

Speaker 2: 2:56

Okay, let me scratch that Seven. Oh, so much better. I didn't respect you with seven, but now, okay, what else?

Speaker 1: 3:04

do we do? We have a travel business, a boutique travel business. My husband and I. We take people on healthy, active vacations in Europe. Wow yeah, they're really fun. I do a lot of the cooking, but people do not have to be plant-based to come on one of our trips. They can eat whatever they want, unless I cooked it. If I cook it, it's going to be plant-based People can do what they like. We've been doing it since 1999. It's been fun. If it's not fun anymore, we stop doing it.

Speaker 2: 3:36

It's not worth it if it's not fun. Life is too short. At my age I finally realized life is too short.

Speaker 1: 3:44

I realized that really early on, sadly.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Oh yes, Well, you had a diagnosis and we'll get to that, but give us a little background. You got Italian and Irish in you and a lot of food and a lot of people.

Speaker 1: 3:59

Yeah, so I'm Italian on my mother's side and Irish on my father's side. My father's side was like you they really like to eat, but nobody knew their way around the kitchen. My Italian side were the cooks. You know, they were the ones that that taught me to love food, taught me how to pick a ripe tomato.

Speaker 1: 4:18

I think I said to you earlier that my grandmother was the youngest of 17 and she and her nine sisters and my mother used to cook very often in our kitchen, and just watching them move around the kitchen was like watching a symphony. They never banged into each other, there was never any irritation. They knew their jobs. They it was. They were always singing and drinking coffee and wine and and creating these amazing meals, and so from a very young age I knew that that's where I wanted to be. I wanted to be part of that music really, and they were more than happy.

Speaker 1: 4:51

You know, people say who taught you how to cook? Nobody. They would give you a job, show you how to do it. You know, do this, and then you master that job, and then you give you another job and another job, and finally you're cooking, and Finally you're cooking, and and that's how it started and I never felt out of love with the kitchen, even when it became our profession years later. There's something about the heat, the pressure, the yelling that you know that's you. You have to be a certain kind of insane, I think, to be in that profession.

Speaker 2: 5:30

But I loved every second of it when I did. I loved every second of it when I did it. Yeah, we've all seen Italian. I mean, even if we don't have an Italian, family.

Speaker 1: 5:33

We've seen it in the movies. I think it's just like that, isn't it? It's pretty much like that. I mean not always, sometimes there's more yelling at the table than you know you see in movies, but there's pretty much that, that very of familial everybody's together. Family's the most important thing, family's the most important thing. It's drilled into you from the youngest age. No matter what you do in your life, never forget your family, and that has always paid off for me and pays off for so many Italians that I know that you can always rely on. You may not like them all the time. Yes, that I know that you can always rely on. You may not like them all the time.

Speaker 2: 6:06

You can always rely on them. Yes, now your mom. She was into healthy eating from the start, right?

Speaker 1: 6:13

My mother was a certified hippie back in the day when I was a little girl and she was always in what we called the health food stores back then, buying vitamins and unmarked brown bottles and sold to her by people with names like Segal and Free. And you know she burned her bra with the other mothers during that time and I have photos of me as a little girl somewhere with sandwich boards. You know, don't drop bombs on me, don't pollute my water. And I always thought we were at a parade. I had no idea, but her sort of social activism like worked its way into my DNA.

Speaker 1: 6:52

You know I can remember as a little kid. You know, turn off the water when you brush your teeth. What are you doing? Wasting water? Do you think there's water forever? And as a kid you're thinking, yeah, and we drive 30 minutes to take the newspaper that my father read every day to the recycling plant.

Speaker 1: 7:07

And she was way ahead of her time. She used to read Prevention Magazine and walk into the kitchen and say do you know? We cook broccoli for too long, okay, ma. And she was always expanding her horizons when it came to health and wellness and lived a very paradoxical life because my mother passed away at 49 from colon cancer because while she knew all this stuff and we had to eat the vegetables from the garden, we had to cook from scratch, we had to eat, take whole wheat bread to school that she baked she basically lived on coffee, cigarettes and whatever chocolate was in the house, what it was. So it was so bizarre to me as a kid she suffered I would say she suffered from the arrogance of knowing stuff but didn't ever put it into practice wow she would eat pizza when we made pizza.

Speaker 1: 7:59

But you know you couldn't get her to like eat the plate of brussels sprouts that we had to eat that we picked out of the garden. It was. She was not. She did a salad now and then, but she really was not a healthy eater, she was a healthy thinker. I don't know if that makes any sense, but yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:13

So when I left home at 18 to go to college, I was so over it. I was like I'm done with this, I'm gonna. I'm gonna live a single woman vegetarian lifestyle. Because I became a vegetarian at 14 because my father's a butcher and he had the opportunity to work in a slaughterhouse and make a ton of money for the time. And my dad was six foot two, pure Irish muscle, and he left, came back within an hour, sat at the kitchen table weeping and said to my mother I know we need the money, but I couldn't do it. And that was it for me. I haven't touched meat since that day. If my father, my strong father, couldn't do what it took to put meat on the table, I was done. He said I couldn't look in their eyes and do it.

Speaker 2: 8:55

Wow.

Speaker 1: 8:56

So when I left home I became a general food vegetarian. By Dr Pepper, the cream in Oreos is vegan. Who knew no cream in it? Wow, it was that kind of and I was working as a chef. So later in years, when I studied with my Asian teacher, he used to say the unhealthiest profession was chef. We never sat down to eat. We, you know, ate whatever we could get our hands on. It's kind of like this constant catch-22 of not being healthy and your day off you didn't really want to cook.

Speaker 1: 9:29

So, yeah, it was interesting.

Speaker 2: 9:31

Wow.

Speaker 1: 9:32

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:33

Okay, so you were a rebel eating junk food.

Speaker 1: 9:36

Oh, tons, yeah, Tons of it, and it's really delicious, by the way.

Speaker 2: 9:41

Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:43

And of course I'm sure you've heard the analogy, might have used it yourself. But you know people think you know they wouldn't put anything but gasoline or diesel in their car, yet in their body, which is so much more complicated than an automobile. In fact, you know, compared to the human body, an automobile is about as complicated as a toothpick. Yeah, but yet we'll put anything, anything that tastes good. You gotta get past that tongue and that palate.

Speaker 1: 10:08

So yeah, we take way better care of our, of our cars than our bodies yeah, and some people still don't make that connection and I didn't amazing, isn't it? I I find that so uh. In the work that I do, I still find myself scratching my head some days like, wow, okay, if I hear it once, I hear it a million times. Well, if I was sick I would do this. My answer is always why wait?

Speaker 2: 10:30

Yeah, that's true. So you're going towards sickness and once you get there, then you'll change right.

Speaker 1: 10:36

Yeah, it's like OK, it might be too late then, but OK, whatever.

Speaker 2: 10:40

Yeah, so you were diagnosed at a young age, right? Yeah, so you were diagnosed at a young age, right.

Speaker 1: 10:44

Yeah, my mother passed away at 49. I was 24 at the time, 25 at the time. I moved to Philadelphia to get a new start in life and six months after I moved there I was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. What they consider terminal leukemia would be they don't really do stages in leukemia, but it would be considered like stage four. They said you have six to nine months. And I said to them, because I was 20, I was almost 26. I sat there and I said but what do we do? And they said we don't think. You're understanding us. You're terminal. And I said to them yeah, that's a big building at the airport. What do we do? And they said well, we can try a few things, but you'll probably just be sick and we can extend your life by a couple months. And I said and I'll be bald and sick? And they said yeah. So I said no, thank you. And I left petrified, not knowing anything Like what would I do. And then? So then I thought, well, maybe I'll move back to Italy. I lived there for a year. I'll just go back and when it's over, it's over. You know, they'll always remember me as young You're so stupid at that age and they'll always remember me young and you know that'll be it.

Speaker 1: 11:52

And then a friend of mine introduced me to Robert, who I am married to for 41 years, and Robert said well, why do you think you have to die from this? Do you know you can change your blood quality in as little as seven months? And I said, well, I only have nine. And he started to talk about macrobiotics and eating. Well, and he said you know how do you eat now? And I said, well, I'm already a vegetarian, so duh. And he said, well, do you eat sugar? And I said, well, everybody eats sugar. And he said do you drink soda? Everybody drinks soda. And I realized I didn't know a thing about nutrition, nothing. I just knew that I wasn't eating animals. So he introduced me to macrobiotics, which I started eating, and I remember the first meal I ate that was macrobiotic.

Speaker 1: 12:38

He had made brown rice, corn on the cob that had pickled Japanese plum paste on it, he had made sea vegetables, kale and tempeh, which is a fermented soy product. And I looked at the plate and I thought I don't know. So I ate a bit of rice. And I thought, well, this is boring. And then I looked at the black sea vegetables and thought I was being pumped. So I wouldn't even touch that. I thought there was mold on my corn because it was pink. The kale I looked at him and said this is the garnish on a salad bar and you think we're going to eat this. And then the tempeh I thought was awful and it turns out he's a really good cook and I just had so much sugar in my palate that I had no idea how to taste food. So he said why don't you give it a month? And I thought, all right, I'm not living for a month, I'll give it a month. So I went back to my doctors. They agreed to monitor my blood.

Speaker 1: 13:36

And in a month I was in remission and I was, when I tell you, jim, I was cooking rice, but I gave up sugar completely, I gave up soda, all junk food, cold turkey completely. So I was eating brown rice, sometimes badly cooked. Sometimes I made miso soup. I would eat, you know, vegetables, but it all was disgusting to me. And I didn't. I was not, I was not one of those people who said, oh, this is going to save my life. I was like, well, he's adorable, and in six months I'll be dead. You know he'll move on. So I went back to the doctor, had my blood test and they said, um, you are in remission. And I said, great, shouldn't you be happier? And they said, well, it won't last. And they were right.

Speaker 1: 14:16

I went in and out of remission for about seven months, but at seven months I was supposed to be coming up on like the end and I was anything but close to my deathbed. I was healthy, I felt good, I had lost weight, but I had muscle, I had energy. So I kept going back every other month and after 14 months they took blood, took it again again, took it again. And finally I said to the technician I'll never forget her, janine. I said are we feeding every vampire in Philly, like what's happening here? And she said well, the doctors need to speak to you. There's a problem.

Speaker 1: 14:51

And I thought okay'm sitting down across from five oncologists and they said we can't seem to find any leukemia in your blood. And again I said to them well, shouldn't you be happier? And they said well, we don't really know what happened here. We think it's spontaneous regression, but don't get too excited, it's not going to last. And I thought okay, see ya. And I was in rage and I said well, you know, you should know. Now that I'm here, you know that I have you all. I'm doing this food thing and I think that that's made the difference, because I didn't take any treatments.

Speaker 1: 15:26

So I think the difference. And the one doctor looked at me and he said you're so cute. Nothing that you eat has an impact on your health. Wow. And I said wait a second. When you take an aspirin or an ibuprofen when you have a headache, isn't there a chemical reaction in the body that causes the headache to go away? And he looked at me, he rolled his eyes, he said yes, of course. And I said so. If I eat broccoli, is there not a chemical reaction that changes the ph in my blood, in my intestines, that allows my health to change? Patted me on the hand and said come back in six months for another blood test. I never went back.

Speaker 2: 16:06

Yes, so they weren't your cheerleaders, is what you're saying.

Speaker 1: 16:09

No, oh gosh, no. If it wasn't for Robert and my family, probably no cheerleaders when you're doing something that no one really knows about. This was 1983. It wasn't like people were using food to influence disease like they do now. This was pretty. In fact, my dad, my mom, had just died. My father said to me I can't do this again. I don't know if I can do this again Because he thought I would die. We all did, and I said well, I kind of need you now. And my father didn't talk to me for two months because he just couldn't deal. So I thought OK, I'm alone with this man I just met, who showed up every morning to help me cook breakfast and, you know, became my head cheerleader to this day, of course.

Speaker 2: 16:51

What's his background?

Speaker 1: 16:57

Robert has a background in marketing. He's a Sicilian, grew up in a big Sicilian family. His mother was one of 15, so he grew up in that same kind of big kitchen, family parties. Everything was about food. But everyone in his family died very young from cancer, mostly cancer. So when he moved away from home he was a runner a distance runner still is. He had a stress fracture in one of his shins was always interested in healthy food, never really liked meat or ricotta, cheese or mozzarella.

Speaker 1: 17:27

He was kind of a weirdo and you saw a magazine article on Dr Anthony Sadalero who cured his cancer with macrobiotics here in Philadelphia and Robert thought that sounded interesting and, while he was perfectly healthy, thought maybe he should do some prevention because his whole family, you know, was dying of cancer. So he studied macrobiotics and never looked back. In 1968. Wow, started eating and went to study with Michio Kushi in Boston and then just never really taught. He still doesn't really teach. But just, you know, lives, the lifestyle. Now we live a little more Mediterranean than Asian, but still you know the principles are there and that's how he started was because he didn't like the way things were going with his family.

Speaker 2: 18:13

Okay, just like James Templeton. I think you were on his podcast also, yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Exactly, almost exactly.

Speaker 2: 18:20

Okay.

Speaker 1: 18:21

So Robert was one of the few people you'll meet in the macrobiotic community who was preventive, not curative.

Speaker 2: 18:28

Right.

Speaker 1: 18:29

He didn't come to us as a last resort. Robert's like maybe I won't wait that long.

Speaker 2: 18:34

You're right, he is a weirdo. He's a little bit of a weirdo, he's small, yes, a good weirdo he is if more of us would do things just to prevent it before it happens I know, I know and I can't really.

Speaker 1: 18:47

You know, when I talk to people I can't really, I can't lecture them about prevention, but I can say to them I know where you are, I was, and let's not let it get to the 11th hour. Do something now, don't wait till they tell you your terminal Wait. You know, do it now. I mean, and listen, even back in 1983, we all knew that we were not supposed to be drinking soda and eating bars for breakfast, like. We all knew that. We just did it because it tasted good and we were marketed to, and you know it tasted good and it was easy. And so nobody you know macrobiotics has the reputation. Nobody was walking down the street in Boston when Michio Kushi was teaching and thinking let me give up everything I love and go eat brown rice and seaweed, unless they had to.

Speaker 2: 19:33

Right.

Speaker 1: 19:33

You know sick or they. You know they needed some kind of intervention and the medical community had written you off. That's who started macrobiotics in this country. Really like, made it a movement.

Speaker 2: 19:44

Yeah, there's, there's still. The mindset is that, even though it's changing, you know lots of people. Slow, very slow. Yeah, doctors like I fortunately had a doctor who's like, hey, everything matters. Like I fortunately had a doctor who's like, hey, everything matters Exercising what you eat, your mindset, you know all these things and I thought, wow, that's incredible.

Speaker 1: 20:03

That's incredible.

Speaker 2: 20:05

Yeah, and then I had a cousin you know I mentioned this in many of our podcasts, but I just want to bring it up because his doctor said it doesn't matter what you eat. In fact, eat more donuts to get that weight back up.

Speaker 1: 20:31

And you know he passed away in five years of just being chemoed because he believed the doctors. I mean, that's how my family was. You know they said it was colon cancer and my, my mother started her very long two year journey, uh, with cancer, with a pain. She said. It was like she had an ice pick in the cheek of her butt.

Speaker 1: 20:47

And she and she was very fit. My mother exercised to Jack LaLanne when I was a little girl. Now, when I taught at Richard Simmons health club, she came to my classes. She was very fit, looked like a 1940s pinup model after having four kids. And so one day she said I think you know you're stretching. I pulled that and she pointed to it and I'm like my, you don't have a muscle there to pull, so I don't know.

Speaker 1: 21:10

Weeks went by and it got worse and worse and worse. And then they said it was colon cancer. They did a full colonoscopy. I mean she ended up with a bag, but the pain in her hip never went away. The pain in her butt never went away. So after 18 months a little longer they said you know? She said I know that I'm not going to beat this. She was either in radiation, in chemotherapy or out of remission. She never quite. She never beat it.

Speaker 1: 21:35

And so one day we were at the doctor's office and she said I have to get rid of this pain. I can't even enjoy my family because I'm always in a fog on painkillers. And he said well, we could do a nerve block in your leg, but your leg will be paralyzed. And she said I don't care, I just don't want to be on painkillers, I want to be with my family. So he said, okay. So we scheduled this thing, 20-minute procedure. Four hours later they come out and say, oops, we misdiagnosed her. Her primary source of cancer was actually bone cancer and when we went in to do the nerve block, her pelvis powdered. She'll be dead in 10 days. And she was dead in 10 days. So did she have colon cancer? Yes, it was a secondary cancer, but the reason nothing worked I look back now and think was because they were treating the wrong thing. So I, you know as a kid, but as a kid, like you just said, when I was 20-something years old and they say do this, you go okay.

Speaker 2: 22:28

I just don't want to lose my mother?

Speaker 1: 22:30

Okay, let's do it. Whatever you say, let's do it. You know, she's vomiting every day and her stomach's all burnt from the radiation. She's vomiting every day and her stomach's all burnt from the radiation, I know, but we're just going to give her a few more treatments, Okay, you know, you always said okay because they were so all powerful and we weren't as smart. We didn't have the internet, we weren't as smart. You know, see, my grandmother, when I was a kid, used to use she used to boil fennel and make a tea if you had a stomach ache, but you didn't really think food could cure disease.

Speaker 1: 22:58

You just knew there were these little folk remedies, that you're non-unmade, and you know how cute.

Speaker 2: 23:04

I look back now and think how smart they were, oh yeah, back then just a bunch of hippies that did weird things, and now they're brilliant.

Speaker 1: 23:13

I always say they're brilliant.

Speaker 2: 23:14

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:15

So who knows, Jim I don't know. That's kind of the story. So for me, when they said welcome to spontaneous regression you won't stay here I was like thanks, I got to go.

Speaker 2: 23:28

Yeah, and you're not going back. So do you go to a doctor at all?

Speaker 1: 23:35

I do on occasion. I have, as I've gotten older, started getting blood tests every couple of years and everything is usually. I do struggle with anemia. I have to be completely honest in full transparency. It never has changed. I struggle with hemoglobin all the time. It's always like seven or eight and when I talk to my doctor she says you know somebody, some people just adjust. My whole family, every female, has Mediterranean anemia, thalassemia, leukemia runs in the genes. So it's like okay, so you know I have energy to burn. So I think your body does adjust somehow to what you have to, whatever your resources are. But yeah, but like regular, like do I go every six months?

Speaker 2: 24:20

No, no, so that made you obviously once you got into the diet, the macro biotics, and then you is that when you got into the healthy cooking or how that transition.

Speaker 1: 24:33

Yeah. So when I was sick and I was learning how to cook real food, you know, that's when my interest was peaked. And then when I recovered, my husband said, well, I was a pastry chef before I got sick. And he said what do you want to do now? And I said, well, with was a pastry chef before I got sick. And he said what do you want to do now? And I said, well, with what I know now I can't go back to poisoning people with sugar, milk and butter, so I have to do something else. And he said what do you want to do? And so my first idea thank goodness he's so much more sensible than me I said, well, here's what I think I should do. I'm going to go sit in oncologist's office and tell people there's a better way. And he said, babe, we don't have that kind of money for bail. So no, you're not doing that. I was like, okay.

Speaker 1: 25:15

So I went to my teacher in macrobiotics and studied with him for about four years, studied Chinese medicine, to understand how the body worked energetically. Not because I wanted to put needles, but it was the only way I could figure out how to study how the body really worked, the five energies and the humors and all of that. I went to my teacher and he said why don't you teach cooking? And I thought, oh really, teach cooking. Why? Because I'm a girl. And he said, no, because we teach people cooking, you can give them tools. So I left him and I started to think well, maybe he's right. I mean, I could talk to you for four hours about what a carrot will do for your health, but if you leave me not knowing what to do with a carrot, what did I really give you? But if I teach you how to cook the carrot while I talk to you about what the carrot can do for your health, I've given you a tool. Whether you use it, don't use it.

Speaker 1: 26:15

So I started teaching cooking and then my classes went from four to eight to 12 to 24, to my house being filled, to renting a space, to teaching all over the world. And then my husband in 1996, I think said you know, you're really funny, you should do this on TV. And I thought, oh sure, yeah, you'll figure it out and I'll do it, thinking, and here we are, and here we are, but yeah, so the healthy cooking came in. I really got creative after I got. Well, I just figured out. Look, I'm a chef, let me. How can I make this food taste better so it doesn't feel like when I tell someone they're going to eat brown rice and vegetables, they don't feel like they're deprived, they feel like they're eating something enjoyable and lovely. And that really became.

Speaker 1: 27:04

What drove me forward was how do I make macrobiotics something that people want to do? Because macrobiotics is just an understanding. Macrobiotics is not about eating seaweed and miso soup. It's about eating seasonal, whole, unprocessed food, cooked in a way that's appropriate for your lifestyle and health condition. That's it. The Asian influence is lovely and mystical, and if you're into it, that's it. The Asian influence is lovely and mystical, and if you're into it, that's cool, but if you're not, I just want to teach you how to make a really good pot of rice, beautifully sweet, delicious vegetables, pasta when you want it and have you enjoy your wellness. That's it.

Speaker 2: 27:44

So you took healthy food and added flavor to it.

Speaker 1: 27:47

Exactly Because nobody wanted to eat it. First year we were on TV. Since you say that first year we were on TV, we won an Emmy. And we were meeting with our production crew at the time and I said to them so the show I mean we just won, so shouldn't we try to elevate it now and maybe do something different? I don't know. Let's think about what we could do. And my one producer said listen, we have a lovely show Just won an Emmy. It's hosted by a pretty girl who makes food that nobody wants to eat. That's it. And I said to my husband how do you feel about becoming an independent producer? And we left that at that moment.

Speaker 2: 28:26

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 28:27

So we became independent and have been producing ourselves ever since, hiring crews and doing the whole thing. It's cool. I like doing it that way.

Speaker 2: 28:35

So you're still on PBS, right.

Speaker 1: 28:37

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 28:38

And also your YouTube channel.

Speaker 1: 28:44

I love public television and Create for many reasons, but the two most important ones are that they're deeply committed to education, and that's really all I care about. I think that you know if I, if I was doing the show to make money, I'd probably do stand up somewhere instead, because you know PBS, not CBS, and um, I feel like it's a huge classroom. Anybody can watch it. You don't have to have cable, everybody has access to it. And I also feel like we own all of our content. I own all my intellectual property.

Speaker 1: 29:14

I don't have ghostwriters on my cookbooks, I don't have somebody else who owns a piece of me, and on public television, while they screen everything for offensive information, nobody tells me what to say. We took the show in the beginning to Discovery and they said this is a great idea. Every now and then you'll have to throw in a chicken breast or some fish to make it friendly for America. And I was like I'm out, I'm out. And our producer at the time said nobody says no to them. And I said I just did. And on public television, I just didn't. And on public television, you know, we're the masters of our own domain in terms of what we say. I mean, I certainly have, at the end of the show, disclaimers that it's not medical advice because it isn't, it's entertainment in the end. But we do give some cool information.

Speaker 2: 30:04

That's a fantastic story. I like that. When you're cancer free, that's always good, good ending.

Speaker 1: 30:10

It's a great ending. It's a great ending to the story.

Speaker 2: 30:14

I want to get into the practical stuff with your cooking and all that kind of stuff which I want it basically for myself. But since everyone else is listening, they can listen in also. That's fine, but we're going to. Can you come back next week? That would be great. We'll just continue this conversation.

Speaker 1: 30:30

Come back whenever you want me to.

Speaker 2: 30:34

Well, and of course, if people want to get a hold of you, just go to ChristinaCookscom, right, all the information's right there.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Yeah, and social media is all. Christina Cooks, if they're interested. Yeah, we have a YouTube channel that has recipe videos. Instagram, facebook, all that stuff, yeah, all right?

Speaker 2: 30:50

Well, thank you so much and we'll talk to you on the next episode.

Speaker 3: 30:53

All right. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to the I Am Healing Strong podcast. A part of the Healing Strong organization. We hope you found encouragement in this episode, as well as the confidence to take control of your healing journey, knowing that God will guide you on this path.

Speaker 3: 31:11

Healing Strong is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to connect, support and educate individuals facing cancer and other diseases through strategies that help to rebuild the body, renew the soul and refresh the spirit. It costs nothing to be a part of a local or online group. You can do that by going to our website at healingstrongorg and finding a group near you or an online group, or start your own, your choice. While you're there, take a look around at all the free resources. Though the resources and groups are free, we encourage you to join our membership program at $25 or $75 a month. This helps us to be able to reach more people with hope and encouragement, and that also comes with some extra perks as well. So check it out. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating, leave an encouraging comment and help us spread the word. We'll see you next week with another story on the I Am Healing Strong podcast.