Serving Up Energy

TV chef Christina Pirello will cook three special whole foods dishes, sign her new book, and tell how she used food to change from having an acute case of leukemia to being cancer-free.

By: Mary Jasch

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Emmy Award-winning TV chef Christina Pirello will show alternative ways to nourish the body in Mercerville April 29.


   Got flyaway hair and split ends? Or maybe those tresses are greasy and you can’t do a thing with them? Just ask Christina Pirello, TV chef, cookbook author, whole foods expert and conqueror of leukemia, and she’ll tell you, "The condition of your hair is determined by the health of your intestines. If it’s shiny and healthy, your intestines are healthy."
   Meet the Emmy Award-winning host of PBS’s Christina Cooks at Robert Wood Johnson Hamilton Center for Health & Wellness April 29, and discover what you can do to nourish your body and look and feel great too. Ms. Pirello will cook three special whole foods dishes and sign her new book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Whole Foods but Were Afraid to Ask (HP Books, $18.95). Hear how she used food to change from having an acute case of leukemia to being cancer-free.
   Cooking the macrobiotic way is simple and an education in food energy and nutrition. Ms. Pirello defines a macrobiotic diet as one of whole, unprocessed, seasonal food, although it is commonly misunderstood to be brown rice and seaweed. The diet is different for every body and during her own 22-year journey of eating and cooking whole foods, her approach to healthful eating has evolved.

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   Ms. Perillo credits her basic understanding of cooking and effect of food on the body to her mother. "My mother laid a foundation when I was a kid," she says. "We ate nothing out of a can, nothing frozen. Everything was made from scratch so I knew how to do it."
   She grew up cooking Italian cuisine at her mother’s side. At age 14 she became a "junk food vegetarian." It wasn’t until she was diagnosed with cancer almost 20 years ago, when she was in her 20s, that she seriously began studying Ayurvedic (East Indian medicine) and Chinese medicine and nutrition. She studied which foods acidify the body and which are alkalinizing. She learned about blood pH, chi, and how to balance foods to get her blood health back.
   "When a diet consists of unprocessed foods," she says, "the blood becomes more alkaline, chi changes, and you feel more energized. When eating processed foods, the blood becomes more acidic and the body becomes predisposed to disease. When I had leukemia my blood was highly acidic — my blood was diseased. I had to nourish my blood."
   Because she was severely ill, Ms. Pirello went on an extreme diet, immediately eliminating sugar, fruit and flour. She ate lots of vegetables and beans for a short period of time to change her blood chemistry. She does not recommend that everyone do the same, but recommends making gentle changes, especially in families. "With macrobiotics, you look at each person and a food plan is designed around your blood and whatever organ that is involved to bring it back to its healthy state," she says.
   Certain foods energize the body — a case for eating what’s in season. "Nature gives us different foods at different times of year because they enliven us in different ways."
   Ms. Pirello admits she was one to enjoy dessert every night, and that giving it up was "withdrawal of an enormous size" when she switched to macrobiotics. In fact, she ate dessert every night for the first two years, then gave them up entirely until one morning just two years ago when she had an epiphany. "It was an energetic or biological shift," she says.
   Well within the parameters of her whole foods diet, she bought brown rice syrup, whole grain flours and nuts and began whipping up desserts again. "We either make them or we don’t eat them," she says. "Now a little tablespoon does it for me. I was a slave to sugar and it’s nice to not feel that way anymore."
   She dines on lots of green veggies, tofu and beans, and root vegetables for sweetness and intestinal strength. About one-third of her diet is raw for the high fiber content rather than digestive enzymes, which she says are produced in the intestines of healthy people. In winter she eats less raw food because "I feel very cold and weak."
   She says skip the spuds because they turn quickly to sugar in the intestines, but if you really must have them choose the tiny new ones with less sugar and more minerals. Everyone should develop their own regimen, she insists. It’s all about knowing food and what it can do for you. Her advice: "Go on the Internet and look up the nutrition of things."
   But how does she convince someone who has no impetus to change? She says, "Why wait? If people make minor changes now — if they take down sugar, meat or butter — and eat tons more vegetables and whole grains, it would be unbelievable. If people could make small changes now, they wouldn’t have to make the drastic ones later. But, drama’s always good. My recovery had a lot of ups and downs for 14 months."
   It’s been almost 20 years since Ms. Pirello’s blood tested positive for leukemia — that fearsome disease that strikes at any age.
   "The one thing I still do get is anemic," she says. But to her that’s small potatoes compared to cancer — and a small price to pay. To counteract anemia, she eats honey. "It’s an ancient remedy for anemia and is high in iron," she says.
   "We don’t think about food anymore in our culture," she continues. "We just eat what the commercials tell us. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I really need that? Do I really want that?’ The body’s not built to feel bad. There’s an incredible amount of flavor in whole food — we just forgot. You don’t have to become obsessive but you do have to control what you eat every day. You don’t have to become a food Nazi, but a little conscientiousness goes a long way to maintaining your health."
Christina Pirello will present a whole foods demonstration and book-signing at Robert Wood Johnson Hamilton Center for Health & Wellness, 3100 Quakerbridge Road, Mercerville, April 29, 7 p.m. Admission costs $15. For information and registration, call Friends’ Health Connection at (800) 483-7436. On the Web: www.friendshealthconnection.org