Swathed in an apron depicting a very voluptuous, very naked female body with a couple of fat tomatoes placed strategically where the nipples would be, Christina Pirello, the fizzy, funny, utterly un-Julia host of the Emmy Award-winning PBS whole foods cooking show Christina Cooks, is on a roll–and her cooking class is rapt. Pirello’s subject du jour: Dent corn. Dent corn?   “You have to cook it with wood ash and then pound it,” Pirello schools, explaining why even she, the poster child for back-to-nature from-scratch cooking, would never use this particular type of corn in the recipe she’s preparing for class–a miso soup. “I mean, come on. I’ve got a life.”   Does she ever.   But it didn’t always look like that would be the case.   Pirello was 26 when she was diagnosed with chronic myelocytic leukemia. Given just 6 months to a year to live with experimental chemotherapy and a possible bone marrow transplant, she chose neither. Instead, she painstakingly changed the way she ate, nourishing her lifeblood–literally cooking her way to life with cancer-fighting foods. That was 20 years ago. Within 14 months, the cancer had disappeared. The diet stuck. And the world got the macrobiotic girl next door.

Saved By Seaweed

There. I said it: the “m word.”   Tune in to Christina Cooks, which now airs in more than 150 US cities and 50-plus countries worldwide, and you’ll never hear Pirello utter it–the seriously fringy sounding term, “macrobiotic,” that is. Yet the macrobiotic philosophy, which stresses eating whole, unprocessed, locally grown foods, is basically what Pirello preaches from her various media pulpits–and what she credits with saving her life. Which wasn’t, by the way, the easiest thing to do, since cancer doesn’t simply run in Pirello’s family–it’s run over Pirello’s family, slammed into reverse, and run over the whole Italian-American lot of them again.“My mother’s mother was one of 17 children, 16 of whom, including her, died of cancer,” says Pirello. “My mother and her brother died of cancer. My mother’s one remaining sister currently has cancer. And my father’s two sisters died of breast cancer. The joke among my brothers and sister and me is that we’ll either get cancer or get hit by a bus. In my family, those are really the only two ways you can go.”   I ask Pirello if she looks both ways every time she crosses the street, since she appears to have a date with a Greyhound. Her eyes immediately scrunch to half-moons, and a toothy grin irradiates her face. “Guess I do,” she nods, “thanks to Robert."[header=Her One-Man Support System] Robert is Pirello’s husband, lean from both marathoning and macrobiotics, with sharp eyes, a fine, upturned nose, and a scruffy mop of salt-and-pepper hair.   “I was diagnosed with leukemia 6 months after my mother died of colon cancer, and I was terrified to go through what she did with the chemotherapy,” Pirello recalls. “Since my doctors weren’t very convinced that chemo would even help me, I decided to do nothing–to run away to Europe and live whatever life I had left there. But as I was packing up, a friend came over and said, ‘You have to meet this guy before you go. He eats seaweed and says he can cure cancer.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh, that’s just charming.’ But I met him, and it was Robert, and he was charming.”   At their first meeting, Robert handed Pirello a copy of The Cancer Prevention Dietby Michio Kushi, the man widely credited with bringing macrobiotics to the US, urging her to read the book and “let him know.” “Well, I let him know,” Pirello wails. “I told him, ‘This is either the biggest crock of s— I’ve ever heard–or the best kept secret on the planet.’”   Banking on the latter, Pirello allowed Robert to empty her cupboards of processed foods, simple sugars, saturated fats, and dairy, and to fill them instead with macrobiotic staples such as brown rice, miso (a fermented soybean paste), and kombu (also called kelp, a sea vegetable). She encouraged him to teach her how to cook with these strange, new foods and to eat according to macrobiotic principles. (The first breakfast Robert made for Pirello consisted of oatmeal–with broccoli in it.) And she quite literally leaned on him as she lost what she describes as a “really scary amount of weight”–dropping from 204 lb to just under 100 in her first 3 months on the diet.“My life changed completely,” observes Pirello, “in no small part because it continued.“Along the way, student and teacher fell in love, and Pirello’s white blood cell count unfalteringly fell away. “My doctors were incredulous,” she recalls. “They labeled it ‘spontaneous regression’ and told me, ‘Maybe God just wants you to be here.’ I was floored. I said, ‘You can accept the possibility of a miracle, but you can’t accept the possibility of a chemical reaction from food?’ They wouldn’t budge, and I was enraged as only a 26-year-old could be. I went downstairs, called Robert, and was raving on the phone. He finally said–preternaturally calm as he is–‘What do you care? You’re better.’ And I said, ‘Oh … right. Right! I almost forgot that part!’   “And so,” Pirello smiles, “here I am."[header=How She Shops]

Christina Shops

Indeed, here I am, with Pirello, in a funky little Philadelphia natural foods market called Essene, located not far from where this butcher’s daughter (not kidding) now lives. It’s the sort of store where the dreadlocked rub elbows with the Prada set, and everyone–but everyone–greets Pirello.   How, I wonder aloud, does an Italian-American, macrobiotic, vegan (no meat, no fish, no dairy, no eggs) now 20 years beyond her cancer scare, shop?   Pretty much by just turning around in the produce department, laughs Pirello, who figures 90 percent of the foods she buys are whole, seasonal, and unprocessed. She then plans her meals–more Mediterranean than Asian these days (and yes, that is allowed)–around them.   “Many people get into macrobiotics because, like me, they have one foot on a banana peel,” explains Pirello. “They adopt what we call the ‘medicinal diet,’ which is extremely monastic. And they try to sustain that diet. You just can’t do it. Believe me, I tried. But after you’ve cleaned out your pipes, you really need to add more fat and variety to your diet.”   What Pirello did was gradually return to her Italian heritage–a move that’s evident even in her first cookbook, the bestselling Cooking the Whole Foods Way(HP Books, 1997). “I think what I do now,” she says, “is apply macrobiotic principles to European cooking. I still use sea vegetables and whole grains, but I cook much more Mediterranean style.”   You mean, you eat … the “p word”? Pirello grins. “My favorite meal at the moment is whole wheat pasta with sun-dried tomatoes, capers, olives, and lots of garlic; bruschetta with roasted red peppers and onions; lentil soup for protein; chocolate-dipped biscotti for dessert; and a bitter green salad to end the dinner.”   Hmmm. If that’s macrobiotic, even I could do it. [header=A Recipe for Pep]

Christina’s Recipe for Pep

Preventionasked Christina Pirello to prescribe the culinary equivalent of a brisk evening walk–a dish designed, according to macrobiotic principles concerning cooking style as well as specific foods, to revitalize your mind as well as your body. Here’s what the chef ordered up.   Cooking Style:Macrobiotic chefs believe that the way in which you cook the food you eat affects the way you feel. For instance, if you’re feeling anxious, they might recommend eating a stew: a meal cooked over long, slow heat–the culinary equivalent of a warm, relaxing bath. If you’re feeling low on energy, however, Pirello suggests the opposite: a sauté–a word that in French literally means “jump.” “It’s a style of cooking that involves high heat, lots of oil, and lots of activity on the part of the cook, who must quickly move the food around in the pan,” explains Pirello.   Food:Just as a specific cooking style imparts a specific feeling in macrobiotic thinking, specific foods serve specific needs as well. For instance, when you’re stressed, you become more rigid, notes Pirello, so you’ll need flexibility as well as vitality.   “I’d recommend eating dark, leafy greens–such as kale or bok choy–which, according to Chinese medicine, will give you a flexible attitude as well as great vitality,” she says. “Leafy greens have very small root systems, so they bend easily–they’re literally very flexible; they grow toward the sun with great vitality; they have veins that run through each leaf, so they draw nutrients into every cell; and they grow in any weather, so they’re very hardy.”   Pirello’s antistress special? Sauté greens with lots of garlic and onions, which are also very stimulating, she says. “The next day, you’ll feel sparklingly fresh,” the chef assures. “It’s amazing to see how quickly it works."[header=The Science Behind Seaweed]

The Science Behind the Seaweed

While the keenest minds in Western medicine now agree that a low-fat, nutrient-dense diet can help prevent cancer, we all simply assume that the same sort of diet won’t make a hill-of-beans difference to a cancer that’s already been diagnosed. Yet the idea has never actually been disproved. In fact, it’s never even been studied.   “Most studies that consider lifestyle variables, such as diet, look at factors that might contribute to the development of cancer,” says Lawrence Kushi, ScD, associate director for etiology and prevention research at Kaiser Permanente’s Division of Research in Oakland, CA, and the son of macrobiotics guru Michio Kushi, the man widely credited with bringing the philosophy to the US. “Whereas research that looks at life after cancer generally focuses on whether this or that chemotherapy agent might lengthen survival.”   As a result, there’s little to no credible-to-conventional-docs research that directly addresses whether dietary change after a cancer diagnosis makes a difference, even though what it does make is solid, common sense–especially when you think of the diagnosis of cancer as an arbitrary point in time.   “The carcinogenic pathway doesn’t change once you’re diagnosed,” explains Dr. Kushi. “It’s the same before as after diagnosis. So there’s no physiological reason why what might help decrease the odds of developing cancer before diagnosis shouldn’t work after. It just makes sense to me that if what people eat makes a difference when they’re well, it should also make a difference when they’re sick.”   Following are the American Cancer Society’s guidelines on preventing cancer with diet, as well as leukemia survivor Christina Pirello’s mostly macrobiotic recipe for an after-the-diagnosis cure.

  1. Be a Veg Head:That is, choose most of the foods you eat from plant sources. Eat five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Christina’s recipe: Pirello is a vegan, meaning she eats only plant food (no meat, no dairy, no eggs, no fish).  
  2. Go Easy on the Fat:Limit your consumption of meats and other high-fat foods–which shouldn’t be unduly arduous if you’re packing your diet (and sating your hunger) with bushels of vegetables and slotted-spoonfuls of pasta. A chocoholic at heart, Pirello limits fat but does consume it (the organic, nondairy variety, mind you) for optimal health as well as sheer gastric delight. “Without fat, your body can’t absorb fat-soluble vitamins,” she explains.  
  3. Maintain a Healthy Weight: “In recent studies, the variable that has made the most significant difference in cancer outcome, especially of cancers that have a hormonal component, such as breast cancer, is body weight–specifically, a reduction in excess body weight,” says Tim Byers, MD, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver. Pirello dropped about 100 lb in the first 3 months she began eating a macrobiotic diet after being diagnosed with chronic leukemia. She has since regained 40 of those pounds, settling comfortably at a healthful weight of 138.