Making the Change

Remember many years ago, when Dr. and Mary McDougall talked about their very first "book" that they made up in 1979 to give their early patients? It was hand typed and bound with those little loose-leaf binder clips.

Every now and then I roam the Internet used book sites hoping to see someone trying to sell theirs. I was even on Ebay this morning looking.

Then suddenly a message appeared in my email in-box at 9:01 - The McDougalls have scanned this little book into digital form and it's now available for free as a PDF download on their website!

Of course I immediately downloaded it!

Oh, it's so cute! OK, maybe not "cute", but I'm so happy to finally get my hands on this. I haven't read through the whole 252 pages yet, obviously, but I did flip through it. Definitely hand-typed, and there are even hand written page numbers and the occasional notes in the margins or between paragraphs.

Of course, the food plan is basically the exact same thing Dr. McDougall teaches today. Just like he did in the Health Supporting Cookbooks, The McDougall Plan, and other early books, the foods are broken down into categories I to IV based on what they're composed of and whether they're health-supporting or not, very similar to the current stoplight differentiation of the more recent  The Color Picture Book.

Glancing through the recipes, there are a lot of old tried-and-true ones that I still make to this day, like the enchilada sauce or the Easy Curried Pea Soup. There are many others I never saw before that look interesting, like a gravy called Whole Wheat Sauce or the variations of refried beans.

I'm going to have fun with this!

Thanks, Dr. and Mary McDougall!

Dr. McDougall Lecture - Dr. McDougall’s Color Picture Book on Food Poisoning (And How to Cure It with Beans, Corn, Potatoes, and Rice)

This was Dr. McDougall's talk at the 2014 VegSource Get Healthy Now conference. You can buy the DVD set or digital downloads of all the talks on VegSource. The set this one came from was the Black set.

The Simpsons - Protestant Heaven vs. Catholic Heaven

WHOSE Food Plan is Best?

Today's newspaper has an article about the death of Mary Max, artist Peter Max's wife. No need to go into any details of the sordid event, but I did find this bit in the article of great interest:

She had been involved in an ugly legal battle with other members of the family over the dementia-afflicted 81-year-old’s artwork.

Peter Max? Dementia? 

Hmm, does this artwork look familiar? Not just the artist (Obviously, it's Peter Max, for those of you who didn't live through the 1960's and saw it everywhere back then), but the subject matter itself?

Yes, Peter Max was a long-time follower of the Fuhrman Eat to Live program. He praises Dr. Fuhrman on the page for the poster on Dr. Fuhrman's web site, and in this article in Vegetarian Times, where he mentioned in 2017 that he's been following Fuhrman for 12 years at that time, and that he had vegan for many years before that, since his mid-20's (He's now 81).

Now, doesn't this put that whole nut debate that's been going on on YouTube in a whole new light? It's looking pretty obvious right about now that nuts do not prevent dementia, as a certain someone has been claiming all along, doesn't it?

Dr. Esselstyn at the 2019 Holistic Holiday at Sea