Free, Free, Free!! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

I suppose by now all of you have gotten this email from Dr. McDougall?

Dear McDougall Friends,
During this uncertain time, there is nothing more important than staying safe and healthy. Dr. McDougall’s Health and Medical Center has always been dedicated to educating the public on how to obtain and maintain optimal health through the numerous articles Dr. McDougall has written over the years on various medical conditions and topics. Now is the time for us to help as many people as we can. How? We are offering all digital content on our website free of charge. 

See the email itself for the links to everything.

I'm now downloading the zip for the one DVD set I don't already own and the few ASW videos that I never purchased, and I already had purchased all those books when he first put them on his store and had them on my Kindle already, but WOW!! For anyone who hasn't, this is a fantastic deal! Thanks, Dr. McDougall!

But I'm a pessimist - I wonder what's going on with him.

 

McDougall Program Infomercial from 1993

Someone posted these 2 links to the McDougall forums for the McDougall Program - 12 Days to Dynamic Health package - the audio tape set, the 12 Days book, and the Doctor McDougall's Health Enhancing Recipe Book, and a VHS tape called Secrets to Good Health, and a bonus called The McDougall Report: Life Saving Facts Your Doctor Never Told You. Sorry, I can't find a link to these anywhere on-line. 

They were filmed back in 1993 during the St. Helena days. The video quality is pretty poor, especially if you're watching in HD on a large monitor, but it's nice to see 1) a young Dr. McDougall and 2) the fact that the message hasn't changed in all these years.

Another bonus is that they both have decent closed captioning for those of us who are hard of hearing.

Enjoy!

Dr. Sanjay Gupta Talks About Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy

This is the heart problem I developed back in 2009. Like many others on the Facebook Takotsubo Support community, I still have on-going problems associated with this and still have to take medications because of it.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the doctor who did that famous video with former President Bill Clinton about going plant-based after his heart problems, The Last Heart Attack, which included interviews with Dr. Ornish and Dr. Esselstyn, recently did this little talk (and joined the FB community, too!).



He said he'll talk more about Takotsubo in his next video, how some people continue to have on-going problems and don't recover 100% even if their echocardiograms show complete recovery, and is already talking with the owner of the community on other things he'll discuss, like exercise. Hopefully he'll also talk about the benefits of a plant based diet, too. There are dreadfully few of us in that community that are plant based, and less than a handful that have even heard of Dr. Esselstyn or Dr. Ornish!

Everything Old Is New Again - Pioneer Baked Beans

While the UWL FB community is doing a challenge to make the recipes in the 21 DAy Recipe Guide, I decided to do a challenge of my own - to make some of the older recipes that got me started on the McDougall program in the first place. The first one of these is Jan Tz's Pioneer Baked Beans.

I've written about long-time McDougaller Jan Tz before. Her recipes go way back to the VegSource McDougall boards days, before Dr. McDougall even had his own web presence. They were always so easy to make, cooked up fast, and were as tasty as heck. These Pioneer Baked Beans was one of her first recipes I ever made:

PIONEER BAKED BEANS
Peeled and cored apple, cut into big chunks
Onion, sliced thinly and separated into rings
Vegetarian Baked Beans

Combine all ingredients in whatever quantities you need, put into a baking dish, and bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 350F.

Fresh out of the oven (See below)

First off, the original Bush Vegetarian Beans that Jan always recommended in her recipes is way too high in sodium for me at this stage of life, so I got the lower sodium ones. Since my husband is a big eater, I got 3 of those 16-ounce cans, the only size the lower sodium ones come in. I should have gotten 4, or used 2 cans of the Bush beans and 2 cans of no-salt added pinto or cannelini beans and added an 8-ounce can of no-salt added tomato sauce. That would have really cut the sodium down without sacrificing taste.

The Vidalia onion I used was gigantic, bigger than one of those bean cans. Like Jan suggested, I sliced it thin and separated the rings. Bad move. When it (finally) cooked down, some of those onion rings were as thin as threads and not too appetizing. Next time I make this I'll take the easier way out and just dump an entire 1-pound bag of frozen diced onions in the bowl.

I used 2 Fuji apples. Apples around here have really been tasteless for years now. Next time I'll add some no-sugar added applesauce along with 2 or 3 apples.

Cooking time. My oven is good - I use an oven thermometer and when I set the oven for 350ºF, by the time the 10 minute pre-heat is done it IS 350ºF. It was 350ºF when I put that bowl into it that night. I either should have used a regular flat casserole dish or lasagna pan or set the heat to 400ºF, because at the end of the 30 minute cooking time the bowl was red hot but the food, even the surface, was barely warm. The photo above was taken at this time. 

By now we were all getting hungry (Our son made his own dinner and was waiting for us so we could eat together) so instead of putting it back in the oven I stuck it in the microwave and popped it on the highest power and turned it on. It took 15 more minutes in the microwave before the onions cooked and the apples softened a bit. Next time it goes right into the microwave for 30 minutes, not the gas oven.

Sorry there's no photo of the final cooked product - we didn't want to wait any more to eat.

Even with all the mis-steps, it tasted delicious! With all that salt in it, how could it not? My husband is looking forward to having this again, but I warned him that if our blood pressure or weight go up form all the extra sodium in our diets, out it goes. He wasn't too happy hearing that, especially because he knows my weight rises just looking at a can of salty stuff. We'll see what the future brings.

Watch What Your Read - Post from Jeff Novick re: the McDougall on Social Media

The McDougall Message and Social Media

by JeffN » Mon Jan 15, 2018 10:09 am

Due to the increasing amount of complaints we get about the information provided in and by the many McDougall related social media groups, we are reposting this message.

Besides this forum, the following social media pages are the only ones that are officially endorsed by The McDougall Program. They are monitored, managed and facilitated by Dr McDougall and his staff.

Twitter
John McDougall, MD
https://twitter.com/johnmcdougallmd

Facebook
John McDougall, MD,
https://www.facebook.com/DrJohnMcDougall

The McDougall 10-Day Program Alumni**
https://www.facebook.com/groups/332055200265040/

The McDougall 3-Day ASW Alumni**
https://www.facebook.com/groups/230013840455156/

The McDougall Travel Adventure Alumni**
https://www.facebook.com/groups/343993155693254/

**These groups require approval

We also maintain a closed FB Page for each of the private companies we work with and one for the graduates of The Starch Solution Course. These also require approval.

While we understand that there are many groups out there trying to share our message, we can not ensure that the message you will get there is accurate and inline with our program.

In Health
Jeff

Fundraiser for the McDougall Family

As you all probably know by now, Dr. and Mary McDougall and his two daughters' homes were all wiped out in the fires at Santa Rosa earlier this week. All John and Mary were left with were the clothes on their back, one phone and one computer. Even their cars are gone. No word on the cat - people keep asking.

They're currently staying with friends, far away from the fires, after being evacuated from the hotel they were first brought to.

There's been a lot of talk on-line about fundraisers for them all, and on Wednesday, some said one was already up on GoFundMe, but that one is NOT an official McDougall fundraiser.

Jeff Novick announced:

The response to help the McDougalls has been overwhelming. 

I have been in conversation with the McDougalls, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and many of the WFPB docs about setting up a go-fund me or something similar. We should know more later today or tomorrow the latest. 

As soon as we get it set up I will post the information and links here.
In Health

         Jeff


So, as of 6am EDT today, there was no official fundraiser set up. Keep watching the official McDougall forums for an announcement of one, not any of the unofficial McDougall Facebook communities.

The McDougall Diet

Want a plain and simple explanation of the McDougall Diet as told by Dr. McDougall himself? Then read this:

Simple Reasoning Solves Dietary Confusion

Lima Bean Stew

I decided to make something different for today, and with some of Dr, McDougall's recent webinars focused on heart health, I decided to pull out The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart and look around. The book is currently out of print, but you can get used copies of it from many on-line book stores, and Dr. McDougall is also selling a PDF version of it on his web site. The 20% off all digital books sale is still going on so you can grab this for only $8.

Lima Bean Stew looked good, but before I started a new post here about it I searched and saw I did a quickie post about it back in 2008. Unfortunately, the link to the recipe itself died along with Geocities, so I guess I better share it again:

Lima Bean Stew
Serving Size: 8     
Preparation Time 15 minutes
Cooking Time: 1 hour

  1             medium  onion -- chopped
  1             medium  green pepper -- or red, chopped
  2             stalks  celery -- sliced
  2             medium  carrots -- sliced
  8               cups  water
  3               cups  frozen lima beans
  16            ounces  tomato sauce -- canned
     3/4           cup  barley -- uncooked
     3/4           cup  brown rice -- uncooked
  2        tablespoons  soy sauce, low sodium
  1         tablespoon  parsley, freeze-dried
  1           teaspoon  dried basil
     1/2      teaspoon  paprika
     1/2      teaspoon  dried oregano
                        fresh ground black pepper -- to taste

Combine all ingredients in a large soup pot. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 60 minutes.

The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart (page 350)
McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook (page 90)
John McDougall, MD and Mary McDougall

NOTES : This may also be made in a slow cooker. Add all ingredients at once and cook on low for 4 to 6 hours. We have let this cook as long as 8 hours with no adverse results except for softer vegetables.

Instead of chopping up a bunch of fresh veggies, I used a container of mirepoix - a carrot, onion, and celery pre-chopped mix from the grocery store - and added some frozen onions, because we love onions in this house.

The tomato sauce is Hunt's no-salt added version. I was so happy when I saw our grocery store decided to stock not only the small 8 ounce size cans of this but also the 15 ounce and 28 ounce cans. It makes it so easy now to make home made, no salt added pasta sauces.

Since the ingredients read green or red pepper, I opened a small jar of sliced pimientos and used that. No pepper skins glueing themselves to my upper palate to worry about.

The lima beans. I had belonged to the Rancho Gordo Bean Club for a year and a half. I didn't immediately renew after the first year and missed one shipment while on the waiting list, then renewed for another quarter and dropped it again. Why? First off, the beans are delicious and definitely fresher than you would ever find in grocery stores. I quit twice because of lima beans. I'm not that big a fan of them, but in the 5 shipments from Rancho Gordo I had gotten 6 bags of lima beans. There aren't the cute little baby limas, either, but honking, gigantic creamy white ones, with skin so thick you can use them to make shoes out of. OK, slight exaggeration. I still had 4 bags of lima beans left in my pantry and figured I better start eating them before they become as old and hard as grocery store beans, so last night I set a bag of Royal Coronas out to soak overnight, and this morning cooked them up in the Instant Pot. It made up 6 cups of beans, so 3 were set aside for this recipe, the others I split in half, put into freezer bags, and when cool, put into the freezer for the next time I need lima beans for anything. If I plan on making more recipies from this book, they'll get used, because Mary does seem to like using lima beans in her older recipes.

Everything got popped back into the cleaned Instant Pot and put on Low for 6 hours. I can never remember if the vent stays open or closed when slow-cooking in this thing. When I used the 6-quart as my primary pot I didn't have any problem - I had purchased the accessories package had had the glass lid that I used. But the 8-quart doesn't have a glass lid, and none of my other pot lids really fit it, so I'm stuck with the regular lid. Even with the valve closed, the house smells great. I can't wait until dinner time!

Here's a photo at the 4 hour point, fluffed up so you can see the ingredients and not just tomato sauce:

I apologize for the fuzziness of the photo. My son said the steam kept clouding his iPod lens.

I really should use these older books more. Some of these recipes are fantastic!

Couldn't Get to the ASW? Here are 2 of Dr. McDougall's Talks for Free!

Maybe he'll share some more as time goes on.

These are more formal versions of topics he covered during recent webinars. 

Dr. McDougall's DVD sets Now Available to Download

Latest Webinar - Dr. McDougall Explains and Gustavo Performs

It starts off with a short piano recital with Gustavo and his mother, then it goes into Dr. McDougall explaining that newsletter article and why he did what he said he did.

And even though many people asked in the comments, Gustavo never did ask if that was a real tattoo. Well, since the doc said in the first webinar on cardiologists that he was going to ask his people to Photoshop that exact same graphic, and it looked Photoshopped, I think it's safe to assume it was Photoshopped.

McDougall's May Newsletter Is Out

And it explains why the doctor has looked like crap the past year. Here's a small excerpt:

On March 16, 2015, during the hours following the McDougall Advanced Study Weekend I developed a viral infection that affected my inner ears. I totally lost my hearing, my balance was disturbed, and I became very weak. At about midnight I walked to the bathroom, lost all control of my muscles, fell down to the floor onto my buttocks, and was unconsciousness for a few minutes. I woke with severe pain. With Mary's help I managed to return to bed. She wanted to call an ambulance, but I refused. I knew what could happen. I would be taken to the hospital, x-rayed, and found to have fractures of my lower vertebrae, pelvis, and a spiral fracture of my left femur (I knew this by the way I felt). 

Treatments of my fractures, including surgery may have been planned. But that was a minor concern of mine. I was afraid of what else might happen to me once under medical care.

In my nearly defenseless condition, they would have wanted to know the condition of my heart before anything else would be done. This decision for them would be easy to justify: after all, I was an elderly male (67) and I had a past history of serious atherosclerosis, having suffered a major stroke at age 18. I have no doubt that there are old blockages (scars) in my arteries that developed as a young man eating the Western diet (my highest cholesterol had once been 338 mg/dL). Twenty years ago I had a CT heart scan (performed out of curiosity) showing significant amounts of calcification in my coronary arteries demonstrating that I had atherosclerotic plaque disease. These blockages were, however, old fibrous scars. Since I changed my diet at age 27 my cholesterol has dropped to below 150 mg/dL and I am confident that no new disease has formed. But the scars (with calcium in them) remain for a lifetime.

The plaques found on my heart scan are healed, stable, non-lethal, and of no risk to me—unless they were to be discovered and treated by a cardiologist or a bypass surgeon. If I would have gone to the hospital after my fall in March of 2015, I would have been facing the standard practice of prophylactic revascularization: angioplasties with stents placed before any other treatment to my bones would be provided. Remember, I refused to go to the hospital so I avoided this common scenario. I healed at home.

Before continuing, I would like to tell you my outcome. My hearing has completely returned to normal and my balance is pretty good. It took about three months for my fractures to heal and after six months I was almost pain free. I can say I am back to 100% a year after this near tragedy. But, how do I protect myself in the future from unnecessary investigations of my heart if I have an accident that leaves me unable to defend myself?  Have a tattoo written on my chest? 

Dr. McDougall Webinar: Cardiologists Acting Criminally

Cardiologists Acting Criminally.

In this live webinar, Dr. McDougall, MD, will discuss why some cardiologists withhold life-saving information from their patients.

The scary thing is, what Dr. McDougall described as what the cardiologist says to the scared wife is *exactly* what my husband's cardiologist said after his cardiac cath, including the bit about his blockage being so bad he could drop dead at any minute! Almost word-for-word!! His doc refused to even discharge him from the hospital after his cath, made plans for ASAP transfer to the university hospital where he would have his CABG surgery, and insisted he go by ambulance with a full cardiac team. If we knew then what we know now about 100% blockages, he would never had had the surgery and just gone 100% Esselstyn, as he's been doing since his post-op discharge a week later.

Register for the Next 2 McDougall Webinars

Thursday, April 21, 2016 at 11 a.m. PST

Title: Making the Change – Why people resist cost-free health

Description:  In this live webinar, Dr. McDougall, MD, will discuss why people are hesitant to change their diet even if they will save thousands of dollars. Q&A will follow.

Register Now

---

Thursday, April 28, 2016 at 11 a.m. PST

Title: Cardiologists Acting Criminally

Description:  In this live webinar, Dr. McDougall, MD, will discuss why some cardiologists withhold life-saving information from their patients. Q&A will follow.

Register Now

Why A Plant Based Diet is Best for Heart Disease

A great demonstration on how the heart works, how it's harmed by a SAD diet, and how a plant-rich diet can lower the risk of heart disease. Yes, it's an ad for his new book, The End of Heart Disease, but everything he says goes for the McDougall and Esselstyn food plans, too.

Dr. McDougall Explains His Color Picture Book to VSH

Dr. and Mary McDougall were recently back in Hawaii setting up their next McDougall Adventure trip there this coming winter. While there, he did a speech to the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii explaining "food poisoning" and his Color Picture Book.

Pasta with Garbanzo Broccoli Sauce

I get tired of making tomato based pasta sauce week after week and made this one for a change. It comes from The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart book.

Garbanzo/Broccoli Sauce
SERVINGS: 4
PREPARATION TIME: 15 MINUTES
COOKING TIME: 10 MINUTES

1 medium onion, cut in half and thinly sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup water
1 bunch fresh broccoli, cut into bite-size florets
2 cups Vegetable Broth
1 15 1/2-ounce can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch mixed in 1/3 cup cold water

Place the onion and garlic in a pot with the water. Cook and stir until the onion is translucent, about 3 minutes.

Add the broccoli, broth, beans, and soy sauce. Cook over low heat about 7 minutes until the broccoli is crisp-tender.

Add the cornstarch mixture, and cook and stir until thickened.

Serve over pasta or potatoes.

From The McDougall Program for a Healthy Heart, page 325

As usual, I used the brown rice pasta. For the broccoli, I used a one-pound bag of frozen chopped broccoli.

Sorry about the picture. I was finishing up my bowl when I realized I didn't take a photo. My husband had already finished his first and seconds, emptying the pot. Good thing I had enough first time around and didn't want more myself! 

After all these years I'm still discovering recipes in the old books that are new to me. Makes me wish there were more days in the week to make them all.