Alkalize Your Body

I first understood the need to balance one's diet between acid and alkaline in about 2005. In researching it, I came upon The Wolfe Clinic, a Canadian website which promoted the ideas of Dr. Darrell Wolfe. By this time, Dr. Wolfe is no longer associated with it, but they still have on-line the three articles he wrote about the importance of our digestive systems to our over-all health. His premise was a revelation to me, a way of preventing the diseases which came up as one grew older, or at least holding them somewhat at bay.

Dr. Darrell Wolfe

In researching Dr. Wolfe now, I find he is in British Columbia and has his own website. He is, if anything, more adamant than ever that one can take responsibility for one’s own health: Joy is the most important component of radical health. People who focus on being sick are usually sick. Cancer is a frequency, a fungus. Acidosis in the body starts it. Alkalize your body to get rid of mold. Society will try to get you to buy anything they can. The “functional medicine” side of things is as bad as our medical systems, insisting that you buy all kinds of supplements. But Vitamin D from the sun is better than any supplement. Your food should be your medicine. Even more than his website, I find this interaction with the father of a young child with cancer, useful.

My Dad was an iconoclast. Upholding the traditions of the Lutheran church and small town America, he was only slightly facetious when he used to say of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, “This is God’s country!” But he looked askance at power and its designs on him. He made up his mind about things himself, well aware that corporations, society may take you down a primrose path, insisting that you buy whatever will increase the GNP. He was a child of first-generation Norwegians in farming country, as well as of the Depression, a time when your own resources made all the difference. He believed in taking responsibility for himself and taught his kids to do the same. Though all about him were smoking, Dad believed that if he didn’t smoke, he could put himself through college. Not smoking helped do that, and seminary as well.

My father’s parents lived in southern Minnesota at the margins of the economy in a house they had built themselves. I knew them when they were quite a bit older, but still working a large garden, using it to feed themselves throughout the year. I especially remember my Grandmother’s pickles, the crabapple pickles seasoned with cloves which I adored. Though my Dad was felled by cancer at 63, his parents lived to be 89 and 86. I find that my Dad’s cousin, Ruth Mickelson (for whom I named the Mikkelsons of my series) was born in 1899 and died in 2001, at 101 years of age. She had taught kindergarten in Thief River Falls (the town of my birth) for almost fifty years.

As represented in my characters, many health ideas have come and gone during the years of my series. The Mikkelsons were victims of a Northern diet which relied on meat and potatoes, frozen vegetables except during the summer, lots of dairy and baked goods. But all of them make changes in this diet as they grow older. They resist processed foods and, in particular, the large quantities of sugar they were used to had to be reduced! During the first decade of the new millennium, it seemed to me doctors were finally going to admit the importance of an alkaline, anti-oxidant diet.

Line is the one most involved in health care her whole life, working as a nurse in community hospitals and finally as a hospice nurse. She sees bodies as a whole, and gives particular attention to a hands-on practice which allows the resonance of one person’s energy to be transferred to another. Marty knows that natural health welling up in the body is what all of nature sees as beauty. She is lucky enough to find tai chi, a movement-based meditation, which wakes up her sedentary life. Despite a healthy diet, Paul’s wife fades from an aggressive cancer. He learns that only if he takes care of himself can he take care of anyone else.

As we have all learned about journalism, in navigating health caveats and research, one must triangulate between the available knowledge. The evidence of one’s experience and one’s senses is essential. Information becomes wisdom only with a few grains of salt, one’s own common sense.