Eating for life: Woman makes headway in cancer fight with macrobiotic diety, chemotherapy
June 9, 2002

By MARILYNN MARTER
Knight Ridder Newspapers

The urgency in the caller’s voice was palpable, her message heartbreaking. Just days before Christmas, Kathleen Maurer was about to begin chemotherapy for stage IV lung cancer.

After a month of treatment for what doctors thought was bronchitis, X-rays revealed a 4 1/2-inch tumor in her left lung and many smaller nodules throughout both lungs.

Within two weeks, the 33-year-old Yardley, Pa., homemaker, a nonsmoker, was in and out of Pennsylvania Hospital and scheduled to begin an aggressive regimen of the anti-cancer drugs Taxol and Carboplatin.

Maurer forged past the disbelief and denial common in newly diagnosed cancer patients. She vowed to get well for the sake of her husband, Gerard, and sons Patrick, 5, and Shane, 3.

So, along with chemotherapy to shrink the tumors, and with her oncologist’s blessing, Maurer changed her diet. For guidance, she asked the Philadelphia Inquirer Food section to put her in touch with South Philadelphia whole-foods proponent Christina Pirello.

Maurer, who completed her first cycle of chemotherapy in April, has embraced macrobiotics. Her tumors have shrunk by about half, and most days her energy and spirits are good.

Her battle with cancer is far from over. She is starting a second round of chemotherapy. But she’s also working with dietitian Debra DeMille at Pennsylvania Hospital’s Joan Karnell Cancer Center to tailor her whole-foods diet to her nutritional needs during treatment. (Whole foods are foods that are unprocessed or minimally processed so they retain their original components and nutrients, according to the Dictionary of Health Food Terms.)

As for the effect of the diet on Maurer’s disease, DeMille says: “I wish we had some research, but there are no studies to say that macrobiotics or whole foods can cure cancer.”

Of course, some people with pristine eating habits still get cancer. Still, a growing number of studies affirm the link between sound nutrition and cancer prevention. The American Institute for Cancer Research cites a 1982 National Academy of Sciences report as the landmark acknowledgment of this connection.

AICR’s 1997 report on Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer “clearly establishes that the foods we choose play an overwhelming role in fighting cancer.”

A friend had told Maurer that Pirello, who hosts the PBS series “Christina Cooks!,” had turned to macrobiotics in 1985 after being diagnosed with leukemia at age 27. Five doctors told her she had three to six months to live.

Fourteen months later, with a macrobiotic diet and determination — but no conventional treatment — Pirello was declared cancer-free. (Read about it at www.macrobiotics.org.) Her continued study of macrobiotics led to her cooking classes, books, Christina Cooks magazine and TV series.

By mid-January, when the two high-spirited women met, Maurer had given up dairy foods, sugar, white flour, red meat — and all her hair, the first side effect of the chemotherapy. This was, Pirello says, not the usual case of someone being “drawn kicking and screaming” to a healthful diet.

Her oncologist, Arthur Staddon, was supportive but not convinced that a macrobiotic diet would help.

Maurer’s anti-cancer diet includes a daily dose of Miso Soup. Miso, popular in Japanese cooking, is a naturally fermented paste of soybeans, brown rice or barley and is used to flavor and enrich foods.

“It contains enzymes that strengthen and nourish the intestinal tract,” Pirello said.