Still no time to blog, but.......

A while ago I chimed in on a professional listserv of oncology dietitians (my friends and my professional peers) with my 2¢ regarding an article recently published pointing out the inconsistent information on the internet about cancer and nutrition information, which caught the attention of Dr. Sanjay Gupta who actually gave it some light of day (instead of having the article just buried in a professional journal).

One of the dietitians on this listserv asked if she could post my listserv response on the website for Meals to Heal, a company that provides home delivery of healthy meals for cancer patients. I agreed (with some tweaking), and it was posted up yesterday.

Please note, I am providing my readers the link to my 'guest blog post' on another website only as a reinforcement of everything I have been writing about on this blog since I started it in 2007 (I have not been paid to write this other blog post, nor am I paid in any way by that company, nor is my posting on that website a 'testimonial' for that company.) For long-time readers, it will contain nothing new (although perhaps I am a bit more frank than usual). For new readers, it will give you a very clear and succinct view of my opinions based on the work I have been doing for the oncology community at-large since my 2nd breast cancer diagnosis in 1995.

Bottom line – oncology centers need to have (more) Registered Dietitians (RDs) on staff, preferably those who are achieved the rigorous credential of being specialists in oncology nutrition with the initials CSO after their name. In fact, I had this very conversation with a friend this morning after she told me of a dear young friend of hers who has just been diagnosed with esophageal cancer at age 40.

"Tell them to get a referral to an RD at their cancer center 'asap'. Do not wait for a crisis, and do not let your friends take 'no' for an answer. Cause a 'ruckus' if necessary. Sending them a copy of my book is a good start, but this young man and his family will need much more of an individualized nutrition assessment and intervention than my book can possibly provide."

Today was non-stop filled with hand-weeding a field that is too wet to cultivate with the tractor and then harvesting, marketing, and cleaning our green garlic. Tonight it has been used as an ingredient for a catered dinner in town for many CEO's who belong to a national organization called Small Giants. It seems like a nice fit since our goal for this new farm has always been to become big enough to contribute to our community while also staying small enough so our focus can stay on "creating a healthy community".  We have tried to encompass those dual purposes in our farm's tag line/mission statement "Shaping our future from the ground up" with the choice of the word 'our' starting with our soil and working its way up to our community.

So even though I have no time to blog, I did it again. :) However, it's almost 9 pm, so now I need to quickly figure out what we are eating for supper and then get back to helping my husband prepare our chefs' orders for tomorrow's delivery.

Oh, and Phoebe had a new experience tonight while we were walking the farm for a break. She saw two turkeys and made them fly, clucking and gobbling away, high high high up and over some trees!

We should all get t-shirts or bandanas to wear that say "Life is Good". :)

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

A Spring Morning

I don’t have time to blog, but I cannot help myself this morning. :)

Spring is rushing to catch up, it is literally ‘popping’ before our eyes and ears. It is as if it has been held back behind a dam, but the gates have finally opened, and now, look out!, here it comes. I am used to being able to ‘hear the corn grow’ in the summer, but I think I can literally see and hear spring growing in front of me right now. 

I have been celebrating each bird that has come back, but yesterday I realized that I had not yet heard any wrens bubbling away. I always harbor a little worry that significant habitat destruction in wintering grounds will lead to a noticeable decrease in the spring return of my bird friends. However, not to be denied, this morning (before we had even opened the windows), my husband announced that he could hear wrens singing away. :) :) ("Thank you, Dick! I’m so glad your ears are better than mine. Diana, stop, stop, stop being such a worrier!")

And so just to show you that the universe is moving in sync this morning, I picked up a new book of Mary Oliver’s poetry at the library, could not resist looking in it before I had even left my parking space, so read just one poem where the book opened up. Here it is:

I Happened to be Standing

I don’t know where prayers go

or what they do.

Do cats pray, while they sleep

half-asleep in the sun?

Does the opposum pray as it

crosses the street?

The sunflowers? The old black oak

growing older every year?

I know I can walk through the world,

along the shore or under the trees,

with my mind filled with things

of little importance, in full

self-attendance. A condition I can’t really 

call being alive.

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,

or does it matter?

The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.

Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing

just outside my door, with my notebook open,

which is the way I being every morning.

Then a wren in a privet began to sing.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,

I don’t know why. And yet, why not.

I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe

or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.

But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be 

if it isn’t a prayer?

So I just listened, my pen in the air. 

~~ Mary Oliver, in A Thousand Mornings, ©2012

“positively drenched in enthusiasm”…………..I don’t know if I am a worrier by nature or if I have honed this characteristic by being such a long-time cancer survivor ……… but my dearest hope is that I can balance (and maybe even over-ride) my tendancy to worry, to be careful, to be preparing for or avoiding ‘trouble’ (like a truly awful case of poison ivy I currently have that came from nowhere in spite of all my appropriate precautions) with a sense of being alive, deeply alive, flying high plus “positively drenched with enthusiasm” like the house wren I heard this morning.

I am hopeful (am I sending a prayer?) and I would be honored and grateful if this wren decides to set up a home somewhere on my farm where I can hear it bubbling away all day, every day for the next several months, helping me remember the first poem I read from Mary Oliver’s book A Thousand Mornings.

I have had years where I have not been well, years when I have been in crisis mode, years where spring has come and gone and I have not had the energy or capacity to ‘be there’ to see it or feel it, to only know that I missed it.  My hope, my prayer, for you, my friends, is that spring has sprung, has burst, has popped right before your eyes and ears already, and that you are well enough this year to be right in with it as it is happening, and that spring, along with enthusiastic new hope, is happening within you, too.

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

Wild weather and winter are still flying high (and more)

Just when I thought it was time to put away the winter coats and my turtleneck shirts, WHAM! comes winter roaring back again along with tornado watches, crazy wind, and rain, rain, rain, and more rain (the hail missed our farm). Our garlic is fine but the cold weather, some snow, combined with ALL the rain we have had makes it too miserable and not good for the soil to be out tromping around doing spring farm work. (Does Phoebe have sandy paws? No she has muddy paws, and belly, and tail, and nose, and is as happy as can be!)

So I am buckling down on finishing up 'stuff' on my desk and computer, knowing that soon, very soon, I will likely not be back to desk-work or paper-work (or vacuuming or dusting or unpacking) or even much computer-work for nearly 6 months. While I had been saying how much we will appreciate April, now I am saying how much we will all really, really appreciate May!

I don't accept many speaking engagements anymore, but I did recently visit Richmond, Virginia, where I was honored to be invited to deliver the opening session at The Virginia Dietetic Association. The theme of their meeting was "Steer Your Course", so I talked about my eclectic career, my various positions as a Registered Dietitian where I have been considered a pioneer expanding the professional boundaries, in which I have 'steered my course' from one end of the health care spectrum (kidney dialysis and then intensive care units focused on the extreme end of disease and treatments), to a middle ground (focused on nutritional aspects for optimizing cancer survivorship), to the far other end (organic farming focused on the other extreme of disease prevention and health creation).

I gave these RDs and students (I had the students show their hands and was thrilled! to see a big block of them in attendance) numerous, numerous examples of additional RDs who are currently working outside the box ('bok choi') so to speak, outside a 'typical' career path where they have also 'steered their own course' based on their own values. I showed them real-life examples of RDs who are also all currently pioneers also working at the far end of the health care spectrum focused on disease prevention and health creation, either right in the soil like I am or by facilitating various and multiple aspects of sustainable food and agricultural systems.

Several students came up to me afterward to thank me for everything I had to say. Since they are the future of our profession and the future of our country, I thanked them for coming, for listening, and for thinking widely about their career options. I urged them to jump in, to not to be afraid to be different, to Go Big! with their career, to be leaders now (don't wait until ________, fill in the blank), and to call me if they needed courage. Lastly I invited them to keep in touch with me to share their career plans or even to brainstorm with me if desired. It would give me great pleasure to include slides highlighting them as new RDs contributing in their own unique way to a fair food system if I do any future speaking.

In the meantime, I am also trying to finish reading a book recommended by a young woman I recently met, The Icarus Deception: How high will you fly? by Seth Godin (actually my new friend recommended the author, and this book, one of many he has written, was available at our library). IF I had read even part of this book prior to speaking at the Virginia Dietetic Association, I would have added it to my resource list, urging all dietitians to read it and think deeply about what is keeping each of us from thinking outside the box, expanding the boundaries of our careers, what is keeping each of us from being leaders?

Read this book for courage.

This book has finally given me validation that my work, particularly my work advocating for cancer survivors via my book, my website, my blogs, and my speaking has been my 'art' for nearly the past two decades. I already had come to that understanding without the language or the realization that other people also thought like this, that one's work can be and even should be viewed as an expression of art. I remember being bewildered several years ago when a copy of my book offered to a local silent auction was rejected because it was not considered 'art'. Huh?

Godin pushes out the edges of defining art and artists by saying "Being an artist isn't a genetic disposition or a specific talent. It's an attitude we can all adopt. It's a hunger to seize new ground by choosing to do something unpredictable and brave (deep breath here), making connections, and working without a map. If you do those things, you are an artist, and you are making art, no matter what is says on your business card." (slightly paraphrased by me)

I repeatedly find myself saying a quiet 'wow' as I am reading this book, wow for validation of what I have been doing, yes - we all need or at least appreciate validation, but also for a deeper understanding of how my work, yes - my art, has continued to develop and evolve. In addition, this book also highlights the vital nature and importance of connections to the creation of art, to our new 'connection economy', and to our sense of purpose.

It's a short book and an 'easy read', except that it's not. It's challenging, it's affirming, but it's mostly challenging. I have begun reading bits of it to my husband (always a sign of a good book!). The author has posed questions that we are thinking about together as we go forward with our joint 'art', i.e., our farm, our work.

It's also a hopeful book, which is important to me, as I read far too many depressing books about our many broken systems, even ones that try to end on a hopeful note.

This may be my last blog post for a while although I will be having several dietetic students on the farm over the next several months for the School to Farm Program sponsored by The Hunger & Environmental Dietetic Practice Group so perhaps I'll have them develop a blog post or two during their time with us. Thus I invite those of you who wish to stay connected to "Like" our farm's Facebook page so that you will automatically receive the short updates that my husband or I post there. For those of you who are not Facebook members, the very same short updates can be seen at the bottom of our farm's website www.dyerfamilyorganicfarm.com.

It's now been 18 years this month since my second breast cancer surgery, and it's been 16 years this month since my story as a Registered Dietitian/cancer survivor was written about in The Detroit Free Press, which was the article that first pushed me out of the trenches into the wide, wide world.  So even though both wild weather and winter are still 'flying high' here during April in the upper Midwest this year, I am grateful beyond measure to also still be 'flying high' as a multiple-time cancer survivor with the opportunities before me to 'make a ruckus' (another of Godin's mandates!), to do something 'interesting' (yet another of his mandates), plus to be making art that is ultimately helping to create healthy communities.

Have a great spring and summer everyone! I'll check in when I'm able to carve out the time (I don't ever stop thinking about this blog and its readers). In the meantime, we have to get ready for our newest venture "Dick's Chicks!". We have 30 baby chicks arriving on May 16, and no, we are not ready for that steep learning curve yet. :) Interesting for sure, and perhaps even a neighborhood ruckus to boot since 50% of them are likely to be baby roosters!

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,                                                (and peep, peep, peep, too!)

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

Easter Sunday Photos

The rain and gray clouds from this morning are almost gone, the snow piles are almost gone, the ice on the pond is almost gone, there is not too much mud :), we have no flowers blooming yet, but it's warm enough to walk around the farm without a winter coat.

No matter the weather tomorrow, no matter what jokes may be in store for April Fool's Day (actually for an early joke my fingers automatically typed April Food's Day!), no matter if we still get a late snow, we will really appreciate April's spring and renewal this year!

Here are a few photos, just a few from this afternoon.

Photo: The 2013 garlic field at The Dyer Family Organic Farm, where yesterday I walked through the field to straighten (or find and replace) the stakes marking the end of each section for our 40+ varieties. Deer walk through the fields all winter at night without out any regard for carefully walking on the paths between our raised beds (Walking 101), or an even more advanced concept, walking in the designated sections between the varieties (Walking 201). Not too many deer signed up for either class! As a matter of candor here, neither did Phoebe. :)

Photo: Two years ago, our 2013 garlic field was covered with scrub/overgrowth, all of it 10-30 feet high, most of it invasive species. We saved as many good trees as we could. Here is one being tapped for our maple syrup in a sumac copse that had significant ice damage this winter (like a good deal of our farm) and still needs clean up. 

Photo: We have debated and debated about cutting down this box elder tree, which is on the east side of our 2012 garlic field and on the west side of our 2011 garlic field . It is considered a 'junk tree', but this single tree (a member of the maple family) is our largest sap producer. We actually have two taps on this tree and fill that 5 gallon bucket almost daily. The sap is not as concentrated as that produced by a sugar maple tree, but it is still delicious! Besides, for two years we positioned our wooden swing to be in the shade during the heat of the day so we could sit down once in a while for a short rest when harvesting our garlic in July. I think the debate is over and this tree will stay!

Photo: Our pond, the ice almost gone, looking to the west with our grape arbor in the foreground. It has taken us (mostly my husband) three years of careful pruning to: 

#1) find the number of vines that had been planted, 

#2) find the base of each individual live vine, 

#3) cut out the dead and excessive vineage, 

#4) remove all the other vegetation that was in there - awful rose bushes, buckthorn, honeysuckle, autumn olive, and red-twig dogwood, but we saw no poison ivy!, 

#5) untangle the vines from and take out the old welded wire fence, 

#6) put in the correct support, which is two 8-foot cedar posts supporting a two-wire arbor and one 6-foot t-post at each plant, 

#7 tie up and prune the remaining vines, and 

#8 now we are waiting for blossoms (there are buds) and grapes!! 

A one-line item on the the 'to-do' white board in the kitchen has been a 100-step process and taken three years, but we are very near the finish line - whoo-hoo!!

Photo: Our pond with the ice almost gone, photo taken from the back of the garage. The 'bare area' in the center of the photo actually does have lawn grass and clover planted and growing. This is the area that was wet with water flowing back into the house due to poor grading, poor drainage, poor planning, etc etc. There are still sections where cattails growing although they are not clearly visible in this photo. Someday (maybe this summer) we'll start developing this low area behind our house (and where our walk-out basement is) into useable outdoor living space. We have such grand visions and in fact we bought this whole mess because we had those grand visions of what care and love could bring to the sadness that overcame this land and house. :)

Happy spring everyone! It won't be long now before I'll have to put blogging on the back burner as we move into our outside focus. Phoebe can't wait!! She has already had to have one emergency bath at the pet store as she found something to roll-in that was just glorious in her view of the world and just downright awful in ours!

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row, or trim out vine by vine!

Diana Dyer, MS, RD 

Follow-up – Happiness :)

How often do I post up something from Youtube? Let alone tell my readers "GO WATCH THIS!" 

At the very least this video will surely bring a smile to your face. :)

I'll give you a few hints - it is about food, it is about good food, it is about sharing good food, it is about growing and selling good food, it is about friends (ours - you don't need to know them!), it is about one of our farmers' markets, it's about creativity, it's about community, and

it is about happiness! 

This video brought the house down at our 2013 Local Food Summit. The producer is our friend Lucas DiGia. He also can 'bring the house down' with his own creativity Rap for Food, which he introduced at the 2012 Local Food Summit. We're told that a 'garlic rap' is in the works, and we can't wait!

Now go watch! I don't think I have ever said that on my blog, so indulge me. I will have a smile envisioning your beautiful smiles while watching this. :)

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow (and eat - i.e., good food!) - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

At last, catching up a bit

Yesterday our farm participated in a community event that was in essence 'speed dating' between the public and the local farms that offer a CSA (community supported agriculture), which is a partnership between a family/individual and the farm where the farmer is paid up front at the beginning of the growing season for a share of the harvest from that farm.

The membership cost paid by a family at this time of year before the growing season really gets into full swing is used by the farmers as 'seed money' in the true sense of the word plus to give some overall stability and financial planning to the growing season for the purposes of buying seeds, equipment, supplies, maintenance, labor costs, etc. This cost offers a guaranteed portion of the harvest to the member, but it also represents a mutual sharing of the risks associated with all farming that are beyond a farmer's control.

This first-time event sponsored by Slow Food Huron Valley and the brand new Great Lakes CSA Coalition was successful beyond anyone's expectations. More people came than expected thus parking was difficult (it did not help that it 'mudded' that afternoon), plus more farmers signed up than anticipated, including several brand new small farms. All signs of success!

Having never done a 'display' for our farm, we were beautiful but decidedly low-key.  However I have ideas for next time to spruce us up a bit, even turning this into a fun project for a dietetic student (with an art background) who is coming to live with us for several weeks this summer.

Nevertheless, people came specifically to sign-up for our Garlic CSA (we had promoted this opportunity in our farm newsletters and our farm's Facebook page), other people who were brand new to us that day also signed up, and we ran out of brochures during the first hour, grossly under-estimating our needs. Again, all signs of success!

Both my husband and I had such a good time during this event meeting loyal customers (now friends), new customers (new friends), and our farmer friends, that we both left the event feeling like we were on a 'high', which I suppose could also be called a sign of success. :)

Which brings me to the catching up bit. I am really trying to clean off my desk of ideas and things that must be done before there is no time to do inside 'paperwork' for at least six months.

As I am sorting through things I have saved 'to do' I am finally coming to a slide show that my good friend Melinda Hemmelgarn, MS, RD (aka Food Sleuth radio interviewer) put together about our farm. Melinda and her husband Dan visited our farm in 2011 to interview us and take these photos (so they are now 2 years old), with the purpose and mission of changing our food system to one that truly provides 'good food and good health for all' (a phrase I use for my email sign-off). Together they hope that the emotionally compelling images (taken by her husband Dan) and the stories of small farmers across the country will help Americans become better citizens (versus consumers), think critically, and take action advocating for food and health policies that truly provide accessible and affordable foods for all that promote health, not disease.

Here is the link to the slide show with Melinda's words on the website for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), an organization whose work and 'action alerts' I follow regularly.

At last, at last. All the comments in Melinda's slide show are accurately stated. Whenever I see my friend Cathy (like I did yesterday) of Frog Holler Organic Farm, I always feel this deep rush of admiration knowing she and her husband started Frog Holler here in Michigan at about the same time we wanted to drop out of our graduate school programs to start a farm in Wisconsin during the 70's. It took us several decades to finally be 'old-new farmers', which I had the pleasure of explaining briefly to a student yesterday doing interviews for one of his university classes about organic farming.

Thus, while I do really like my new idea of having our upcoming student helping us develop a display for future events, we are actually content to be rather 'low-tech' without fancy displays, knowing our success is really represented by our happiness, which we hope showed through to all yesterday, all of our old friends and all of our new friends who are all part of the 'family' in our Dyer Family Organic Farm, at last. :)

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

Nutrition Basics – FOOD

Several years ago I read a definition of CR*P (as it related to food), liked it a lot, and then could never find it again. The definition above seems to fit rather well with my various posts about junk (as it relates to food). I don't know if this definition is identical to the the one I first found, but it is pretty close and good enough. 

Regarding this definition of FOOD, it's pretty close and good enough to what I eat. Perhaps for the second O, I would have said 'Only healthy fats', which does include omega-3 fatty acids. 

A recently published mouse study has shown that a life-time intake of omega-3 fatty acids reduced both incidence of breast cancer tumors and also tumor size. Now a mouse study is not a human study, but this study was designed to define a clear role for omega-3 fatty acids in the reduced risk of breast cancer development and tumor size in this cancer model. 

I am currently reviewing research projects already funded in 2013 by the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) to consider which of those I wish to contribute supplemental funding from my endowment at AICR (funded by proceeds from my book A Dietitian's Cancer Story). 

They are all worthy projects, but the one that has caught my attention (and I am gathering additional information before I make my final decision) is a small randomized-controlled pilot study to determine if and how omega-3 fatty acid supplementation may impact indicators of both breast cancer cell growth and cell death in women with newly diagnosed breast cancer (stages I-IIIA). Many factors will be evaluated, including dietary intake of multiple types of fatty acids, in order to determine if dietary intakes of a single nutrient can potentially improve prognosis. 

A professional colleague recently asked me how closely I still follow the dietary changes I made in my own diet after my second breast cancer diagnosis in 1995, which I discuss in my book A Dietitian's Cancer Story. I did honestly tell her that I am still very close to those guidelines. The only thing I have now changed since I first wrote the book is to add back some/a little/not much animal protein sources where I know these animals have been raised on organic foods with healthy healthy fats. I still eat a 'plant-based diet' but I am now a 'careful omnivore' who enjoys foods with healthy fats instead of a 'near-vegan' and/or someone avoiding nearly all fats. 

As I write this post, I realize it was 18 years ago sometime last month I had my 10-year anniversary mammogram after my first breast cancer in 1984, in which the results showed something that the radiologist was clearly very worried about. It was 18 years ago this month that I had the biopsy that showed she was correct to be very worried, and it will be 18 years ago next month that I had my second mastectomy with the additional testing that showed the extensive lymph node involvement (even though the tumor was considerably smaller than my first breast cancer) putting me at very high risk for rapid recurrence. 

After finishing the chemotherapy for my second breast cancer, I took it upon myself to see if I could tip the scale a bit to improve my odds for long-term recovery, as there was no "Survivorship Clinic" to help me thrive after cancer as some cancer centers have today. I changed many things in my diet and my life with the twin goals of living longer and living better. I have not had 18 trouble-free years, but I am still here, and I do believe I have achieved those twin goals. :)

I keep my book in print because it is still relevant. In fact, I still get letters and telephone calls from people telling me that my book has been their 'life-line' as they became active patients, participating in their own personal version of 'active hope', giving this cancer journey their all to both live longer and live better after hearing those truly mind- and soul-numbing words 'you have cancer'. I also still get comments from professional colleagues telling me that they have found no other book to fill its shoes, so for now anyway, I will keep it in print. 

As mentioned above, proceeds are still donated to an endowment I established at AICR in 1999 to help fund research focused on nutritional strategies after a cancer diagnosis in order to optimize the odds for longer survival but also increased quality of life for cancer survivors. In fact, I look forward to reviewing and choosing a project to fund every year. It's really a hopeful way to start the year! 

Translating research results into recommendations for real people is painfully slow, but step, step, step, progress is being made. In the meantime, the many recommendations in my book are a good start as is choosing FOOD, not CR*P. :)

Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row,

Diana Dyer, MS, RD