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Food not Meds
Food not Meds
Food not Meds
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Food not Meds

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Carol tells a compelling story (her own story) of wellness & healing using our lowest cost healthcare systems – friendship, family and food. As a clinical psychologist working to increase client’s well-being and finding wisdom in their own life journeys
“I find Carol’s viewpoint abundantly useful and easily applied. She provides alternatives that will increase your wellness options and it is a ve

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 17, 2013
ISBN9780615721439
Food not Meds
Author

Carol Amendola D'anca

Carol D’Anca is a board certified nutritionist combining scientific and fact based research with practical application for improving clients’ nutritional status. Her broadly based approach to helping others includes monthly meetings with a large urban group dedicated to preventing and reversing heart disease, educational webinars, cooking demos and private consultations. For those wanting to immerse themselves in the lifestyle, cooking and community of an ancient culture promoting longevity, Carol regularly hosts culinary trips to Italy. These tours allow individuals the unparalleled experience of briefly living the healthy “Mediterranean Way of Life.” After graduating with honors from the University of Wisconsin, Carol attended graduate school at Lake Forest Graduate School of Management, and then earned a Master of Science Degree in Clinical Nutrition from Rosalind Franklin University of Science and Medicine/The Chicago Medical School. Carol has over 20 years of experience in the healthcare field including an executive position with an international medical device company based in Austria. Her professional associations include the American Nutrition Association, a task force committee member of the Certification board for Nutrition Specialists and the Institute for Functional Medicine.

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    Food not Meds - Carol Amendola D'anca

    Chapter One: Roots

    The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.

    ~ Joel Salatin, Author

    "Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for

    Happier Hens, Healthier People and a Better World.

    It has been said that you can find all of the answers to life’s greatest mysteries in your own backyard if you know where to look. After a lifetime of being in the world, I can now say that’s true. But I’ve learned that many of us have to go out into the world for a while to discover and gain the perspective we need to know where to look.

    After college I did what so many of us do. I set out to pursue a career. Right out of school I began working in the healthcare field for some of the largest healthcare companies in the world and moved on to an international medical device company as well. I can honestly say healthcare has been my life for my entire career.

    Yet, it’s only been in the last twenty-four months that I finally glanced over my shoulder and realized that the answers about health that I’ve been seeking were literally in my own backyard, and not in the medical model where I’ve spent the last twenty-plus years. The answers to health are among the herbs and flowers. They’re seated at the table, and resting under the pergola. Yes. I discovered that the answers to the health questions I haven’t even fully formed yet are indeed in my own backyard. Well actually, they’re in several yards—plural.

    First, there’s the backyard in a suburb of Chicago, the one I share with my husband of nineteen years. It’s a replica of the sort of typical backyard you’d see in Italy, complete with a pergola, a long table for family dinners and an outdoor kitchen complete with a pizza oven. Urns and pots grouped around our patio and the paths that meander through the yard grow basil, oregano, rosemary, mint and sage. Flowers overflow from pots around the yard, and my favorite piece of statuary is surrounded with blooms all summer long.

    When the wind blows strong enough to move the shrubs, or when I brush past them enough to disturb them, the rosemary and basil throw their pungent oils into the breeze.

    I can close my eyes, inhale deeply, and feel like I’m in the yard of my childhood again as the smell of rosemary and basil, the classic Italian herbs, fill the air. When our outdoor pizza oven is heated and the fragrance of homemade pizza and cooking crust begins to waft through the yard, the smell takes me back to family and food and laughter and people gathered around to share stories, and to talk, and to eat.

    My backyard is a lot like the other backyard, the one where my grandparents lived and where I still visit as often as I can. Like Naples, Italy, Acerra (province of Naples) and Nocelleto (province of Caserta), are all Italian. It’s like my parent’s backyard, the one I grew up in, in the United States, just as my parents had, in a small city on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin.  Like I said, yards, plural.

    It was in my childhood home and backyard I first became fascinated with food. Food wasn’t just something you ate. It was something you shared. If my father was sitting at the table in the back yard relaxing, or thinking, Rosie Sirocchi, a neighbor, would bring fresh, hot bread, or maybe biscotti, or whatever homemade food she made fresh that morning, over. She would offer it, and they would sit and talk, if only for a few minutes. Food was community. It was a reason to gather, to talk, to laugh, to share, to grieve, to celebrate, to connect and to mourn. It was a condiment for life, not a main course. Food seasoned our lives; it was not the focus of them.

    My lunches, for instance, were not like the lunches of my classmates. I would have a piece of fresh fruit, some dried apricots, perhaps a handful of walnuts, and a homemade cookie. Lunch was not intended to stave off starvation, but to keep the metabolism burning steady and even. It was a midday snack, followed by another piece of fruit, or some nuts after school.

    I didn’t have the white bread, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or juice boxes my classmates brought. I never had meat in my lunches because meat was never part of a true Mediterranean diet.

    Maybe I’d have a pepper and egg frittata, but our meals were simple, healthy and delicious. While Naples is famous for its mozzarella and cheeses and for its pizza, I admit that even though I lived in America I didn’t have pizza American style, with mozzarella on it, until I was sixteen years old! Our pizza was made with fresh dough and tomatoes we had canned from our own garden! We added a touch of fresh basil and the pizza was so much better than anything delivered in a cardboard box!

    Even as a second-generation Italian-American, I’ve always embraced my culture.

    Although my mother was conceived in Italy, she was born in the United States a few months after my grandparents arrived in the early 1900s. Both of my parents were first-born children of Italian immigrants, but were fortunate enough to grow up in a large Italian-American immigrant community.

    I was so connected to my Italian roots I later applied for and received my Italian citizenship. I now hold dual citizenship in the U.S. and Italy. I and qualified because my parents were still considered Italian citizens when I was born.

    My parents may have lived in America, but their first language was Italian, their first culture was Italian, and they raised their children as Italians. They grafted Americanisms onto their family vine later in life, but their roots were always Italian. Like the grape vines that grew thick and strong in my grandfather’s arbor, our Italian roots twisted, reached and curled deep into the soil and soul of a culture half a world away.

    My grandparents were bright, beautiful people with bright, beautiful lives — especially my Nonna on my mother’s side, Carmella D’Angelo. They brought with them the three things that mattered most in Italian life: family, food and community. 

    My father was a public official in an American town, but he took care of Italian people. The city was heavily populated with Italian immigrants and, like us, they re-created the life they knew back in Naples. So I grew up immersed in the Italian way of life, the language, the food, the sense of community

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