"We all know someone who has or has had cancer. Not a day goes by when you don't hear those words," Amanda Archibald, RD,  told the participants at Food Solutions: Navigating Cancer at Urban Zen.

"This is personal for all of us," revealed Donna Karan, who founded Urban Zen, after her late husband Stephan Weiss, passed away after a bout with the disease. "We always need to share and learn more. At one time or another in our lives, we might find ourselves the caretaker or a loved one, facing an illness. This problem has to be taken care of at every single level. Our system of health care is broken and we have to correct it."

"For 30 years, cancer never affected me until the day when Rand received the diagnosis with a 3 - 6 month prognosis," said Terrence Meck, the Executive Director of the Palette Fund, one of the sponsors of Food Solutions. Meck, whose partner was Rand Skolnick, head of Solgar, the supplement company, said that although they had the resources to "fly anywhere and consult any specialist... Money and access don't help when you have cancer. Only two things help -- food and patient navigation."

"It's important to share your story," said Patient Advocate Ken Schueler. "Isolation is torture for cancer patients and survivors. When you have cancer, you need to be seen."

"We all like to be loved and cared for," says Donna Karan. "If someone you love is in the hospital, go to the hospital. Change the pillows, change the fabrics, change the foods."

Pamela Yee, MD, an integrative oncologist, at New York's Continuum Center for Health and Healing was inspired by her Grandma, who had passed along to Yee the traditional Chinese wisdom that food is medicine.

Following an ovarian cancer diagnosis, Yee's grandmother went through what Yee describes as "processed medicine from which the true meaning of healing was extracted. Back then, hospice care was non-existent." This led Yee to make nutrition an integral part of her treatment approach, even though it's not typically emphasized in conventional medical practice.

"When people face a cancer diagnosis they ask, 'What should I eat?' and the usual answer they are given is, 'Whatever you want and if you lose weight, drink Ensure.'" Yee reports.

Ensure is a processed nutritional shake whose top ingredients (after water) are corn maltodextrin, sugar, protein concentrate, soy oil, soy protein isolates, and flavoring.

Despite ample research into the health-giving properties of nutrients found in many vegetables and fruits, nutrition is still given short shrift by most doctors.

Yee drily noted that "Sometimes it can take forty years for a shift in the medical paradigm."

"A trail horse can explore different paths, while a ranch horse only goes down the route he's followed before, and won't change," Schueler commented. Given that, it's optimal to find practitioners and navigators to help individualize treatments, and also pursue healthy supports like nutrition.

"In cancer, there's a complex interplay of many factors including nutrition, genetics, and toxic exposures," says Mary Beth Augustine, RD CDN http://www.TheNaturalNutritionist.com who along with healthy nutrition strongly recommends smoking cessation for the patients she counsels.

All Food Solutions presenters agreed that foods that help people during a bout with cancer also help prevent cancer, promote recovery, prevent recurrences, and rebuild health.

Since babies are now born pre-polluted with man-made chemicals and toxins, Dr. Pamela Yee, who is herself an organic farmer, first recommends eating organic foods wherever possible. (Yee supports www.realfoodcampaign.org)

What foods are healthiest? Based on recent studies, the Food Solutions experts recommended the following:

• Crucifers, like broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts, help the liver process toxins. Find the ones you like, Amanda Archibald recommends.

• Eat your carrots! High carotenoid content lowers cancer risk.

• Eat the flavonoids, foods with deep red, purple and blue pigments, like grapes, red cabbage, plums, and cherries.

• Three tablespoons of flaxseeds per day decreases cell proliferation.

• Marinating meat lowers cancer-causing compounds.

• Shitaki mushrooms are a non-animal source of vitamin D.

• Avoid high carb foods which may increase risk.

• Eliminate sugar which is a fuel for tumor growth.

• Use healthy herbs like cumin, ginger, coriander, rosemary, and turmeric.

• Drink teas, including black, green, white, and brightly pigmented ones

Recent studies show that people need a wide variety of different families of fruits and vegetables to prevent the DNA changes leading to cancer. In one study, participants who chose foods from five different botanical families lowered their cancer risk, but those who ate vegetables and fruits from 18 different botanical families, substantially lowed their risk. Eating salads was found to be more beneficial than following the Standard American, Mediterranean or the Prudent diets.

Unfortunately, many Americans avoid healthy foods because there is little translation from nutritional recommendations to culinary choices. That's why Food Solutions also showed participants how to select and prepare healthy foods for every palate and preference. Said Archibald, "You have to put food in people' mouths to open their ears. You can't download flavor."

"We've forgotten to ask what's in the food. We just eat what is given to us, no matter what it contains," said Culinary Nutritionist Stephanie Sacks, one of Food Solutions' organizers.

"Your body is an amazing source of information," said Donna Karan. "You have to listen and let it tell you what it needs."

"We all know that this is the future," said particpant Luana Halpern, "How do we open up more people to innovative thinking?

"We're creating a movement for patient-centered health care, and you're all invited to participate and contribute," Donna Karan responded. "This has to be a consumer movement. Once people can taste healthier foods, consumer demand will create the change."

For upcoming Food Solutions, go to Urban Zen.

For health insight, science and action, sign up here for Your Health Outlook.

"The way we think about medicine is all wrong." Mark Hyman told participants at a half day seminar he offered last week at the Urban Zen Center in downtown New York-- where Donna Karan's Urban Zen Foundation holds a series of health seminars

"We used to have acute diseases and infectious diseases, but now we have long-latency deficiency diseases. If you don't have adequate minerals for thirty years, ultimately you get osteoporosis," he said. "But why wait that long? Shouldn't we do something now?"

Hyman questions why conventional doctors fail to offer immediate nutritional interventions that could stem a full blow disease before it happens. Instead "They tell patients, let's wait and watch. Why wait until you're sick, and then place you on a costly medication--often with side effects--for life? It doesn't make sense."

Who can figure out what's in what we inhale, eat, drink and absorb through our skin or via injection? Who has time to worry about what's tracked onto the floor where our kids play?

Yes, it's inconvenient to worry about how what we buy in the hardware store (or food market, beauty counter, pharmacy, doctor's office, flooring, or furniture store) affects our family's health. It's easier to choose to eat organic than to think about the health impact of what we can't control: the brew of interactive, toxic chemicals which the exterminator, house painter, road repair team, farmer, fish farmer, agribusiness, local industry, hospital, manufacturer and gas driller infuse into our air, water, land and food supply.

Exposure to toxic chemicals is a major, known contributor to the rise in chronic diseases, cancer and childhood illnesses. Whatever the differences in our values or lifestyles, we're all exposed to them. As the individualistic bias in health keeps our focus on our individual bank account or health state, we forget that the best way to safeguard both is to protect our collective health and environment.

The moment to shift our focus is now. For the first time in 34 years, a newly introduced Safe Chemicals Act aims to do what so many of us wrongly assumed government was doing all along: Assure that the chemicals to which we're all exposed and which show up in 95 percent of Americans tested, are safe.

Since chemicals are invisible, we don't know that they are in our bodies, where they come from, how long they remain, or how they affect us. The only clue we get that this overall brew is dangerous is when we (or a loved one) get sick, as more and more people do. But even then, we can't trace that illness to any single exposure--so it's easier to blame our luck, our genes, or our attitude.

Over 80,000 chemicals are in use today, many of them known contributors to diseases like cancer, learning disabilities and reproductive disorders. The government we expect to guarantee their safety lacks resources for studies; nor are manufacturers required to prove safety. According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), "chemical companies are not required to tell (the Environmental Protection Agency) EPA how their compounds are used ... (nor) to conduct basic health and safety testing of their products ... Eighty percent of all applications to produce a new chemical are approved by the U.S. EPA with no health and safety data.. in three weeks ..."

Absurdly, the burden is on the EPA to prove chemicals harmful, even though it lacks legal authority to compel industries to study, withdraw, monitor use, or modify any chemicals, including known carcinogens, neurotoxins and immune system modulators.

Where do these chemicals wind up? In us and in our children. At birth, newborns harbor over two hundred chemicals, testing reveals. Due to lower body weight and lesser ability to shield their developing brains, infants and children are at higher risk from exposure.

Fortunately, with strong public support, that can change thanks to the Safe Chemicals Act, introduced by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), to revise the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) which determines the policies for public protection. If the bill passes, for the first time, the burden of proof for safety will transfer to industry.

Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families is a coalition of groups that supports the bill and will monitor its progress to assure that effective provisions pass into law. Safe Chemicals Director, Andy Igrejas, who I interview this week on my radio program, wants the bill strengthened so the EPA is empowered to act immediately to curtail the use of the most highly toxic chemicals.

Concurrent bills will move through the Senate and House this spring and summer. Due to chemical industry pushback, passing a bill that protects public health will require strong public support. To receive environmental health info, radio interviews with health leaders, and action updates on chemical safety, please sign up at " target="_blank">www.healthjournalist.com.

Happy Earth Day!

Last Sunday, the Urban Zen Center offered “A Day of Wellness in Support of Africa,” infused with the spirit of Kageno, which means “a place of hope.” Kageno is the name of the unique organization that benefited from the event, using this crucial support to offer hope to Kenyans and Rwandans, struggling to build lives of dignity and sustainability in the wake of their countries’ AIDS crises. The day’s proceeds will benefit Kageno health and educational programs that serve over 11,000 villagers.

Urban Zen Foundation Director, Joanne Heyman, spoke to one hundred thirty yoga garbed participants, ready for a day of healing, learning, and yoga. Springtime shone forth on the sunny day for this gathering on the beautiful outdoor deck outside the Urban Zen loft space.

“Urban Zen is first and foremost about promoting healing,” Joanne said. “Whether it’s individual, familial, communal, societal, or global—or all of them, that’s what we’re about. So we couldn’t have a better match than Kageno.”

Kageno founder Dr. Frank Andolino told the group that Kageno’s four main areas of activity are education, health, income generation, and sustainability, sharing a delightful story of how all key areas intertwine in even the simplest aspect of their program.

In the small school they support, they have hired three HIV-positive women to prepare and serve the children a porridge, which is cooked on a fire fueled by brickets that community members make from recycled garbage. The brickets are sustainable, provide income to the villagers who make them, and are used to prepare healthy food in the school. The women are provided both income and health support, while serving the school children. Kageno’s natural ecology resonates with its community, and was inspired in part by the Partners in Health (PIH) model which was developed in Haiti by Paul Farmer, who serves on the Kageno Board.

During the day long UZ event, participants could self-select from among several concurrent healing options, available throughout the day. There was a lecture on cleansing, by leading doctor, Alejandro Junger, MD, whose book Cleanse became a bestseller after his book launch party at Urban Zen nearly a year ago. Anusara Yoga teacher, Jordan Mallah, led enthusiastic yogis and yoginis in a vigorous yet relaxing class. Recent graduates of the Urban Zen Integrative Therapist’s program (UZIT) offered yoga therapy, massage, and Reiki sessions which featured Young Living essential oils.

I experienced first hand the UZIT Reiki-oils session, which was totally restorative and relaxing. I was also fascinated by Dr. Junger’s presentation, because it’s so rare for a conventionally trained physician to champion detox. Having enjoyed a healthy lifestyle growing up in Uruguay, Dr. Junger attended medical school in the U.S. where he developed standard American nutritional and lifestyle habits, that ultimately caused his health to seriously decline. He inadvertently discovered the virtues of cleansing practices which allowed him to recover his own health, and subsequently, used them to support many of his clients in healing from a wide range of illnesses.

Cleansing is a vital, but often overlooked aspect of health care, especially now that research has revealed that 95% of all Americans carry toxins from chemicals, industry, products, and the environment, which researchers link to rising rates of everything from obesity to cancer. For the first time in 34 years, Congress is looking at governmental regulations that have proved inadequate to assure chemical safety—a great opportunity to limit the chemicals we need to detoxify, and give ourselves a real chance to heal.

For health insight and links to crucial health actions, you’re invited to sign up at: www.HealthJournalist.com

As health care reform staggers along in the political realm, let’s feel grateful to those who don’t hesitate to stand up for the health of our children. With actions that speak louder than the words of a partisan political debate, two organizations, HealthCorps, launched by Mehmet Oz, MD and his wife, Lisa Oz, and Urban Zen, the foundation launched by Donna Karan, joined forces to share creative solutions for children’s health concerns. Since 2007, Urban Zen’s Health and Wellbeing Initiative has offered an ongoing series of public forums on wellness and nutrition for health, while HealthCorps’ school-based program has expanded nationwide to empower young people to become agents for healthy change.

There's an experiment going on right now--but it isn't being conducted by scientists. It's being conducted by parents. In 30 million kitchens across the U.S. that experiment is called  "What Can My Child Eat?" In families with children with autism and allergies, the result of that experiment can either be a day of relative calm and comfort, or it can produce anything from brain fog, digestive discomfort, and mood swings, to pain, seizures, skin outbreaks, and severe digestive distress.

In today's uncertain world, we can be certain of at least one thing--that science can provide us with the proof that we seek.Or can we?

According to the world-class scientists at the Sages and Scientists Symposium organized by Deepak Chopra and Rustum Roy last week, the foundational laws of science reveal a whole lot. But neither proof, certainty, nor even matter itself are engraved on the checklist. Proof is dependent, certainty, uncertain--and matter? Well, it doesn't exist. At the core of reality, everything is in play, dynamic, interactive, shape changing--and uncertain.
Bad news for a health journalist like me? Maybe. And maybe not. I've spent the last twenty years dutifully pegging each health recommendation, blog, or book to the "latest research which proves that X does Y to Z."

But the more I learned, the more I learned to question whether the "proof" was as air tight as health experts, researchers, and journalists like me assume. While we reassured people that research shows that "this works for that," evidence mounted that medical science's well advertised white-coated certainty--was contradicted by the warnings in the fine print.
What if we could no longer assert the primacy (and certainty of) biomedicine as the ultimate authority of human life? What if its microscopic analysis, though often useful, presumed too much, omitted too much, and at the end of the day would prove to be the scientific equivalent of foot-binding-- a little too narrow?

Last weekend in Carlsbad, California, I got a rare chance to ask and get answers about this. Welcomed by Deepak Chopra, world class international scientists gathered to share with the public the frontier science they usually reserve for dense papers read by their colleagues.

During dazzling exchanges among brilliant scientists of diverse disciplines, it became clear that biomedical science, however helpful, was just one kid on the scientific block-- the child and grandchild of other senior branches of science,--like biology, chemistry, and physics.
But can biomedicine learn to respect its elders--and play better with its peers?
For example, with all the evidence of nonlocal/nonsensory observation, intention, and knowledge, Chopra and other scientists question why biomedicine insists that awareness is just a biochemical secretion.

What about its first cousin, the so-called soft social sciences? Nowadays, cuz's emotionally intelligent questions sound more relevant, such as "How well is this health model working for people, children, families, communities, the economy, and our society?"
"Scientists conduct research as if the laws of nature were fixed," said Vladimir Voeikov, a biologist who came from Moscow where he's the Chairman of Bioorganic Chemistry at a major university. "But in living systems, everything is changing. As a scientist, my goal is to understand the ways that living systems self-organize and regulate for change."
"Science has to go beyond its laboratory confines to reveal the real environmental and social dangers we face now, and to indicate the opportunities to renew ourselves on this planet." posited pioneering systems theorist Ervin Laszlo.

Unfortunately, said Larry Dossey, "We're up against an old science in which consciousness is local, finite, and physical with no direction, and no meaning. One prominent scientist called humans nothing but computers made of meat.""The physical body and world are symbolic representations of qualities of consciousness. They appear outside but are within consciousness," said Deepak Chopra who called for the transformation of awareness as a crucial lever for change.

As Chopra pointed out, in quantum physics, matter fluctuates between a wave and a particle, only "collapsing into manifestation" in response to an observer. Not only do differing levels of awareness lead people to perceive the world differently, but through our awareness and conscious and unconscious layers of intention, we all participate in creating what manifests.

As a result, the absolute, unalterable certainty humans seek cannot be measured, proven, and frozen into a fixed form. But certainty can perhaps be found as "an inner experience of oneness, in which the distinction between object and subject dissolve," Chopra says.
If science's task is to reflect reality, what happens to us and to our planet when instead our science treats dynamic life forms as fixed, dead, separate, and devoid of awareness and organizing intelligence, rather than as mutually interdependent and connected?
Has our quest for absolute certainty led us to parse reality into manageable pieces while myopically overlooking the whole?

"What many call science is really a religion, enforced by the popes and the cardinals of academia. Their quest is for grants, not scientific inquiry," said Rustum Roy, a distinguished material scientist and water researcher at Pennsylvania State University. A long-time champion of cross-disciplinary science, it was Roy who had invited many of his esteemed colleagues to gather at the Symposium.

One was physicist Hans Peter Duerr, a successor to Werner Heisenberg, the discoverer of the famous Uncertainty Principle, a foundation of quantum science."We want it to be either yes, or no. But the truth is always somewhere on the way between yes and no," said Duerr. "What makes humans think that cosmic design can be totally apprehended by the human brain or captured by human logic or language?" Duerr asked. "If you're so sure that you know exactly what something means--you're probably wrong. If you're uncertain about what's going on, you're on the right track."

Can we take in the humility of this deeper scientific view and allow it to shape our science and our lives? Instead of trying to erase uncertainty, what would happen if we were to accept it? Can we let go of proving what's right?  Can not knowing, and being vulnerable pave the way to mutual respect, and interdependence--between people, and between branches of science?

"We are in a transitional period. People are disoriented and suffering. We have to wake up and that means the system itself has to change," Laszlo reminded us. According to Voeikov, "It's not that we must compete with each other-- but we must together develop the most harmonious strategies for life." "We need community to share the complexities of our own evolution," offered Marilyn Schlitz, President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences.
In this time of transition, Duerr counseled, "The fittest who survive are those who know best how to cooperate."

Demanding a science that gave me and my readers definite answers, I lost the open science that asked questions. At Sages and Scientists, I rediscovered that science and it's still as uncertain as ever.
Go to www.DeepakChopra.com to watch video interviews with these great scientists.

For more on Sages and Scientists, (and health, psychological, and spiritual insight), follow me on Twitter @AlisonRoseLevy, or get my ezine at: www.healthjournalist.com

"We can't walk away from this and lead our daily lives as if nothing had happened," Donna Karan immediately thought when she heard about the tragic earthquake in Haiti. "This is a wake-up call, a call to community, to caring, to something greater than ourselves."

Andre Harrell, an entertainment industry executive and founder of Uptown Records, heard the same call. "From the first moment I heard about the crisis in Haiti, I felt a sense of responsibility -- and the question: 'What can I do to help?' It sounds a little mystical but I felt like the universe was speaking to me," he said.

Harrell went through a typical day for him--high level meetings uptown, midtown and downtown in Manhattan. Later at the Boom Boom room, he connected with his friend, Andre Balazs at Balazs' elegant Standard Hotel. "We're great friends and I felt the urgency of finding a way to support him in supporting Haiti," Balazs explained. "This is an opportunity to take advantage of a tragedy to focus the world's attention on an ongoing crisis, and create a sustainable solution."

Before long, the two Andres reached out to Donna Karan, whose Urban Zen Center is just a few blocks away from the Standard.

"We have the passion to support Haiti, we have the dream of making a difference, but the question is how do we make it happen?" Karan asked when the powerhouse creative trio met to discuss partnering to bring together the New York art, music, fashion and entertainment worlds to kick off a benefit called Hope, Help, and Relief Haiti, slated for next Monday, February 8th.

Read rest of article on Huffington Post and comment here.

Today, in America, portions are out of control. The old admonition to eat everything on your plate no longer applies when processed foods add little nutrition and loads of calories. With an epidemic of obesity, people need to know more than what to eat, and what not to eat to stay healthy. They also need to learn to distinguish a sufficient portion, from one that packs on the pounds. In her opening talk, nutritionist Dr. Lisa Young, author of The Portion Teller Plan pointed out that by definition, fast food is cheap food. Super-sizing your portion costs food companies nothing, but eating over-sized portions can cost you your health.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

As resources and volunteers head to Haiti, I learned that among the medical personnel who have traveled there to serve are Urban Zen presenter and good friend, Dr. Mark Hyman, MD, and his lovely wife, Pier Boutin, also a physician. Traveling with them are a medical team.

The dedicated pair arrived in Port Au Prince on Friday night, and according to a report sent to a colleague, which I'll quote here, they found "the conditions to be absolutely horrific, a scene of death, devastation, and chaos."