The Power of Celery Juice

My wife was translating excerpts to me from a book on healing the liver. She took quite a shock to the system the other day when she tried a bullet coffee, which includes butter and MCT oil. A friend of hers swears by this drink. She immediately started sweating and felt awful the rest of the day. Turns out this drink is a killer on the liver, packed with so many unsaturated fats that her liver took quite a pounding. She recovered and is now reading a Lithuanian edition of Anthony William's Liver Rescue, convinced that celery juice will restore her liver to full glow.

The only problem is that Anthony William is not a doctor, or even dietician, but rather a "medical medium," who claims he was given the power to cure at the very young of age of four by a spirit second only to God, and has been sharing his secrets on the Internet, garnering nearly 2 million followers, including some high profile ones like Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sly Stallone.

He's been promoting celery juice as a prophylactic and cure for everything, most recently coronavirus, which has doctors and dieticians worried that his ever-growing popularity will result in more hospital patients. There is no harm in drinking liters of celery juice per day but doctors say it isn't a magic elixer. The best thing is just to swear off the foods and drinks that ruin the liver, which to his credit Anthony William does note as well.

Dr. Austin Chiang has been trying to fight this medical misinformation one post at a time on instagram, but it is a tall order. These misleading infomercials spread faster than any virus, especially with so many persons looking for the magic cure to their ailments. That's why Thomas Jefferson University Hospital is soliciting more proven doctors to go on social media to counter this hokum.

I usually go to Healthline, Mayo Clinic or WebMD when I doubt the veracity of these magic elixers and cures. Mayo has a good page on the liver. Whereas the "Medical Medium" warns against eggs, The doctors at Mayo note that it is not eggs that are bad for you but the butter you tend to fry them in, and the bacon you usually have as a side. There are different types of cholesterol, good and bad, and eggs are mostly good, whereas butter and bacon are mostly bad. You can eat up to seven eggs per week as long as you avoid the fatty oils and sides.

Doctors also caution against coconut oil that may help you burn fat on a Keto diet, which my wife was trying, but is hell on your liver, largely due to the medium-chain tryglicerides, or MCT's found in it. This may be fine if you have a perfectly healthy liver and are trying to lose weight, but if you have any problems with your liver, you will soon feel it.

Unfortunately, people seem more influenced by Gwyneth's Goop or how Sly stays so fit at 75. I don't know quite how to break this bad news to my wife, but I think the video of Sly and Anthony promoting celery juice will convince her that this guy is not all he's cracked up to be.

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer. Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions. I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters. Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs. Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77. I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not. Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud. -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!

TripplerAugust 3, 2021 at 7:55 PM
Too much tryglicerides?
I had a major problem with it but found a natural cure online for it: sauerkraut. After a year of eating a healthy amount of it, the tryglicerides problem cleared up. My doctor was absolutely floored when I told him of my natural cure.

Re celery ~ yuck. Hate the taste but must confess that it is a great cure for halitosis.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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