Food touted as path to good health

Like any cancer survivor, Elizabeth Eckholt isn't happy she caught the disease in the first place and certainly wouldn't recommend the experience to anyone.

But she does have conflicting emotions now that it's in the past tense.

If not for cancer and the healthy regimen it introduced her to, heaven knows how many diseases she might have contracted in the years since.

Elizabeth's story begins when she was 35 and the doctors told her she had breast cancer.

She was living in San Francisco at the time, working in a hospital as a physical therapist and moonlighting at night as a chef, where she catered private affairs to, among others, recording artists the likes of Keith Richards, Dolly Parton and Pearl Jam.

The cancer, as it will, quickly shut down all the good life as she suffered through six months of chemotherapy followed by surgery.

When she crawled out the other end, the doctors beamed. The treatments worked. The cancer was no longer detectable. Elizabeth was given a clean bill of health.

But there was one problem. She felt awful. And looked worse. Her skin was a pallid gray, her left arm had ballooned to twice its normal size because of lymph nodes that had been removed, and she had no energy.

"I was sick as a dog," she says.

She'd survived the cancer but wasn't sure if she could survive the cure.

On a friend's suggestion, she booked a visit to the Optimum Health Institute in San Diego.

There, she cleansed her system through a regimen of clean foods that removed the toxins and acidity from her ailing body.

This treatment worked, too.

"I was a new person," Elizabeth says, still beaming more than a decade later. "It took one week."

The experience forever changed the way she would look at food, health — and life.

Ever since, she has devoted herself to spreading the word that food — clean, unadulterated food — is the ultimate healer.

The trick, of course, is distinguishing between foods that heal and foods loaded down with acids and toxins that invite unhealthy side effects.

Eckholt is a devotee of Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of "In Defense of Food," and credits Pollan when she says, "If your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it."