Originally posted on Sep 26, 2018, 10:36 am. Updated on Oct. 16, 2019.

If you’re doubtful of the healing power of food, just ask Brooke Goldner, M.D. When she was 16 and diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Nephritis with stage four kidney disease, she never thought she would reach the age of 40. Now she’s healed, healthy and was featured on the cover of Vegan Health & Fitness magazine’s Fit Over 40 issue in April 2018. That’s a transformation that she credits almost entirely to the way she eats. Today, as a best-selling author, the founder of VeganMedicalDoctor.com, GoodbyeLupus.com and creator of the Hyper-Nourishing Nutrition Protocol for Lupus Recovery, she’s helping others to heal themselves with food as well.

As I was interviewing Dr. Goldner for my post on Exploring a Plant-Based Diet, she shared her story with me. There was simply no way I could fit in all of the powerful information she gave me into that one post, so I decided to begin my new profile series on the Healing Power of Food with Dr. Goldner’s journey from disease to health. She reveals the not-so-secret way that she overcame her debilitating and potentially deadly disease and some things you can do to heal your body and feel your best.

** The end of this post was updated in October 2019 with information about the amount of nutrition training U.S. doctors get in medical school.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made through some of the links included on this page. You can read my disclosure policy here.

A Grim Outlook

When Dr. Goldner was diagnosed with Lupus as a teenager, she was already in stage four kidney failure from the disease, she had arthritis throughout her body, would get long-lasting migraines, and some days couldn’t even get out of bed. She was told she had at best six months to live unless she did “above and beyond aggressive medical therapies.” To say the prognosis was extremely grim would be an understatement.

After two grueling years of chemotherapy and high doses of steroids, Dr. Goldner’s disease went into remission. Even though she was stable at the time, she knew that she was going to be someone who didn’t live a long life and that she would probably end up handicapped at some point, more than likely by the time she was in her 40s. As she started medical school, she remembers thinking, “If I go into medicine, I can help people, and even if I don’t live a long life, I’ll have done something important.” Because of the rigorous schedule she had to keep in medical school, Dr. Goldner ended up getting sick again and developed new antibodies that caused blood clots resulting in a mini-stroke. When that happened, they told her that getting pregnant was not an option because she may have a massive stroke or repeated miscarriages and that she would have to be on blood thinners for life. Her expected life span and quality of life were looking fairly grim again.

“I had just graduated medical school at the time. I knew that nutrition had nothing to do with disease!” – Brooke Goldner, M.D. 

A Healing Discovery

When Dr. Goldner was 28, she asked her celebrity trainer fiancé Thomas Tadlock, M.S. to train her for their wedding. As part of that training, he put her on the meal plan he had developed. She says, “He had figured out that you can increase people’s metabolic state, by feeding them huge amounts of raw vegetables, high Omega 3s and a lot of hydration, and at the time, he also thought you needed meat for muscle building. This was a long time ago. So, it was kind of like the best version of paleo could be nowadays. He was doing that and getting great results.” Since Dr. Goldner was a vegetarian at that point, she didn’t eat the meat, but she added tofu and followed the rest of his plan. Within a few months and with nutrition being the only thing that had changed, her Lupus tests were negative for the first time since she had been diagnosed 12 years before, and they have been ever since. That was 13 years ago.

Dr. Goldner has easily maintained low body fat and high fitness levels and was even able to have two healthy pregnancies and to give birth to two healthy sons. She says, “I have an amazing life now. It’s quite remarkable to compare the 12 years prior and the 13 years after. It’s like I’m in a different body altogether, and really I am. The body I live in now is built out of kale, spinach, broccoli, flax and chia seeds instead of being built out of macaroni and cheese, Doritos and eggs like it was before.”

According to Dr. Goldner, what she discovered for herself about the healing power of food holds true for everyone. “All of our cells, every single cell in our body, is made out of what we eat. There’s no way around it. Literally, that expression, you are what you eat, is true. We make ourselves out of our foods. The reason that people get sick is that they’re either eating foods that make them sick and/or they’re not eating the foods that their body uses for repair and healing.” What do our cells need for healing and repair? Dr. Goldner says the not-so-secret secret is in the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and all the different phytonutrients we get from living plants. In other words, a whole foods, plant-based diet that she strongly believes can cure most of what ails us.

Photo by freestocks.org from Pexels

The Healing Power of Food

When Dr. Goldner is trying to help people recover from illness, she implements a protocol with them that focuses on what she calls hypernourishment. This is her specialty – to use the healing power of food to help her patients learn how to nourish themselves from the cellular level. She does this by getting them to focus not only on what to get rid of but what to add. “Every bite that you put in your mouth is something that your cells use for cellular repair – nothing else.” This means making sure that 75 percent of what you eat is coming from green salads, green smoothies and fresh foods “because that’s what our bodies should be built from.” She says that in the long term, people can eat things like whole grains, beans and other things but when she’s helping people with what she calls rapid recovery (a matter of weeks to a couple of months), she doesn’t use any cooked plant foods. The focus is on raw foods, especially greens.

She says that even if people just want to get closer to a healthier version of themselves, adding what they’re missing, even if they’re still eating foods that aren’t so good for them, is the best place to start. “If you’re not eating processed foods, you’re not eating animal products, you’re getting a good dose of Omega 3s every day to create your anti-inflammatory immune system, and you’re eating lots of fresh foods like vegetables, you’re going to go a long way toward general good health.”

Dr. Goldner believes that eliminating animal products is critical in healing because they may very well be what’s making us sick in the first place. She says, “There’s a lot of research that shows that eating meat increases mortality by 50 percent, that processed meats are in the same category of carcinogens as asbestos and cigarettes, and that it increases your risk of heart attack and stroke.” Dr. Goldner also blames dairy products for illness because they’re “probably the most inflammatory thing that people eat. That’s why as a vegetarian, I was still extremely ill because I ate a ton of eggs and cheese every day. Those increase your inflammatory markers, they encourage the production of your inflammatory immune system, which is going to drive inflammation up and trigger your genes for illness. When you get rid of animal products, you are automatically increasing your ability to heal disease and eliminate inflammation.”

Getting Down to the Numbers

If you’re looking for amounts to guide you on a daily basis, Dr. Goldner likes to see the following:

• At least eight cups of raw vegetables a day
• At least 96 ounces of water a day
• A handful of flax or chia seeds a day (her suggestions include either ground up into your smoothie or in a chia pudding)

She says this isn’t as intimidating as it may sound at first. “Drink green smoothies and eat salads all day, so that you’re raw all day, and then come home and cook dinner with your quinoa and beans and vegetables or something like that.”

Dr. Goldner believes that based on her own experience and her experience with treating her patients that if people can follow this way of eating, it’s not only going to help with any kind of disease they already have, but it’s going to keep them healthier than they would normally be.

Resources for Healing

Dr. Goldner is so passionate about making sure that everyone has access to healing resources that in addition to her books Goodbye Autoimmune Disease (affiliate link) and Goodbye Lupus (affiliate link), she also offers free 6 Steps to Reversing Disease with Supermarket Food online classes. In addition, Dr. Goldner’s husband Thomas Tadlock, M.S. started smoothieshred.com, which offers FREE smoothie recipes, workouts, group support and mentoring. If you don’t want to give any personal information, you can still access the smoothie recipes without signing in.

If you’re dealing with a chronic illness, Dr. Goldner suggests talking with your doctor about the possibility of incorporating nutrition into the treatment plan. But, she cautions, don’t be sidetracked if you meet resistance. According to her, doctors weren’t taught about the role of nutrition in illness, health and healing in medical school. Now, they should be getting more exposure to how it’s all connected, but “This is a ground up movement. Patients are the ones that are going to have to bring it to their doctors.” After all, it is your health, and ultimately, eating a lot more vegetables can only help to fuel your body and your recovery.

October 2019 update: While doctors should be getting more education about the role of nutrition in illness, health and healing in medical school, recent studies show that in most cases, they’re not. According to the research article The State of Nutrition Education at US Medical Schools published in The Journal of Biomedical Education, as of 2013, most U.S. medical schools (71 percent) fail to provide the recommended minimum 25 hours of nutrition education and 36 percent provide less than half that much. That’s based on survey responses from 121 of all 133 U.S. medical schools. Bottom line: Trust your doctor but don’t be afraid to educate yourself about the healing power of food and bring what you learn back to them. Together, you’ll be better equipped to support the best you possible. 

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Food storage containers are like socks and underwear. For most of us, there are so many more fun and exciting things we’d rather buy. The fact of the matter though is that these containers are some of the most used, most important parts of our kitchen and our everyday lives. If we don’t give them the thought they deserve, they could be causing us a lot of harm. How? Because the plastic storage containers, baggies and plastic wraps that most of us grew up with might be leaching chemicals that are proven endocrine-disruptors¹ into our food if not used exactly right, and let’s face it, most of us aren’t using them exactly right.

This is a topic I don’t take lightly because I know I’m behind the curve in addressing this issue in my own kitchen. While we are transitioning to safer products, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. That’s why I turned to the mountains of research available out there and to chef, nutritionist and award-winning cookbook author Jackie Newgent, RDN, CDN for guidance for us all. As a topic that she’s well-versed in, she steers us in the right direction when it comes to safe food storage containers, and if we do use plastic, how to use it correctly.

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made through some of the links included on this page. You can read my disclosure policy here.

Confusion Over Plastic for Food Storage

Before we get to Jackie’s look at how we can store our food safely, it’s important to give a little background on why there’s so much confusion and concern over using plastic for food storage. Most of us are familiar with the concerns over Bisphenol A (BPA) in bottles of water, but other plastic food containers have chemicals that can leach into food if those containers aren’t used properly. The problem is, there’s a lot of confusion and variation on what “used properly” means. For many products, this means they shouldn’t be heated in the microwave or washed in the dishwasher. For others, it’s that food should be at room temperature or cooler before being put into the containers.

More confusion and concern stem from the fact that there are plenty of studies and reports with conflicting results when it comes to how harmful the chemicals in plastic food storage containers really are and at what levels they’re proving to be harmful. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is waiting on the final report from a comprehensive two-year rodent study examining the potential effects of BPA on health to be published in the future, it released a statement earlier this year saying, “Overall, the study found ‘minimal effects’ for the BPA-dosed groups of rodents.” But what are minimal effects, and do we really want any effects at all?

Despite the FDA’s repeated assurances about the safety of BPA in food packaging (although it did ban BPA in baby bottles in 2012), many companies have responded to public concern in recent years and made their products “BPA free.” As a result though, some of the chemicals that replaced BPA such as phthalates and Bisphenol S (BPS) are also being called into question as endocrine-disruptors that are as potentially harmful as BPA.^{2,3, 4}  Because of that, companies are pushing harder to come up with safer alternatives, but how do we know what’s really safe and what’s not? That’s where Jackie Newgent’s advice comes in.

Safe Food Storage Containers

Peppermint Tea & Me: With all of the awareness about BPA and other chemicals leaking into our food through plastics in the past, how safe do you think plastic food storage containers are now? 

Jackie Newgent: More environmentally-conscious plastic food storage containers are available now than even just a year ago, but you do still need to choose wisely. I do still suggest using plastic food storage containers only for cold or dry storage, not for hot foods.

PTM:What if a plastic container doesn’t specifically say it’s BPA-free. How can we determine whether it should be safe to use?

JN: If you don’t see the BPA-free term on the packaging of a plastic container, do watch out for the recycling codes “3,” “6,” and “7” on the container itself. These numbers are an indicator that it has the potentially harmful chemicals called phthalates, styrene, and bisphenols, respectively. To help me remember this, I use the motto, “Nix the 3, 7, 6.”

If the container is “Greenware” or “biobased”, it’s okay since it’s made using a plant starch, such as corn.

 Note: The codes Jackie mentioned can be found on the bottom of plastic containers. It’s a triangle with a number in the middle.

PTM: Some companies say their plastic containers are safe for the microwave. Do you consider plastic containers ever to be safe for the microwave? 

JN: I don’t advise microwaving plastic containers, period. Even if BPA-free or dioxin-free, for instance, heat can cause the leaching of chemicals, in general, into food. That said, I advise not cleaning them in the dishwasher either.

PTM: When is it safe to use plastic storage containers for food?

JN: Generally speaking, when a food is at room temperature or colder, it should OK to store it in a plastic container.

PTM: Do you believe plastic baggies and plastic wrap are safe to use? 

JN: If you can use an alternative, like glass, stainless steel, unbleached parchment paper, or an eco-wrap, I strongly advise using those instead of plastics. But if you do use plastic zip bags or wraps, only use them when a food is at room temperature or colder.

PTM: Why are glass storage containers considered to be better for food than plastic?

JN: Simply put, when using glass, you don’t need to be concerned about leaking of chemicals into foods. However, do know the lids of some glass storage containers may still contain harmful chemicals.

Note: To avoid chemicals from plastic lids coming into contact with your food as much as possible, do not heat glass containers with a plastic lid still sitting even loosely on top (usually done to prevent splatter), don’t put the lid on the container until the food has reached room temperature and try not to fill the container so full that the food is touching the lid.

 PTM: Are there any brands or resources that you would recommend for someone trying to get plastic food containers out of their kitchen?

JN: A few eco-friendly storage alternative picks that I recommend trying include mason jars, unbleached parchment paper products, and beeswax eco-wraps.

Note: Stainless steel lunch boxes (Affiliate Link) are a good alternative to plastic baggies. One thing to keep in mind if investing in lunch container options like this seem too pricey, if you’re using baggies for lunch every day, you could be spending anywhere between $5-$10 per month just on baggies. Lunch containers are reusable, baggies are not.

PTM: Many of the foods we buy in the grocery store come in some type of plastic packaging. Should we be worried about these and try to only buy foods that come in glass containers?

JN: Even with food storage, you can drive yourself silly if you always aim for perfection. So, I suggest that as long as you do all you can at home to keep your food as safe as possible, give yourself a little leeway when buying healthy foods for yourself or family, even if they’re packaged with some plastic. I call that “finding your ‘sustainable sweet spot’.”

 PTM: Do you use plastic food containers in your kitchen? Why or why not?

JN:I stick almost exclusively with glass storage containers, not plastic. It’s just the smart thing to do.

Clearly purging your kitchen of every plastic food container at one time may not be a choice, but as we’ve seen here, transitioning to other types of containers over time is probably our safest option. Breast cancer survivor Susan Leonard recently told me  that she didn’t need to see that all the evidence was conclusive. As she’s taking steps to make her home and life healthier, heating any type of plastic in the microwave was one of the first things to go. Isn’t the same true for all of us?  While all the evidence may not be pointing to exactly the same spot, it is pointing in the same general direction. Plastic food storage containers should be eliminated as much as possible, and if we are going to use them, we need to use them in the way Jackie Newgent advises. I for one, will be speeding up my transition to other types of containers. Buying new food storage containers may not be as fun as something else, but it certainly seems to be a worthwhile investment in my family’s long-term health and wellbeing.

 Sources Cited:

1. Bisphenol A: an endocrine disruptor with widespread exposure and multiple effects
2. Phtalates and diet: a review of the food monitoring and epidemiology data
3. Bisphenol S Induces Adipogenesis in Primary Human Preadipocytes From Female Donors
4. Bisphenol S and F: A Systematic Review and Comparison of the Hormonal Activity of Bisphenol A Substitutes

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