Cathy Katin-Grazzini changed to a plant-based diet after a family diagnosis of atherosclerosis.
It’s been said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and nobody knows that better than Cathy Katin-Grazzini of Ridgefield.
In 2013, Cathy’s husband, Giordano, was diagnosed with atherosclerosis, a disease commonly known as plaque on the arteries of the heart. His case was severe and there were complications.
Frantic to find a way to make him well again, she scoured the web and learned of the success patients in worse condition than her husband had with a plant based diet. Through the writings by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn Jr., Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Dr. Michael Greger and Dr. Neal Barnard, she became a convert and switched her family to a plant based diet.
There’s no milk, no cheese, no eggs, no cooking oils, no fish, no meats of any kind. Fruits and vegetables including beans of all kinds abound, and grains are the whole type, like whole grain brown rice.
“We eat everything in the plant and mushroom kingdom,” Cathy said.
The result is after a couple of years, Giordano is feeling great and the whole family, wife, husband and son Lorenzo, 26, have adapted to eating that way.
“We’ve been enjoying it very much,” said Giordano, who said it took little more than a year to get used to the plant based diet where he wasn’t craving meat, dairy or any of the other foods he had cut out like fish.
“Now, even if I didn’t have health issues,” I wouldn’t go back,” Giordano said. “This food makes me feel really good. We have chili, nachos, a lot of beans cooked in different ways, pizza, pasta with different sauces.”
Cathy doesn’t like to think of it as a diet in the truest sense of the word though, because there’s no emphasis on calorie restriction. “There’s no denial or deprivation, just an alteration of the food you consume,” Cathy said.
Rapidly, there came positive changes in blood pressure and cholesterol. The body seemed to return to a set point, of optimal body weight.
“It changes your body composition,” Cathy said.
The idea of the plant based diet is to avoid inflammation, which provokes so many diseases. The side benefits are wonderful, she said.
Cathy, 62, and Giordano, 60, have become a beacon of light for others seeking better health. She operates a business, Cathy’s Kitchen Prescriptions LLC, which teaches others how to cook and live in the plant based lifestyle.
She took up her business after going back to school to learn how to cook for her husband.
“My world was rocked when I needed to explore this other way of eating, because how do you cook without oil?” Cathy said.
She got certified in plant based nutrition, through the Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, and became a plant based chef through the online Rouxbe Cooking School.
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