My father and mother did a lot together — they both had their gallbladders removed before age 60, got cancer at age 72 (dad had stomach cancer and mom had Lymphoma) and, sadly, died at the same age of 79. Meanwhile, their siblings, on both sides, lived cancer-free well into their late 80’s.

I began to realize the difference had to be diet related, and took the first steps to change my diet by drastically cutting my consumption of red meat because, growing up, our family enjoyed a lot of red meat — sometimes three times a day! And when we weren’t eating red meat, we were eating pork and chicken. 

I had heard about the McDougall Program years ago from my ex-wife Wendy, a McDougall alumnus, but had not been convinced to change my way of eating when I agreed to accompany her to a McDougall Intensive Weekend in March 2020. I was interested to hear the information, but merely thought of it as a fun weekend in Northern California. I had no intention of changing my way of eating. In fact, on the way up from Orange County we stopped for lunch at In-N-Out Burger!

During the meals at the McDougall Weekend, Wendy and I joined a regular group of nice folks that included a retired HR executive from Texas. He mentioned pain he was having in the quad muscles of his legs and the diagnosis from his doctor that the pain was being caused by the long-term use of the statins he was taking for cholesterol. This concerned me because I had been on statins for 25 years and had been experiencing pain in my quads for about three weeks. I thought they were related to age because I retired a year ago and do not exercise as much as I used to. Now I began to wonder.