Life in Appalachia

Adventures in Appalachia, and the Beginnings of my Dad’s Research

In the paid newsletter sent out this past Wednesday, I went into greater detail about the research my father performed at Virginia Tech, and I will continue this discussion in the next paid newsletter. Here, I would like to share a more personal account of this part of his life.

My childhood memories from those years are vivid. The world was so different back then. When we weren’t in school, my mom kicked my siblings and me out of the house, as long as the weather was even the least bit tolerable, and would tell us to play outside until the next mealtime. We spent hours and hours with friends, playing basketball and tackle football, and running through the surrounding fields and forests, exploring every nook and cranny. And if that wasn’t fun enough, my parents bought a 200-acre farm property in a tiny nearby town of about 100 people called Newport. We went there on weekends to help my dad clear brush, then we moved there and, for a brief time, I got a real taste of Appalachian life and culture.

My father wanted to buy the Newport property because he couldn’t get the farm out of his system, and my mother liked the idea of small-town living. It seems weird to say now, but we had beef cattle on our farm because we had rented the land to a local cattle farmer, and one year we even filled our freezer with the meat from a cow raised on the property. We also had people from around the world traipsing through our slice of heaven because a mile of the Appalachian Trail crossed over it. And just a short walk from our farm was a meandering creek, the kind you see in one of those old movies of someone sitting on a rounded dirt bank, throwing a bobber into some still water beneath overarching leaf-filled branches, with dragonflies and all kinds of other insects flying about. The headwaters of this creek flowed down from the surrounding mountains, and at some point downstream from my fishing bank it lost water as it sank into the ground, most likely into the porous limestone that was everywhere in that part of the state. Its name, “Sinking Creek,” certainly seemed appropriate.

I also spent some time in that limestone, exploring with my dad a vast cavern that extended for what might have been miles beneath one of the largest mountains in the state. I still remember those trips—all the beautiful stalactites and stalagmites, the ledges we had to walk across next to 100’ drop offs, the underground crystal-clear streams and pools, the hordes of bats, and once, even a cornered bobcat.

I am grateful for my childhood and the fact that my parents worked hard to keep us close to Nature. Throughout all my years at home, my father tried to recreate the environment he grew up in, wherever we lived, which also meant lots of time outdoors working, whether building barns and fences, shoveling horse manure, mowing fields, hauling and storing hay, weeding the garden, cutting firewood, and on and on.

But while my father still seemed just a step away from his old dairy farm, his life was turning in a different direction. It was during these years at Virginia Tech that he started conducting with his team of graduate students prolific laboratory research exploring the impact of animal protein on various biological mechanisms involved in the initiation and progression of cancer. At first, he wanted to find what he thought might be the primary mechanism involved in cancer, then study the impact of animal protein on that particular mechanism. He started down this path, but every time he researched a mechanism, he saw others, and studied the next one, and then the next one after that. He quickly realized there is no single dominant mechanism involved in the initiation and promotion of cancer. Instead, there are more steps in that process than we may ever understand—it’s complex beyond our imagination.

But while that all-important mechanism proved elusive, he discovered something else that rocked his world. Every time he looked at a mechanism involved in cancer, he found that animal protein impacted that mechanism in a way that pushed the cancer process forward—100% of the time, with no outliers.

Granted, he did this research in the lab using a rat model, but this was critical research because it demonstrated that nutrition can in fact control the initiation and progression of cancer. I say “control” because in one of his last lab experiments, he showed he could turn the cancer process on and off, like a light switch, simply by toggling between plant and animal protein.

All this laid the groundwork for my dad’s famous human study in China. I’ll discuss this in my next letter, and in the meantime, if you want to go deeper into the mechanistic research my father performed, I invite you to consider a paid subscription, which costs only $10/month. We are doing our best to build up our paid subscriber base so we can continue with our publication.

Until next time.

Nelson

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This past week featured an article on my father’s early research at Virginia Tech. This part of his story is not well understood by the public, but was an important part of the path he walked.

Soup Before Politics, by Kim Campbell

For more than a century, a pot of simple white bean soup has been quietly simmering behind the scenes in the United States Senate. Legend has it that one senator loved the soup so much, he insisted it be served in the Senate dining room every single day, no matter what. From that time, it has been understood that bean soup must always be on the menu.

In 1943, during wartime rationing, they ran out of beans, and the soup could not be made. The announcement apparently caused more uproar than some of the legislation on the floor that week. Priorities. I wonder whether the more recent government shutdown had a similar impact.

What I love about this story is how ordinary the soup is. It does not require a culinary degree or an excessive number of spices. It is just a simple, old-fashioned comfort soup—the kind of soup that has fed and comforted tired people at the end of long days. Is that not what soup is supposed to do?

Every family has their version of a Senate Soup. For some families, it is a hearty chili, for others, a simple vegetable soup. For mine, it was always a pot of beans simmering on the stove, perfuming the whole house with warmth.

This creamy white bean version is my homage to that tradition, minus the Senate floor debates. It is hearty, soothing, and nourishing, the kind of bowl you can eat slowly with a big spoon while the whole world relaxes for just a minute.

Here is your recipe for White Bean Soup:

https://plantpurecommunities.org/recipes/creamy-white-bean-soup/