Anneliese Moore was 67 years old when she was first diagnosed with breast cancer and told she needed to have her breasts removed. Lucky for her she was a fighter, and she met Dr. McDougall who helped her find the plant-based cure. Simply by eating plants and following the healing diet, Annelise kept her breasts and lived another 30 years! Anneliese shared her story in her own words with Dr. McDougall in hopes that it would help other women heal naturally and regain their health through nutrition. She writes that as a poor young girl in Germany she grew up eating the same diet that would eventually heal her. She says,
“Living in Germany, not being rich and without the ‘right’ contacts, I was brought up on the strictest McDougall diet possible – if I was fortunate, my daily food was maybe potatoes, rye bread, and some veggies. We had occasionally meat on a Sunday. This went on throughout all my childhood.”
When she met her American husband and moved to the United States, Anneliese began changing her diet to include more meat with her meals. She writes,
“Soon I learned that Americans needed meat with their meals. Women in Hawaii showed me how to make roasts, meat loaf and chickens – the American dream. This was an ideal eating-style that most Europeans envied. I was so eager to fill in with all those foods I had missed during my youth living in Germany. Even though I tried to eat more meat, our meals still had lots of potatoes and much less meat than most people. So, I don’t think it was my diet that gave me breast cancer – I think it was the Premarin (estrogen) my doctors put me on.”
Anneliese says she happily followed her doctor’s orders to start taking Premarin ate age 50 and she continued the drug till age 67 when she discovered the lump in her breast. It was 1980 when her doctor gave her the news, there was no mention of nutrition or diet. Instead she says,
“Then without any apparent question or thought about alternatives they told me I had to have a mastectomy.”
Anneliese was devastated. She was just getting ready to retire and her breast cancer diagnosis put a damper on her vision of enjoying her retirement. She said that living through Nazi Germany as a young woman had hardened her to bad news and pretty quickly she decided she would fight back. Fortunately she had heard Dr. McDougall talk about breast cancer and the research that showed a mastectomy conferred no survival advantage compared to no mastectomy.
Not wanting to amputate her breasts and desperate for a less-invasive cure, she made an appointment with Dr. McDougall. She initially had a small biopsy and says that despite Dr.McDougall’s advice to get the margins of the tumor removed, she had, “had enough of the medical business.” Four years later, as Dr. McDougall has predicted, the cancer came back in her breast. She writes,
” I saw Dr. McDougall. He reassured me that the reappearance of the cancer was not necessarily a bad sign and that this was probably tumor left behind from the first biopsy. I decided to have a more careful lumpectomy to get the entire tumor in the breast and then some radiation.”
Anneliese called the reemergence of the caner a “wake-up call” which prompted her to adopt a diet of whole plant foods. She writes,
“After my diagnosis I returned to my old German diet, which was now known as the ‘McDougall diet,’ but a lot more interesting and tastier. Since then I have enjoyed excellent health, and I have had no recurrence of the cancer. I will always be grateful that Dr. McDougall supported me in not having a mastectomy, when no one else would (except my husband, Paul).”
Anneliese enjoyed a full and healthy life after healing from breast cancer and continued to vacation in Europe every summer. One summer she visited Dr. McDougall and Mary McDougall in Santa Ana, CA at their 10 day program. She writes,
“Even though I was eating well before I came to the program, in 10 days my cholesterol went from 150 to 116 mg/dl. And I made some great friends.”
In her later life Anneliese enjoyed sharing recipes she learned from her time with the McDougalls and making healthy meals with other retired people. She said that many people were interested in her story and diet because they could tell she was healthy and doing something right. She wrote,
“They say, ‘That is what you are doing and you are 88 and living by yourself – and you look so good!'”
Anneliese Moore died February 11, 2012 at age 97. After being diagnosed with breast cancer she lived another 30 years thanks to the good advice of Dr.McDougall. Simply by eating nutritious and delicious whole plant foods, Anneliese healed from breast cancer and enjoyed a long life of delicious foods, beautiful places, and sharing with family and friends.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Approximately 268,600 women and 2,670 men will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer and 42,260 people will die of breast cancer this year in the United States. Many people have regained their health and healed from breast cancer simply by eating more plants and at Healing With Plants we are spreading the good news! Follow Healing With Plants on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook for more healing whole foods plant-based recipes and inspiring stories that testify for the amazing healing power of plants.
Sources: 1. Dr. McDougall's Health & Medical Center, "Anneliese Moore: Breast Cancer Treated with Diet." 2. Dr. Harris, Williams, MD. "Breast Cancer Statistics." VegSource.com. 3. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, "Cancer Prevention Infographic."
