Anderson Abbott Quotes

The nutrition recommendations of the American Cancer Society (ACS) are formulated by registered dietitians trained in the food pyramid (read: Big Agriculture) model. Their corporate sponsors are the American Dairy Association, Abbott Nutrition (maker of seasonal vaccines and ibuprofen), and PepsiCo. The “quick and easy” snacks they recommend to people undergoing cancer treatment include angel food cake, cookies, doughnuts, ice cream, and microwavable snacks.16 (We are not kidding; visit their website and see for yourself.) These recommendations turn a blind eye to the many important studies (not to mention the suppressed work of Otto Warburg, PhD, MD, and Thomas Seyfried, PhD, in the field of the metabolic theory of cancer, which we detail in chapter 4; see “How Cancer Cells Gobble Glucose: The Warburg Effect”) that have proven that sugar causes—or, at the very least, can stimulate—cancer. Even a mainstream 2016 study from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center concluded that diets high in sugar are “a major risk factor” for certain types of cancers, especially breast cancer. We simply must reverse the dismissive attitude toward the role that diet and lifestyle play in cancer prevention or progression. Because it may very well be our only hope.

Leeda looked straight out of Martha’s Vineyard---all perfect cheekbones and alabaster skin with a smattering of sun-induced freckles and clothes that were totally season-appropriate. Even loose and sloppy like she was today, she looked like the kind of loose and sloppy you saw in People magazine when they caught a celebrity all tired and mussed up at the airport. Birdie, on the other hand, was curved and rosy and Renoir soft. She looked like the milk-fed farm girl that she was. The two were second cousins but nothing alike. Leeda was straight up and down, and Birdie was as gentle and easy as the rain. Leeda had grown up wearing mostly white and exceeding everyone as the glossiest, the smilingest, and the most southern of the southern belles in Bridgewater. Birdie had grown up with dirt under her fingernails, homeschooled on the orchard, her feet planted in the earth. Before Judge Miller Abbott sentenced Murphy to time on the orchard picking peaches that summer, Murphy had pegged Leeda for uptight and Birdie for weak. But their time together---picking peaches, sweating in the dorms at night, cooling off in the lake---had been like living the fable of her life. The lesson being that when you think you know more than you do, you end up looking like an idiot.

She looked at Murphy, whose crazy brown hair leapt out of her cheap wool hat like snakes in a trick can of nuts. Then she winked at Judge Abbott as if they were in on some private joke. “Murphy, you should come in for a cut before your interviews start.” Murphy squinted at Lucretia with exaggerated concern. “Do they do waxing? It looks like your mustache is growing back.

That night, a cold breeze swept into Bridgewater. The leaves went fluttering like butterflies, and Judge Abbott began to have what he later called “the orchard dreams.” Every night far into the following year, he dreamed of Jodee McGowen reclining nude by the Smoaky Lake, like she was Eve lying in a cluster of reeds in the oldest garden in the world.

Murphy biked circles around the courthouse parking lot like an evil newspaper boy from one of her favorite movies, Better Off Dead. She and Judge Miller Abbott didn't have a great history. Since she'd hit puberty, he'd seen her through two shoplifting convictions, countless underage alcohol issues, a few streaking episodes, and the time she'd mutilated the Bob's Big Boy "Big Boy.