Curt Arens / Ag Today, Special Dairy Month Edition, Northeast Nebraska News Agency / June 16, 2004
BLOOMFIELD, Neb. - Dr. Richard Franssen took the bad news pretty hard. Away from his Glenvil, NE home visiting relatives with his wife, he had an extreme episode of shortness of breath. As a veteran medical doctor - an anesthesiologist - he knew something was terribly wrong. After a visit to the emergency room and a hospital stay, doctors told him that things had to change in his life if he were to avoid a major heart attack or stroke.
After eventual surgery and lots of medication, he found himself alive - but his quality of life was gone. Sitting up one night feeling really tough and unable to sleep for the all the medication he was taking, Franssen decided he needed to explore another avenue to get his life back.
Overweight, Franssen started looking at diets to shed the pounds and change his lifestyle. He looked into everything - Atkins, South Beach, low carb, you name it. Finally he learned about the value of milk from grass-based dairies when it comes to fighting cancer, holding down cholesterol and boosting health. And he learned how locally grown, unprocessed food of all kinds could be the answer to his problems.
Franssen gave his testimony for around 40 people attending a "pasture chat" at Kelly and Cindy Bruns' grass-based dairy west of Bloomfield. "The thing about all these diets," said Franssen, "is that they are all trying to sell books." So Franssen took the good things from many of the popular diets of the day and with help from his wife, formulated a special diet that had a foundation of grass-based milk, pastured poultry, grass-fed meats and locally grown food products.
After five months of experimenting with local and whole foods, Franssen was a new man. Before his episode, he was overweight, his cholesterol was off the charts, his good cholesterol was low and his blood sugar was high.
Three weeks before the Bruns' meeting, he tested all the vitals and found his cholesterol level cut in half, his good cholesterol more than doubled and his blood sugar dropped by a third.
The most important thing for Franssen, was that he went off all his medication slowly over this time period with a doctor's guidance and now he is not using any medication, but only utilizing his own specialized diet to control the problem.
He didn't switch his diet overnight. He talked with farmers and clinicians. With no grass-dairies around Glenvil, he purchased a Jersey cow from Bruns' and milks it himself. His wife has not only supported his changes, but she helps implement them on the dinner table.
Franssen said that doctors and pharmaceutical companies these days have a pill for everything, but many times the pills interact with side effects that are nearly unbearable. Balancing Omega 3 fatty acids available in grass-based foods and Omega 6 fatty acids in most conventional food is key to good health in a diet.
"My great grandfather had a ratio (Omega 3 to Omega 6) of 1 to 2 or 3," Franssen said. "Today, we have ratios of 1 to 20 or 50."
His diet has been relatively simple. For protein, Franssen relies on grassfed red meat of all kinds, pastured poultry and eggs, fish and milk and dairy products from his own cow, as well as an ethnic cultured milk product called Kefir.
His fats come from cooking with olive oil, butter from grass milk, coconut oil, hard cheese from grass milk and some nuts in moderation. For carbohydrates he eats plenty of green asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, radishes, tomatoes and others. In moderation, he likes beets and carrots and he tries to limit corn, peas and potatoes.
But Franssen also likes fermented vegetables in sauerkraut for instance. They process wheat, oats, hull-less barley and others for cooking. They use raw honey for a sweetener and fresh or frozen fruits, particularly apples and berries of all kinds.
The Franssens stay away from sugar, processed flour foods like white bread, cakes, cookies, processed cereals and pasta. They don't use hydrogenated vegetable oil for cooking any more and they don't eat or drink foods with high fructose corn syrup.
My hospital stay for that one day cost $33,000 and my medication bill was $550 each month, he said. "I got a second chance, that's why I'm so serious about this."
Franssen knows his diet wouldn't work for everyone and he knows that medication is important for treating patients. But in his medical practice, he now has nearly 100 people at risk on his formulated diet, based on locally grown food.
Eating local food is really a change in philosophy. He said he'd only buy raw milk for instance from a farmer he knows and trusts, because he understands the integrity of the family he's buying from. "Know your farmer, that's the answer," said Franssen. "We all should have access to farm stuff and access to the farm."
