‘How I beat my back and joint pain’
Sally Norton always had an interest in doing right by her health. Even as a kindergartner, after being taught how much milk she was supposed to drink each day, she remembers running home and schooling her mother on the subject.
“I was the one kid who would geek out with my mom and eat pickled herring and yogurt,”she says. “I was a great food adventurer. I ate anything and everything, and in rather large doses. I was the kid who ate three servings of goulash and then skipped ice cream to go play.”
Although she was raised in a family that liked cooking from scratch and had the ethic of eating lots of fresh vegetables and salads, the modern world of food encroached when her mother began working several evenings a week as an optician. Sally’s job was to heat up the new-fangled TV dinners when her mother wasn’t there. But with her growing focus on healthy eating, she was concerned that TV dinners didn’t have enough vegetables.
By age nine, she had learned how to grow vegetables and was enjoying the delights of having lots of fresh beet greens and Swiss chard available from the family’s garden. By the time she was 12, however, she started to experience back and joint pain. She also started having some cognitive struggles with homework and concentration. But never in a million years did she think her problems could be related to food.
“I thought,
