The Apostle of “Clean Food”

Written By David Greisman

When Terry Walters was 19 years old, she was a fit teenager who played lacrosse and considered herself athletic. But her father and grandfather had heart disease. And her mother insisted that she have her cholesterol level checked.

It was high.

“I wasn’t going on medicines for the rest of my life to regulate cholesterol,” said Walters, now 43. “I decided there had to be a connection with what I was eating, and if I changed what I ate, I wouldn’t need the medicine, and I’d be fine. I tried many different diets. I was macrobiotic. I was vegan. I was vegetarian. I tried them all to see what effect they had on my own body. It was evident that the dietary changes I was making were helping.”

Still, a diet of kale and brown rice did not satisfy Walters’ palate. She figured there had to be a better way. Eventually, she found it.

Walters favors what she calls “Clean Food,” recipes she says bring people closer to the source of what they eat, with as little processing and as few additives as possible.

“It’s simply to get the most nutrition out of the food and to be able to maintain balance,” says Walters, who lives in Avon, Conn., with her husband, Chip, and their two daughters, who are 9 and 11. A lecturer on food and diet, Walters spoke earlier this year at Carroll Hospital Center in Westminster.

“I talk about ÔClean Food’ as a scale,” Walters says. “We pick it from the earth. That is where it’s cleanest. There is some processing. You can’t just eat a grain of rice picked from the earth. You have to take off the outer hull and boil it in water. But you could eat it in that form.

“If you process it a little more, you might find that same rice in bread or pasta or cereal. You’ve taken away more color and taste, and you have less nutritional value to access,” she says. “The food close to the source comes naturally in a rainbow of colors and has all five tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter and pungent. And the farther from the source it gets, the more you lose that natural color and the taste.”

Walters’ focus was not always on nutrition. She had studied business, psychology and religion at the University of Rochester in New York, and she went on to earn her master’s degree in business communications and public relations from Emerson College in Boston.

About a decade ago, a friend gave her a brochure for the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York City. Walters enrolled two weeks later.

She had already been eating healthily. Her new course of studies validated much of what she was doing.
Walters helped her friends with their diets. “I would say, this looks very good, but if you get more dark, leafy greensÉ and they’d look at me as if I had three heads – ÔThat’s great,’ they’d say, Ôbut how do I cook that?’ ”
Her nutritional message spread via word-of-mouth. She showed friends how to buy the food, how to store it and how to cook it.

Soon, Walters started teaching cooking classes, which led to another project.

“I did not start out to write a cookbook,” said Walters. “People would say, ÔI’ve got your handouts all over my kitchen. Can’t you bind this somehow?’ I actually took four years of recipes and information and sent them to a friend of mine who’s a designer. By the time we were done, we had this cookbook.”

“This cookbook” is titled – what else? – Clean Food. It was released in October 2007. The first printing sold out.

Walters also does private health counseling and public speaking. She speaks about three to four times a month to community groups, at hospitals and colleges and to athletic organizations. Walters has also been featured on local news shows. Her attention to nutrition has become a full-time job.

Walters’ nutritional basics consist of eating a rainbow of color, eating all five tastes and eating as close to the source as possible.

She counts as her “heavy hitters” grains such as brown rice, oats and barley; vegetables, including, but not limited to, dark, leafy greens (though not spinach or chard, which she says contain an acid that pulls minerals from the body); protein from legumes, nuts, seeds, butters, fish, fowl and meat; sea vegetables such as kombu and nori; condiments such as ground flaxseed and extra virgin olive oil; and fruits such as apples, pears, lemons and berries.

“If people go to the grocery and spend more time at the perimeter of the store, they’ll automatically be buying more clean food,” said Walters. “Your fresh produce, your meat, your dairy, all of that’s at the perimeter of the store.

“Most of what’s in the middle aisles of the grocery store is salty and sweet,” she said. “It’s highly processed. It doesn’t come from the green kind of plants. It comes from the cement kind of plant. That’s not something the body can translate easily; sometimes not at all.”

If people can picture how their food grows, Walters said, then they know their bodies can translate the nutrients, break them down, use them and then eliminate the rest. If they cannot picture how their food grows, she said, they should know that their bodies will sometimes get what nutrients they need, but at other times, they will have acidity, imbalance and illness.

As for herself, Walters still gets her cholesterol level checked regularly.

“The reality is that I maintain my health with my diet,” she said. “If I stray significantly, it [her cholesterol level] goes up. It never goes down to where I wish it would go. I have the ability to maintain it, but not to lower.”

And her daughters have taken to “Clean Food,” too.

“My oldest’s favorite food is tofu kale lasagna,” said Walters. “My youngest loves collard greens. But I will admit, it took two years of putting kale and collards on the table and having them reject it.”