Christina Cooks 

Christina Pirello infuses the seventh season

of her popular cooking show with a Mediterranean flair

By Anna Christopher

When Christina Pirello was diagnosed with acute leukemia at the age of 26, she started packing her belongings with the intent of spending her final days in Tuscany. That plan changed, however, when a colleague

introduced her to a friend, Robert, who swore by a macrobiotic diet.

The book Robert gave Christina -- The Cancer Prevention Diet by Michio Kushi -- immediately enthralled her, and she decided to give macrobiotics a try. Two months after starting the diet, doctors began to notice a significant change in Christina's blood; after a year and a half, tests revealed no sign of cancer cells; and more than 20 years later, Christina, who married Robert Pirello on New Year's Eve in 1987, is still cancer free.

Now entering the seventh season of her Emmy Award-winning public television program Christina Cooks, the ingredient-conscious chef continues to introduce viewers to a style of whole-foods cooking that is not only healthy, but also delicious and easy to do. This season's menus -- which Christina

says were purposely designed to be "supermarket friendly" -- take on a decidedly Mediterranean flair, and many recipes were adapted from Christina's own Italian heritage.

Here, the fiery host dishes about her love of whole foods, the importance of eating well and behind-the-scenes fun on the Christina Cooks set.

When you were diagnosed with leukemia in 1983, you were introduced to a macrobiotic diet. What sorts of foods were you eating before the cancer diagnosis, and what was a typical menu after?

I'd been vegetarian since I was 14 years old, but what that meant to me was Diet Dr. Pepper, Snickers bars, pizza and an occasional salad. I lived on junk food, and as long as it didn't have a face, I ate it. I grew up in a household where we always cooked, and when I left home at 18 I thought, 'I'm done with this. I'm not going to be Donna Reed my whole life.' Be careful what you wish for, right?

After I was diagnosed, the typical day would involve brown rice or whole-wheat pasta, raw salads, cooked veggies, cooked beans -- lentils and chickpeas -- and tofu, which I never imagined I would ever eat in my life. I cooked a lot more, but what I moved from was junk food to a balanced diet that included protein, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, which I was totally unconscious of before. You figure you're a vegetarian, you're healthy, but I lived on sugar.

Many of this season's recipes have a Mediterranean feel. Why did you decide to focus on this type of cooking for the seventh season?

What we've discovered over the years is that the more foreign we make the ingredients and the recipes, the more difficult it is for people to actually discover healthy cooking for themselves. It's one thing for them to watch and be entertained, and it's something else for them to look at the recipe and go, 'I could do that, and it would be good, and my family would eat it.' So we decided to make this series...I'm going to call it supermarket friendly.

You grew up in an Italian household, so are you able to use some of your family's recipes but substitute whole foods for the traditional ingredients?

Absolutely. More than I ever thought I would be able to. It's funny…my grandmother would be looking down and going, 'Wow, making lentils are ya?,' just the way she did went I was growing up. I'm able to use a lot more of my own culinary history, and that's what this book's about, actually. Most of the recipes in there are founded in my family.

How do you make a traditional Italian dish like lasagna using organic ingredients?

I tend to not do those dishes so much. You can -- there are tofu lasagna dishes that are amazing, and soy cheeses that are astonishingly good. To me, and this is just me, I'm not real big on fake foods. Like, if it's going to be lasagna, it should be lasagna. You can do them, and they're acceptable, but you're never going to make tofu lasagna and feed it to somebody who eats lasagna and have them be fooled.

Were the goals this season to show people that organic ingredients are out there, they are accessible, and you don't have to go to a specialty store?

And, that it's way easy. Most everything that we did you can buy in your supermarket with very few exceptions. You can even find tofu in the supermarkets now. We wanted to make it very easy and approachable and friendly. Our health in this country is in such…we're at such a crisis level, that I just wanted it, first of all, to be appetizing.

There are so many popular diet crazes out now like Atkins and South Beach. How does the whole-foods method compare? Why do you think this is a healthier alternative?

When you take a whole-foods approach -- which means just eating whole, unprocessed food -- what you discover is a way of eating that helps you get to your ideal weight and is sustainable for the rest of your life, both in a way that's appealing to you, and is also good for your health.

My concern with high-protein diets over time is the long-term effects on people's health. Look, they're great for losing five pounds and getting into that little black number in two weeks. But people can't go on a high-protein diet and stay on it for the rest of their lives. They just can't. It's too much saturated fat.

I'm not even advocating vegetarianism. People are going to eat meat; they're going to do what they want to do. For me, it's important to compound that with lots of vegetables and some whole grains, which helps with fiber, and helps the body to get rid of all that protein. We're suffering bone loss at epidemic rates because of high-protein diets. Heart disease is the number one killer of both men and women, and high-protein diets can't fight that. Eating a diet that's appropriate to humans is much more effective long term -- we have to stop looking for the quick fix.

What do you think are the top food mistakes Americans make? For someone who's just starting to diet, what are the first few things they should cut out?

The first thing people should do is to start reading labels, and eliminate foods that have unnecessary sugar in them because sugar depletes us of minerals. Peanut butter doesn't need to have sugar in it. Mayonnaise and tomato sauce don't need to have sugar in them. Read labels, and if it doesn't make sense to you that there's sugar in that ingredient list, buy a brand that doesn't have it.

In my ideal world people would give up dairy food completely, because it's not natural for us and it is the cause of so many things from allergies to earaches. Chemicals in processed foods -- if you can't pronounce it, you probably don't want to eat it. If your ingredient panel reads like War and Peace, you want to think about buying something that has fewer ingredients.

But the most important thing would be to walk into the produce section and add vegetables to your diet. I don't care if they're raw, cooked, sautéed, but the more vegetables you add, the more moisture and vitamins and minerals you get. Whatever you eat that might not be the most optimal, with vegetables in your diet you get to sort of flesh your system out. Your skin gets better, and your hair gets more beautiful, and everything sort of functions better with the combination you get from fresh fruits and veggies.

Many of this season's programs focus on maintaining health for specific organs, whether it's the lungs, kidneys or liver. Is that culled from your own experiences?

It's all based in my experience in Chinese medicine and acupuncture. There are certain foods that have certain qualities that are particularly nourishing to the lungs, and particularly nourishing to the kidneys, or to the intestines, so that your body can -- with all the nutrients that nature has to offer us -- take in what it needs and have each organ benefit. All of these organs work together in a network, but each one has its own specific needs to be able do its job well.

This season you have singer-songwriter Jon Michaels accompany you as you cook at the end of the show. I'm sure that added a whole different element on the set.

When I met Jon in Nashville, I was so taken by his music and by him, and I really wanted to help to get him seen. So I said to him one day, on an impulse, 'Why don't we have you perform on the show?' And then I went to my director and he said, 'That's great. How are you planning to do that exactly?' And I thought, 'I don't know. I really don't know.'

A bit later, Jon was in town playing a concert, and I was cooking dinner and I said to him, 'Get in here and sing for your supper. Get in here and practice.' So I was cooking and he was playing in the kitchen, and I called the director and said, 'Oh my God! I got it! He should play while I'm in the kitchen. That's what we do at my house. He sits on the counter and just plays.' So that's what we ended up coming up with. When I do the last recipe of the show, he comes on and jokes around with me and plays. We tease him that he's not going to get food until he plays, or that he's better than a radio. And, on the set, it was just like a whole new energy was brought to the show. We have a great time with the show anyway, but now there was this whole celebratory element at the end. Adding music was a nice way to lift the energy up so it didn't get too lecture-y. You know, 'Don't eat this, it's bad for you.' I think it will make people see that living a healthy life is really very cool. You feel good, you're happy, and it's like a big party.

On your Web site, I read that you and your husband Robert host healthy vacations.

They're the greatest things in the world. We have two places that we go to currently -- Tuscany and Belize. We always go to the Caribbean in the winter, and we discovered Belize last year, and it's just heaven on earth. We provide people with two or three meals a day, depending on where we are.

How many people do you take?

We limit them to 26, and then I have a staff of four that comes along. For one of our trips we had 43 people, and what I discovered was that there were people on the trip that I met long enough to say hello, but I never got to interact with them because I was too busy -- too much food to cook, too much to do. So with 25 or 26 we have a very nice group. We've had people form lifelong friendships on these trips because they eat together, they hang together, they party together. And in Italy, they see all the sights that they could want to see -- Siena, Florence, Rome. It's so interesting to see how when people share food, they become this one group that hangs together, and travels together.

For more information, visit http://www.christinacooks.com.