https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Pop-pop-fizz-fizz-Cancer-survivor-says-6575102.php
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz: Cancer survivor says "8G" bubbly drink is path to better health
By Carolyne Zinko
Updated 9:56 am PDT, Saturday, October 17, 2015
Cancer survivor and former model Dawn Russell created dietary supplement 8G after finding that eating leafy greens helped her to feel better during her recovery from surgery. Russell, the wife of British aristocrat and environmental investor Lord James Russell appears at Nordstrom at the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Oct. 17. Her product is sold exclusively at Nordstrom's through January and is also available at www.8greens.com. less
Cancer survivor and former model Dawn Russell created dietary supplement 8G after finding that eating leafy greens helped her to feel better during her recovery from surgery. Russell, the wife of British ... more
Photo: Carolyne Zinko, San Francisco Chronicle
Your parents always told you to eat your vegetables—but 20 cups of broccoli, seven cups of lima beans and 10 cups of asparagus a day?
It was enough to make a group of well-heeled women at a Presidio Heights lunch pause over their organic squash and pesto soup, visualizing the sheer volume of vegetable matter.
But that is what the guest of honor, cancer survivor Dawn Russell, advocates, in a sense.
Russell is the creator of 8G, a new dietary supplement that comes in effervescent tablets that dissolves in water and contain dehydrated spinach, wheatgrass, kale, blue green algae, spirulina, chlorella, barley grass and aloe vera. Each tablet also promises to deliver as much vitamin C as five oranges, as much B6 as 20 cups of broccoli, as much B3 as 18 cups of carrots, as much B6 as seven cups of lima beans, as much B12 as nine cups of milk and as much zinc as 10 cups of asparagus.
Only 9 percent of Americans eat the recommended two to three cups a day of vegetables and only 13 percent eat the recommended one to two cups of fruit, according to a July 2015 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With the juice craze taking off in recent years, Americans have recently begun drinking their fruits and veggies — in drinks that typically contain sugar, too.
The tablets, which sell for $12.50 for a tube of 10, are aimed at helping everyone — from Russell's jet-set friends to health and fitness junkies to people who just eat junk food — get more vegetable-derived nutrients into their systems every day, at a reasonable price and with only 9 calories a tablet.
Russell's product, five years in the making, launched in the U.S. on Oct.9 and will be sold exclusively at Nordstrom's until January 9 (and online at www.8greens.com). She will appear at Nordstrom at the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Saturday, Oct. 17, but made her first pitch at the home of her longtime friend, Sako Fisher, president of the San Francisco Symphony and a Stanford University trustee. Guests included philanthropist Eliza Chang; Ann Paolini, an executive at the RealReal consignment clothing website; painter Tjasa Owen; documentary filmmaker Annie Costner; and Harper's Bazaar contributor Tatiana Sorokko.
Over soup, an entree of salad, sauteed kale and poached salmon, and a dessert of custard with organic pears from Fisher's garden, Russell, 41, said she had a personal interest in developing the product.
At 25, the then-Manhattan resident and former Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan model was diagnosed with stage 3 lymphatic cancer. She underwent surgery but developed a bone infection that prevented her from undergoing chemotherapy or radiation. In the bid to improve her health, she spent four years trying a variety of alternative therapies. After consulting with Dr. Woodson Merrell at the Department of Integrative Medicine at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, she began acupuncture, meditation and a Mediterranean diet.
As guests plunked their tablets into glasses of water and watched it turn pale green, Russell told them that consuming large amounts of greens, including blue-green algae (30,000 units three times a day) was the first thing that made her feel better.
According to Medline Plus, a health information site from the National Library of Medicine, blue-green algae is used to treat a wide variety of health conditions, but at present, "there isn't enough scientific evidence to determine whether or not they are effective for any of them."
An abstract from the Cardiovascular Therapeutics journal in 2010 stated that "the antioxidant and/or anti-inflammatory activities of spirulina were demonstrated in a large number of preclinical studies. However, a limited number of clinical trials have been carried out so far to confirm such activities in humans."
But nationally renowned physicians Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Michael Roizen are famous for their contention that food is medicine and specific choices can lead to better health.
Hyman goes so far as to say that such phytonutrients are "special plant chemicals that are not calories, protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, but special molecules that interact with your biology, special molecules that act like switches on your DNA to heal your body."
If you are what you eat, there's probably no harm in drowning yourself in leafy foods like arugula: one cup contains 6 calories and 10 percent of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A.
Sorokko certainly wanted to spread the word to her relatives in meat-and-potatoes Russia.
"I'm going to buy a case of it for my friends and family there," she said. "They don't have enough greens there for sure."
Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: czinko@sfchronicle.com