'Cheat Sheet' Helps Cancer Patients
Vicki Barghout, 40, a Morristown mom of two who is celebrating five years cancer free, spends quality family time with her two daughters -- (right) Olivia, 7, and (left) Elinor, 5, at the home in Morristown, NJ Monday October 26, 2015. Vicki, who has a long personal history of leading research projects for pharma companies, today runs her own company, Viver Health. It is dedicated to help others do what she did: meld the best science has to offer with back-to-basics food techniques to enhance treatment. Photo by Tanya Breen, Daily Record Staff Photographer
MORRISTOWN, NJ – In the past five years, Vicki Barghout has done far more than survive breast cancer.
The 40-year-old health economist and mother of two, who calls herself a “thriver,” is the driving force behind Viver Health, a two-year-old company that has created two laminated, colorful, 5-by-8 pocket guides—“Reduce Your Risk of Cancer: 5 Simple Steps to Boost Your Health” and “Your Guide to Healthy Eating: 5 Simple Steps to Boost Your Health.”
They are chock-full of facts, tips, pictures, and infographics, a distillation of the very best evidence-based, food-as-medicine research on the planet.
In January, Viver—the name means “life” or “rebirth”—will launch an app of the same name in app stores. Designed to be a cancer patient’s companion, the app will contain all the food information in the guides as well as other features.
Barghout lives the information in the guides. For instance, she eats at least two-and-a-half cups of cruciferous, disease-fighting vegetables a day. These veggies include bok choy, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collard greens, and kale.
Next to the stove in her Morristown home is a bottle of avocado oil. She cooks with it because it has a high smoke point, meaning it doesn’t start to oxidize and break down until it hits 450 degrees F. Oxidizing may cause some damage to cells. It says so at OncoLink.org. Barghout doesn’t use oils with low smoke points.
“Look at my range of motion,” she said, rotating her two arms fully back and forward. “Most mastectomy patients can’t do that.”
So why can she? Because she worked out with a personal trainer during a crucial period —from the time she started chemo in May 2010, just three weeks after giving birth to her second daughter, to the date of her double mastectomy operation in September of that year.
Risk Reduction
The vibrant Barghout isn’t bragging. Far from it. Thing is, she wants what she had — a holistic, healthy outcome — for breast cancer patients and all cancer patients everywhere. So she did what she could to make it easy for people to move and eat and live in a way that optimizes their health.
“Good nutrition and lifestyle changes can yield a 50 percent reduction in the risk of recurrence of some cancers,” Barghout said. “That’s something, isn’t it? It’s straight from the Journal of Clinical Oncology.”
She also knows, from analyzing claims data for breast cancer patients through the years, that the average Body Mass Index (BMI) for someone with breast cancer is 29.
“That’s high,” Barghout said. “Obesity is really linked with cancer.”
Barghout’s personal motive was clear and strong: she was not taking any chances with her health. She and her husband have two daughters to raise.
“I have no choice. I have to be healthy,” Barghout said. “I want to be around in 20 years. I want to be around till I’m 90. I set high goals and we knew that wasn’t going to work with the way I’d been living.”
Right through that last pregnancy, she was holding down a busy, stressful corporate job that came with lots of deadlines and responsibilities.
“When you’re working in that type of environment, you’re drinking a pot of coffee every day,” she explained. “I was traveling all the time. I was very stressed. I didn’t prioritize myself. Most people don’t. No one I know goes to the gym. At dinnertime, everyone’s like: ‘I’ve got to pick something up at ShopRite.’ When I got diagnosed, I no longer could do that.”
The Diagnosis
On April 8, the day before she gave birth, Barghout put her hand on her breast. There it was: a lump that felt like a marble.
“That’s not a good sign,” she said. She knew about signs. She knew about cancer. After all, she ran the health economics and pricing division for all the cancer products Novartis produced in the U.S. She’d had more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles published.
She’d worked with top people in oncology, so she knew the statistics, too, including the progression-free, and overall, survival rate for patients like her.
Before long, the then-35-year-old mother understood what had happened to her and realized the enormity of the challenge before her. She’d had a miscarriage and, three months later, got pregnant for the third time.
“They think my hormone level never went down,” she said. “At the same time, I was eating badly, and then there was the stress.”
So doctors decided to treat the cancer as if it had advanced to Stage 3 and had lymph node involvement, though it was difficult to tell for sure in her post-birth, high-estrogen state. Her team decided on a potent ACT chemo regimen, and because Barghout’s cancer was aggressive, Herceptin. Surgery was part of the plan, too.
“I had two kids at home and I knew, even during treatment, I had to able to pick up these kids and maintain my independence and daily activities,” Barghout explained.
She told the doctors she would follow their plan. She knew she couldn’t control the medicine she had to take. But she kept asking what else she could do to get healthy.
“No one could really answer,” Barghout said. “I heard, ‘Stay the course,’ ‘Just be happy,’ ‘Do what you need to do.’ As a very educated patient who was working in the field, I was having a difficult time getting answers. I knew there was an unmet need.”
Everything changed when she reached out to Dr. Beth DuPree, a renowned breast surgeon, patient advocate, and integrative medicine champion at Holy Redeemer Health System. While traditional medicine focuses on treating disease, integrative medicine emphasizes what makes people well.
Vicki Barghout, 40, a Morristown mom of two who is celebrating five years cancer free, spends quality family time with her two daughters -- (right) Olivia, 7, and (left) Elinor, 5, at the home in Morristown. Photo by Tanya Breen, Daily Record Staff Photographer
‘Cliffs Notes of Nutrition’
Dr. DuPree, founder of The Healing Consciousness Foundation and a frequent contributor to NBC Nightly News, believes in using both approaches. At the Breast Health Program at Holy Redeemer, she already had begun healthy cooking classes for cancer patients, firmly believing that nutrition, exercise, and stress management are essential for everyone’s health.
At one point, she recalled, the program decided to create a cookbook that focused on eating for a healthy life.
“So Vicki started doing the research,” Dr. DuPree recalled. “I said that if we’re going to call it healthy cooking, we need to have the data to back it up. For the love of God, she came in with more than 300 peer-reviewed journals. I told her I was a busy doctor and didn’t have time to read all 300 papers.
“Nor were my patients going to be able to digest all this information on food, no pun intended,” she added. “For people to change their behavior, they have to understand it. I told her we needed the CliffsNotes of nutrition. Nobody had done it. Vicki did. She’s brilliant.”
Barghout, who has a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health, spent two years creating what she calls a “cheat sheet” for people who want to be — or stay — healthy. She drew upon what she knew from her own work in big pharma in the areas of oncology and gastrointestinal health.
The Viver guides, she said, were well thought out: They fit easily in a purse. They’re very visual. At $11.95, they’re affordable. They’re laminated, too.
“When you’re in chemo, you need something durable because things are always spilling,” Barghout said.
App Time
When Barghout showed her Viver guides to her old Novartis colleague Jean-Manassé Theagene, who was once associate director of global marketing for the company, new possibilities opened up.
Since they worked together, Theagene had founded 360Medlink, a company that specializes in developing apps for the healthcare industry. Like Barghout, he, too, had developed a newfound empathy with patients after he’d had surgery for a ruptured Achilles tendon.
“I thought the Viver guide for cancer patients was excellent,” Theagene recalled. “At that point two people in my family were going through a battle with cancer. My father-in-law had prostate cancer around that time, so I shared the guide with him, and he really liked it.”
Next, Theagene envisioned and built, gratis for his old friend, of whom he was proud, the company website. Then together they conceived of an app that could be a companion for cancer patients that included the Viver guide, recipes, highlights on how to eat and cook, calendars related to doctor visits and meals, and more.
The recipes for the site were created just for Viver by another luminary drawn into the project—Celebrity Chef Hans Rueffert, whose recipes use the healthful ingredients in the Viver guide and can all be made in five to 10 minutes.
These days, as she works on developing Viver, Barghout stays true to living what she’s preaching. She eats mindfully and well, rises early every morning to exercise, and, once a month, indulges in some form of mindful, stress-busting practice from a Reiki session to craniosacral therapy.
She also stresses the importance of family involvement and support, for the good health of all involved.
“All we did during that one year I was sick wouldn’t have been possible without the community, without the support of my husband,” Barghout said. “My mom came in. My mother-in-law came in. My husband is from Sweden so even his aunt came and stayed with us. We had people living with us for about a year.”
She also sticks to the basics and isn’t shy about sharing what she knows, even the basic stuff. Take sugar, for instance. It feeds cancer, she said, advising people to have protein when they eat something sweet to smooth out the sugar rush.
Loved ones should know, Barghout explained, that giving someone with a cancer diagnosis cakes and cookies to make them feel better is ill advised.
“When you get scans, they give you a liquid to drink,” she said. “That’s glucose. It’s actually sugar and it goes through your body and then they see where it lights up. They give you that because they know the tumors are going to take it in. If sugar is what they give you to spot cancer, what does that say?”
Lorraine Ash: 973-428-6660; lash@dailyrecord.com