A Tribute to the Woman Who Changed My Life

Honoring the timeless Dr. Hazel Parcells.

Anyone who knows me or has followed my career surely knows about my deep admiration and respect for my mentor, Dr. Hazel Parcells—who lived to be 106! Yesterday she would have turned 118 and I honestly thought that she would live that long! I had the absolute privilege of working with Dr. Parcells personally—and soaked up all of the wisdom that she shared. She was known as the grande dame of nutrition and I can’t think of a more fitting woman for the title.

This adaptation to the forward by Dr. Kaayla Daniels in the book Healer: The Pioneer Nutritionist and Prophet by Joseph Dispenza describes Dr. Parcells’ legacy magnificently.

“I never met Dr. Hazel Parcells, but I want to grow up to be just like her.

Dr. Parcells discovered the secrets to a long life, and lived into grand old age with strength, stamina, mental acuity, emotional balance, spiritual attunement, and meaningful, enduring accomplishment. Lest you think she was born with good genes—or blessed with unusually fine luck—the truth is this: she was diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis at 42, healed her way back to full health, and then went on to live another whole lifetime—65 years making pioneering discoveries in the fields of nutrition and alternative medicine before her death in 1996 at 106 years young.

Dr. Parcells liked to say, ‘If you want to be healthy, you need to trade your wishbone for a backbone and get to work.’ I took her advice and became healthy. I noted that she earned several advanced degrees after the age of 50 and went for my own Ph.D. I was so intrigued by her findings about the health problems cause by soy protein and soy in margarine that I researched and wrote The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America’s Favorite Health Food. It took me four years to review scientific studies spanning seven decades only to confirm what she—in her brilliance—knew back in the 1950s. So much for today’s so-called health experts touting soy as the cure-all for everything from cancer to ingrown toenails!

How did she achieve so much? By living large in the dual roles of enlightened warrior and wizard. Her warrior’s path required laser focus, high energy, unwavering commitment, uncompromising integrity and the sheer willpower to live long enough to attain her goals. The wizard’s way led her to acknowledge and feed her inner flame, tune into spirit, drop preconceptions and judgements, laugh at herself and keep her mind wide open to possibility.

Dr. Parcells believed in body rejuvenation—even healing ‘incurables’—if people would just step out of Mother Nature’s way. She considered it a ‘grave mistake’ to chase disease symptoms, choosing instead to address malnutrition, parasite infestations, pesticide poisoning, radiation sickness, toxic metal poisoning, miasms, and other unwanted by-products from Father Technology. Rather than reduce nutrition to data banks of macro and micro nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and calories, she expanded it with the simple, yet stunning, concept that it is ‘not the food in our life but the life in our food.’ What’s more, she could measure that food energy! She found it highest in traditionally prepared organic, free-range, pastured and cultured foods, and lowest in processed, packaged, fast, fractionated and fake. Surprisingly, she could bring health-promoting energy to even low-quality products with her unique food cleaning and energy charging techniques.

Moving into energy medicine, she explored homeopathy, light and color therapies, Bach Flower remedies, radionics, and other modalities, and grasped the unity of body/mind/spirit medicine long before its reinvention in the New Age. Ever humble, she never took credit for cures, preferring to quip, ‘Only taxidermists and undertakers do curing.’

Dr. Parcells kept a low profile because of the unorthodox nature of her work. She did not want to butt heads with the AMA, FDA and other medical police. She did not want to be made an example of as happened to pioneers Royal Rife, Royal Lee, Ruth Drown and Max Gerson. Word of her gifts spread anyway, and she was revered—and is still remembered—as a ‘doctor’s doctor.’”

A Birthday Thought

I will leave you with a poem written by Dr. Hazel Parcells herself.

“Time tells us that birthdays are slipping away,
That years are making us wrinkled and gray.
But science refutes this statement, it’s true,
Claims every cell tissue is each year built anew.
And birthdays, well really there’s only one,
For no man since the days of birthdays begun
Has ever been born but once in this life.
So why do we make all this trouble and strife?
Celebrate an anniversary with laughter and song.
Forget about the years as you go along.
Just realize each year you’re building anew
The living temple of God that was given to you.”