Howard Straus: The Beautiful Truth
By Tamara Palmer
Jan 16, 2009
In the 1920s, Dr. Max Gerson developed the Gerson
Therapy, a methodology of boosting the immune system
largely led by an organic diet that has been at
controversial odds with conventional medicine for
decades -- despite a difficult-to-ignore track record of
helping people survive cancer and other terminal
illnesses.
The Beautiful Truth is a documentary which explores this treatment regimen. It was directed and shot by Steve Kroschel, an accomplished wildlife cinematographer and natural history filmmaker. This is his third film about the Gerson Therapy, but this time his subject hits closer to home; Garret, the 15-year-old boy who serves as the film's central figure, is Kroschel's son.
Garret's research for a home school project leads him to learn about the Gerson Therapy. The film documents his real life quest to learn why the therapy has been systematically suppressed. The camera follows Garret as he meets with those charged with the Gerson Therapy legacy: Charlotte Gerson, daughter of Dr. Max Gerson, and her son Howard Straus, who is Max's official biographer as well as the founder of the Cancer Research Wellness Institute.
Speaking with Howard Straus illuminates not only the people behind and in front of the camera in The Beautiful Truth, but also how we are quick to put our trust into corporations and agencies that might not exactly have the public health as their top priority.
The Beautiful Truth is a documentary which explores this treatment regimen. It was directed and shot by Steve Kroschel, an accomplished wildlife cinematographer and natural history filmmaker. This is his third film about the Gerson Therapy, but this time his subject hits closer to home; Garret, the 15-year-old boy who serves as the film's central figure, is Kroschel's son.
Garret's research for a home school project leads him to learn about the Gerson Therapy. The film documents his real life quest to learn why the therapy has been systematically suppressed. The camera follows Garret as he meets with those charged with the Gerson Therapy legacy: Charlotte Gerson, daughter of Dr. Max Gerson, and her son Howard Straus, who is Max's official biographer as well as the founder of the Cancer Research Wellness Institute.
Speaking with Howard Straus illuminates not only the people behind and in front of the camera in The Beautiful Truth, but also how we are quick to put our trust into corporations and agencies that might not exactly have the public health as their top priority.
Tamara Palmer: This film is so
beautifully shot that the cinematography might draw
some people in sooner than the actual health
information that's being presented.
Howard Straus: Steve [Kroschel]
lives in Alaska, which is cinematography heaven as
far as beauty is concerned. He's been doing wildlife
and landscape cinematography for many years. He did
a lot of the mountain photography in [feature films]
Vertical Limit and 7 Years in Tibet
and he also worked on Cry Wolf. So he's
worked on a lot of beautifully shot films, he's very
artistic.
TP:
Was that the first project that you know of
where he really turned the camera inward and
showed something of his own family?
HS:
Actually, this is his third Gerson documentary.
His first, The Gerson Miracle, won Best
Picture at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in
2004.
TP:
I guess what I mean to ask is: In The
Beautiful Truth, you see him behind
the camera and I'd imagine in some of his other
work, you don't see him at all?
HS:
One does see him, not in the big budget movies
but in some of his documentary work. He also
specializes in avalanche photography for
[science TV program] Nova and for
advertisements and sometimes you do see him in
front of the camera doing the avalanche work.
He's quite a fascinating guy. I call him the
Energizer bunny. He never stops moving, which in
Alaska is, I think, a requirement, or otherwise
you'll freeze solid!
TP:
Exactly! So it sounds like his son Garret has a
good foundation for being inquisitive and
exploratory, then?
HS:
Oh yes, and even more so, Steve runs a wildlife
ranch and raises everything from wolverines and
grizzly bears to caribou and lynx and foxes and
so forth and uses them for cinematography. He
also runs educational wildlife tours for
tourists. Now, you must understand that a
caribou doesn't eat the same thing as a wolf or
a porcupine or a grizzly bear, so they have to
understand the nutritional needs of the animals
in order to keep them not only healthy but
viable. They're very attuned to nutrition and
its connection with health, and that's what led
them to the Gerson Therapy in the first place.
TP:
So they didn't have somebody in their family who
had cancer?
HS:
No, it was Steve's mentor, who is known as one
of the steadiest hands on a camera in Alaska:
Bill Bacon. He's famous in Alaska for a
cameraman and used to work for Walt Disney. One
day, Steve was expressing his concerns about
being alone and being a single father and
running this huge operation all by himself and
getting on in years. And his friend said, "You
know what? You oughta look at this," and he
handed him a book by Dr. Max Gerson, my
grandfather.
Steve read that and it just jibed with everything he knew about keeping healthy with nutrition. That's when he started to live according to the Gerson Therapy, not to cure cancer or some awful disease, but just to maintain his health at an optimum level. He got such good results that after a couple of years, he just felt impelled, he said, "I want to pay back, I want to somehow bring this information to the world." How does he bring this information to the world? He uses a camera.
Steve read that and it just jibed with everything he knew about keeping healthy with nutrition. That's when he started to live according to the Gerson Therapy, not to cure cancer or some awful disease, but just to maintain his health at an optimum level. He got such good results that after a couple of years, he just felt impelled, he said, "I want to pay back, I want to somehow bring this information to the world." How does he bring this information to the world? He uses a camera.
TP:
He's also using the perspective of his son to
make some complex issues easier for normal
people viewing the film to be able to digest.
HS:
Not just normal people, but even teenagers and
younger people who are starting to wake up to
these issues. They can identify a little more
with Garret than they can with some of these
scientists who are talking about nutrition.
TP:
To that end, it's also something that could be
shown in the classroom as an alternative.
HS:
It definitely should be. Kids need to know about
this stuff. Everybody needs to know about this
stuff. If you believe what the FDA is telling
you, you're going to die. They are not out for
your health. They are out for the financial
health of the pharmaceutical companies and that
is evident in just this last week. Are you aware
that the FDA reversed its former stance warning
pregnant women and infants to stay away from
mercury? They reversed that. They turned around
and said, "No, no - mercury is perfectly safe."
No upper limit for the dosage, with no
upper limit!
Now, everybody knows that mercury is the most toxic, non-radioactive metal there is. It's a potent neurotoxin. It used to drive hatters crazy, you know, "Mad as a hatter?" The Mad Hatter was a cultural icon back in the Elizabethan and Victorian days. Because hatters, the people who used to make hats, used to work the mercury into the felt with their fingers, liquid mercury. Therefore, they absorbed huge amounts of it and they went mad and had to be institutionalized. But as far as the FDA is concerned, there's no upper limit for giving mercury to infants.
Now, everybody knows that mercury is the most toxic, non-radioactive metal there is. It's a potent neurotoxin. It used to drive hatters crazy, you know, "Mad as a hatter?" The Mad Hatter was a cultural icon back in the Elizabethan and Victorian days. Because hatters, the people who used to make hats, used to work the mercury into the felt with their fingers, liquid mercury. Therefore, they absorbed huge amounts of it and they went mad and had to be institutionalized. But as far as the FDA is concerned, there's no upper limit for giving mercury to infants.
TP:
This is an extreme of what's demonstrated and
described in the film, when experiments on
amalgam fillings in a tooth are performed so
that we can see mercury vapor come off the
tooth, and we also learn that dentists are
pressured to say that it is safe.
HS:
The reason is that it's so incredibly profitable
for these companies to make mercury amalgam
fillings that they don't want that source of
profit to go away. And since they own the FDA,
the FDA must do what they tell them. I must tell
you this: For 30 years, Congress has been
demanding, requiring, mandating, repeatedly
requesting the FDA to do safety tests on mercury
amalgam fillings. For 30 years, the FDA has been
lying, obfuscating, stalling and just not doing
it. And so in the last 30 years, the FDA has
still not tested according to the Congressional
requirement the safety and effectiveness of
mercury amalgam fillings.
TP:
Is it so low on the list of Congressional
priorities that nobody is around to enforce it?
HS:
Who is more powerful, the lobbyists for the drug
companies or the Congress people? Apparently,
it's the lobbyists. And so the Congress people
are literally selling out our health and our
sanity for campaign contributions. But that's
not a surprise, is it?
TP:
Well, I hope none of them have mercury in their
mouths.
HS:
I hope they all do! That's karma, right? The
problem is, even if everybody around you has
mercury and you don't, the mercury in their
mouths is outgassing. When they inhale, they put
it into their lungs. When they exhale, they put
it out into the air. So when you're in an
elevator with 20 people and each of the people
has 10 mercury fillings, the air is filling up
with mercury vapor whether or not you have
fillings. You absorb it anyway.
TP:
So I'm powerless no matter what? It's like dying
of secondhand smoke?
HS:
That's exactly right. And the FDA is telling us
don't worry, it's perfectly safe, no upper limit
to it. Pretty scary.
TP:
Where do we go from here?
HS:
Ha ha ha! Where do we go from here? Well, every
single one of the substances that we talk about
in the film, from aspartame and MSG to the
mercury, they're all perfectly legal and
perfectly well approved by the FDA to put in our
food, and they're lethal. GMOs, there's one for
you: Genetically modified organisms. Those are
lethal, and the animal tests that have shown
them to be carcinogenic and lethal have been
suppressed by the GMO manufacturers, who say
it's a trade secret. Trade secret? Your trade
secret is that you're killing people? I should
think they'd want to keep it secret but I should
also think that any reasonable government
wanting to protect its people should say, "No,
you can't keep that information secret. That's
killing people."
TP:
Even when ingredients are clearly labeled on a
package, people still buy it because they're
looking increasingly at price and not content.
HS:
They're not even looking at the warning labels,
are they? Let me ask you something: Do you brush
your teeth?
TP:
Of course.
HS:
Okay, and you brush it with some toothpaste that
you get at a supermarket?
TP:
Most of the time.
HS:
Okay, and you don't think about it more than
once. You just go and get what you always get at
the supermarket. But if you turn it over and you
look at the back of that toothpaste label, it
says, "Do not let children under six use this
product unsupervised. If you swallow more than
you use to brush your teeth, call your doctor or
a poison control center immediately." Every
single brand of toothpaste you get at the
supermarket says that, every single one.
TP:
So what's the best toothpaste? Is the best
toothpaste no toothpaste?
HS:
You'd be almost just as well off brushing your
teeth with a dry toothbrush to get the
mechanical action of it. All toothpaste foamers
are sodium lauryl sulfate, which is an engine
degreaser and not something you want in your
body, but they all have it in there. And many of
them have bicarbonate of soda, baking soda,
which itself is sodium and cancer needs sodium
to grow. It's amazing, it's like a minefield out
there. No matter where you put your foot, no
matter where you breathe, or what you drink, eat
or anything, they're slowly stealing your health
from you. But if you remember that the FDA just
said that if you are an infant or pregnant that
you can have as much mercury as you can and
there's no danger to it, then you must also
understand what their declaration of safety for
all the other ingredients out there means.
For more information go to TheBeautifulTruthMovie.com.
For more information go to TheBeautifulTruthMovie.com.