‘Cancer floored me – so I made good nutrition my business’
After surviving cancer, Dawn Russell, 45, made healthy eating a priority. Now she has celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama raving about her product
‘Just as I was about to leave my doctor’s surgery I turned back and mentioned that I had a little itchy thing on my bottom. As a part-time model
I’d been seeing a dermatologist for years and had come in for a totally unrelated skin issue. She removed the little mole for a closer investigation and off I went, forgetting all about it.
I was 24, living in New York and applying for journalism school, and I’d just done a modelling campaign with Donna Karan, a family friend. I was athletic and I felt invincible. So I was completely floored when a few weeks later
I was diagnosed with stage three [out of four] lymphatic cancer.
Suddenly, I found myself in a very different world. I had surgery to remove some lymph nodes, but the results showed they were still cancerous so I had more taken away, then more again. Ultimately, I needed four surgeries on my groin for the doctors to go deep enough to remove the cancerous lymph nodes. I was the youngest person they’d ever treated with lymph cancer to this degree.
Because of all the operations, I contracted a bone infection. It was agony. I was transferred to a hospital in Boston and I was in so much pain I even started losing my hearing. It was scary, feeling I was losing control of my body.
The one good thing that happened during that time was meeting Jamie, who I went on to marry. Looking and feeling horrific, I begged doctors to let me visit a friend, dragging my IV drip and nurse along with me. Jamie was also there and we became friends.
While the Boston hospital succeeded in killing the bone infection, it was obvious just looking at my body that I wouldn’t be able to undergo radiology or chemotherapy. That’s when I knew I had to try something else. While my friends were out leading normal lives, I got into Buddhism and yoga, and began taking care of myself.
I poured all my energy into a kind of scavenger hunt of alternative medicine. I tried everything. Any time someone said, “Oh, there’s this seed in Brazil,” I was there. But in the end I went back to basics with food, spending hours at farmers’ markets and health food stores.
I was eating more healthily than ever before – spinach, kale, blue-green algae. My skin colour returned to normal, my hair got stronger and my energy levels rose. I could walk three blocks and not be nauseous. My relationship with Jamie also strengthened. After four years together, we married in 2015, when I was 30. We came to live in England, where he’s from.
I’d always longed to be a mum, but the doctors were very concerned about me getting pregnant and my hormones being messed up. So I felt so blessed when Alexander, now
10, and then Leo, now seven, came along.
By this time, green foods had become trendy. I’d spent so much time learning about their benefits, I assumed everyone else already knew. But when friends began asking questions, I realised they didn’t. I said to Jamie, “I’ve got all this knowledge, I’ve got to use it.”
So I went to farmers, scientists and manufacturers, determined to formulate a sugar-free way of ingesting the things I knew worked – spinach, wheatgrass, kale, blue-green algae, spirulina, aloe vera, chlorella and barley grass. I wanted the real greens, not extracted powders, in a tasty form.
Over the next five years I tried 264 different prototypes before finally reaching the one that became the effervescent tablet 8Greens, which you add to water to make a drink. When even super-picky Jamie deemed it palatable, I knew I had a winner.
I never intended to launch a huge business, but it just grew until suddenly department stores in New York got wind of it and there was a bidding war to market it as a digestible beauty and health product. I was determined it would be affordable, aiming for roughly a dollar or a pound a tablet. It flew off the shelves.
By the second week, celebrities were talking about it. A well-connected friend went to a dinner at the White House and 8Greens was mentioned by Michelle Obama. Actor Zac
Efron posted about it on social media. Kim Kardashian gave it to her guests at a birthday party. It just exploded.
I felt so relieved all my hard work had finally paid off, although the celebrity market was never my aim. I move in those circles anyway, and count Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore and Helena Christensen as friends. What really makes me buzz is seeing regular mums, kids and stressed-out city workers drinking my creation. When a nurse or a grandma writes saying they have more energy, or a mum whose kids normally refuse vegetables is pleased, that’s when I get goosebumps.
We launched in the UK this year. I drink one every day myself. Of course, I don’t ever claim to have “cured” my own cancer, but it was that experience that sent me on this incredible journey, and for that I will always be grateful.’