Improve Your Survival Odds with Cancer
A DIAGNOSIS
As I state in the description on my website, “We all love the idea of health and sunny skies and most of us actually live in that world until we don’t. One day we may have a pain in our chest or cramping in our gut and after a trip to our physician or the emergency room and many diagnostic tests later, we are given a diagnosis.”
Unfortunately, two friends were given their diagnoses last week.
The first was told he had follicular lymphoma, a blood cancer that affects white blood cells which help the body fight infections. Follicular lymphoma is a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma which is usually very slow growing.
The second was told she had a rare genetic disorder called, von Hippel-Lindau syndrome. It is an inherited disorder characterized by the formation of tumors and fluid-filled sacs (cysts) in many different parts of the body. Tumors may be either noncancerous or cancerous.
People with this disorder are at an increased risk of developing a type of kidney cancer called clear cell renal cell carcinoma and a type of pancreatic cancer called a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
One friend needs to treat cancer and the other needs to prevent it.
The key to both cancer prevention and treatment is to keep tumor cells from multiplying out of control while allowing healthy cells to grow normally.
According to Michael Greger, M.D., “Chemotherapy and radiation do a great job of wiping out cancer cells, but healthy cells can get caught in the crossfire. Some compounds in plants, though, may be more discriminating.”
What can you do?
REVERSE OR SUPPRESS NON-HODGKINS LYMPHOMA
University of Oxford researchers followed sixty thousand people for more than a dozen years, and found that people who consumed a plant-based diet are less likely to develop all forms of cancer. In fact, plant-based diets are associated with nearly half the risk of blood cancers.
In a different study, Yale University researchers followed more than five hundred women with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They found that the women who ate three or more vegetables a day had a 42 percent improved survival rate over those who ate less. Salads made of green, leafy vegetables and cooked greens and citrus fruits appeared most protective.
A higher dietary intake of antioxidants is associated with significantly lower lymphoma risk, whereas taking antioxidant supplements did not appear to work.
According to Dr. Greger, “When you buy antioxidant supplements, you may be doling out money to live a shorter life. Save your cash and your health by eating the real thing: food.”
In the EPIC study, of more than four hundred thousand men and women across ten countries followed for nine years, eating poultry tended to be associated with the greatest increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, all grades of follicular lymphoma, and B-cell lymphomas.
In a small Japanese study of end-stage lymphoma patients, researchers found that giving half the patients a daily pinch of nutritional yeast, kept them alive two to three months longer than those in the control group.
Therefore, sprinkling nutritional yeast on your fat-free popcorn, could be worth a try.
PREVENT PANCREATIC CANCER
Pancreatic cancer is a virtual death sentence; only about 10 percent of patients respond to chemotherapy and few survive beyond a year. This is why prevention is so important.
The NIH-AARP study, which followed 545,000 men and women aged fifty to seventy-one for a decade, found that meat consumption was associated with an increased risk of premature death from all causes, but especially cancer and heart disease.
Using this study, scientists were able to tease out that fat consumed from animal sources (including meats, dairy products, and eggs) was significantly associated with pancreatic cancer risk, but no correlation was found with the consumption of plant fats.
In a recent study, thirty thousand poultry workers were studied to see if the exposure to poultry cancer-causing viruses was associated with increased risks of deaths from liver and pancreatic cancers. This study found that those who slaughter chickens have about nine times the odds of both pancreatic cancer and liver cancer.
What about people wo eat chicken? The largest study to address that question is the EPIC study (mentioned above). The researchers found a 72 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every fifty grams of chicken consumed daily (about a quarter of a chicken breast).
In a study at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, patients with advanced pancreatic cancer were given large doses of curcumin (from the spice turmeric). Out of the twenty-one patients, only one showed steady improvement over eighteen months. That is about the same amount of success with a chemo regiment, but the curcumin caused no side effects.
Steps to take to hopefully avoid pancreatic cancer: 1) Avoid tobacco; 2) Avoid excess alcohol; 3.) Stay thin; 4.) Eat a diet very low in animal products, especially chicken; 5.) Avoid eating processed foods with refined grains and added sugars; 6.) Eat a diet rich in beans, lentils, split peas and dried fruit; and 7.) Eat ¼ teaspoon of turmeric, daily.
PREVENT KIDNEY CANCER
More than half of American adults currently aged thirty to sixty-four are expected to develop chronic kidney disease during their lifetimes. Some studies show that people with kidney disease may have a higher risk for kidney cancer.
Researchers have found three specific dietary components in declining kidney function: 1.) Eating animal protein; 2.) Eating animal fat; and 3.) High cholesterol.
People who eat a plant-based diet appear to have better kidney function. Eating animal protein can cause an overload reaction, but plant protein does not.
GET SOME EXERCISE AND SUNLIGHT
In a series of experiments, Dr. Dean Ornish found that men who were placed on a plant-based diet for a year, had blood circulating through their bodies which could suppress cancer cell growth by 70 percent – that’s nearly eight times the stopping power compared to a meat-centered diet.
Studies of women eating plant-based diets appear to strengthen their bodies’ defenses against breast cancer in just fourteen days.
These experiments that showed a strengthening of cancer defenses involved eating a plant-based diet and exercising. In the breast-cancer study, the women were asked to walk thirty to sixty minutes a day.
They teased out the effects of exercise by using three groups: a plant-based diet and exercise group, an exercise-only group, and a control group of sedentary people eating standard fare. The exercise-only group exercised strenuously for an hour a day at the gym for at least five days a week.
Blood from each group was dripped onto human cancer cells growing in a petri dish. Blood from the couch potatoes killed off about 2 percent of the cancer cells. The blood from the strenuous exercisers killed off 2,000 percent more cancer cells, but the blood of those in the plant-based diet-and-exercise group wiped out an astounding 4,000 percent more cancer cells that the control group!
Clearly exercise alone had a dramatic effect, but even those thousands of hours in the gym was no match for the plant-based diet.
Sign up to receive new blog posts directly to your inbox. Just fill in your name and e-mail address in the gray/green box and hit the "submit" button. You will then get an e-mail asking you to confirm your e-mail address. Once you do that, you will be signed up to receive new blog posts.
©2022 Melinda Coker
WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You can, as long as you include this complete blurb with it: “Melinda Coker, health coach and author of the book, Diet and Cancer: Is There a Connection?, teaches men and women around the world how to develop a healthy lifestyle.”
Sources:
American Institute for Cancer Research
Lymphoma-Action – Types of Lymphoma
Medline Plus – Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome
Michael Greger, MD, How Not to Die
National Cancer Institute
National Foundation for Cancer Research
Web MD – Follicular Lymphoma
