Slowing Cancer Growth by Vegetables

November 12, 2012Slowing Cancer Growth by Vegetables Reference:  Barnard, Nutrition CancerSoliman Evid Based Alternative Med To detect a cancer, you need about a billion cells.  That size a lesion can be picked up on mammogram.  To get to a billion, you have to have cells double about 30 times. (Try it on your calculator.)  A cancer cell doubles in about 30 to 500 days.  If it doubles in 30 days, you only need 30 months to get from one cancer cell to a detectable lesion.  If it takes 365 days to double, your tiny cancer will take 30 years to develop to detectable size.  So, ask yourself whether you want your inevitable cancer to multiply at 30 day doubling time, or 365 day doubling time. Just about all men have some prostate cancer in them when they die.  But there remains quite a difference between different cultures in the rate at which men die FROM their cancer, versus WITH their cancer.   The same data holds true for breast cancer.  It has been estimated that at least a third of women have some detectable cancer in their breasts by age 30.  It may have been there all along, just growing very, very slowly.  The whole story with cancer may not be that we get it or not.   We all have it.  The question is whether our bodies are welcoming hosts that make the cancer at home and provide it with all the nutrients it needs, and take away all its impediments. That’s what Dr Barnard describes in this delightful little study.  He took blood from folks eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) and dripped it onto little cultures of breast cancer cells.  Result: 8 day dividing time.  Wicked disease.  Next try,  vegan diet with daily exercise.  In just two weeks, the cancer cells slowed their growth by 20% when the folks with the cancer started diet and exercise.   Their IGF-1 (growth hormone) levels dropped dramatically.  When Dr Soliman tried that experiment, he took prostate cancer cells and added the IGF-1 back and sure enough, the diet and exercise beneficial effect went away.   Their conclusion was that the vegan diet slowed the rate of cancer cell growth and concordantly increased the rate of cell death in cancer cells dramatically.  These results might well be mediated by the growth hormone. When you add all these effects together, taking into account different researchers findings, you can project that a long term vegan diet will lower the rate of cancer double by as much as 70%.  This is in support of Colin Campbell’s findings from the Philippines where he found that children eating less than 5% animal protein got cancer from aflatoxin at dramatically lower rates than children eating high animal protein diets. What is the magic of plants?  Is it the multitude of phytonutrients, flavonoids and other antioxidants?  Or is it something simpler?  How about acid – base balance?  How about plants just making your body more alkaline?  Probably not your blood, but your urine and the buffers in your blood.  That would be my bet. WWW.  What will work for me?  My goal is to die WITH my cancers, and have them simply be well-behaved, quite little devils: like good children.  Seen but not heard.   I can accept that we are all getting them all the time.  It appears that vegan eating has an effect that we can’t quantify fully yet, but dramatic lowering of cancer doubling time is possible.  Cutting down our diets to less than 5% animal, and no trans fats and no sugar is pretty hard to do in America.  The value may be there to give it a try.  It likely will work better if you start before you have the obvious, detectable cancer.