RebelRabble's Flow

I’m getting more and more interested in the way our diet relates to cancer.

This is a touchy subject as people don’t like to be preached to.  I think it’s good to be exposed to the theories so you can decide for yourself; the huge effect diet can have on cancer certainly struck me as something plausible.

Do you ever wonder why Japanese in Japan have the lowest cancer rate in the developed world, and yet by the time they have lived in America for 2 generations their cancer rates catch up to the national average?

The China Study (A study on diet in relation to health)
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Anti-cancer (on tailoring your diet to fight and prevent cancer)
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The books above talk about how the Western diet could be linked to our rising cancer rates.  Some big factors are the over-prevalence of animal protein and hormones in our diets, which appear to:

a) feed cancer cells that might otherwise sit harmlessly in our bodies.  Cancer cells appear to multiply at a much higher rate in the presence of animal proteins.

b) raise our own hormone levels to be alarmingly high so that as we age we have ‘further to fall’. (As we age our hormones take a dive - particularly at menopause, but men’s hormones also fall naturally).  A large change in hormone levels seems to be related to the development of cancer in hormonal hot spots (breast, prostate etc)

Furthermore, scientists are discovering ‘super-foods’ which can strengthen the body’s immune system, such as shiitake mushrooms, ginger, and garlic.  Infact people undergoing chemotherapy in Japan are prescribed a shiitake mushroom extract as par-for-the-course.

The human body is equipped with NK cells (Natural Killer cells - a type of white blood cell) which seem to recognise cancer cells and destroy them.   If this is true, then chemotherapy does just as much harm as good - along with cancer cells it also obliterates the immune system.  No wonder there is only a 5% increased survival rate over people who don’t undergo the treatment.

Apart from strengthening the immune system, there are also foods that prevent the growth of blood vessels that feed a tumour.  This is called “anti-angiogenesis”, explained superbly by William Li in this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html