Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss (15 page)

What makes the data from the China Project so intriguing is that breast cancer incidence is so low in China compared with Western countries and that animal-food consumption is so much lower than in America. Even those consuming the most animal products in China consume less than half the amount Americans do. As animal-food intake increased from about once a week in the lowest third to about four times a week in the highest third, breast cancer rates increased by 70 percent. Of note is that the only difference among the diets was the addition of meat in varying amounts. Consumption of fresh vegetables in all groups was about the same, offering little chance of confounding variables. There was a strong increase in the occurrence of breast cancer mortality with increasing animal-product consumption.

In this country, we consume an enormous amount of cheese. Our record-high increase in cheese consumption is alarming: a 182 percent increase in the past thirty years.
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Cheese has more saturated fat and more hormone-containing and promoting substances than any other food, and the incidence of our hormonally sensitive cancers has skyrocketed.

In spite of studies that do not show an impressive association with small differences in fat consumption later in life, large changes early in life have huge repercussions.
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When we consider the diet consumed throughout our life, meat and dairy continue to be implicated as a strong causal factor in breast cancer.
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There is almost no breast cancer at all in populations that consume less than 10 percent of their calories from animal products.
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After reviewing many studies on this issue for the
Journal of the National Cancer Institute,
a group of prominent scientists concluded that the studies that failed to show the relationship between animal-product consumption and breast cancer suffered from methodological problems.
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We have been indoctrinated since early childhood to believe that animal protein is a nutrient to be held in high esteem. We have been brought up with the idea that foods are good for us if they help us grow bigger and faster. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The public as well as the media are confused about this issue. They continue to associate the term
better nutrition
with earlier maturity and larger stature resulting from our greater consumption of animal protein and animal fats. These unfavorable trends are repeatedly reported as positive events. Earlier writers and nutritionists have mistakenly equated rapid growth with health. I believe an increased rate of growth is not a good thing. The slower a child grows, the slower he or she is aging. Slower growth, taking longer to reach maturity, is predictive of a longer life in animal studies.
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We are finding the same thing in humans: an unnaturally rapid growth and premature puberty are risk factors for cancers and other diseases later in life. Evidence continues to mount that these same factors leading to early maturity and excessive growth in childhood increase the occurrence of cancer in general, not just breast and prostate cancer.
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Excluding malnutrition or serious disease, the slower we grow and mature, the longer we live.

The other side of the story is that it is not just the fat in animal foods that causes cancer and heart disease. Animal protein is also getting a bad rap by legitimate nutritional researchers and scientists in studies. Scientists have discovered a link between animal protein and cancer in both laboratory and human epidemiological studies, and reducing one’s consumption of animal protein slows the aging process.
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Animal-product consumption in general is proportionally associated with multiple types of cancer. A massive international study that amassed data from fifty-nine different countries showed that men who ate the most meat, poultry, and dairy products were the most likely to die from prostate cancer, while those who ate the most unrefined plant foods and nuts were the least likely to succumb to this disease.
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Another study from Germany found colon cancer and rectal cancer decreased by about 50 percent in adult vegetarians. However, a significantly greater reduction of cancer and all-cause mortality (about a 75 percent reduction) was related to being on a vegetarian diet for more than twenty years.
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The degree of protection correlated well with number of years on a vegetarian diet. Other studies on vegetarian diet in different countries show almost the same thing.
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The causes start accumulating early.

There is considerable evidence that exposure to certain outlawed chemicals, especially PCBs and DDT, may promote further pathologic changes. Women who have breast cancer have a higher concentration of these chemicals in their breast tissue than do women who do not have cancer.
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This has also been noted in Long Island, New York, where there is a particularly high rate of breast cancer. Researchers hypothesize that the increased exposure to these chemicals, still in our environment, is the result of eating coastal fish. Added to all of this is the exposure to trans fats and cancer-causing compounds that are released when meat, fish, or fowl is grilled, fried, or barbecued.
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Clearly, cancer causation is a complicated, multifactorial issue.

Researchers at the University of Tromsø in Norway report that women who exercise regularly reduce their risk of developing breast cancer substantially. Their study involved more than 25,000 women ages twenty to fifty-four at the time of their entry into the study. The researchers found that younger, premenopausal women (under forty-five years old) who exercised regularly had 62 percent less risk than sedentary women. The risk reduction was highest for lean women who exercised more than four hours per week; these women had a 72 percent reduction in risk.

Diet and exercise have a much more important role to play in cancer prevention than mammograms and other detection methods. Keep in mind that mammograms merely detect, not prevent, cancer; they show disease only after the cancerous cells have been proliferating for many years.
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By that time the majority of cancers have already spread from their local site and surgically removing the tumor is not curative. Only a minority of women who have their breast cancers detected by a mammogram have their survival increased because of the earlier detection.
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The majority would have done just as well to find it later. I am not aiming to discourage women ages fifty to sixty-five from having mammograms; rather, my message is that this alone is insufficient.
Mammograms, which do nothing to prevent breast cancer, are heavily publicized, while women hear nothing else about what they can do to prevent and protect themselves against breast cancer in the first place.

Do not underestimate the effect of a superior diet on gradually removing and repairing damage caused by years of self-abuse. Do not be discouraged just because you cannot bring your risk down to zero because of your mistakes in the past. The same thing could be said for cigarette smokers. Should they not quit smoking, merely because their risk of lung cancer can’t be brought down to zero when they quit? Actually, lung cancer rates are considerably lower (about one-fifth) in countries that have a high vegetable consumption, even though they may smoke like crazy.
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Raw fruits and vegetables offer powerful protection; leafy greens are the most protective.
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My main point is that our population has been ignoring those interventions that can most effectively save lives. We search for more answers because the ones we have found are not to our liking. Our most powerful artillery on the war against breast cancer, and cancer in general, is to follow the overall advice presented in this book and begin at as young an age as possible.

It would be difficult for anyone to disagree that superior nutrition has a protective effect against cancer. The question that remains is this: Can optimal nutrition or nutritional intervention be an effective therapeutic approach for patients who already have cancer? Can the diet you eat make a difference if you have cancer? Scientific data indicates that the answer is yes.

Researchers looking for answers to these questions studied women with cancer and found that saturated fat in the diet promoted a more rapid spread of the cancer.
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Other researchers found similar results. For a woman who already has cancer, her risk of dying increased 40 percent for every 1,000 grams of fat
consumed monthly.
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Studies also indicate that high fruit and vegetable intake improved survival, and fat on the body increases the risk of a premature death.
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Similar findings are found in the scientific literature regarding prostate cancer and diet, indicating that diet has a powerful effect on survival for those with prostate cancer.
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For humans,
too much processed food and too many animal products are toxic.

When it is consumed in significant volume, animal protein, not only animal fat, is earning a reputation as a toxic nutrient to humans. More books are touting the benefits of high-protein diets for weight loss and are getting much publicity. Many Americans wish to protect their addiction to high-fat, nutrient-inadequate animal foods. These consumers form a huge market for such topsy-turvy scientific-sounding quackery.

Today the link between animal products and many different diseases is as strongly supported in the scientific literature as the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. For example, subjects who ate meat, including poultry and fish, were found to be twice as likely to develop dementia (loss of intellectual function with aging) as their vegetarian counterparts in a carefully designed study.
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The discrepancy was further widened when
past meat consumption was taken into account. The same diet, loaded with animal products, that causes heart disease and cancer also causes most every other disease prevalent in America, including kidney stones, renal insufficiency and renal failure, osteoporosis, uterine fibroids, hypertension, appendicitis, diverticulosis, and thrombosis.
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Dairy products are held in high esteem in America. Most people consider a diet without dairy unhealthy. Without dairy foods, how could we obtain sufficient calcium for our bones? Let’s examine this accepted wisdom: is it true, or have we been brainwashed by years and years of misinformation and advertising?

Hip fractures and osteoporosis are more frequent in populations in which dairy products are commonly consumed and calcium intakes are commonly high. For example, American women drink thirty to thirty-two times as much cow’s milk as the New Guineans, yet suffer forty-seven times as many broken hips. A multicountry analysis of hip-fracture incidence and dairy-product consumption found that milk consumption has a high statistical association with higher rates of hip fractures.
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Does this suggest that drinking cow’s milk causes osteoporosis? Certainly, it brings into question the continual advertising message from the National Dairy Council that drinking cow’s milk prevents osteoporosis. The major finding from the Nurses’ Health Study, which included 121,701 women ages thirty to fifty-five at enrollment in 1976, was that the data does not support the hypothesis that the consumption of milk protects against hip or forearm fractures.
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In fact, those who drank three or more servings of milk a day had a slightly higher rate of fractures than women who drank little or no milk.