Foods That Fight Pain by M.D. Neal Barnard

Author:M.D. Neal Barnard [Neal Barnard, M.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307556226
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 1998-02-04T21:00:00+00:00

USING FOODS AGAINST CANCER

Cancer begins when one cell starts multiplying out of control. It may be in the prostate gland, the lung, the breast, the digestive tract, or anywhere else. It divides over and over, becoming a mass that invades neighboring tissues. Eventually, some of the cancer cells break off and spread to other parts of the body, a process called metastasis.

One in three adults in Western countries develops cancer. This is a huge increase over statistics from years past and very different from the experience in countries where Western eating habits have not yet taken hold.

The National Cancer Institute has set out to analyze how much of our cancer risk is due to genetics and how much is due to factors that we can potentially control, e.g., smoking, diet, X rays, radon, etc. According to the best assessments, 80 to 90 percent of cancers are attributable to environmental factors, if we define our environment to include our diets and our smoking habits. Thirty percent of cancers are caused by tobacco, including cancers of the lung, mouth, throat, kidney, and bladder. Even more cases—from 30 to 60 percent—are caused by foods. Cancer of the prostate, breast, ovary, uterus, colon, stomach, and even lung, among other sites, are linked to specific kinds of foods that encourage the growth of cancer cells. Food is not the only cause of cancers at these sites, but it contributes along with toxic exposures, radiation, genetic vulnerabilities, and other factors.

Clues about how foods affect cancer come from many different kinds of studies. Researchers have compared cancer rates of various countries where diets differ greatly, for example, Japan and the United States. To separate diet from genetics, they then studied people who had moved from Asia to the United States and adopted Western eating habits. They also studied the diets of cancer patients and compared them to those of other people living in the same community. It has become abundantly clear that certain foods promote cancer, while others tend to be protective.

We can use this information to reduce the odds of ever developing cancer. And if you have been diagnosed with cancer, we also have information on how foods influence its course, which is vitally important when your goal is to prevent a recurrence, become free of pain, or minimize the effect of the cancer on your life. We know much more about how foods help prevent cancer than about how they influence it after it has been diagnosed, but there is certainly a great deal of important information about both.

The kinds of cancer that are most strongly linked to diet are those that arise in organs that are controlled by sex hormones, i.e., the prostate, breast, uterus, and ovary, and those that begin in organs involved with the digestion of food, i.e., the esophagus, stomach, colon, liver, and pancreas. However, eating habits have been shown to influence other kinds of cancer as well.

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, let me encourage you to work with your doctor to individualize your treatment and to take a long look at how nutrition might help.

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