CHAPTER 9 
“Low-fat diets cure cancer.”
“Eating twigs and berries like a vegan hippie can eradicate it, too.”
“If it’s really bad, you can hop the border for a jillion cancer-cure cocktails that are so good the U.S. government had to ban them for fear of losing money to the competition.”
The natural cure camp is always promoting wide-eyed theories. But very little is based on science. It’s mostly hype and hope. The same can be said of the conventional medicine camp.
“Chemotherapy drugs have a great success rate and are a good bet in the fight against cancer.”
“Radiation will curtail cancer’s deadly path.”
“Painkillers known as NSAIDs can halt cancer growth in its tracks.”
“Early detection can help you live longer.”
“The war on cancer has made great strides in preventing this pandemic killer.”
Corny conventional cancer cures abound. And as with the natural cure purveyors, very little is based on science. It’s mostly hype and hope. Whether natural or conventional, all cancer cures are ripe for the taking as they appeal to emotion, not logic. But who’s to blame?
Cancer is a gargantuan topic, and very few people have wrapped their brains around its ever-expanding politics, biology, and biochemistry. Inundated with the barrage of information and choices, most cancer patients simply get scared and either “jump the border” or “get chemo.” Very few realize what they’re doing or why they are doing it. In this wake of blind faith, such decisions may be more dangerous than cancer itself. Don’t roll the dice with your life.
Whatever you choose in your avoidance or fight against cancer, make sure it’s done with logic, not emotion. The wrong choice can be the difference between life and death. While every cancer differs in type, stage, and required treatment (natural or otherwise), some “universal cancer truths” can arm you with the logic needed to make the right choice—whatever your situation. But first, you need to learn the truth about cancer, rather than blindly fear it.
CANCER UNCOVERED
You started out as a single cell. It contained all the information and instructions required to make you who you are today. This “how-to guide” was stored as DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), a tightly coiled strand—measuring up to 3 feet in length—jammed into the microscopic cell. When you divided into two cells, this information was passed on to ensure the proper function and health of the newly formed cell.
Cells can divide at a rate of up to 2 million times per second and, as a full grown adult, you are about 100 trillion cells in total. While some serve as bone, blood, hair, or skin, all cells contain the how-to guide that teaches them how to collaborate and make you the person you are today. And they’re always working, dividing (you make 30,000 new skin cells every minute), and fulfilling a specific role in accordance with this guide. But sometimes a page gets torn from it.
DNA isn’t invincible. In fact, it’s consistently bombarded with something that threatens its function. Whether that is cigarette smoke, a lack of essential micronutrients like selenium or B vitamins, a rogue virus, industrial toxins, or prescription drugs, the information and instructions can get damaged. DNA—or the cellular components that help it replicate—becomes unable to control cellular division. When this occurs, cancer can develop, which simply means that a healthy cell has turned into a rogue one, dividing and replicating wildly.
Rather than carry out their roles and collaborate with nearby cells as bone, blood, or skin builders, cancer cells are slackers. They replicate without performing their vital purpose and eventually form a mass of slacker cells that we know as “tumors.”
Cancerous tumors go unhindered and can invade other regions of the body, while at the same time disrupting organ function. To gain such seemingly invisible, superhero powers, they secrete various chemicals that help them flourish while making them invisible to the immune system. Adding to the onslaught, they quickly and methodically produce blood vessels to help satisfy their greedy thirst for oxygen and nutrients. This eventually “starves out” the rest of the body, causing us to die prematurely. Where these rogue cells develop determines which kind of cancer arises. If in the pancreas, it’s pancreatic cancer; if in the breast, breast cancer; if among white blood cells, leukemia, and so on.
CELL SUICIDE
Cancer rarely occurs when cells go rogue because when DNA is damaged, every cell has specialized proteins that can repair it. If irreparable damage occurs, cells “commit suicide” before they become wildly dividing cancer cells. And if cell suicide doesn’t do the job, they are attacked by a robust immune system before they become invisible.
Cell suicide is cancer’s worst enemy and explains why it is not invincible. It’s a programmed, survival response to inevitable damage, and every cell is born with this weapon of mass cancer destruction. When cellular DNA is compromised, our body helps itself by simply eradicating the cell before it grows into a potentially dangerous rogue. Without this, we would all die prematurely from cancer—probably before we even reached adulthood. You’ll want to remember this over everything else.
This introduces my first universal cancer truth: All cancer is a normal cellular process that only leads to death when cells fail to commit suicide in response to some type of DNA damage. Ensuring proper cell suicide is ensuring that you don’t suffer from cancer.
SHOULD YOU CHOOSE CONVENTIONAL CANCER TREATMENTS?
The war on cancer began in 1971. In the wake of massive cancer fears, President Richard Nixon appropriated $100 million to find a cure. Big Pharma got the lion’s share of the cash since the use of conventional chemotherapy got the boost they wanted. “The war on cancer” became nothing more than a profitable catchphrase for Big Pharma to win big. But America lost big time.
Chemotherapy has been an abysmal failure. Twenty-three years of waging war led to an 8 percent increase in deaths from cancer. Cancer experts were quoted in the New York Times as telling Congress that “the war against cancer has stalled and that without major changes, including a cabinet-level director and universal access to treatment, it will become the nation’s top killer.” That prediction in 1994 came true in 2005. The American Cancer Society announced, “For the first time, cancer has surpassed heart disease as the top killer of Americans under [age] eighty-five.”110 This introduces my second universal cancer truth: The shotgun approach of destroying cancer cells with conventional chemotherapy isn’t as effective as you’ve been told by the media and doctors.
CHEMOTHERAPY SECRECY
The overt failure of chemotherapy is shrouded in secrecy. In pushing chemotherapy on cancer patients, most physicians regurgitate the pharmaceutical cure rate as being as high as 60 percent. Pharmaceutical statistics are skewed, but most patients blindly accept these figures without knowing how chemo is supposed to work or how effective it really is.
Chemotherapy is a general term describing any treatment that involves the use of a “chemical” agent (drug) to stop cancer cells from proliferating. Believe it or not, the first agent used in chemotherapy was the biochemical warfare agent known as mustard gas.
Within about twenty-four hours of being exposed, mustard gas begins to elicit a whirlwind of deadly effects. Victims experience intense itching. Skin irritations turn into the unsightly and humiliating outcome of enormous blisters. Depending on the dose, slow death can ensue, which is why it’s great for killing your enemy. The odiferous chemical attacks the cellular DNA of all cells, healthy or cancerous, and damages their ability to replicate.
The U.S. Department of Defense thought mustard gas would be great at eradicating cancer cells and started administering it to unsuspecting cancer patients in the 1940s. These clinicians conveniently overlooked the fact that the gas was also killing healthy cells. Cured from cancer, patients were demoralized and faced premature death, courtesy of the side effects, just like when mustard gas was used in warfare.
Mustard gas is no longer used, but its concept still exists today. The toxic mix of chemotherapy drugs usually fall into one of three classes—anthracyclines, taxanes, or platinum-based drugs. In one way or another, these drugs attempt to target and quickly destroy dividing cancer cells. But the drugs’ overt failure to make a dent in the war on cancer elucidates their flaws, as do their biological actions.
The anthracyclines are technically antibiotics, but they are so toxic that they were never approved for that use. They work by overloading the cells with oxygen-free radicals, thereby damaging DNA and future replication. But they also attack healthy cells, especially those within the heart. Doctors contributing to the New England Journal of Medicine showed that up to 57 percent of children receiving anthracyclines suffered from cardiotoxicity, sometimes resulting in heart failure later in life.111 The researchers stated that “avoiding anthracyclines would be an option” for avoiding the toxic outcome. Research by Dennis Slamon, MD, PhD, chief of oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has led him to insist that these drugs no longer be used in the fight against cancer.112 In most treatment protocols for childhood cancer, anthracyclines are still being introduced without data from randomized, controlled trials that would support their use. The same is true for the use of the drugs on adults.
Taxanes destroy the structural component of cells that are responsible for dividing. These components are known technically as microtubules. Since all cells—cancer or otherwise—have these, taxane destruction is unselective. Just as cancer cells are destroyed by the drugs, so are healthy ones.
Platinum-based drugs like cisplatin chop DNA into tiny pieces, preventing cellular information from being passed to the next generation of cells. Like mustard gas, the drugs attack healthy cells as well as cancerous ones, causing humiliating and deadly side effects. For instance, cisplatin acts as a cog in the wheel of our DNA repair system. That causes our genetic information to be split, leading to cell death. This would be great if it occurred only among cancerous cells. But it doesn’t. The chemical cog goes after anything that contains DNA, and that means healthy cells get the monkey wrench, too.
But even more ghastly than being nonselective, today’s chemotherapy drugs can elicit cancer among healthy cells not yet affected by a patient’s cancer. Leukemia and other forms of cancer show up years or even decades after chemo treatments. This is hard to swallow, but even harder when you’re a drug chemist learning that the same is true for today’s bestselling chemotherapy drug, tamoxifen.
TAMOXIFEN SECRETS UNCOVERED
Long white lab coat, giant safety goggles, rubber gloves, and face mask were my usual chemist attire when I worked for Big Pharma. I rarely got to sport my baggy jeans, tight T-shirt and black leather wristband. The chemicals I was dealing with were simply too hazardous and required that I wear as much protection as possible. Having them penetrate my protective layers could mean bad news internally. I was designing and making chemical cousins of tamoxifen.
Tamoxifen is known commercially as Nolvadex. It’s the gold standard in chemotherapy for breast cancer. But what a drug does biologically and what a drug does according to pharmaceutical advertising are often two distinctly different things.
To my surprise, I learned that the tamoxifen cash cow wasn’t performing like the industry wanted. Patients who took it were dying from cancer at a much faster rate than without it. As a medicinal chemist, my job was to fix the “little cancer problem of tamoxifen.”
Initially, tamoxifen was thought to stop cancer by displacing estrogen, one of the hormones that helped it grow. As time progressed, though, researchers learned that tamoxifen acted just like the cancer fertilizer by mimicking estrogen. The end result was a biochemical environment favorable to cancer growth among users of tamoxifen. My task was made clear: design “knockoffs” that are effective (at blocking estrogen) without causing cancer.
My attempt to design safer tamoxifen alternatives was unsuccessful. And after one year, the project was ended. However, access to tamoxifen wasn’t. It remained on the market. Even today, it’s advertised and pushed by doctors as a first line of defense against breast cancer. But science and anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to take tamoxifen can tell you that this isn’t something you want to swallow in an attempt to beat cancer.
The National Cancer Institute has recently begun to warn that “tamoxifen increases the risk of two types of cancer that can develop in the uterus: endometrial cancer, which arises in the lining of the uterus, and uterine sarcoma, which arises in the muscular wall of the uterus. Like all cancers, endometrial cancer and uterine sarcoma are potentially life-threatening.”113 The risk of these types of cancers triples with the use of tamoxifen, while other types—such as liver and breast cancer—are just as likely.
Tamoxifen is so potent that it has been listed as a cancer-causing substance in the Department of Health and Human Services’ Report on Carcinogens. This report is a scientific and public health document first ordered by Congress in 1978 to educate the public and health professionals about the many cancers induced by chemicals in the home, workplace, general environment, and from the use of certain drugs!114
This brings me to my third universal cancer truth: tamoxifen is not a safe option for women battling breast cancer. But don’t expect this failing drug—or any other chemotherapy agents—to be pulled from the market. Despite their mustard gas–like toxicity, chemotherapy drugs will continue to be pushed on vulnerable patients, thanks to what I call “chemotherapy life support.”
CHEMOTHERAPY LIFE SUPPORT
Big Pharma isn’t letting the chemotherapy cash cow get away because she’s worth about 50 billion bucks annually worldwide. To protect obscene profits earned from dead chemo drugs (those with overwhelming evidence of risk and ineffectiveness), Big Pharma has designed an ingenious “chemotherapy life-support” system. This system deceitfully uses a five-year survival rate as a cure rate, pays doctors handsomely to enlist cancer patients into the whirlwind of chemotherapy drudgery, and finally, encourages early diagnosis to get people ensnared in the expensive chemotherapy web as soon as possible. In the end, dead drugs survive while patients die slowly and miserably.
As taught by Joel Kauffman, PhD, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and author of Malignant Medical Myths, a five-year survival rate is not a cure rate. And using it as such gives false hope to patients who don’t know otherwise, while putting them at risk for negative side effects. Doctors writing for the New England Journal of Medicine illustrated this by highlighting the rarely acknowledged risk of using anthracycline chemo agents on children. They warned that “more than 70 percent of children who are treated for childhood cancer can be cured. For long-term survivors [past five years], possible late effects of treatment and their consequences for the quality of life are a major concern.”115
The five-year survival rate refers to the percentage of patients who live at least five years after their cancer is diagnosed. A cure rate refers to how many cancer patients overcome cancer and live a full, healthy life. The difference is stark.
Since chemotherapy kills cancer cells—and healthy ones—so quickly, a five-year survival rate gives the illusion of eradicating cancer. It does not account for cancer cells that rebound or even for cancer caused by the drugs after that period. Moreover, chemotherapy side effects are slow and arduous, and therefore don’t show up within the five years of follow-up. After this time, Big Pharma looks away while the whirlwind of side effects are just beginning. In other words, the effectiveness of chemo drugs is inflated, and side effects are hidden by the five-year survival rates being used as “cure rates.”
The second life support system put into place is simply paying doctors to prescribe chemotherapy drugs. Unlike in all other areas of medicine, cancer doctors are allowed to profit from the sale of chemotherapy drugs. To me, this explained why doctors were totally unaware of the studies showing that chemotherapy agents like tamoxifen are deadly: they were being paid to ignore them!
In 2006, NBC News introduced the world to the shady and unethical practice of corporate drug dealing. “Doctors in other specialties simply write prescriptions. But oncologists make most of their income by buying drugs wholesale and selling them to patients at marked-up prices,” according to the NBC report.116 No chemo, no money. In an unspeakable confession from a corporate drug dealer, Peter Eisenberg, MD, a private physician who specializes in cancer treatment, said, “The significant amount of our revenue comes from the profit, if you will, that we make from selling the drugs.”
Spreading the notion that “early cancer detection saves lives” is the final part of the chemotherapy life-support system. With millions of people being scanned for cancer via questionable testing methods, nobody is being saved. Rather, more people are being put on chemo drugs faster, thereby increasing negative side effects. Under a regime that provides ineffective and dangerous drugs, the only point in early detection is to get into your wallet.
Few people realize that chemotherapy sales are the result of a successful life-support system rather than the use of successful drugs. This lack of understanding gets most patients ensnared in the deadly chemotherapy web. Sometimes, it’s coupled with risky radiation treatment.
RISKY RADIATION
Pat has been one of my best friends for more than fifteen years. We met in college while wrestling. And during that time, we shared not only the same weight class, but also the same majors: biology and chemistry. Like it or not, we saw a lot of each other during our college days. Fortunately, being his friend is easy.
Pat is fairly laid back—so much so that he’s probably the only person in history to go dancing in Vegas wearing flip-flops. He’s always ready for adventure. Whether that means losing fifteen pounds of water to make weight, participating in a twelve-hour adventure race, or mountain bike racing at 2:00 a.m. among the cacti in Tucson, he’s game. He doesn’t talk much, which means I’m never forced to take part in idle chitchat or some sappy conversation dripping with emotions and feelings. And most importantly, he’s got a brain and knows how to use it.
Top in his class, Pat took learning very seriously. Good thing, because today he has an extremely risky job as a radiation safety officer for a global pharmaceutical company. They specialize in making and distributing radiation meds for cancer patients. Supervising the handling of these drugs requires extreme focus and knowledge. Radiation is risky business. A single mistake could mean serious tragedy. And nobody knows this better than Pat.
As a safety officer, his main priority is to teach new employees the risk associated with radiation. Learning direct from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the U.S. Department of Energy, he teaches that radiation is simply the emission of energy from any source—like the sun or even heat from our body. Of course, these types of radiation can be harmless. But others can sabotage human cells.
Danger arises when we are exposed to high-frequency ionizing radiation known as gamma rays, which are the type used in Pat’s lab and being aimed at cancer patients. Unlike the energy emitted from the sun, gamma rays penetrate the cell membrane and cause a slurry of free radicals, which accelerate aging by destroying our internal how-to book, DNA. This can result in cancer among previously healthy cells. The official statement from the ACS is that “ionizing radiation has been shown to cause cancer in many different species of animals and in almost all parts of the body. It is one of the few scientifically proven carcinogens (cancer-causing agents) in human beings.” In cancer treatment, the use of gamma rays is rationalized by the fact that only cancer cells are targeted. But like a child using a bow and arrow for the first time, radiation treatment rarely hits the cancer bull’s-eye. Pat insists that he would never recommend radiation therapy because it’s not “selective.” “While cancer cells might be eradicated by radiation, there’s no guarantee that it won’t also attack healthy cells and elicit radical damage at the same time.”
His warning was borne out by research by Dutch scientists and reported in the Washington Post. Amanda Gardner wrote in the Post that “young women receiving radiation after having surgery for breast cancer are at increased risk of developing a new tumor in the opposite—or contralateral—breast.” According to the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, women have three to four times the risk of developing new cancer in the other breast.117
This introduces my fourth universal cancer truth: the shotgun approach of destroying cancer cells with radiation isn’t as effective as you’ve been told by the media and doctors. It’s time to stop all the nonsense.
The mass use of chemotherapy and radiation is nothing more than the result of fear and obscene profits. If logic and health were the driving force behind cancer treatments, much of this fear would be eradicated with the understanding that “nutritional chemo-prevention” with nutrient logic is a viable option for beating cancer. Such steps to prevent cancer would cause profits to plummet. Without a hint of toxicity or even expense, nutritional chemotherapy can give cancer cells the biological smackdown they deserve, as shown by history and science. (Note: Any and all approaches to beating cancer should be performed under the care of a health-care practitioner who supports and respects your decisions.)
NUTRITIONAL CHEMOTHERAPY
Right now, millions of your cells are committing suicide. Once done, they are cleaned and eliminated from the body courtesy of the immune system, leaving behind only healthy cells. This is a good thing. Your survival depends on this, and it was my first universal cancer truth: all cancer is a normal cellular process that only leads to death when cells fail to commit suicide in response to some type of DNA damage. Rather than “fight” cancer, you simply need to cooperate with your body to ensure that this vital protection mechanism is intact. And the best way to do this is with nutritional chemotherapy.
While the body produces healthy cells, individual cells must possess the ability to self-destruct when they become cancerous. This critical process is termed “programmed cell death,” or apoptosis, and it’s induced by nutrient logic—select nutrients found in nature.
Commenting on the importance of programmed cell death to protect us, Jon Christensen wrote in the New York Times:
Apoptosis plays a crucial role in developing and maintaining healthy organisms by eliminating unnecessary, old, and unhealthy cells. In contrast to the more familiar and messy death known as necrosis, which is caused by an injury or attack that results in the hemorrhaging of cells and inflammation, apoptosis is a neat way to eliminate cells without leaving any evidence behind.118
John Reed, MD, PhD, president of the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, has shown that a healthy human body replaces more than 1 million cells every second and that it’s quite possible to replace the entire body every year with fresh cells.119
Just as your body can’t activate metabolism without sufficient water, your cells cannot protect you from cancer, courtesy of programmed cell death, without nutritional chemotherapy. In short, nutrient logic “helps your body help itself.” Over the last two decades or so, several nutrients have been identified that help cancer cells activate this survival mechanism when needed. That’s why I call it nutritional chemotherapy: these nontoxic compounds work directly with the body, not against it, to stop cancer cells from proliferating.
Such discoveries include elderberry, rich in the natural compounds anthocyanidins; cloudberry, stacked with ellagic acid; green tea, loaded with natural compounds EGCG; broccoli, saturated with the natural compound sulphorane; and skullcap (I recommend New Chapter brand), jam-packed with the natural compound baicalein. Without these, our body becomes a playground for rogue cancer cells and ultimately invasive tumors. Each nutrient works selectively on cancer cells to help them know when to induce cell suicide.
These discoveries have given rise to the identification of Mother Nature’s most potent weapon against cancer: turmeric. Not only does the commonly used spice give cancer cells a biological smack-down, but it also can prevent unruly and invasive cancer tumors from spreading.120 This makes it distinct, compared to other nutritional chemotherapy options.
Turmeric, otherwise known as “Indian gold,” has been used as an immunity booster in the Far East for thousands of years, probably tens of thousands. Only in the last two decades has it received attention from major universities for its ability to fight cancer.
Early in the 1990s, the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, found the anticancer effects of turmeric to be “staggering.” After sprinkling a pinch of the spice on cancer cells in the lab, they found that it blocked a crucial pathway required for the development of skin cancer and other types, including prostate tumors.121
Epidemiology has further increased the turmeric excitement with population studies showing that India, the country whose residents consume most of the world’s turmeric, has the world’s lowest prostate cancer rate—twenty-five times less than that of men within the United States.122
Further studies by the University of Wisconsin and others reported that turmeric blocks a type of cancer fertilizer known as VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor). Without this growth factor, cancer cells are unable to thrive and eventually commit cell suicide. In 2001, scientists also discovered that turmeric dampens the inflammation cascade within the body, thereby stopping the proliferation of cancer in its tracks.123
Unlike conventional treatments, turmeric strengthens healthy cells, while removing cancerous ones with laserlike precision In 2002, scientists began unraveling how turmeric selectively gave cancer cells a biological smack-down. They found that cancer cells produce “transcription factors” that turn off the survival mechanism of cell suicide. Turmeric’s active ingredients include a host of compounds known as curcuminoids. Collectively, they attack the cancer’s transcription factor. Doing so restores the cells’ ability to commit suicide and, therefore, frees us from cancer’s wanton destruction without harming healthy cells.124
In 2008, the medical journal Endocrinology, together with the Medical College of Wisconsin, studied the curcuminoids extensively. Their positive results led them to this recommendation: “We propose developing curcumin as a novel therapeutic tool.” Following this lead, Big Pharma is hell-bent on creating a synthetic, turmeric copycat.125
Rather than adhere to nutrient logic and promote turmeric as a nutritional chemotherapy substance, Big Pharma is working rigorously to design drugs that mimic the active ingredients in turmeric—the curcuminoids. To date they have failed miserably. This is business as usual. Rather than promote the naturally occurring substance, they like to stick to their greedy business model, which demands that patients trade health for wealth. Turmeric is simply too inexpensive to sustain the billion-dollar cancer industry. And since nobody wants to take pay cuts, nobody is being prescribed turmeric.
Interestingly, doctors have even tried to patent turmeric to profit from later prescribing it. They were shot down after the Indian government filed complaints that “you can’t patent something we’ve known for thousands of years.” That would be as silly as trying to patent the sun for its beneficial effect on vitamin D production within the human body.
This brings me to my fifth universal cancer truth: nutritional chemotherapy will never be advocated by Big Pharma because it doesn’t fit into the business model of putting wealth before health. Fortunately, you can get turmeric anywhere.
THE OVER-THE-COUNTER NATURAL CURE
Jarrow Formula brand provides a nicely designed turmeric supplement—Curcumin 95—for about $8.00 per month—a far cry from the economic pillaging that accompanies conventional chemotherapy. Not only does Jarrow use whole-herb turmeric, but as an added measure to ensure vast amounts of curcumin and other beneficial compounds, they use an 18 to 1 concentrate, which means you get way more than what you pay for!
Manufactured under FDA-approved good manufacturing practices, Curcumin 95 has no adulterants or excess fillers, based on my independent lab analysis. Due to the importance of having the phytochemical curcumin in turmeric and Jarrow’s aim of having a large amount in the supplement, I also tested for “total curcuminoids.” Jarrow Turmeric is loaded with the cancer fighters! This can be verified with the certificate of analysis found at my website, www.overthecounternaturalcures.com.
The best way to take turmeric is the same way it’s been done for thousands of years—with food. A review of turmeric studies shows that the best maintenance dose is 400 to 600 milligrams daily. For aggressive use, doses as high as 0.05 milligrams per kilogram—or 4, 6, or 8 grams daily—are fine. No toxicity has ever been shown from using too much turmeric, even at the dose of 12 grams daily.
No definitive drug interactions have been identified with turmeric. However, there are some plausible ones. Tumeric may potentiate conventional chemotherapy as well as certain blood thinners. If you are taking any of these, you’ll want to monitor drug side effects and blood viscosity more closely than usual. To date, nobody has ever been poisoned by such interactions.
FOUR LIFESTYLE HABITS THAT WARD OFF CANCER
Don’t fear cancer. Hopefully, at this point you have learned that you do have a chance of avoiding it as long as you cooperate with your body by giving it the nutrients it needs to help itself. And if you’re a nonsmoker, cancer really doesn’t stand a chance against you. Most of the massive rise in cancer rates is due to smoking, drug use (like women previously force-fed hormone replacement therapy drugs), and mass exposure to pesticides. Furthermore, while more people are dying from cancer, this reflects increased population more than increased cancer rates among healthy people.
Stick to these four lifestyle habits that are proven to ward off cancer. Combined, they help the body help itself by increasing circulation for better distribution of oxygen and nutrients; lowering inflammation to halt growth and spread of cancer; boosting immunity so that the immune system can attack cancer; and preventing cancer cells from becoming “invisible” to our immune system, thereby ensuring that they are systematically destroyed by our natural defense system.
FIRST, EAT FEWER INFLAMMATION-CAUSING FATS
You know by now that there are “good” fats and “bad” fats. And you’ve probably heard that small amounts of omega-6 fatty acids from seeds and plants are essential to your body. When combined with omega-3 fatty acids from fish, omega-6 fats appear to play an integral role in maintaining health. Combined, these two fats can help regulate proper brain development, energy production, and immune function, as well as putting out the fires of inflammation. However, large quantities of omega-6 fats can become poisonous (which is why you have to make sure your supplement soft gels aren’t loaded with them from soy or vegetable oil!).
Omega-6 fatty acids promote oxygen shock by disabling one of the body’s other defenses against cancer—the cells’ antioxidant. Adding insult to injury, omega-6 fats increase inflammation within skin cells. Inflammation can be the driving force for the growth of skin cancer and its ability to spread to nearby tissues and organs.
Like skin cancer (and many other forms of cancer), this omega-6 threat did not exist one hundred years ago. Our ancestors only consumed small quantities of omega-6 in the form of whole corn, seeds, or legumes. Their ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 was about 1:1. Today, a large segment of the population consumes a ratio of 20:1.
The omega-6 overdose exists thanks to the advent of technology—chemical extraction methods, to be exact. Instead of consuming omega-6 in its natural state from plants and seeds, our primary sources today are plant and seed oils such as corn, soy, safflower, and sunflower oil. A single tablespoon of omega-6–laden corn oil is derived from twelve to eighteen ears of corn. Make sure you get these cancer-fertilizing oils out of your house.
The ideal ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids remains to be determined, although lots of speculation exists. One thing is certain: the overdose of omega-6 predisposes us to all types of cancer. The best thing you can do to protect against cancer is rid your diet of omega-6–laden plant and seed oils while consuming more protective omega-3 fatty acids and naturally occurring, healthy saturated fats from seeds, nuts, butter, fish, grass-fed beef, and coconut oil.
SECOND, LIMIT YOUR CONSUMPTION OF SUGAR AND ALCOHOL
When the immune system identifies a cancerous tumor, it attacks and eliminates it from the body. But every now and then, this system gets hoodwinked by rogue cancer cells. Rogue cancer cells have the ability to become invisible and therefore overcome our immune-system defenses. This superpower helps cancer invade other regions of the body. Internally, we become a playground for cancerous infection and disease. Slow death ensues.
To beat rogue cancer cells, you need to eliminate their ability to become invisible. What keeps cancer cells out of sight from your immune system? Trophoblast cells. You can expose cancer for what it is—deadly—by ensuring that you have plenty of pancreatic enzymes. Pancreatic enzymes eliminate trophoblast cells and thus reveal any underlying cancer cells to your “immunity radar” for eventual eradication.
Excess sugar and alcohol, however, diminish pancreatic enzymes and increase your chances of suffering from cancer. Don’t overindulge! Considering how pancreatic enzymes aggressively attack invisible cancer cells, ensuring that we have plenty of these enzymes should be a top priority for anyone who wants to ward off cancer.
THIRD, GET SOME SUNSHINE!
Stop fearing the sun. If you don’t get enough sunshine, your body cannot produce vitamin D and many other compounds that help ward off cancer and premature aging. Sensible sun exposure helps cancerous cells eradicate themselves via cell suicide. Slapping conventional wisdom in the face, studies show that sensible sun exposure can reduce the risk of skin cancer by 30 to 40 percent!126 The message here is that most people have a sunshine deficiency, not a vitamin D one as hyped by supplement hucksters! And to avoid cancer, you need to fix it. Don’t be scammed into buying fake sunshine in a bottle—the Franken-Chemical vitamin D. Get the real thing.
The American Cancer Society has called ultraviolet exposure “the best way to achieve proper vitamin D status.”127 Exposing 80 percent of your body to sunshine every other day for about twenty minutes has a proven beneficial effect on vitamin D production and lots more.
Don’t blow the benefits of sunshine by slathering on the sunblock. This would prevent your body from responding positively to sunshine. The more sunblock you use, the greater your risk of cancer. Since its widespread use from 1950 to 1990, deaths from skin cancer have doubled in women and tripled among men!128 To protect from excess sun exposure, use a hat and light clothing.
AND FINALLY, EAT YOUR VEGETABLES
If you think they taste bad, compare that small inconvenience to being incapacitated by cancer at the age of sixty-five. That’s right, no veggies equals lots of cancer. Your mamma innately knew this when she insisted that you eat your broccoli.
If you don’t eat tons of colorful veggies, you’ll be slurping applesauce and asking the nurse to bring you a new bedpan while your veggie-eating friends are sipping wine on their favorite cruise ship. What kind of veggies should you eat? All of them. They are loaded with anthocyanidins. Much like turmeric, these phytochemicals help your body help itself by inducing cell suicide when needed. By taking a shotgun approach with conventional chemotherapy and radiation, Big Pharma discounts this.
THE FINAL UNIVERSAL CANCER TRUTH
Any and all approaches to beating cancer should be performed under the care of a health-care practitioner who supports your decisions. Your doctor should also respect your decisions. People are more than their cancer symptoms. With a shortsighted measure of progress, they kill not only cancer cells, but also the healthy ones that make us who we are. They watch as the symptoms of cancer dissipate but look away as the patient does the same. Cancer patients’ dignity is taken, and then their hope, and finally the last ounces of their life force are evicted from their body.
That introduces my final universal cancer truth: cancer patients deserve not only compassion but also the freedom to choose nutritional chemotherapy as the first line of defense against cancer, rather than being force-fed pricey and invasive conventional methods. This will help cancer patients make informed decisions rather than relying on blind faith that ultimately force them to roll the dice with their lives.