Is This ‘Nature’s Perfect Food’?

After radical mastectomy, thirty-five doses of radiotherapy and twelve chemotherapy sessions, the battle was lost as far as her oncologist was concerned. 42-year-old scientist Jane Plant was given only three months to live.

This post is on Healthwise

15 April 2015

Is This ‘Nature’s Perfect Food’ or a Banquet for Hormone-Related Cancers?

The cancer returned for the fifth time.

After radical mastectomy, thirty-five doses of radiotherapy and twelve chemotherapy sessions, the battle was lost as far as her oncologist was concerned. 42-year-old scientist Jane Plant was given only three months to live.

That was 28 years ago. Today Janet, professor of geochemistry at Imperial College London, is free of cancer.

As she states in her book Your Life in Your Hands, “having no alternative but to die or find a way out myself, I decided to find a way out. I determined to take control of my situation using my training as a natural scientist.”
This was her way out. . .

The clue comes from China

After looking at a range of factors that included genetic predisposition, estrogen, fat intake, stress, and personality type — and ruling them out of the equation — she finally hit on a clue as to why she came down breast cancer and what she could do about it.

At one time she had worked with Chinese scientists and they had given her a book called The Atlas of Cancer Mortality in the People’s Republic of China.

She was struck by the low rates of breast and prostate cancer among the Chinese. Americans were eight times more likely to contract breast cancer and two hundred times more likely to develop prostate cancer than people living in rural China.

When the Chinese adopt a Western lifestyle, as they might do if they live in Hong Kong or move to a Western country, over time their cancer rates become similar to those found in their adopted homes.

So Professor Plant reasoned there must be some environmental factor at work, but what could it be?

Then it hit her.

The native Chinese don’t eat dairy products – and she was a big eater of such foods.

She immediately stopped consuming milk, butter, cream, cheese and any foods containing them. This included commercial soups, biscuits, cakes, sunflower or olive oil spreads and soya margarine. It’s surprising how many food products contain dairy.

Within days a secondary tumor on the back of her neck started to shrink. Six weeks later it was gone.

“None of my doctors….had expected someone with my type and stage of cancer (which had clearly spread to the lymph system) to have survived, let alone be so hale and hearty.”

Americans are big consumers of dairy foods

Americans consume 614 pounds of cows’ milk products per year (USDA, 2012). This works out to 1.68 pounds per person per day. That’s a huge amount — for a food that was only designed for babies.

But that in itself does not mean milk can’t be good nutrition for adults. What evidence is there that it could be a risk factor for cancer?

According to Professor Plant, the hormones and growth factors in milk increase your risk for all hormone-related cancers – breast, prostate, ovary and testicular.

From a young age we no longer need the hormones and growth factors found in milk because the body produces and regulates its own requirements.

The concern is that ingesting additional quantities of these highly bioactive chemicals designed to stimulate cell growth in the young could result in unwanted growth and differentiation of adult tissues – in other words, cancer.

And there are lots of hormones in milk. At least 35 different kinds — plus 11 growth factors. Many of these have been linked to cancer.

For instance, excessive amounts of luteinizing hormone releasing hormone (LHRH) stimulates the secretion of luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone which have been implicated in testicular, prostate and ovarian cancer.

Prolactin and epidermal growth factor have been shown to enhance breast and prostate cancer.

Testosterone and other androgens have been linked with increased prostate cancer risk.

Of particular concern is insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1).

IGF-1 stimulates cancer growth

Stanford University researchers reported in 1990 that IGF-1 promotes prostate cancer cell growth. Five years later the National Institutes of Health reported that IGF-1 plays an important role in some children’s cancers as well as in prostate, breast, pancreas, small cell lung and melanoma cancers. Other researchers in the 1990s found that the growth factor was linked to breast, prostate and colon cancers.

In 1998, researchers from Harvard found men under 60 with the highest IGF-1 concentrations in the blood were four times more likely to develop prostate cancer than those with the lowest levels. And for those over 60 the risk was eight times as high.

IGF-1 has growth-promoting effects in concentrations as low as 1 ng/ml, and yet milk contains 30 times as much. (1 ng is a billionth of a gram.) Three percent of the IGF-1 in cow’s milk is also in a form that’s ten times as potent.

Although the dairy industry claims that this growth factor doesn’t get absorbed into the body, research says otherwise.

A number of studies have found that the amount of milk a person consumes correlates with the amount of IGF-1 in the blood. For instance vegans who don’t eat any animal or dairy products had levels that were 9 – 13% lower than meat eaters and vegetarians and a 2005 study found “milk consumption was significantly positively related to IGF-1 levels.”

Also, the actions of IGF-1 are modulated by protective binding proteins which control their effects. However these are considerably lower in vegetarians compared to those on a vegan diet. They are therefore not only at higher levels but are more potent in dairy consumers.

Reviewing the research, Hans Larsen, M.Sc., Ch.E., said, “The evidence of a strong link between cancer risk and a high level of IGF-1 is now indisputable.”

This view has been echoed by other researchers who state that IGF-1 not only stimulates cancer cell growth but enhances metastasis and prevents apoptosis (natural cancer cell death). A European Union scientific committee concluded that this growth factor poses an increased risk of breast and prostate cancer.

Having reviewed the studies, Professor Plant states in her book Prostate Cancer that “the evidence suggests that the association between IGF-1 and cancer incidence complies with many of the accepted criteria for causality: the association is strong and specific, it demonstrates the correct temporal sequence, it is dose responsive, it has biological plausibility, and it has coherence with other documented associations.”

rBGH and VEGF – growth factors to avoid

In spite of this evidence, in 1993 the FDA approved the use of a genetically engineered growth hormone called recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) to increase milk production. If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter, you’re familiar with it.

It’s known that rBGH boosts the average concentration of IGF-1 by up to five-fold.

The European Union and many other countries do not permit the use of rBGH, but the FDA seems to have no concerns about its safety.

Could it get any worse? I’m afraid it does.

rBGH vastly increases udder infections called mastitis. The disease can affect almost half of all dairy cows in any one year. To fight the infection, cows produce Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF). Unfortunately this also promotes the development and spread of cancer. Some classes of cancer drugs are specifically designed to block VEGF.

Soaring estrogen levels in modern milk

On top of all this, modern high production methods require cows to be milked while pregnant, which is most of the year. When pregnant they are producing vastly more estrogen and progesterone than they otherwise would.

This point was emphasized by Ganmaa Davaasambuu, M.D., Ph.D., research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her findings comparing rates of cancer in 42 countries showed a strong association between milk and cheese consumption and hormone-related cancers.

She believes natural estrogens found in milk — which are already 100,000 times more potent than their environmental equivalent — are up to 33 times greater in milk produced from cows in the late stages of pregnancy.

As she puts it, “Today’s milk is vastly different from the milk your ancestors consumed 80 years ago.”

She advises us to cut down on dairy products.

Professor Plant gives the same advice, even more so since 2011. Following a hectic work schedule, she relaxed her no-dairy policy and went back to eating some milk products. The result was a lump under her collarbone and tumors in her lungs.

As well as taking a drug to suppress estrogen, she returned to her strict dairy-free diet. Several months later she was in remission for the sixth time. And this time she intends to stay cancer free.

While it may be considered to be un-American to advise against drinking milk, the milk produced by modern high-intensive farming methods should be avoided. Milk that’s produced this way cannot be described as nature’s perfect food.

If you can find raw, organic milk from grass-fed cows not milked during pregnancy it would be a vast improvement. However, if you are at known risk or want to reduce your risk of hormone-related cancers, then it’s best to keep dairy consumption to a minimum..

http://www.cancerdefeated.com/is-this-natures-perfect-food-or-a-banquet-for-hormone-related-cancers/3162/

Go to Healthwise for more articles

More of Prof Plant's articles:

• 'Give up dairy products to beat cancer’
• Give up dairy to beat cancer':

Factory Farm Meat: Why Vegetarians, Ranchers, and Conscious Omnivores Need to Unite

Government agencies are recommending Americans eat less red meat, without acknowledging the vast differences between meat from factory farms and meat from pasture.

This post is on Healthwise

April 22, 2015

Factory Farm Meat: Why Vegetarians, Ranchers, and Conscious Omnivores Need to Unite

Story at-a-glance

• The federal government is considering advising Americans to eat “less red and processed meat”
• The recommendation should say Americans should eat less, or no, red and processed meat from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs)
• While meat from CAFOs contributes to disease, environmental destruction, and the inhumane treatment of animals, meat raised on pasture is good for you and the environment

By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

For the first time since the advent of industrial agriculture, the federal government is considering advising Americans to eat “less red and processed meat.”

That advice is the outcome of studies conducted by an independent panel of “experts” which was asked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for recommended changes to the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

The February 19 “eat less red and processed meat” pronouncement by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) was reported widely in mainstream media.

It set off a heated debate about whether or not consumers should eat meat, a debate that included the standard name-calling by factory farm front groups, including the Farm Bureau, denouncing consumers and environmentalists (and their alleged pawns on the DGAC) for being “anti-meat” and “anti-farmer.”

Unfortunately in its recommendations, the DGAC didn’t really come out and tell us the whole truth, which would go something like this:

“Americans should eat less, or rather no red and processed meat from filthy, inhumane factory farms or feedlots, where the animals are cruelly crammed together and routinely fed a diet of herbicide-drenched, genetically engineered grains…

…supplemented by a witch’s brew of antibiotics, artificial hormones, steroids, blood, manure, and slaughterhouse waste, contributing to a deadly public health epidemic of obesity, heart disease, cancer, antibiotic resistance, hormone disruption, and food allergies.”

95% of US Red Meat Comes from Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)

If the DGAC had really told us the truth about America’s red meat horror show (95 percent of our red meat comes from these Confined Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs), we’d be having a conversation about how we can get rid of factory farms, instead of a rather abstract debate on the ethics of eating meat.

With a real debate we could conceivably start to change the self-destructive purchasing and eating habits (the average American carnivore consumes nine ounces or more of toxic CAFO meat and animal products daily) of most Americans.

Instead we are having a slightly more high-volume replay of the same old debate, whereby vegetarians and vegans, constituting approximately 5 percent of the population, tell the other 95 percent, who are omnivores, to stop eating meat.

Nothing much ever comes of that particular debate, which leaves thousands of hard-working, conscientious ranchers, and millions of health-, environment-, and humane-minded omnivores, out of the conversation. I say thousands of “hard-working, conscientious,” ranchers are being left out of the conversation because I know lots of them.

North American cattle ranchers, for the most part, have no love for Cargill, Tyson, Monsanto, JBS, Smithfield, Elanco (animal drugs), or McDonald’s. Most of these ranchers practice traditional animal husbandry, conscientiously taking care of their animals from birth.

They graze their cattle free-range on grass, as nature intended, before they’re forced to sell these heretofore-healthy animals at rock-bottom prices to the monopolistic meat cartel.

Grass-Fed Meat Is Better for You Than CAFO Meat

Before these hapless creatures are dragged away to hell, to be fattened up on GMO grains and drugged up in America’s CAFOs, their meat is high in beneficial omega-3 and conjugated linoleic acids (CLA), and low in “bad” fats.

Unfortunately by the time their abused and contaminated carcasses arrive, all neatly packaged, at your local supermarket, restaurant, or school cafeteria, the meat is low in omega-3 and good “fats,” and routinely tainted by harmful bacteria, not to mention pesticide, steroid, and antibiotic residues.

What was once a healthy food has now become a literal poison that clogs up your veins, makes you fat, and heightens your risk of heart attack or cancer. I mention millions of “health-, environment-, and humane-minded” consumers being left out of the “meat versus no meat” conversation because, as director of the 2 million-strong Organic Consumers Association, I talk and exchange emails with conscious consumers every day.

No organic consumer, vegetarian, or omnivore I’ve ever encountered consciously supports the cruelty of intensive confinement for farm animals. Nor do they support feeding herbivores genetically engineered, herbicide-drenched grains, mixed with slaughterhouse waste.

No one supports dosing factory farmed animals with antibiotics and hormones that then end up in your kid’s hamburger at school (unless it’s organic or 100-percent grass-fed.) No one in their right mind, or at least no one who has ever experienced a factory farm first-hand or even read a book or watched a video about what’s going on, supports CAFOs.

‘Ag Gag’ Laws, Lack of Labeling Aim to Keep You in the Dark

That’s why corporate agribusiness is working overtime to pass state “Ag Gag” laws making it a crime to take photos of CAFOs. That’s why the beef cartel and Big Food spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep you in the dark about CAFOs, about whether or not your food contains genetically engineered ingredients, and about the country-of-origin of your food.

If CAFO meat and animal products had to be labeled (a proposition I support wholeheartedly), the entire factory farm industry would collapse. If CAFO meat had to be labeled, not only in grocery stores but also in restaurants, McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and the rest would immediately be on the phone, contacting ranchers directly to buy their grass-fed, healthy, free-range beef.

Before we go any further, let’s identify the real culprits in this CAFO horror show. Four multi-billion-dollar transnational companies—Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield—produce about 85 percent of the factory farm meat in the U.S., making it difficult for ranchers to sell their livestock to anyone but the Big Four.

And of course these same Big Four companies, along with their front groups such as the North American Meat Institute, are lobbying the government to ditch the 2015 dietary guidelines to “eat less red and processed meat” recommendation because they understand what that recommendation will do to their bottom lines.

But what the Big Four fear even more is the thought of consumers waking up to the horrors of factory farms, and the filthy, contaminated meat that comes out of these animal prisons.

Fortunately, demand for healthier, sustainably raised grass-fed beef is growing rapidly. Here in Minneapolis-St. Paul where I spend a good part of the year, there are now over 100 restaurants that offer grass-fed beef on their menus. Local co-ops and natural food grocery stores are barely able to keep up with the increasing consumer demand.

Most Grass-Fed Beef Sold in the US Is Imported

But unfortunately 95 percent of beef today still comes from factory farms and feedlots. Meanwhile most of the 100-percent grass-fed meat sold at restaurants such as Chipotle or Carl’s Jr. (a popular chain on the West Coast) is imported from Australia, New Zealand, Uruguay, and Argentina, rather than produced here in the US.

Why? It’s not because consumers don’t want healthier, more humanely raised 100-percent grass fed beef. It’s because Cargill and Big Food have monopolized the market by brainwashing the public into believing that cheap CAFO meat is OK, while controlling nearly all of the meat processing plants in the country.

The time has come to shift the American diet away from unhealthy, inhumane, GMO factory farmed food. But as Kendra Kimbirauskas of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project (SRAP) pointed out at her TEDx talk in New York City recently, we, conscious consumers and farmers, “need to get on common ground” and stop “in-fighting over whether to eat ethical meat, go meat-free, or advocate for bigger cages…”

As Kimbirauskas emphasizes, we need to enlist environmentalists in our anti-CAFO campaigning as well. “As long as animals are in factory farms, they are polluting our environment…” And, Kimbirauskas added, “Those most impacted by the problem (farmers and rural people adjacent to CAFOs) need to be most visible in the fight to change it.”

It’s Time to Boycott CAFO Foods

Meat (along with eggs and dairy products) from factory farms is literally killing people with diet-related diseases. Factory farms are a disaster, not only for the animals, but also for the communities where manure and chemical fertilizers and pesticides pollute the air, the soil, streams, lakes, rivers, and drinking water.

Factory farms and the GMO farms that supply them with animal feed are a disaster for the climate as well, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases, including CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

The grasslands that support grass-fed beef, on the other hand, if grazed properly, sequester CO2 from the air and put it in the soil, while drastically reducing or eliminating altogether methane and nitrous oxide emissions. It’s time to stop fighting among ourselves about whether or not to eat meat. Americans need to boycott all factory farmed meat and animal products. Period.

Beyond boycotting CAFO products, if consumers care about their health and the health of the planet, we need to reduce our consumption of sustainable grass-fed animal products to approximately three or four ounces a day (not nine ounces a day, the current average). We are what we eat. We must get rid of factory farms and put the Earth’s billions of confined farm animals back outside on the land, grazing and foraging, where they belong.

Ronnie Cummins is the international director of the Organic Consumers Association and its Mexico-based affiliate, Via Organica.

What Are GMOs?

From April 19th through April 25th we launch GMO Awareness Week. We set aside an entire week dedicated to providing you with information on GMOs and labeling initiatives. 

GMOs are a product of genetic engineering, meaning their genetic makeup has been altered to induce a variety of “unique” traits to crops, such as making them drought-resistant or giving them “more nutrients.” GMO proponents claim that genetic engineering is “safe and beneficial,” and that it advances the agricultural industry. They also say that GMOs help ensure the global food supply and sustainability. But is there any truth to these claims? I believe not. For years, I've stated the belief that GMOs pose one of the greatest threats to life on the planet. Genetic engineering is NOT the safe and beneficial technology that it is touted to be.

Help Support GMO Labeling

The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA)—Monsanto’s Evil Twin—is pulling out all the stops to keep you in the dark about what’s in your food. For nearly two decades, Monsanto and corporate agribusiness have exercised near-dictatorial control over American agriculture. For example, Monsanto has made many claims that glyphosate in Roundup is harmless to animals and humans. However, recently the World Health Organization (WHO) had their research team test glyphosate and have labeled it a probable carcinogen.

Public opinion around the biotech industry's contamination of our food supply and destruction of our environment has reached the tipping point. We're fighting back. That's why I was the first to push for GMO labeling. I donated a significant sum to the first ballot initiative in California in 2012, which inspired others to donate to the campaign as well. We technically "lost the vote, but we are winning the war, as these labeling initiatives have raised a considerable amount of public awareness.

The insanity has gone far enough, which is why I encourage you to boycott every single product owned by members of the GMA, including natural and organic brands. More than 80 percent of our support comes from individual consumers like you, who understand that real change comes from the grassroots.

Thankfully, we have organizations like the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) to fight back against these junk food manufacturers, pesticide producers, and corporate giants.

Internet Resources Where You Can Learn More

• Non-GMO Shopping Guide
• GMA Boycott List
• GMA Traitor Brands

Together, Let's Help OCA Get The Funding They Deserve

Let’s Help OCA get the funding it deserves. I have found very few organizations who are as effective and efficient as OCA. It’s a public interest organization dedicated to promoting health justice and sustainability. A central focus of the OCA is building a healthy, equitable, and sustainable system of food production and consumption. That's why I'm proud to announce I will be matching donations up to $250,000 this week.

Please make a donation to help OCA fight for GMO labeling.

 

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/04/22/factory-farm-meat.aspx

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Tetanus Shots Can Help Fight Brain Cancer

I'm sure you've heard plenty about the vaccine controversy. Critics have challenged the effectiveness of vaccines and highlighted their dangers for years.

This post is on Healthwise

19 April 2105

Cancer Research Surprise:
Tetanus Shots Can Help Fight Brain Cancer

I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about the vaccine controversy. Critics have challenged the effectiveness of vaccines and highlighted their dangers for years.

But recent research suggests at least one vaccine may have a valuable application no one ever imagined. Researchers looking into better ways to protect the brain have discovered a surprising new life-saving use for a vaccine that has been around since the 1920s.

Their work shows that a tetanus shot can boost survival rates among people battling a type of brain cancer that’s been considered a sure death sentence until now. Keep reading, it’s a remarkable story. . .

This variety of brain cancer, glioblastoma, is diagnosed in 20,000 Americans a year. It’s the brain cancer that killed Senator Ted Kennedy.

This difficult-to-treat cancer kills most victims in about twelve months. It’s usually inoperable and often attacks a part of the brain where radiation treatment is difficult, adjacent to neurons involved in memory and motor skills.

Calling on the Immune System

Your risk for this disease increases as you age. In the latest round of research about how to treat glioblastoma, the most promising treatment is proving to be immunotherapy, a technique that ramps up the immune system’s arsenal against cancer cells.

When cancer strikes, the cells in tumors often suppress the immune response, allowing malignant cells to escape attack by the body’s defenses. During immunotherapy, injections are given to people who are already stricken with cancer, in an effort to reawaken the immune response.

In the case of glioblastoma, studies show that the cancer cells are home to an activated form of cytomegalovirus (CMV), something that is not present in normal cells. Consequently, researchers have tried to boost the immune response to CMV in an effort to wipe out tumors.

To do this, scientists first take a blood sample from patients and culture what are called dendritic cells. Dendritic cells are immune cells that function like tiny detectives. Their job is to locate and identify viruses the body should be attacking and then convey an immunological “wanted poster” to cells called T cells.

Once T cells get the message, they form an immune cell posse that tracks down and kills the designated pathogens. (The type of wanted poster communicated by dendritic cells doesn’t say “Wanted: Dead or Alive;” it’s more like “Wanted: Dead and more Dead.”)

In the initial immunotherapy research, the mean survival time for cancer patients receiving the treatment was only about a year. But when a tetanus shot was added to the treatment, the patients generally lived from four to eight years.

“Patients with glioblastoma usually survive for little more than one year. However, in patients who received the immunotherapy (with the tetanus shot), half lived nearly five years or longer from their diagnosis, so the findings are promising and significant,” says researcher John Sampson, chief of the Division of Neurosurgery at Duke University Medical Center.

The reasons remain mysterious

Many of the details of exactly why the tetanus shot helps improve the immune response to cancer remain unknown. In lab tests, scientists did uncover the fact that the tetanus shot increases the production of a protein called CCL3 that apparently sends more of the injected dendritic cells into the body’s lymph nodes. When more of those cells get into the lymph nodes, they can interact more abundantly with T cells, sending them to attack cancer cells that contain CMV.

As you grow older, your risk for glioblastoma grows. But this new use for a tetanus shot means your chances of surviving this disease are growing, too.

I haven’t had a tetanus shot in years, and I don’t plan to get one. The disease is so rare it’s not worth worrying about. But I believe I WOULD get a tetanus shot if I had glioblastoma brain cancer and was planning to received immunotherapy.

http://www.cancerdefeated.com/cancer-research-surprise-tetanus-shots-can-help-fight-brain-cancer/3168/

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