About Cancer

An astonishing number of foods are purported to cure cancer. Authors write books about them and then ask you to pay a fee to learn about their previously undiscovered cure for all cancers, including yours. A typical advertisement for one of these supposed cancer cures might read something like this:

"At long last here's the reason you can take minerals, vitamins, and herbs by the handful and not recover your health. Even if you take the supplements you need to make up for the nutrients needed in our modern depleted soils, there is one super-food that you need to cure you cancer. Even most doctors specializing in alternative medicine don't know about it."

"One grandmother in Hoboken, New Jersey said eating this food made her 35-year problem with migraine disappear instantly. Women who eat this food never develop breast cancer, breast tumors, or hot flashes. Men who eat this food every day never develop prostate cancer and maintain their sexual stamina well past age 80. And a man with liver cancer, given just days to live, went into remission and is still alive 25 years later after a single serving of this unknown supplemental food!"

"Your doctor does not know about this food because the original studies were published in Sanskrit written backwards and never translated. But if you will just send me $159.95 I will send you three 15-minute DVDs telling you everything you need to know about this remarkable food..."

Although this might seem like a parody of a sales pitch for a supplement or a health food, unfortunately, it's not. It's paraphrased from an actual advertisement for an actual product (which advised buyers they could cure their cancer by eating pineapple). Unscrupulous alternative health "experts" regularly play on the hopes and fears of the desperate to sell products that may not be worthless, but certainly are not the best option for everyone who has cancer.

Super-foods are almost never super. Even highly principled true medical experts can make this mistake. In Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life, Dr. David Servan-Schreiber describes a number of super-foods that stop 100 per cent of the growth of cancer cells. For instance, beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, garlic, leeks, Savoy cabbage, scallions, and spinach stop 100 per cent of the growth of brain cancer cells in a test tube. The same group of vegetables plus asparagus and fiddlehead fern stop 100 of the growth of colon cancer cells.

Brussels sprouts, garlic, leeks, and scallions stop 100 per cent of the growth of lung cancer cells, and breast and prostate cancers also are stopped in their tracks with these foods. So isn't it true that all we really need to stop the growth of cancer is to get enough of these super-foods?

Absolutely, positively not. These foods were tested for anti-cancer activity by a Dr. Richard Béliveau. He applied extracts of these foods to cultures of cancer cells and found that the cancer, in a test tube, stopped growing. While these foods may in fact be useful in the diet of people with certain brain, breast, colon, lung, or prostate cancers, the test did not even prove they stop the growth of cancer in real people.

Dr. Béliveau's tests used extracts. People consume foods, not food extracts. The tests applied the extracts directly to the foods. People do not apply extracts directly to cancers inside their bodies (and would risk death if they were to try). There are genetic differences in how people respond to the cancer-fighting chemicals in various foods.
Let's look at a common example.

The isothiocyanates, also known as ITCs, are the anti-cancer compounds in vegetables in the Brassica family. They are found in the crucifers such as bok choi, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kai-lan, kale, kohlrabi, komatsuna, mustard, rapini, rutabagas, and turnips. The same sulfur-laden compounds that make most of these vegetables smelly when they are cooked become potent cancer-fighters when they are digested in the human body.

The ITCs do their work in the liver. They help the liver's Phase I enzymes add a highly reactive atom of oxygen to many common toxins, such as the carcinogens in tobacco smoke and charcoal-grilled meat. This addition of "reactivity" in the toxin makes it more susceptible to further processing by the liver's Phase II enzymes, which actually neutralize the dangerous chemical.

The cancer-fighting chemicals from cabbage and similar vegetables, however, do not act independently. They interact with a complex series of proteins the liver itself makes. These proteins are coded in not just one gene, but at least two different genes known as GSTM1 and GSTT1. Fifty percent of people do not have a GSTM1 gene. Forty percent of people do not have a GSTT1 gene. This means that for fifty to ninety percent of all humans on earth, ITCs are of limited value. Eating these vegetables simply does not do them a whole lot of good. For at least 10 per cent of the human population, however, vegetables in the cabbage family are truly cancer-protective.

Genetics also determines the body's response to other healing foods and supplements. There are genetic variations in the body's cancer-curative responses to foods and supplements providing alpha-carotene, beta-carotene, vitamin A, folic acid, and vitamin D. Nutrients that seem to assist recovery for one kind of cancer can actually cause the proliferation of another form of cancer.

No single food and no single supplement ever is going to be everybody's cancer cure. Scientists believe that at least 70 per cent of the differences in how the body responds to healing nutrients in food is determined by genetics. Just 30 per cent of the variation in how the body responds to healing nutrients in food is determined by the food itself.

That 30 per cent, however, can make the critical difference in getting well. If your body does not respond to one nutrient, it certainly responds to others. The objective of anti-cancer nutrition is to make sure your body gets all the nutrients that are potentially helpful. That's why cancer-fighting diets are more important than cancer-fighting foods.

No single diet cures every kind of cancer or everyone who has cancer. Patterns of food choices, however, involving dozens of foods, are far more likely to be helpful than focusing on a single food. Just like you'd never buy shoes at a shoe store that advertised with the slogan "One Size Fits All," you should never limit yourself to someone else's cancer-fighting program unless you have discovered that that is the program that works for you.