Cancer Prevention and Cure, Food as Preventive Medicine-

[Guest guest]

Cancer Prevention and Cure, Food as Preventive Medicine-

JoAnn Guest

Dec 03, 2004 19:51 PST

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Cancer Prevention and Cures

By James A. Duke Ph.D.

 

 

Food as Preventive Medicine-

 

One definition of herb—the one I favor—is any plant that can be used as

a healing agent.

 

As our understanding of the healing power of plants continues to grow,

so does the number of plants that can be called herbs. If these days the

definition embraces many of our foods, so be it.

 

When it comes to preventing cancer, the key seems to be eating as wide a

variety of fruits and vegetables as possible.

 

In a sense, if you want to lower your risk of cancer, you can create a

whole diet—excluding or minimizing meats and dairy products—that

consists of healing herbs.

 

So singling out individual plants would be giving you a false picture of

how to use herbs for cancer.

 

I was one of the first of the high-fiber* flakes, back when

nutritionists discovered the importance of what they used to call

“roughage”.

 

As a matter of fact, my everyday diet turned out to be higher in fiber

than the high-fiber diets that were fed to the volunteers in five formal

USDA studies. I know, because I was one of the subjects in those

studies.

 

Of course, I can’t prove that my dad’s high-fat diet killed him, nor

that my plant-based diet has spared me from becoming a cancer statistic.

But the research is very clear.

 

As fat and meat consumption increases, cancer rates rise. But in fruit

and vegetable consumption increases,

thereby lowering fat in the diet and increasing the amount of fiber and

helpful phytochemicals, cancer rates fall!

 

Fighting the Wrong Battles

 

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has been waging its war on cancer

for 30 years now. But in every year reported up until 1996, cancer

deaths were increasing, according to NCI statistics.

 

Some of the increases have to do with the fact that fewer people are

dying of heart disease and stroke, so they live long enough to get

cancer.

But considering all the money and all the effort that this country has

invested in beating cancer, we don’t have a whole lot to show for it.

 

Lifestyle Keys to Locking out Cancer

 

Cancer prevention involves many of the same wise moves involved in

preventing many other diseases. You should make the effort to get:

 

· More vegetables and fruits, less fat in red meats and fowl.

· Greater variety in your diet, less monotony.

· More whole grains and less processed sugar.

· More natural food colors, fewer artificial colors.

· Some herbal spices, fewer artificial flavorings

· More natural, whole foods, fewer processed foods

· More estrogen-like chemicals from plants (phytoestrogens), fewer

synthetic hormones.

· More fruit and vegetable juices, fewer alcoholic beverages.

· More fresh air, less smoke- and pollution-filled air.

· More tranquility, less stress.

· More exercise, less television.

· More public greenery, less pavement.

· More organic gardens and farms, fewer pesticides.

· More herbal alternatives, fewer pharmaceutical “magic bullets”

 

Over the years, many new chemotherapy drugs have been developed.

 

They might extend life, but they don’t cure cancer.

And some of the best of those new chemotherapeutics come from plants.

 

Taxol, a treatment for ovarian and breast cancer, originally came from

the Pacific yew tree Etoposide, a treatment for testicular cancer and

small-cell lung cancer,

from the mayapple; and vinblastine and cincristine, which treat

Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia and lymphomas, both from the Madasgascar

periwinkle.

 

But as far as I’m concerned, something is very wrong with the way the

NCI has approached cancer.

The vast majority of NCI research money-our tax dollars- has gone for

the development of chemotherapies, with comparatively little devoted to

prevention.

Chemotherapeutics have their place in the grand scheme of things, but

they’re not cures.

They are usually life-extenders that add a few months or years to

average survival.

 

But those months or years are often lower-quality time because of the

many devastating side effects that chemotherapy drugs

cause. (a vast understatement in my estimation)

 

From 1977 to 1982, I was involved with the NCI’s cancer screening

program, a multiyear effort that investigated the cancer treatment

potential of thousands of plant compounds and gave us the ones mentioned

above.

 

I’ve also been involved with the embryonic Designer Food Program of the

National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is attempting to design foods

high in healthful phytochemicals that prevent cancer.

 

I have a greater respect for the potential of the food program than I do

for the results of the drug-finding programs.

 

Clearly, cancer prevention programs can save more lives than treatment

programs can, and at a fraction of the cost. Still, the 30 year

cure-oriented war on cancer gets the most tax dollars, while prevention

programs get very little.

 

 

 

Green Pharmacy for Cancer

 

Twenty years ago, long before scientists reached a consensus on the fact

that a diet high in fruits and vegetables helps to prevent cancer, and

long before the NIH began urging everyone to “strive for five”—five

servings of fruits and vegetables a day—Prevention magazine asked me for

ideas on cancer prevention.

 

I came up with several; a big green salad or coleslaw, a big bowl of

'minestrone' soup and a Cancer prevention 'Herbal Salad'.

 

 

Cancer Prevention Herbal Salad

 

At the core of the recipe are several plants I lifted from Jonathan

Hartwell’s ethnobotanical classic “Plants used against cancer”, a

compendium of about 3,000 plants cited in the medical-folklore

literature for treating cancer.

 

More than half of Hartwell’s plants turned out to contain a compound

useful in the treatment of some types of cancers, at least in the test

tube.

 

My 'Cancer Prevention' Herbal Salad now includes garlic, onions, red

peppers, tomatoes (organic), red clover flowers, shopping cooked beets,

fresh calendula flowers, celery, fresh chicory flowers, chives,

cucumbers, cumin, peanuts, poke salad, purslane and sage.

 

In addition, I came up with a cancer prevention dressing to use with

this salad.

 

It includes organic flaxseed oil, evening primrose oil, garlic,

rosemary, a dash of lemon juice and that Latin American favorite, hot

peppers.

 

Fifteen years after I developed my salad, late in 1989, Herbert Pierson,

Ph. D. of the NIH called to invite my participation in the Designer Food

Program for cancer prevention.

 

This was a major national effort to manipulate foods to increase their

content of nutraceuticals (nutrients with medicinal value).

 

The idea was to enhance the amount of cancer fighting chemicals in

foods, either by manipulating the plant’s genes or by coming up with

necessary techniques that would preserve or enhance the desired

medicinal effects.

 

Dr. Pierson was most interested in my database of phytochemicals in food

plants and herbs, which includes anti-cancer compounds—

the same ever-evolving database on which this book is based. He invited

me to attend a meeting where experts would explain the cancer-prevention

benefits of various plants.

 

Imagine my delight when my colleagues and fellow researchers spoke about

the anti-cancer phytochemicals that they were finding in plants.

 

My fellow scientists gave presentations on the sulfides in garlic, the

capsaicin in red peppers, the limonene in citrus fruits and the lycopene

in tomatoes.

 

They touted the cancer-fighting potential of such herbs as flax.

Licorice, and rosemary. (Ever since, I have added rosemary to my salad

dressing.)

 

The Designer Food Program clearly had a lot going for it. I got excited

about the program and eagerly anticipated five years of helping the NIH

in this area.

But alas, Dr. Pierson left the NIH, and the program now seems much less

visible and exciting.

 

Fortunately, research on the medicinal potential of foods is going

forward in other programs and institutions throughout the nation.

 

Over the next several years, you’ll be hearing a lot more about

nutraceuticals, phytochemicals and meals that heal.

 

Foods and medicinal herbs clearly have healing properties, including the

ability to prevent and fight cancer.

 

 

Excerpt from:

“The Green Pharmacy”

James A. Duke, Ph.D.

________________

 

JoAnn Guest

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