Plant-based diet greatly reduces risk of cancer, say studies

[Guest guest]

Plant-based diet greatly reduces risk of cancer, say studies JoAnn Guest Apr

07, 2005 11:50 PDT

 

 

http://www.newstarget.com/005070.html

 

Three new studies published in the journal of the American Medical

Association are proving the benefit of a plant-based diet in greatly

reducing the risk of cancer.

 

The studies show that high consumption of fruits and vegetables wards

off a variety of cancers. (They also show that consuming red meat

multiplies the risk of colon cancer.) Another study in the same issue

shows that consuming olive oil reduces the risk of breast cancer.

 

 

 

So here we're talking about a wide variety of cancers: prostate cancer,

breast cancer, colon cancer, even leukemia and multiple myeloma. And

across the board, we're seeing that consuming a plant-based diet is what

prevents cancer and enhances health at many different levels, including

cardiovascular health.

 

But here's what's fascinating about this study that you probably haven't

heard in the mainstream press: it was conducted on regular, everyday

people that are generally consuming unhealthy diets to begin with.

 

Let me explain further: if you select 1000 people out of the population

and examine their diets in terms of cancer prevention, the vast majority

of those 1000 people are consuming a lot of cancer-causing ingredients

in packaged meats (the sodium nitrite ingredient), they're consuming

artificial coloring, and they're eating monosodium glutamate and other

ingredients that actually promote cancer. And yet, we see that the small

amount of fruits and vegetables these people consume actually protects

them from the dangerous effects of those ingredients.

 

Now, if you were to repeat this study and look at the anti-cancer

benefit in holistic nutritionists, or people who consume vegetarian

organic diets, you would see a much stronger protective effect. The

cancer rates in that group would plummet. Because, let's face it, even

in the published studies when people talk about eating fruits and

vegetables, a lot of the data come from self-reported surveys.

 

And the things that people consider to be fruits are not necessarily

healthy fruits. For example, eating apple pie is counted as a fruit in

clinical trials. Personally, I wouldn't count that as a fruit. It's a

cooked, sugary apple pie made with hydrogenated oils, refined white

flour and refined sugar in the crust. To me, that's not fruit. That's

junk food.

 

But medical studies call that " fruit. "

 

The same is true with vegetables: a lot of people might think spinach

lasagna counts as a vegetable serving. And, again, I consider that to be

junk food. It's loaded up with cheese, it probably has some sort of

chemical taste enhancer if it's been purchased at the store, it has

refined carbohydrates in the crust, and it probably has refined sugar in

the tomato sauce. And yes, there's a little bit of spinach in there too,

but that's not a vegetable serving. That's just junk food with a bit of

spinach filler.

 

To me, eating spinach means buying raw spinach and having a nice spinach

salad, or giving it a Chinese-style stir fry with nothing but garlic and

a little bit of soy sauce. That's a real vegetable serving. So if you

look across the population at what people consider to be fruits and

vegetables, to me it's amazing that there's any health benefit coming

out of these studies at all. Because people have distorted definitions

of what fruits and vegetables really are.

(Some people consider strawberry ice cream to be a serving of fruits!)

 

As a result, if you observed a group of people in a study and you made

sure they ate raw fruits and vegetables and avoided all of the refined,

manufactured food products, you would see phenomenal results.

 

If you had people eating raw blueberries, nuts, green leafy vegetables,

salads, and consuming whole drinks made from vegetable concentrates,

then the results would be vastly different from what you're seeing in

these published studies. You'd see diseases like cancer literally

vanishing in the group.

 

And yet even these mainstream studies using unhealthy people on minimal

plant diets are showing positive results. It goes to show you that even

people who have poor dietary habits can dramatically reduce their risk

of cancer by consuming a few fruits and vegetables along with their

unhealthy foods.

 

There's an important side note in all of this too: the common fault of

all clinical trials. The population at large is so unbelievably

unhealthy that clinical trials using everyday people lose relevance to

the nature of healthy human physiology. Because, let's face it, when

you're conducting trials on the existing population, you're really only

asking the question, " What will be the effect of this treatment or drug

or supplement on diseased people? " That's the question you're asking.

 

So you get all of these study results about prescription drugs or olive

oil or nutritional supplements, and really these results only tell you

how they operate on unhealthy people. We don't really have any clinical

trials being conducted on strictly healthy individuals, because where do

you round up 1,000 healthy people who follow an organic, plant-based

diet, who engage in regular physical exercise, and who avoid all the

metabolic disrupting ingredients that I commonly write about here? Where

do you find people like that? Maybe only at a natural health convention,

but certainly not in the population at large.

 

Look around: the population is heavily diseased. Why are we basing all

modern medical studies on the physiology of diseased people?

 

(Some medical researchers might answer by saying, " Because that's who we

need to treat with the drugs! " And I say, sure, but if you only study

unhealthy people, how do you expect to learn anything about the causes

of health?

 

You see, modern medicine really only studies disease.

 

That's why med school graduates are generally clueless about nutrition

(see related ebook on nutrition) and disease prevention.)

 

All this leads us to a startling realization, which is that we now have

a system of medicine based on a collection of clinical evidence that was

derived from studying how unhealthy, chronically diseased,

malfunctioning human bodies respond to certain chemicals. That's what we

have today.

 

So when people call it evidence based medicine, it's actually not based

on any realistic evidence of how healthy bodies might respond. It's all

based on running clinical trials with diseased individuals.

 

That's how conventional medicine smeared the reputation of vitamin E, by

the way. Some vitamin E haters rounded up a bunch of people dying from

advanced stage heart disease, then they gave them synthetic vitamin E

(i.e. a non-natural chemical) in very low doses.

 

When the people started dying off from their heart disease, the

researchers put the blame squarely on vitamin E.

 

Hence the bizarre news headlines in late 2004 proclaiming, " Vitamin E

will kill you! " It's all nonsense. The people were dying of heart

disease in the first place, and the statistics were not adequately

adjusted to take expected mortality rates into account.

 

But getting back to the JAMA studies, we at least now know that eating

more plants -- even small portions of those plants -- will vastly

improve the health of most people (even diseased people). That much is

clear. And if you actually eat real fruits and vegetables instead of

processed ones, you'll benefit even more.

 

 

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AIM Barleygreen

" Wisdom of the Past, Food of the Future "

 

http://www.geocities.com/mrsjoguest/Diets.html