The Right Diet Improves Cancer Survival

by Sherry A Rogers, MD
Northeast Center for Environmental Medicine, Syracuse, New York.

Over the decades, numerous people have written their own autobiographies on how they turned around irreversible end-stage cancers with the macrobiotic diet. Anthony Satillaro, MD, wrote about his metastatic prostate cancer in "Recalled by Life". Hugh Faulkner, MD, reversed his cancer of the pancreas six years ago, when he was 74, and wrote about it in "Physician Heal Thyself".

Ealine Nussbaum described her incredible siege with metastatic cancer of the ovaries in her 30's which spread to liver lungs and the backbones. The backbones collapsed and, after two years of failed surgery, chemotherapy and radiation, she was given three weeks to live with her pneumonia. In fact, she was told that antibiotics could not he used for the pneumonia because she was so weak from the vicious spread of cancer, that the antibiotics might shorten her three weeks. It was at this point she turned to macrobiotics and wrote the story of her cure in "Recovery". That was over eight years ago, and I delight in lecturing with her each year, as I see her vivaciously returning from jogging.

Other people wrote their own stories in 'The Cure is in the Kitchen", which is the only book to give in detail what it is that people ate and did day-to-day to turn irreversible end-stage incurable cancers around with a diet and lifestyle change. This information is no limited to just cancers. Dr Dean Ornish published his work in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet in 1990. He demonstrated that people with end-stage cardiovascular disease could also reverse their PET scans when high-tech cardiovascular bypass surgery and modern-day cholesterol-lowering drugs had failed.

Recently, 6 researchers published a study showing that a macrobiotic diet, even if not done perfectly, increased the one-year survival for cancer of the pancreas from 10% to 52%. Likewise, they have shown that with cancer of the prostate, the median survival can be improved from 72 months to 228 months (Carter JP, Saxe Ci; Newbold V, Peres CE, Campeau RJ, and Bernal-Green, L:

Hpothesis: Dietary management may improve survival from nutritionally-linked cancers based on analysis of representative cases. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, vol.12, no 3, 209-226, 1993).

As increasingly more research points out that the causes of most cancers are dietary, it seems only logical that the improvement in survival should also have a bearing on dietary intake. One of the biggest problems we have seen, however, is compliance. In other words, it is very difficult for people to figure out how to do the diet and di it as carefully as they need to, in order to have long-term survival and actually reverse cancer. That is why we took the time to spell out the directions in "The Cure is In the Kitchen". For there are scores of books telling how to prepare the food and the philosophy of macrobiotics, but no one has ever actually spelled out in detail what it is that cancer survivors did day-t~day to make their dietary changes such a success. But, everything is not for everyone, and that includes this therapy.

But what about the stories of long-time macrobiotic-using people who have actually gotten cancer? How can we reconcile this? Many people become disheartened when they hear of someone who has been on a macrobiotic diet for a long time who has just developed a cancer. But they neednt be disenchanted with the diet, but rather they need to understand that we are in a different era now.

First of all, we are the first generation of humans ever to be exposed to such a high number of chemicals in our daily work, home and traffic environments. The average person is exposed to over 500 chemicals a day, and this does not include someone who works in a particularly overloaded chemical environment such as a factory. These chemicals have wide potential for causing cancers and many of the mechanisms are known and have been spelled out in the scientific research for years.

For example, did you ever wonder how they produce animals with cancer to do research on cancer drugs? They can give the animal one dose of a chemical in order to cause a cancer. Yes, one solitary dose. So, you can imagine what the total cumulative effect of our daily exposures an be. For example, an average carpet can outgas benzene, toluene, xylene, trichiorethylene and formaldehyde, all of which are cancer potentiators, and some can actually induce it themselves. But no one has studied the total effect of this load on the body. Remember the TV program where the researchers found the mice in the jar with the new carpeting were dead in the morning? Suffice it to say that with such an unprecedented load of chemicals each day to detoxify, we are constantly in more danger of initiating cancer than ever before.

Nutrient loss in detox

The other problem that goes hand in hand with this unprecedented exposure to chemicals is that every time we detoxify a chemical, we use up, lose, throw away forever, a certain amount of nutrients. For example, if you walk into a grocery store, you dontt even have to be aware of the smell of a pesticide, but for everv molecule of pesticide that your body' detoxifies, you throw away or use up forever, a molecule of glutathione magnesium and more.

Your body uses nutrients to make this glutathione and it uses up energy as well. Clutathione is a tripeptide synthesised from your body's amino acids, glycine. glutamic acid and cysteine; it then uses this tripeptide to onjugate, or hook on to, the chemical to make it a heavier molecular weight. In this way, it becomes more bar and is easily dragged out of the liver into the bile ducts and into the gut where the body disposes of the chemical in the stool.

But you have lost the tripeptide conjugate, glutathione, in the process. Now you have a reduced store of detoxifiers with which to meet your daily chemical challenges. So now some chemicals have a chance of sneaking into your body, but your body is unable to detoxify them. So instead they initiate the chemistry to start a cancer.

If these two reasons weren't enough, there is yet another reason why there is so much more cancer than there used to be: we are the first generation to eat so many processed foods. Up to 25-75% of the nutritional value has been remo;'ed from processed foods, so that they will have a longer shelf life. This is a vast experiment in what the human body can endure. For example, vitamins B6 and E are removed from oils and grain, so they will last longen But these vitamins are necessary to prevent cardiovascular disease, which is now the number one cause of death.

Twenty-five years ago when I was at medical school, it was rare to know anybody with cancer, and the cancer rate was about I in 11 people. Now it is the second most common cause of death and rather than being restricted mainly to people over 55, as it was back then, it's not at all unusual now to see people in our offices with cancers at 21, 29 and 31.

So, what can you do to protect yourself? "Read Tired or Toxic?" which has references for all of the statements here, as well as instructions for your physician to assay your blood for the most common mineral deficiencies that occur today and find out what is missing, so that you will have a healthier detoxification system and more protection. For starters, I would suggest an rbc zinc, rbc copper and rbc manganese, for these are crucial for function of superoxide dismutase, witch is a family of enzymes necessary to neutralize the toxic and carcinogenic effects of chemicals that get into our bodies. And you would need to do the magnesium loading test (described in the book) since magnesium is crucial for these pathways.

For example, government surveys show that the average American diet provides only 40% or less than half of the magnesium you need in a day. Unfortunately, another study in the Journal of the American Medical As5ociation (June 13, 1990) showed that when 1,033 patients who were hospitalised, over 54% were low in magnesium. The worst part of the study showed that 90% of the doctors never even thought of ordering a magnesium test. So, in essence, what is usual and customary in the practice of

Medicine in the U.S. today is pretty poor in terms of what we know about the prevalence of nutrient deficiencies. And it is even more disheartening when research confirms that it is these very deficiencies that allow a chemical to become a carcinogen in an individual.

Multiple studies throughout the scientific literature show that a vast number of the populace has deficiencies in intracellular copper, zinc, chromium, molybdenum, manganese, copper, magnesium and much more. These are crucial in the workings of the chemical detoxification pathways in the body, to protect us form the cancer-promoting effects of everyday chemical overload. If the body does not properly detoxify chemicals then they back up and damage the genetic structure and can turn on the message to produce cancers.

Nowadays in our office, it is not unusual for patients to come from Canada or England, Jordan or California. But it is unusual to see anyone anymore with all of their detox nutrients at normal levels... even if they have been macrobiotic counsellors for 15 years, as two recent examples showed us.

Cravings are significant

One of the most common clues that you have nutrient deficiencies is if you have cravings. For cravings are a natural symptom that you are eating out of balance and/or have nutrient deficiencies. It is an animal instinct. The only problem is that animals gnaw on the bark of some tree for the missing nutrients, and we forage in the refrigerator for Hagen Daz. Actually, even if you have any symptoms at all, or require any medications, you most likelv have biochemical abnormalities that can be identified.

So, when you read about someone who has been a long-time macrobiotic practitioner who suddenly has cancer, don't be disheartened or give up on the program; for indeed it is a very healthful lifestyle for the majority of people. But it does need to be modified in this century-in view of our daily unprecedented chemical overloads and prevalent nutrient deficiencies. The macrobiotic diet could stand alone and heal cancers 40 years ago, but no longer is that the case. Now we need to pay more attention to the rampant nutrient deficiencies as well as to the total load of stressors to the body; For the diet is only one part of the package of total modalities that can help bring about weilness.

For a list of nutrient tests your doctor should check, other parts of the total load, and over 33 biochemical reasons why macrobiotics are able to heal cancer, read 'Tred or Toxic?" Then for the first book to spell out the explicit healing steps of the macrobiotic diet, read "The Cure is In the Kitchen". These are available from Prestige Publishing, Box ~61, Syracuse NY 13220, 800-846-ONUS.

Sherry A Rogers is a specialist in environmental and nutritional medicine. She has published 7 books, 14 scientific papers in the medical literature, lectured in 6 countries and over 50 US cities. She has taught for over 10 years the advanced courses for physicians learning these newer techniques.
She was the Environmental Medicine column editor for Internal Medicine World, A Report, that goes to 100,000 physicians, for two years, and has published dozens of magazine articles and done numerous radio and television shows.
She has a private practice in Syracuse, New York, where she sees patients from all over the world, with undiagnosable or untreatable problems. The malor thrust of her investigations is to identify hidden, yet treatable causes rather than using medications to mask and stifle symptoms.
She is board-certified by the American Academy ofFamily Practice and the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, and is a fellow of the American College of Allergy arid Immunology.

My interest is in the future, because land my children are going to spend the rest of our lives there. HARRIET KETTERING.

In addition to warning against reproductive technologies, what we must also provide are visions for a different kind of life: a life without one's own biological children perhaps, a life in which a woirian is valued for herself a life in which women value themselves. RENATE KLEIN

It takes an act of complete courage for a woman to explore other ways of being in the world beside motherhood. It takes an act of courage for a woman to give birth to a book, a painting, a business, an idea, a dance. Giving birth to oneself is an act of complete courage. NANCY WAKEMAN

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