Welcome vibrant viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated of 12 million deaths in 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the first of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through nutrition education and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is an affiliate of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine. We are now pleased to show a segment from “How Foods Fight Cancer,” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thank you for joining us. In today’s program we’re going to zero in on how nutrition affects not just our risk of getting cancer or helping us to stay free of cancer, but also if we have this condition already how we can use nutrition for better survival.

Now, I have two points before we get started. The first is let’s set aside blame. There is a natural tendency. If you’ve got any kind of serious health condition to think, “What caused this? Did I cause this? Or did somebody else cause it?” Well, I understand that but for now let’s just set that aside.

And the second point is work with your doctor or health care provider. All of the information that you are about to receive is designed to be used in addition to the tests or treatments your doctor might prescribe, not instead of them. Okay, let’s get started.

First of all, what is cancer? Cancer starts in the inside of a cell. Inside the nucleus is DNA. That’s the blueprint that makes each cell what it is, and makes you what you are. But that DNA can be easily damaged. And when it is, instead of that cell staying put and doing its normal job, it starts multiplying out of control. It’s like a weed that then sends roots into the flower bed disrupting the other plants.

And a little bit of it can break off, get into the bloodstream and spread somewhere else in the body where it does the same thing, spreading and damaging other tissues. That’s what cancer is. But there are certain things that make it worse and certain things that can help make it better.

In the worse category are hormones. If a woman has breast cancer, the female sex hormones – estrogens, they tend to fuel its growth and they make it more likely not only that it will occur in the first place but more likely to spread. If a man has prostate cancer, the male sex hormone – testosterone does exactly the same thing. It encourages its growth, and encourages its spread.

Now the first inklings that cancer had anything to do with diet came from comparisons between different countries. If you compare Japan to the United States for example, a Japanese woman is much less likely to develop cancer compared to an American woman. But if she gets cancer she is much more likely to survive. Why would that be?

Well, the first theory was well Japanese women are thin. And that’s important because body fat actually acts as a factory for making estrogens. The more fat you have, the more it cranks out estrogens, I mean the female sex hormones, into the bloodstream. And as they are coursing around through the blood they are just looking for that one cancer cell. And they act like fertilizer on weeds. They make it grow, they make it spread. They make the disease much more aggressive. Well, that’s part of it.

Diet plays a role even if a woman is not heavy. And if a woman is on a diet that’s high in fat and very low in fiber… you know what I’m talking about when I say fiber? I mean plant roughage.

That kind of diet also increases the amount of estrogen in her blood, the amount of fertilizer on the weeds if you will. Well, how does that happen? Well, researchers learned a long time ago that if a woman goes on a diet that has a lot of fat in it and not very much fiber, the amount of estrogen in her bloodstream goes up within just a couple of weeks. It’s measurably higher than it was before. Part of the reason for this is that fiber helps your body get rid of the extra estrogens.

Pictures this - your liver is filtering your blood every minute of every day and it’s looking for things that don’t belong there. And it will find extra estrogen and it’s in the blood, the liver pulls it out, it sends it down through a little tube called the bile duct into the intestinal tract and sends it out with the wastes.

So the liver is filtering the blood, hears an estrogen, “I don’t think we need you anymore, let’s get rid of you.” It pulls it out, sends it down the bile duct, into the intestinal tract, out it goes. Good system.

Only problem is it depends on one thing and it depends on fiber. If you ate plenty of fiber, I mean vegetables, fruit, beans, whole grains, then that little estrogen that the liver found, it sent it down to the bile duct into the intestinal tract, it hooked onto the fiber and the fiber is what carried it away. But let’s say my lunch was skimmed milk, yogurt, chicken breast.

How much fiber is in those foods? Well, they’re not plants; they don’t have plant roughage. There is no fiber in any of those foods. There is no fiber in anything from an animal. So what happens? The liver is filtering the blood finds the estrogen, sends it down the bile duct into the intestinal tract. Where is my fiber? Where is my fiber? Where is my fiber? There isn’t any fiber! So what does it do?

It goes back into the bloodstream. It’s reabsorbed again. And it circulates around the body and then it arrives back at the liver and the liver says, “What are you doing here?” And the liver actually removes that estrogen again, sends it down bile duct into the intestinal tract. Looking for fiber, looking for fiber, looking for fiber, there isn’t any, it’s reabsorbed again!

And this estrogen does this circle we call enterohepatic circulation. “Entero” means intestinal tract, “hepatic” means liver, like hepatitis. And this works not just for estrogen, it also works for testosterone. A man who is at higher risk for prostate cancer, if he can get rid of extra testosterone he uses that same system. If he has lots of fiber in his diet, his testosterone level will be adequate, but not excessive because the liver finds the testosterone and gets rid of it.

Same thing for cholesterol. You’ve heard about how oats will reduce cholesterol, you know what I’m talking about. Well, this is how it works: You ate oats, they’re rich in fiber. The liver finds the cholesterol, sends it down the bile duct and its going down there and if the oats or other kinds of fiber are there it carries it out with the waste and your cholesterol level goes down.

Now that’s the theory, does it actually work? Well, the answer is yes it does. There have been a number of studies that have looked at the effect of changing the diet on not only hormones but also on cancer rates. And there are two that I want to share with you very quickly.

One was at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA). They looked at women who already had breast cancer; there were about 900 of them. And what they found was that as the time went by the risk of dying of that disease increased by 40% for every thousand grams of fat the women consumed per month.

Now to picture what I’m talking about. Let’s say you’re on a plant- based diet, without animal products, without a lot of added fat. There is really not much fat in that kind of diet. For comparison purposes let’s take a typical American diet that might have lots of cheeseburgers and gravy and French fries, a lot of fat in it right?

Those two differ by a good thousand to 1500 grams of fat every single month. That’s good for a 40 to 60% difference in whether you are dead or alive at any time point down the road.

Now another study called the Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study, the WINS Study, was very important. They brought in women who had breast cancer. And what they did was they asked them to lower the fat content in their diet, and the women did this. They compared the women on the diet who were getting about 30, 33 grams of fat. That’s really low. They compared them to a control group, that got about 51 grams of fat, that’s lower than average but not as good as the people on the special diet.

They then tracked one thing. These women had been treated for breast cancer, did it come back? Or did they get a new kind of cancer because as you may know, if you’ve been diagnosed with cancer before, breast cancer, you are more likely not only to get a recurrence but to get a new cancer again.

And what they found was absolutely being on this diet did help prevent it. It cut the risk of a recurrence or a new cancer by 24%. Same thing with prostate cancer. Researchers have looked at men with prostate cancer, changed their diets, and looked to see does this really make a difference for me? The answer is yes.

Dr. Dean Ornish, do you know his work? He did the research studies on showing that you could actually reverse heart disease. He used a low fat vegetarian diet, exercise, and stress reduction which is why he didn’t do the study in Washington D.C. (USA) where I live. And what he found is that it does reverse heart disease. But then he put this to work for men who had prostate cancer and the results were amazing.

Ninety-three men, everybody had prostate cancer… As you may know if you have prostate cancer you don’t necessarily have to have treatment right away. Many of these men are older, they can sometimes wait and they track a blood test called PSA – Prostate Specific Antigen. If it’s not going up too fast you just wait. If it is going up fast, you need treatment, you can’t wait anymore.

And what they found was that half of the group put on a vegetarian diet compared to the other half that didn’t change their diet. The men on the vegetarian diet showed their PSA wasn’t rising, it started to fall. It fell about four percent over the course of this trial. That's good. That means we're re-gaining our health and there wasn't a single person in that part of the study that needed to have treatment.

But in the control group, their PSA was going up. It went up about six percent and when you looked at the group, out of 49 men in that part of the study, six of them couldn't wait, their cancer was aggressively advancing. They had to have treatment.

And there’s another wrinkle in all of this. There's a specific effect apparently, of dairy products. Men who consume more dairy products, seem to be at higher risk of prostate cancer. Now we need more research on this but two large Harvard (University) studies have shown that when men consume a lot of dairy products, their risk of prostate cancer is substantially higher than that of other men.

And the reason, maybe, is that dairy products change a man's bloodstream. What they do is they increase the amount of something called IGF-1. I don't know if you've ever heard of this? IGF-1 “Insulin-like growth factor number one.” I think of it as a little bit like cholesterol. You know how if I take cholesterol, a blood sample and I measure cholesterol, that tells me what? It tells me, are you going to have a heart problem down the road? Not necessarily right now, but 10 years from now.

If I draw a blood sample and I check your IGF-1 level, “Insulin-like growth factor number one,” if it's higher, that means your risk of certain cancers is higher too. Prostate cancer for men, breast cancer for women. Why would milk cause IGF-1 to increase? Which it does.

Well think about this: What's milk’s job? What is milk for? Milk's job is to help a little baby calf grow fast. And once the calf is big enough to graze, there's no need for milk anymore, right? So, if milk's job is to make things grow, it includes not just protein, not just fat, not just sugar, that's the lactose that's in the milk, it also contains hormones and growth factors. And inside the calf's body, it causes the production of more growth factors that allow the tissues to grow.

One of these – IGF-1 is a very potent stimulus for cancer cell growth. If I mix IGF-1 in a test tube with cancer cells, they grow like crazy! Well, a man or a woman who drinks three glasses of milk per day, has a 10% rise in the amount of IGF-1 in his or her bloodstream. So, it's very rapid. It happens very, very quickly.

So many researchers are now saying, "Well, if I don't want to have things growing in my body, maybe I should not be having food that causes growth factors to be produced.”

We deeply appreciate Dr. Neal Barnard’s important work in the field of cancer prevention and for actively seeking to enhance overall public health. We firmly support him in his call for everyone to quickly adopt the vegan diet, the key to well-being and longevity.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you beloved viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month for the remainder of this eight part series. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May you always enjoy the very best of health.

Welcome considerate viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the second part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is an affiliate of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show the conclusion of Dr. Barnard’s presentation “How Foods Fight Cancer,” and segments from “Fueling Up on Low-Fat Foods,” two chapters from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

How Foods Fight Cancer from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Now, that's not all there is to it. When researchers have looked at colon cancer, cancer of the second half of the digestive tract, one of the big factors that seems to play a role is meat consumption and especially when meat is grilled, when it's cooked at very high temperatures. Why would that be?

There's something in the grilled meat called HCA's. You probably have never heard of this, it stands for Heterocyclic amines. And this will not be on the test. But HCA's Heterocyclic amines are cancer-causing chemicals. Dozens and dozens of studies have shown that the more of these that are in the foods you eat, the higher your risk of cancer down the road.

Well, where do they come from? You can go into just about any restaurant and if you order the grilled chicken, grilled chicken sandwich, grilled chicken salad, whatever it is, get that grilled chicken with a nice little, grilling lines on it, send it to a laboratory. They'll tell you, there are HCA's in there. Heterocyclic amines. These are carcinogens. And they come from heating up meat at a high, high temperature.

Within the meat is something called creatine, there are other amino acids, there are sugars, and there are natural fats in it. When the meat is heated to a high temperature and it's kept there for long enough to cook, that's when the carcinogens form. And regrettably, people are trying to be healthy, they don't want to eat the fried chicken, so we're eating all the grilled chicken. And the carcinogens are there.

Americans now we eat, believe or not, about a million chickens per hour. And we are getting quite a load of these carcinogens. If I take a hamburger and I grill it, what happens? Well, the carcinogens are likely to form. If I take chicken breast and I grill that, same thing, the carcinogens are likely to form because it's hot animal muscle.

What if I take a veggie burger and I grill that? What happens? It gets warm. That's about it. It's not an animal muscle so these carcinogens are not likely to form. Now it's important to say that not every food is bad for you. There are plenty of things that are good for you. You know about Beta-carotene? What color is Beta-carotene?

Orange

And where do we find it?

Carrots.

Carrots, cantaloupes, pumpkins, okay, sure. Now, it's an orange coloring that's there to protect the plant. It protects against free-radicals. Free-radicals are chemicals that can lead to cancer. It protects you too. And its cousin is called lycopene. Lycopene is in tomatoes. It's in other reddish plants and it's an even more powerful antioxidant, even than Beta-carotene.

So, how does all this translate into something that I'm going to actually eat? Well I like to use something called the "new four food groups." The new four food groups means: whole grains, vegetables, fruits and the bean group. Or you might call the legume group – beans, peas and lentils.

So those are our ingredients, and on my plate it might start with say, a bowl of oatmeal in the morning, top it with cinnamon and raisins or maybe a half a cantaloupe. Some rye toast, hold the butter.

Now for lunch, let's say I'm at a fast food restaurant. Don't get the greasy, taco dripping with cheese; instead you have the bean burrito or something like that. Instead of the hamburger, have the veggie burger. Have lots of vegetables.

And at dinner, let's say we're out at an Italian place, you're not going to have the meat sauce on your pasta and you're not going to have the Alfredo. But let's say you have the pasta with a lot of marinara sauce and all the doctors leap to their feet and applaud, all that lycopene in your dinner, and have the vegetables on the side. So this isn't suffering but it sure is a healthy way to go!

And if you do it every day, what happens? Vegetarians have about 40% of everybody else's cancer risk. That's the careless vegetarians, the French fry eating vegetarians. If you throw away the French fries and really build in the high fiber foods and lots of vegetables and fruits, you can do better than that.

But wait, there's actually more. Your cholesterol level falls. When people go to this kind of diet they lose weight, on average about a pound per week, and don't get nervous if you're already at your normal weight, you don't keep losing, you don't just blow away.

But if you've got weight to lose, you'll generally lose it. Heart disease, if you have artery blockages, it actually tends to reverse. The arteries actually start opening up. Your energy level improves as well. Digestion gets better. If you have diabetes, your blood sugars fall. If you've got high blood pressure, it tends to come down. And sometimes people find if they've had a little bit of arthritis, that gets better. If they've got migraines, that gets better too. Why is that?

This doesn't happen in every case but it happens sometimes. And I think it's because there are certain foods that tend to trigger these things, and getting away from them allows the body to start to heal. So let me encourage you all to be part of this team. We're learning a lot and we're spreading it around to our loved ones.

People all over the world are test driving this kind of routine, putting it to work and I'd like you to be part of it. If you're thinking, “Well okay, I'll stick my toe in that swimming pool, I'll give it a try," here's what I suggest you do. As a preliminary, just try some new recipes, no long-term commitment. You just give it a try and see what you like and when you're ready, take about a three week period and during that three weeks do it 100%.

Jump in head first, make every meal for the three weeks a really healthy meal. Why do I say that? Because you know it's true. If you have a healthy meal on Monday and another healthy meal on say, Thursday and maybe another one, the following Wednesday, are you going to see any benefit from that at all? No. And are your tastes going to change? No.

But let's say you do it every single meal, every day, even for a short period of time, you find that your tastes actually change. Your body feels different. Most people go through their whole lives never having even a week on the diet their body was actually designed for and this is the chance to really do it.

So give it a go, and if you want to, you can try these transition foods. I'm suggesting you get away from meat. So if you want to have the veggie burgers and the veggie hot dogs in the transition, on your way to simpler foods, go ahead. So, we've covered the basis, I hope that you agree that nutrition is a really powerful force for health. Okay, I think you've got the idea. Thank you.

We now present excerpts from the chapter “Fueling Up on Low-Fat Foods” from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thanks for joining us. When researchers have looked to find the best means of preventing cancer one of the things they’ve really focused in on, is how people eat in different places around the world and how cancer rates differ sometimes dramatically from one place to another.

And one of the first comparisons that really bore fruit, so to speak, was the comparison between Asia and the Western countries. In Japan the risk that a woman will develop cancer is quite low, at least traditionally, compared to Western countries. And for women who get cancer, survival is much better, again compared to Western countries.

Well, that could be because in Asian countries women tend to be thinner, but it also seems to relate to their diet. There’s a lot less fat in a traditional Asian diet. The staple is rice, noodles there’s a lot of use of vegetables, not much of very fatty foods, and that seemed to play a big difference. But it’s not just all fats really the animal fats, the saturated fats that seem to be a big part of the problem. But, things are changing.

You don’t have to just compare between say Japan and North America. You can stay home in Japan. Bad food comes to you! You’ve now got all kinds of fast food restaurants and meaty diets, the westernization of the diet is causing a change right there, and we’ve seen dramatic differences as this has occurred.

Particularly for two kinds of cancer: The digestive cancers, you know what I’m talking about, colon cancers especially. And also the hormone related cancers. In man this would mean prostate cancer, in women breast cancer and uterine cancer especially. And the reason seems to be that when a woman is on a high fat diet, and a low fiber diet, her hormones change.

There’s more estrogen in her bloodstream and that seems to fuel the growth of cancers. Same for men if he is on a diet without much fiber and with a lot of fat his testosterone level rises. It does not make him more macho, what it’s going to do is increase his likelihood of getting cancer.

The differences are huge! A study of Japanese women compared those who are affluent, and had westernized their diets early on, compared them to women who are less affluent and stuck with their traditional diet of rice and noodles and that sort of thing. The difference in breast cancer was 900%. Those women who westernized their diets were nine times more likely to develop this condition compared to the other women.

Now, it even matters after a person has been diagnosed. If a woman has breast cancer, if she has more fat in her diet, numerous studies have shown, her survival is likely to be shorter, that cancer is more likely, after treatment it’s more likely to come back.

There was an important study at the State University of New York at Buffalo (USA). What they did, it wasn’t a treatment study, they were just following the women who were getting treatment separately. It was about 900 women and they tracked their fat intake and then how they did over the next 12 years. What they found was dramatic.

The likelihood of dying at any time point down the road was increased by 40% for every thousand grams of fat the women were eating per month. Well, what does that mean? If I take a typical American diet and I add up all the fat that’s in that diet day after day after day for a whole month.

And I compare that to say a vegetarian diet, so there’s no animal fat and I keep the vegetable oils really low, those two diets differ by about 1000 to 1500 grams of fat per month. That’s good for a 40 to 60% difference in whether you’re dead or alive at any time point down the road. So it makes a huge difference.

Now in men, same story. If a man reduces fat intake and increases the fiber intake, well his testosterone level will come down just a little bit. He’s still got enough testosterone but those excesses that increase the risk of cancer will be gone. Now a lot of people are aware of this. They think, “Well I’m cutting back fatty foods. I’m switching from beef to chicken, I’m eating more fish.” You hear people say that.

Well, here’s the bad news for you. The leanest beef is about 29% fat as a percentage of its calories, which is what dieticians care about. The leanest chicken is not much lower, it’s about 23 (percent). Now fish vary, some are lower, some are higher, some are a lot higher. Chinook salmon, 50% fat or even higher, but broccoli is eight percent fat, beans are about four percent fat, rice is one to five (percent) depending on the type.

A potato is one percent fat, until it comes out of the oven and then of course at that point we put on the butter and the sour cream and Cheez Doodles and Bac-O-Bits, and suddenly it’s back up to where you started. But you get the point, that there are certain foods that are very low in fat, they’re very high in fiber and that will help you. Does it make a difference? You bet!

Our gratitude Dr. Neal Barnard for dedicating your career to informing people how a plant-based diet keeps us fit and full of vitality. May you continue your important contributions to the advancement of public health for many years to come.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you admirable viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month on Healthy Living for the remainder of this eight part series, including the conclusion of Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Fueling Up on Low-Fat Foods.” Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May you always enjoy the very best of health.

Welcome radiant viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the third part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is an affiliate of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show the conclusion of Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Fueling Up on Low-Fat Foods,” and his talk called “Favoring Fiber,” two chapters from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

If you compare a man in Hong Kong to a man in Sweden, the man in Hong Kong is about half as likely to have cancer cells in his prostate. And if he gets cancer he is about eight times more likely to survive compared to the man in Sweden. So the difference can really be huge. And researchers have put this to the test and found that indeed it works.

Dr Dean Ornish, who became famous for showing that a vegetarian diet along with other healthy lifestyle changes can actually reverse heart disease. In the arteries to the heart they actually open up again, when you get the cholesterol and the animal fat out of the diet and you get healthy vegetables and fruits into the diet.

He did a study in which he brought 93 men into the study. Everybody have prostate cancer, but they all had the form of the disease where you didn’t have to have surgery right yet, you could wait. You track something called PSA. Have you heard of this? It’s prostate specific antigen. It’s just a blood test and it shows you if the cancer is progressing rapidly or very slowly if it’s not progressing rapidly you can wait.

So the men came into the study, half of them followed a vegan diet. Now, vegans are not people from the planet of Vegas. A vegan is a person… is pure vegetarian diet, okay, no animal products and they kept the oils very low and that was the program. And the other group followed whatever diet they came into the program on.

Ninety-three men and what they found was in the control group, I mean the people who didn’t make the diet changes, their PSA levels do just what PSAs do in men with cancer. They got worse. As time went on they went up about six percent. And out of the men in that group, six of them couldn’t wait anymore. They had to have treatment. Their cancer was getting worse.

But the vegan group, something different happened. Their PSAs weren’t holding steady, they were actually on average falling, meaning they were getting healthier and there wasn’t a single man in that group that needed to go on to get treatment in the course of this stuff. So it really does work, it’s a very effective thing.

Getting the fat out of your diet is just the first step, but it’s a very important step. Okay, so we’re going to get the fat out, we’re going to slim down and we’re going to make room for all the healthier foods. Let’s put it to work.

We now present Dr. Barnard’s lecture entitled “Favoring Fiber” from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thanks for joining us. When researchers have looked for parts of the diet that can help us against cancer, prevent it or improve survival, or improve health overall, one of the things we’ve really keyed in on is fiber. What is fiber?

Fiber means plant roughage, and by that I mean it’s the part of plants that doesn’t get digested right away and it helps us in many ways. One thing you know is it helps keep you regular, you hear people say that. All that means is it moves things along, but it doesn’t just move food along, it moves carcinogens along.

Let’s say there was something not too healthy in the food I ate, well the quicker it leaves your body, the better off you are. Now that can mean that if something was going to increase the likelihood of developing colon cancer, because it’s attacking the cells of your intestinal tract, it’s gone, it’s gone much faster, that’s a good thing.

Now there’s another thing though: Fiber helps remove things that are circulating in your blood. How does that work? Your liver is filtering your bloodstream, every minute of every day, blood is going through the liver and the liver is looking for things that don’t belong there. It’s looking for hormones like estrogen or testosterone.

You need some of those but you don’t need a huge excess so your liver takes them out. It gets rid of cholesterol, it gets rid of medicines and things like that. And what it does is the liver filters the blood, finds a little excess estrogen, pulls it out of the blood, and sends it down a little tube called the bile duct. And it ends up in the intestinal tract and there this little bit of estrogen goes down attaches to some fiber, that carries it out of the body. Very nice.

So, if you’re thinking well a high amount of estrogen in my blood is linked to too much risk of breast cancer, a high fiber diet helps pull it away. One problem: a lot of people don’t have much fiber in their diet. Let’s say for breakfast I had bacon and eggs. How much fiber is there in that? Well, bacon and eggs aren’t from plants, they don’t have any plant roughage in it.

Let’s say for lunch I had yogurt and chicken breast; how much fiber is there? None, right? So the liver filters the blood, the little estrogen gets pulled out, goes down the bile duct, ends up in the intestinal tract, looking for fiber, looking for fiber, where is it? There isn’t any! It reabsorbs back into the bloodstream.

The estrogen goes around ends up back at the liver. The liver says, “What are you doing here? I thought I got rid of you.” It pulls it out of the blood again, sends it down the bile duct into the intestinal tract, looking for fiber, where is my fiber? There isn’t any, it’s absorbed again. That estrogen will do this cycle over and over and over and over again. It’s called enterohepatic circulation. Entero means intestinal tract, hepatic means liver, like hepatitis.

And this works not just for estrogen but also cholesterol. Cholesterol will go around and around and around until you eat fiber. You hear about oat bran and oat cereals, they will reduce the amount of cholesterol in the blood. That’s all they do. It’s not rocket science. What they do is they grab that cholesterol that the liver has sent down and they make sure it cannot get reabsorbed. That’s a good thing.

Same for testosterone, a man says, “I don’t want those testosterone excesses that are going to increase my risk of prostate cancer.” Fiber is your friend. It puts the lid on it. It helps you to remove those excesses.

Now let me walk you through an exercise. I want to help you to see how much fiber there is in the foods you eat. And inside of just a couple of minutes you are going to know how much fiber there is in just about everything in the store without reading the label. Will you do this with me? Okay.

Let’s take something like a banana. How much fiber is there in a banana? Now you may not know right off hand but give me a guess. Give me a guess. Is there one gram, 16,000 grams, how much fiber would you say there is in a banana? Anybody.

Eight...

Five? Eight? (Two.) 10? Two? Okay, very good. It’s about 2.7 (grams) in an average banana. Okay, so not quite three. How about an apple? Now is it, an apple is kind of like a banana so it’s not going to be 25, how much fiber would you guess is in an apple?

Five. 10. 10.

Ten, three, what? About 3.7. So similar to a banana, a little bit more. How about cantaloupe? Now here is a clue for you. If I take a cup of cantaloupe, it’s a little bit more watery so a little bit less fibrous.

So if a banana is 2.7, and an apple is 3.7, what’s cantaloupe? (One, two.) Okay, one to two. Right, good. About 1.3. So let’s say an average fruit, you walk in the store, an average fruit is going to be about three. Three grams per fruit. Alright.

Let’s take some vegetables. How about if I have a cup of broccoli? Give me a guess. Now here is a clue. It’s maybe, broccoli is not quite as watery as a typical fruit is it? A little more fibrous. So how much fiber would you say is maybe in a cup of broccoli? (Seven. Six.) Six? Seven? (Eight.) Eight? Okay about 4.6. So a cup of broccoli is about 4.6 (grams).

How about carrots? Are they more like broccoli or is a carrot is more like cantaloupe? Well it’s more like broccoli, it’s fibrous, right? So, how much fiber will... (Five.) About five? Very good. About 5.2 in a typical cup of, cup of carrots.

How about iceberg lettuce? (Nothing. Zero.) Well, it’s not zero. It is a plant. Okay? But you also know, you’re thinking right, it’s not huge, it’s not like broccoli. So give me number. (One and a half.) One, one and half? Okay, perfect. 1.2. Alright. So a typical cup of vegetables we’re going to say four. Alright where am I? Fruit, three; vegetables, four. Very easy, unless it’s iceberg lettuce, we’re going to cut that down a little bit.

Give me beans now. How about if I have a half cup serving of black beans? How many grams of fiber in that? Now here is a clue. Beans are not really watery. They’re pretty fibrous. So half cup of black beans? (Eight. Six.) Eight? Six? Seven? Very good. About 7.5.

How about baked beans? (Baked?) Baked beans. Six? Seven? Okay. About 6.4, good. So a typical half cup serving of beans about seven. Alright. Where are we? Fruit, three. Vegetables, four. Beans, seven.

Now let’s go to our grain group. How about pumpernickel bread? Actually a slice of pumpernickel has about two grams about 2.1. It’s less than you’d think. How about white bread? (Nothing. Zero. )Zero? Well now it’s not going to be zero because it is from a plant. Now they’ve done their best to make sure there is no nutrition in there but they did leave a little. So let’s call it about a half, about a half a gram of fiber. Okay?

So a typical bit of a white bread maybe up to a gram or more or whole grain bread, maybe about two. But does that surprise you? Fruits is three, vegetables are four, and beans are seven. The breads which we think of as being high fiber are lower.

Okay. So our fiber champions – the bean group, at about seven for half a cup.

And then the vegetables at about four, fruits at about three and if I have a slice of bread, if it’s white maybe a gram, if it’s whole grain about two. Typical cereals about three. Okay?

You walk in the store and you can look on the left, you can look on the right and you can estimate even for a packaged food ...food or a canned food what’s inside and you’re going to have a pretty good ball-park of whether it has fiber or not.

Okay, extra credit. How much fiber is there in a pork chop? (Zero.) Zero? Zero? We agree? Well why? Why? Is it from a plant? (It’s from an animal.) It’s from an animal. Animals don’t have plant roughage so the answer is zero. How about a cup of milk? (Zero!) Zero because it’s from ... (animal.) An animal, not a plant.

Wait, how about if it’s skim milk? How about if it’s organic skim milk? (Zero.) Still zero? You’re with me. Okay. How about eggs? (Zero.) Zero. How about eggplant? Okay. Very good! So there’s fiber in eggplant. Okay. So animal... I always like things that are easy to remember: animal products don’t have fiber, plant products do. So what? Does fiber really help? The answer is yes.

Let’s say I want to knock off a few extra pounds one of the best things you can do is pump up the fiber intake in your diet. I’m going to give you a number. Every 14 grams of fiber that are part of your regular daily menu, every 14 grams of fiber cuts your calorie intake by about 10%.

So let’s say a typical person in the United States is eating maybe 12 grams of fiber per day. Add 14, I get 26 (grams), I’m going to feel fuller and even though I think I’m eating the same amount, my calorie intake drops about 10%. So if I go up another 14 from 26 to… where am I now? 40. My calorie intake drops again.

Again, I think I’m eating the same amount but all that fiber fills me up, my calorie intake falls. Something is happening to my scale. I’m losing weight automatically, without ever going hungry. Fiber is a good thing. It improves your digestion, it slims your waist line, it reduces cholesterol and it will reduce your cancer risk too. That’s the power of healthy fiber. Thanks.

Our deep appreciation Dr. Neal Barnard for starting The Cancer Project to inform people how a plant-based diet is superb protection against cancer and a host of other diseases. May you continue your important contributions to the advancement of public health for many years to come.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you honored viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month on Healthy Living for the remainder of this eight part series. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May you always enjoy the very best of health.

Welcome loyal viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the fourth part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard, a vegan, is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is a part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Discovering Dairy Alternatives” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Discovering Dairy Alternatives from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Welcome, thanks for joining us. In today’s program we are going to focus on milk. Most of us grew up with the idea that dairy products were healthy but cancer researchers are showing us a side of dairy products that might really surprise you. Starting with, “What’s in milk?”

Well if you take a typical glass of milk and you send it to a lab the first thing you discover is that about 49% of the calories are nothing but fat. And most of this is what we call saturated fat, some people call it “bad fat.” That’s the fat that causes your cholesterol level to rise.

It’s also associated in some studies with a higher risk of developing breast cancer. So that’s why a lot of people are saying well I don’t want to have whole fat milk, I want to skim that away and have skim or non-fat milk, right? Well, let’s say I send that to the lab.

The biggest nutrient in it, the biggest source of its calories about 55%, is sugar, lactose sugar. That's where most of the calories in skim milk come from. Now if you have lactose intolerance, meaning that you get a real belly ache from consuming milk, you know all about lactose, but for people who don't, you have no need for this at all and that's the primary nutrient in it.

In addition to that, there are proteins in milk. And these proteins for some people trigger arthritis pains or allergies, or for some folks, even allergies and diabetes researchers are showing that early exposure to those dairy proteins might be the cause, or at least a contributor to the kind of diabetes that starts in childhood.

Well what about its link to cancer? Researchers have known for a long time, that countries that consume a lot of dairy products, like Switzerland or Sweden, the other Scandinavian countries, European countries; they have a lot more prostate cancer compared to other countries where dairy is not a big part of the diet. I'm talking about China, Japan or Thailand. Dairy is not a big thing in those countries, at least traditionally.

Well, if it's true that a higher intake of milk could in some way be associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer, then it ought to be true in this country. Let's say I compare men who drink a lot of milk, compare them to the men who don't. Is it true? Do they really get more prostate cancer? At Harvard (University), they did exactly that study. It was called the "Physicians Health Study".

It was about 21,000 men, all of them were physicians, everybody’s healthy, nobody has cancer. They tracked their diet, and then they watched how the men did as time went on. And it turned out, that those men who were the big dairy consumers, I'm talking about a couple of servings per day, which is not out of the range of what people do. Their risk of prostate cancer was 34% higher compared to the men who generally avoided milk.

They did another study called the "Health Professionals Follow-up Study". It was health professionals, but not physicians. It was pharmacists and other kinds of health professionals. But they found exactly the same thing, that those men who were the big dairy consumers, a couple of servings per day, had in this case, about a 60% higher risk of developing prostate cancer.

Well, what's this about? Why should milk do this? Well, think about it. What's milk's job? What's, what's the purpose of milk?

Okay, it's there to dunk cookies in. It's there splash on my cereal. No, no. What milk is for, is to help a calf grow big. Right? That's what it's for. It's to help rapid growth. So, the cow makes the milk, the baby cow, the calf consumes it and that calf is going to grow very rapidly.

Now, that's for two reasons. One reason is there are nutrients in the milk that support growth. There is a lot of fat, there is a lot of sugar, the lactose sugar, there is a lot of protein. But the other thing is, there are hormones in milk, there are growth factors in milk and consuming it causes these things to change inside a man’s body.

And one that cancer researchers are really zeroing in on is called IGF-1. I don't know if you’ve ever heard of this, Insulin-like Growth Factor number 1. IGF-1 it's a mouthful of a name, but all it really means “Insulin-like,” means it's like insulin, meaning it helps sugar to get into the cells, out of the blood, into the cells. Growth factor means it is a growth factor.

If I take IGF-1 in a test tube, I add cancer cells to it, they grow like crazy. That's true for breast cancer cells, that's true for prostate cancer cells. So, let's say I stick a needle in a man’s arm, and I measure how much IGF-1 he's got in his blood, and then I start feeding him a couple of glasses of milk every day. Or let's say it's a woman, and I feed her a couple of glasses milk every day.

What you find, is over the course of the next several weeks, the amount of IGF-1 in the blood rises. So this is just like a calf, the calf drinks the milk, and this IGF-1 is built in the blood, and it causes the growth of tissues. Now growth is a good thing at certain times, but it's not such a good thing when you are an adult, and you've got a cancer cell waiting somewhere, growth of that cancer cell is a very dangerous thing.

So, in an international comparisons, when we look at who has the highest risk of cancer, it's those countries that have a high dairy intake with regard to prostate cancer, and a high IGF-1 may be the reason for it. But other forms of cancer seem to be related to this as well. There is some speculation that breast cancer may or may not be linked to milk consumption. And the evidence is as follows.

Some studies show higher risk, some show lower risk, but when people have looked at IGF-1 levels, I mean, I draw a blood sample, and I look at what it is now, and your risk of getting cancer: the higher IGF-1 is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer. Cancer of the ovary has been looked at as well.

And here, I think we need more research, but there is some suggestion that there is a higher risk among milk drinkers; higher risk of ovarian cancers. For colon cancer it’s probably the reverse. Calcium seems to help prevent cancer. So milk drinkers seem to have a little bit lower risk of colon cancer. But the point is, there are plenty of healthy sources of calcium, you don't need to drink milk for it, so you can get the protection without the risky factors.

Now you might be saying, "Well, wait a minute, so you’re kind of suggesting here that milk is not a really great thing in your diet." Well, let me be clear about this, I think babies need milk, they need mother's milk. A baby should have breast milk, and we should do what we can to help kids to be breast fed. After the age of weaning, there is no physical requirement for milk at all. It's strictly a cultural thing.

But, “Where am I going to get my calcium?” Well, a couple of points. The first is: researchers have looked at the countries where people consume a lot of milk, you think those people are never going to have a hip fracture because of all that milk they’re getting, and bringing calcium into their diet. You know what? It's just the opposite.

The countries that get the highest milk intake, have the highest risk of hip fracture. The countries with low intake of milk and relatively low calcium intakes, actually do better. They have stronger bones, and have less risk.

Within this country, at Harvard (University), the "Nurses’ Health Study," have you heard about this study? The "Nurses’ Health Study" has been going on for many, many years, and tracking women over 18 years, they found that those who got the most milk in their diet, had no protection whatsoever from bone breaks. It didn't seem to makes any difference at all.

So, there are some things that you can do to protect your bones. First is, if you got calcium in your bones now, let's keep it, let's not lose it. Well, how do I do that? Well, avoiding animal protein helps. Did you know that? Animal protein causes the body to lose calcium.

Let me say that again! Animal protein, I'm talking about meat, I'm talking about eggs, even the protein in dairy products, animal protein causes your body to lose calcium. Where is it going? It's in the blood, it's going out through the kidney and into the urine. It's leaving the body.

Sodium does the same thing. A high salt diet, potato chips, salt that we add in the kitchen, that does the same thing, you lose calcium. Caffeine does it too, not the occasional cup of coffee, but if you are a big coffee enthusiast, as some of you may be, ah, a high caffeine intake is associated with some loss of calcium as well.

Exercise is, you know, give your bones a reason to live. Exercise is really the best friend of your bones. If you compare a tennis player, you look at their dominant arm, they've got better bone density in that arm than the opposite arm. So, exercise really does help strengthen the bones.

And oddly enough, vegetables and fruits do as well. Vegetables and fruits, some of them have calcium, some of them don't. But the vegetables and fruits seem to help build up the boney matrix and help the bones stay strong.

Sunlight is also important. Sunlight gives you vitamin D, so you’re out in the Sun. Sun hits your skin, vitamin D is made in the skin, and it travels around through the body, and as it's activated, it helps your intestinal tract, pull calcium in from the foods that you’re eating. So sunlight is going to help you as well.

Well, are there foods, that aren't from dairy products that have calcium in them, because I'm going to need some calcium. Well, let me give you two words, "greens" and "beans." The greens means broccoli and all of its cousins, they have lots of calcium in them. Except for spinach, spinach has lots of calcium, but it's very selfish, it won't let you have it. The calcium in spinach is not very absorbable.

But the other greens have a lot of calcium in them, and the absorption rate is actually higher than the absorption percentage from milk. And the other group is the bean group. Beans have a lot of calcium in them, you know they have soluble fiber in them. They've got iron in them, they've got protein in them, they've even got some omega-3 fatty acids in them.

Beans don't have a good lobby group, but they've got all kinds of other good things. So the "greens" and the "beans", remember them. Now, if you really want to have a huge calcium intake, you don't need this, but you can, have you seen these fortified orange juice products, fortified soymilk, they’re adding calcium to lots of things, breakfast cereals, you don't need that huge amount of calcium, but it's there if you want it.

The point I’m making is that researchers are starting to point a finger at dairy products, and teasing out the risks that it might pose us. You don't need it. There are plenty of good calcium sources, and really good ways to get away from that and to bring the calcium into your body and to keep it there. And as you replace the dairy products with healthier choices, you'll keep strong bones, and you'll keep the rest of your body healthy as well. Thank you!

Our sincere gratitude Dr. Neal Barnard, for your many years of strongly advocating for the universal adoption of the plant-based diet. The Cancer Project’s invaluable information on nutrition has reached many people and given them a new perspective as to why what we put on our plates every day has such important consequences to our health.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you optimistic viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month on Healthy Living for the remainder of this eight part series. Next episode… Dr. Neal Barnard’s Eating Right for Cancer Survival – Part 5 of 8 “Replacing Meat” Monday, October 18.

Up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May the Providence bless all with everlasting love and wisdom.

Welcome health-conscious viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the fifth part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard, a vegan, is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is a part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine. We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Replacing Meat” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Replacing Meat from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Hi, welcome. Thanks for joining us. Researchers have tried to tease apart which parts of the foods that we eat, might be actually responsible for increasing our cancer risk and what kind of dietary patterns reduce that risk. And one of the things that they’ve really zeroed their attention in on is meat. Why? Because in countries with a lot of cancer we tend to be meat-eaters and in countries where there’s not a lot of cancer, I’m talking about Asian countries, the staple is something different.

In Japan the staple is not a pork chop; the staple is rice, noodles, that sort of thing. And as these countries have westernized their diets, bringing in meat in a big way, cancer rates have risen. So the point is in these Asian countries, meat is at most just a condiment for other foods as opposed to being the main dish and in some religious traditions, they don’t consume it at all.

Well, why would meat be linked to cancer risk? One of the reasons is that meat itself actually delivers carcinogens to your plate. I mean cancer-causing chemicals. And it works like this: Let’s say I take a burger or a steak or a chicken fillet and I put it on a grill, and I heat it up, and I put it then onto my plate. Well, if I analyze it, you’ll find cancer-causing chemicals were formed sometime while it was on the grill.

What’s happening is that the heat, the intense heat of the grilling process causes a change in the animal muscle tissue, so that carcinogens called heterocyclic amines actually start to form. And if you swallow them, they increase your risk of cancer. Dozens of studies have shown that these cancer-causing chemicals that come from heating up meat are linked to certain forms of cancer.

Now they form in red meat, but they also form in a big way on fish and also on chicken. Now Americans now eat, believe it or not about a million chickens per hour, we eat a huge amount of chicken! And people say “Well I don’t want to eat red meat, I want to eat more white meat,” as if that’s going to be healthier, so they’re eating a lot of chicken.

They’re not realizing that the biggest single source of these carcinogenic, these cancer-causing heterocyclic amines is actually chicken. And people are eating it grilled, because you don’t want to eat it fried, that’s full of fat, that will fatten you up. That’s all true. But the grilled chicken is actually the biggest contributor to these heterocyclic amines in the body.

I’m just trying to cheer everybody up. Okay. You’re thinking back, “Oh, what did I eat yesterday?” Well okay, let’s do an experiment, let say I take a burger and I’m going to take a chicken breast, and I’m going to take a veggie burger. I grill the burger, it gets nice and hot and I analyze it, what’s inside? You got it, the carcinogens are there.

What if I take the chicken breast and I grill that and I send it to the lab, are there carcinogens there? You bet! What happens if I grill a veggie burger? It gets warm! That’s all. The nice thing is that plant products tend not produce these heterocyclic amines, which is a good thing, but that’s not the only reason why meat might contribute to cancer.

In fact, it may not even be the main reason. Meat has a lot of fat in it. It doesn’t have any fiber in it. You know, meat is not plant, so it doesn’t have plant roughage in it. And so what that means, is that high fat, low fiber combination tends to affect your hormones. If you don’t have fiber in your diet, and you have a lot of fat, estrogen in a woman’s body, testosterone in a man’s body starts to increase.

And if I’m centering my diet, not around rice and vegetables but around that big chuck of meat, then my hormones are likely to get out of control. So researchers have put this to the test. Do meat-eaters really have more cancer or not? And the answer is they sure do.

At Harvard University (USA), they’ve looked at colon cancer. And a man or a woman, who eats meat every day, particularly red meat, has about three times the risk of colon cancer, compared to men or women who tend to avoid it. So it makes a big difference.

And you might say, “Well what about fish? I hear fish is okay.” Well, fish has a lot of fat, doesn’t have any fiber, and if I grill fish, same story. I’m going to find those same heterocyclic amines in the fish as well. So, the other thing by the way about the fish, is a lot people say “Well, yes, but it’s got good fat in it.” You know what I’m talking about, the omega-3 fatty acids. That’s true it does. But the omega-3’s are only part of the story.

All fats are mixtures; fish has saturated fat in it, bad fat. Saturated fat is the kind that raises your cholesterol. It’s the kind that’s associated with higher breast cancer risk. So fish fat brings you good fat and it brings you bad fat too. So by now you’re thinking. “Well, I guess maybe the healthiest diet is a vegetarian diet.” Well, it turns out that’s true.

If you compare vegetarians, they’ve got about 40% less cancer risk, compared to everybody else. And when I say vegetarians, I mean casual vegetarians, the vegetarian off the street who’s eating healthy food but also the occasional French fries and barbecued potato chips and whatnot. They have around 40% less cancer compared to other people.

Well what if I’m a careful vegetarian? So I’m avoiding the meats and the dairy products, but I’m really bringing in the vegetables and the fruits and the high fiber foods. You can affect your cancer risk even more. And it’s a good move. Because if you’re just going, as a lot of people do, if you’re just going from beef to chicken, here’s exactly how far that gets you.

The leanest beef is about 29% fat, as a percentage of calories, the leanest chicken, without the skin, without the dark meat, it’s about 23. Fish vary, some are low, some are high… or lower I should say, some are higher, some are a lot higher. Salmon, Chinook salmon are about 50% fat. Broccoli is eight percent fat, beans are four, rice is between one and five, depending on the variety. A potato is one percent fat. A yam, sweet potato is one percent fat. That’s a way to really get away from the fat, really bringing in the fiber.

So if you avoid the meat products, what are you doing? You’re avoiding the carcinogens, you’re avoiding the hormone changing effects that these foods have and you’re allowing room in your diet to bring the healthy things in, all the vegetables and fruits and things are coming in.

Now, you might say, “Well, am I going to get enough protein?” You hear people say that right? Well, vegetarians get enough protein. And Frances Moore Lappé wrote a really good book a few years ago, called “Diet for a Small Planet.” Any of you ever see this book? She said if we follow a vegetarian diet, we could save this planet. We could feed hungry people.

And that’s true, because instead of feeding all the feed grains to animals to get this little bit of meat out, we can eat the grains directly. But she made one mistake. She said to get adequate protein you need to eat food in certain combinations. She had a list of grains and said, eat them with the beans, and if one is missing something, the other will make up for it.

And that’s sort of true, except the American Dietetic Association looked at this and said it’s actually much easier. If you eat any normal combination of plant foods, you get all the protein that you’re ever going to need.

So you don’t need to do this protein complementing. You don’t have to do that, just eat any normal combination of foods that your tastes call for and you’re going to get all the protein that you’ll need. So if you want to complement your proteins, just say something nice about them, that’s all you have to do.

Now, people do freak out about this a little bit. I was flying once and back in the old days, when they used to provide meals in flight, I would always order the vegetarian meal, because you get served first. And there’s a guy sitting there next to me, he says “Why did you get served and the rest of us haven’t?” I said, “Well, I just ordered a special meal.” “What kind?” “It’s vegetarian.” “Oh, you’re a vegetarian are you? Don’t you feel kind of weak?”

So the psychoanalyst in me leapt to the fore and I said, “Well, what’s your image of strong? Give a strong animal.” “Oh,” he said “strong like a bull or a stallion, or a gorilla, elephant.” These are all vegans okay. Well you get the point. A pussy cat is a meat eater, a bull or a stallion gets that massive rippling musculature from plant foods. And what that means is that plants have protein in them.

You may not realize it, but if you take some broccoli, about 40% of it is protein. If you take beans they’re about 30% protein and if you take tofu it’s about 40% protein. So the animal protein is the one you want to get away from. The plant proteins, the same one that makes animals strong is the one that you want to have.

If you look at what is in meat, it’s really just a mixture of protein and fat, there isn’t any fiber in it. There isn’t any complex carbohydrate in it. There isn’t any vitamin C in it. It’s protein mixed with fat, plus the occasional parasite perhaps, but from a nutritional standpoint, it’s really just protein mixed with fat.

Now, we all really grew up with meat-based diets. I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota and that was the only way knew to eat. Today we know better. Today we’re discovering the advantages of plant-based nutrition. Thank you.

Our sincere gratitude Dr. Neal Barnard, for your many years of strongly advocating for the universal adoption of the plant-based diet. The Cancer Project’s invaluable information on nutrition has reached many people and given them a new perspective as to why what we put on our plates every day has such important consequences to our health.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you gentle viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month on Healthy Living for the remainder of this eight part series. Next episode… Dr. Neal Barnard’s Eating Right for Cancer Survival – Part 6 of 8 “Cancer-fighting Compounds and Immune-boosting foods” Monday, November 15.

Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May health and happiness be with you always.

Welcome energetic viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the sixth part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard, a vegan, is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is a part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Cancer-fighting Compounds and Immune-boosting Foods” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Cancer-fighting Compounds and Immune-boosting Foods from the DVD
“Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

Welcome, thanks for joining us. What is it that starts the cancer process? That's important, because if I know what starts it, then I can prevent it from getting started. Cancer starts with damage to DNA. Inside each cell of your body is DNA, that's the blueprint that makes the cell what it is, and makes you what you are. And that DNA is damaged.

What’s it damaged by? It’s damaged by something called a free radical. Have you heard about free radicals? Free radicals sounds like a complicated sort of a thing, but what it actually is, is oxygen. Every minute of every day, hopefully, we're breathing in oxygen, we're breathing out carbon dioxide, and that oxygen is life-giving.

But oxygen is also very unstable. In some conditions, oxygen can even be explosive. It’s an unstable molecule, so as you're breathing it in, as it’s used in the body, it gets changed. When I say changed, I mean the oxygen molecule, if you could look at it very close-up, it has too many electrons on it.

Or electrons in unstable orbits, it becomes a little bit like a piranha, it gets inside the cell and it wants to take a bite out of your DNA, or it takes a bite out of the cell membrane itself. If those cells are in your skin, free radical damage is the cause of wrinkles. It’s the cause of the aging process. If there were no free radical damage at all, our lives would be very, very different.

And when it comes to cancer, it’s the free radicals getting into the cell, into the nucleus, attaching to DNA and taking a bite out of it. The free radical is trying to get stable, and it does this by attacking the other cells of the body. Well, the nice thing is we have defenses against free radicals, beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is found in which kinds of food? Carrots.

Carrots, of course. But also all of the orange foods like cantaloupes and pumpkins and sweet potatoes. And beta-carotene parks in the cell membrane, and it waits there and the free radical comes along and it attacks the beta-carotene not you, that's why it works. Now, lycopene as well, is in red foods like tomatoes, watermelon, same story, it parks in the cell membrane and helps protect against it, and that's a good thing.

Now these foods also will boost immunity. They boost the immune system. How do they do that? By protecting the white blood cells of the body. Think about this. What is it about the immune system? We need an immune system because if you don’t have one, you’ll be filled by a virus, or by a bacterium, or by cancer cells.

In your bloodstream you have red blood cells, the red blood cells carry oxygen. You have white blood cells; the white blood cells are there as sort of the bodyguards for everybody else. They're swimming along and if they see a virus that doesn't belong there, they engulf it. They destroy it.

They see a bacteria, they destroy it. If they find a cancer cell, they can tell the difference between a cancerous cell and a healthy cell, they try to destroy it, and we probably have cancer cells arising in our bodies all the time. But if our immune system recognizes them, grabs them and destroys them, you’ll never know that it has ever had occurred.

Well, these foods actually protect your immune system. Beta-carotene will protect you. And the carrots and the yams and the sweet potatoes and things that provide it, will protect you as well. Now, there is one little caveat I have here, and that is if you're undergoing certain kinds of cancer treatments, your doctor might say “Don't have those anti-oxidants in your diet,” because they imagine they’ll protect the cancer cell that they’re trying to wipe out.

The point is simply this: that these foods are big cellular protectors. Well, does it work? Does it matter? Yes, it sure does. There was a Canadian study of women who had breast cancer, and they looked at their diets and they looked at who did well and who didn't do well. And what they found was that those women who had the most beta-carotene in their diet, and what foods are we talking about? Beta-carotene-rich foods?

Carrots, yams, pumpkins…

Carrots, yams, pumpkins, cantaloupe, sure. By the way, also the green vegetables, did you know this? Broccoli has beta-carotene too. You can't see it, because it’s got a lot of chlorophyll in it. Do that sometime, leave some broccoli just sitting on your shelf for about two or three weeks. What happens to it? The green fades away, the orange comes out, and you can see it, okay.

It's sort like in the autumn, when the chlorophyll is gone, you see these other colors comes out. Well one of those colors is beta-carotene, it’s there in the green leafy vegetables, not as much as carrots, but it's there. Okay, so in the Canadian study, those women who had the most beta-carotene in their diets lived substantially longer compared… in other words, it helped keep their cancer at bay, compared to others.

Well, how much beta-carotene? How does this work? Here are the numbers. If they had more than five milligrams of beta-carotene every day, they had double the survival odds compared to those women who got less than two milligrams every day. What’s five milligrams of beta-carotene? A half of a carrot, about a quarter cup of sweet potato; it’s no big deal, it's from a diet standpoint very easy to do, but it makes a big difference.

And there was a study called the Women Healthy Eating and Living Study, the WHEL Study. Same thing. They had a group of individuals, they brought them in, and as one part of this study, they did blood tests on everybody, and they analyzed them for what are called carotenoids, beta-carotene and all of its chemical cousins that help neutralize these free radicals and help boost immunity.

And what they found was that those individuals who had the most carotenoids in their bloodstream, meaning they were eating their vegetables, eating their fruits, they had a much higher likelihood of surviving their cancer, and not having a recurrence, doing very, very well with it.

Now how much beta-carotene should I really get from day to day? Well, the federal government doesn't set any recommended daily intake of beta-carotene. What they do say is that if a man gets about 11 milligrams per day, and if a women gets about nine milligrams per day, he or she will get all the vitamin A that they need. Did you know this? Beta-carotene turns into Vitamin A in the body.

And in research studies, they will generally use maybe about 30 milligrams per day, which is the amount in two large carrots, maybe about one yam, also a diet rich in green vegetables can give you that. So, aim for about 30 (milligrams), aim for about the equivalent two carrots a day.

Now, I do have one caution for you. A lot of people will say “Why do I have to eat carrots? I can go to any health food store and they’ll sell me beta-carotene in a bottle.” Well researchers thought that too, they figured “People won't change their diets, let’s just give them pills.” Well it didn't work out so well.

There were two research studies amongst smokers. Smokers are at high risk of lung cancer, so let’s give them beta-carotene. Let’s see if this protects them. It had exactly the opposite effect. The smokers who took beta-carotene pills had higher risk of developing lung cancer compared to the men who didn't. And the researchers were so shocked by this they had to stop the research study.

When they looked at the data, here’s what they found: Those individuals who got more beta-carotene in foods had protection. If they got it as pills, they got worse. Now, we don’t know why, but here’s what I believe happened, here’s what we’re speculating: is that if you take just one nutrient and you take a huge amount of it, then it might interfere with the absorption of others, but if you get it in food, you’re getting these nutrients in the proportions that nature had in mind for you.

Now, it's not just beta-carotene, it’s also lycopene. Lycopene is the red coloring as we were talking about; watermelon, pink grapefruit, especially tomatoes, salsa, yes, salsa, ketchup, these have lycopene in them, believe it or not. They’re not necessarily health foods, but they’re there. And what do they do? They park in the cell membrane, the free-radical comes along, they attack the carotenoid, not you.

Now, vitamin E is also similar. Vitamin E will park in the membrane, and vitamin E is a powerful anti-oxidant, however this one I’m going to make a little bit of an exception on. By that I mean more is not really better. I don't like the idea of having a huge amount of vitamin E in your diet, and here’s why.

Researchers years ago studied premature babies. Little babies are really at risk of free radical damage, their little lungs are taking in oxygen for the first time, and they really can't handle it, so researchers have used vitamin E compounds as powerful anti-oxidants and what they found was that these kids would start to develop infections. Their immune defenses were disabled in part by the vitamin E.

So a little vitamin E is good, get it from foods. I suggest people not go to the store and take vitamin E supplements. So there is one other trick that you can do though, with regard to vitamin E, if you have vitamin C-rich foods, like fruits, citrus fruits, and vegetables.

Vitamin C actually restores vitamin E. Did you know that? You don't even need to take the supplements of vitamin E to have it be restored. Vitamin C-rich foods help sort of recycle and rejuvenate the vitamin E for you. Okay. Now…

let’s say a word about vitamin C. Everybody knows vitamin C is good for you but it fights free radicals as well. And if the beta-carotene is in the cell membrane the vitamin C goes in the watery parts of your body, it’s not parked in the membrane, it’s free. It’s going inside the cell and the watery part in the cell in case a free radical gets in, and it’s between the cells knocking them out in the bloodstream and other watery parts of the body. And if you have a diet that is loaded with vitamin C-rich fruits and vegetables, you’ve got your defenses there set.

Now the Canadian research study that I was just describing earlier, where women who had cancer were watched to see how they did, it turned out that those women who had more vitamin C in their diets did better. They were less likely to succumb to their condition, which will not surprise you by now.

Well how much? They didn’t have to have a huge amount. It turned out that those women who had 200 milligrams or more of vitamin C in their diet had about double the survival odds, compared to those who had less than 100 per day. Now 200 is not a lot, you can get that by having a diet that’s rich in vegetables and oranges, one orange has about 60 in it. If you have typical vegetables, they’ll all add to it.

And you can take supplements if you want to. I don’t believe there’s toxicity to vitamin C supplements for you. So if you put these all together, you’ll have a diet that’s rich in vegetables and rich in fruits and you’ll get the beta-carotene and the vitamin C that you need.

Now let me add some other pieces of this puzzle. You know about broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, they’re in the group called the cruciferous vegetables, and scientists love these vegetables because they give them a lot of things to study.

By the way the name cruciferous mean “cross-like.” The flower has sort of a little shape of a cross. So this will be broccoli, cauliflower, kale, brussels sprouts and many, many others. And what do they do? They work in the liver to sort of tune up the part of your body, the enzymes in your body that eliminate toxins. They’re called, I’m going to get a little bit complicated here, this will not be on the test.

You have inside your liver, different kinds of enzymes that are there to recognize things that aren’t supposed to be in your body. The phase one enzymes begin the process of eliminating toxins, the phase two enzymes actually carry toxins out of the body. They clamp them onto a carrier molecule and pull them away. It’s just like a criminal. You take the handcuffs, put them on, attach him to the police officer who carries them away. That’s what the phase two enzymes do.

Broccoli increases the activity of these enzymes, very, very rapidly. If you have broccoli today and I don’t mean just like one little floret, I mean if you gave a normal good serving of it today, and if you keep that up, you’ll find within 24 to 48 hours the activity of these phase two enzymes is greatly increased.

Now there are a few things that I’m suggesting we want to avoid. And we’ve talked about fat. Researchers are concerned about fat and you know what? They’re right. Researchers have found that fat interferes with the immune system and the experiments are heroic.

They’ll take volunteers; they’ll feed them high-fat diets. They’ll hook them up to an intravenous and drip fat into their bloodstream and then, I’m not kidding, don’t volunteer for these experiments. What they do is they then pull some of their blood cells out, mix them with cancer cells and they watch, how fast do the white blood cells chew up and destroy the cancer cell?

That gives you a good clue as to whether you have good or bad immunity. Well the more fat that gets into your bloodstream, the more your white blood cells have trouble doing their job, they just can’t work in an oil slick. Okay? So you get the fat out of your diet, your white blood cells will thank you.

Now the good kind of diet would be rich in vegetables and fruits and it wouldn’t have the fat in it, wouldn’t have the meat in it. So what happens if I’m following that kind of diet? Well, at the German Cancer Research Center, they did exactly this test. They took a group of vegetarians.

They thought, “You aren’t eating any meat, and you’re probably eating a lot of vegetables. Let’s test your immunity.” They tested something called the NK cell, natural killer cell. This is a white blood cell that is a natural killer, it shoots first and asks questions later.

If it finds a cancer cell, it gobbles it up. You want them. And what they found was that the vegetarians had about double the NK cell activity compared to the non- vegetarians. Meaning their cells are vigilant, they’re looking for cancer cells, they’re trying to knock them out. So what we’ve seen is that a diet that’s rich in vegetables and fruits, along with the grains and beans, it’s good for immunity, it’s good against cancer and it’s good for overall health. Thank you very much.

Our deep appreciation Dr. Neal Barnard for starting The Cancer Project to inform people how a plant-based diet is superb protection against cancer and a host of other diseases. May you continue your important contributions to the advancement of public health for many years to come.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Next episode… Dr. Neal Barnard’s Eating Right for Cancer Survival – Part 7 of 8 “Maintaining a Healthy Weight” and “Foods and Prostrate Cancer Survival” Monday, December 20, 2010

Thank you determined viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us the third Monday of each month on Healthy Living for the remainder of this eight part series. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May you always enjoy the very best of health.

Welcome friendly viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the seventh part of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard, a vegan, is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is a part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentations “Maintaining a Healthy Weight” and “Foods and Prostate Cancer Survival,” two chapters from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Maintaining a Healthy Weight from the DVD
“Eating Right for Cancer Survival”

One of the most important things that a healthy person can do to avoid getting cancer is to keep their body weight down to normal limits. And one of the most important things that a person who has been diagnosed with cancer can do, is to keep excess weight away as well, because the heavier you are, not only are you more likely to develop cancer, if you have it already, you are more likely to succumb to it.

What is body fat doing to us? Body fat is not just stored energy, body fat is a living organ and body fat actually makes estrogen, you can see this on the beach. If you look at a guy who’s developed a little bit of extra body fat, and he’s now pretty chunky, he has breast development, that’s not just fat, that’s breast tissue that came because his body fat is building estrogens and estrogens is causing the development of breasts in a man, and ultimately it will cause impotence.

And if he loses weight those estrogens diminish and those problems will tend to reverse. Now this happens in women as well, both women and men. And in women the concern is that if there’s more and more estrogen coursing through your blood, all it takes is one cancer cell, and that estrogen causes the cell to grow.

Researchers have long known that Japanese woman are less likely than Western woman to develop breast cancer and if they have breast cancer they are much more likely to survive it. Well the fact that they are generally slimmer than Western people could be a big part of the reason.

Researchers have discovered that indeed their hormones are somewhat lower levels compared to other folks, there’s less fuel for the cancer cells to grow. And it isn’t just a question of, am I massively overweight versus moderately overweight? It even makes a difference when a person is different gradations of normal weight.

There was study in Shanghai (China) that looked at individuals of different body weights and we would consider them all pretty much normal. They were using the BMI. Do you know what I’m talking about, body mass index? The body mass index or BMI is a way of measuring your weight, but adjusting for your height. Because what’s an ideal weight for you depends on how tall you are.

And an optimal body weight, people would say is under 25. If you’re over 25 BMI that’s going to be mildly overweight. If you’re over 30 that would be called obese. Okay, that’s our frame of reference. The study in Shanghai, they looked at women, everybody had breast cancer, but some had a BMI under 23, that means they’re thin women, and their five-year survival rate was about 87%.

But they then looked at those women who were between 23 and 25, they’re still normal weight but they’re just a little bit heavier. Their five-year survival rate wasn’t 87%; it was down to about 84%. Then they looked at those whose body weight was over 25, in the mildly overweight area and their five- year survival rate was down to about 80%. You get the picture?

The heavier you are the greater your likelihood of succumbing to this condition, so you want to stay down to a healthy kind of weight. So when people are overweight what do they do? Often they don’t know what to do, so they stop eating. You skip meals, you starve yourself, and you go on a punishing low calorie diet. And regrettably that’s not going to last.

For any of you who, you know this is true, if you’ve ever been on this kind of diet, “I’m really going to starve it off!” We end up rebounding, hunger takes over and you’re going to end up binging and putting back however much weight you lost and then some. So don’t do that.

Look around the world and eat the way thin people eat. The thinnest people on the planet live in Asia, vegetarians are also thin. And they have different characteristics compared to what we have in Western countries. They’re eating diets that are first of all much lower in fat; they’re not eating lots of meat and cheese and fried foods, they’re eating rice, vegetables. And if they’re eating meat it’s little tiny amounts, used as a flavoring.

Of course this is all changing, as diets are westernizing, meat is coming in, dairy products are coming in to Asian countries, with this unfortunate process of the westernization of the diet.

But, when researchers have put that kind of diet to a test, amongst Western populations, “Let’s eat a plant-based diet,” they find that people lose weight in a healthful kind of way. My research group did a study in women who had moderate to severe weight problems, and we asked them to follow a diet that was vegan, and low in fat.

That was the whole diet, just avoid the animal products, so there’s no animal fat, and keep the vegetable oils low. Now when you take those out of the diet, that makes room for vegetables, fruits, beans and grains that are high in fiber. So the diet’s filling, low in fat. What happened?

As time went by, the women lost weight week after week after week, the average weight loss was about a pound week. Doesn’t sound like much, except, after a year, 52-weeks in a year, you’re talking serious weight loss and that’s exactly what we saw. So the nice thing about this is, you don’t have to starve, you don’t have to exercise necessarily, exercise is good, but if you’re not able to for whatever reason, your joints are bad, your heart is bad, you can still lose weight.

So, to put this all together, what is a weight-loss regiment? A good weight loss diet is the same kind of diet that’s good to keep your cholesterol down, to reduce your cancer risk overall. It’s getting away from the animal products. That means avoiding the meats and the dairy products and the eggs. And in the process, you’re not just avoiding their fat, you’re avoiding their cholesterol, and you’re making room for the high fiber foods.

Keep the oils very low, every gram of oil, every gram of any kind of fat has nine calories. Those calories have your name on them, and if you eat them it will straight to your thighs. Instead, bring in the high fiber foods, the high carbohydrate beans, vegetables and fruits. Carbohydrates have only four calories in a gram. So, that’s a healthful regiment.

And don’t go off on high-protein diets, the low carbohydrate (diets), you know what I’m talking about, they’ve been very popular, they cause short-term weight loss. But over the long run, people tend not to do very well on them, and they have, unfortunately, some rather bad side effects.

Because the diets are so low in carbohydrates, people are avoiding starchy vegetables, they’re avoiding fruits, they’re avoiding breads, they’re avoiding pasta, they’re avoiding rice, and instead, they are eating, meat and eggs and cheese. Some people’s cholesterol will fall, if they’re losing weight on it, but others, their cholesterol is up. About one in three low-carbohydrate dieters, has their cholesterol go up, sometimes it goes right up through the roof. You don’t want to be one of them. And you don’t need that kind of approach.

So, it’s a good idea, to follow a plant-based diet, bring the exercise into it, exercise is good. Exercise, well, for a couple of reasons, it burns calories, it’s also impossible to eat potato chips while you’re out running. So, bring it in, in a good way.

And if you have any kind of health condition, definitely see your doctor first. You want to make sure your heart is up to it, you want to make sure your joints are up to it, and the rest of your body is up to it. But when got your green light, go ahead.

How do you start? I start small. About a half hour walk every day, and I don’t mean a trudge, I mean a brisk walk, and then gradually build up from there. And then, if you want to do more than that, go ahead. If you want to do resistance training, you know what I mean, like weight training, go see a professional and get a good regiment that’s tailored for your own needs.

Put it together, and you’ve got a really good weight loss program, because you’re on foods that are going to work for you, plus an exercise program that works for you as well. And that’s the best prescription for weight control. Thank you very much.

“Food and Prostate Cancer Survival” is the next lecture by Dr. Barnard.

Food and Prostate Cancer Survival from the DVD “Food and Prostate Cancer Survival”

Halo and welcome. Prostate cancer is a leading killer and it doesn’t have to be, because if we take lessons from around the world and people who follow different kinds of diets, we get clues about how we can actually reduce the likelihood that this will happen in our own lives.

And for men who already have prostate cancer, there’s a lot they can do to hold it beyond arm’s length. Let me share with you a couple of things, first of all the good news. There is something in foods that is actually protective against prostate cancer and that is the red coloring in tomatoes. Anybody know what that’s called?

Lycopene.

Very good, lycopene, lycopene, l-y-c-o-p-e-n-e. Lycopene is a cousin of beta-carotene. In the same way as carrots get their orange color from beta-carotene, a tomato gets its red color from lycopene. It’s a powerful antioxidant.

And studies have shown that men who have just two tomato servings per week have about 23% less risk of prostate cancer compared to other men. Men who have 10 or more servings per week, have a 35% reduction in their likelihood of ever developing this disease compared to men who get less.

And the nice thing is, it happens even with spaghetti sauce, salsa, all that you don’t think of these as healthy foods but they’ve got a lot of lycopene in them and it will pass into your bloodstream and it will protect you.

Now there are some things that aren’t so healthful. Milk products surprisingly enough are associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer. And this first came out of studies comparing different countries.

Countries like Thailand, Japan, and China. On a traditional diet there is very little dairy products, very little milk, very little of any kind of dairy products in their diet. You compare that to Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, lots of dairy products and you see a clear pattern the more dairy men eat the more prostate cancer risk they have.

So researches at Harvard (University, USA) said “That’s interesting. But would that be true in this country?” And so they did a study called The Physicians’ Health Study. They took about 21,000 men, everybody is a physician, everybody is healthy, and nobody’s got cancer. They look at their diets.

And what they find is exactly what we find comparing different countries, that those men who had the most dairy products as part of their regular diet two and a half servings or more per day, they had about a 34% increased risk of developing prostate cancer. Well that’s intriguing, seems to confirm the finding.

They did another study called The Health Professionals Follow up Study. These were health professionals who were not physicians, and what they found was exactly the same thing. Among about 48,000 men, those who consumed more than two glasses of milk per day had in this case about 60% higher risk of prostate cancer compared to other men. How can that be?

We’re talking about milk. We grew up with this, our parents wanted us to consume it, you go to the school lunch line, and they want you to have it. It’s heavily promoted. Why is it linked with cancer? Well there are several possible reasons but the one that people have really zeroed in on the most is something called IGF-1, Insulin-like Growth Factor number 1.

What’s IGF-1? This is a bit of a mouthful, they should have invented a shorter name for it, but that’s the name we’re stuck with. Insulin-like, means like insulin. It puts sugar into cells. But it’s a growth factor; that means if I mix IGF-1 with prostate cancer cells in the test tube, they grow like crazy. I think of it as fertilizer on weeds.

So if a man is avoiding milk, where is he going to get his calcium? Well, I like to think of two sources, the greens and the beans. When I say greens, what do I mean? Green vegetables, broccoli, kale, collard greens; just about any of the green vegetables, they’ve got a lot of calcium, one exception spinach. Spinach is a very selfish vegetable. It’s got calcium but it won’t let you have it. It has calcium, it’s just not absorbable.

But the others, they actually have a higher absorption rate, a higher absorption percentage than milk does. Broccoli more than 50% of the calcium in broccoli is absorbed, for milk it’s about 32%. So the greens are good. The beans are good as well. Just about any of the beans. They’ve got lots of calcium in them and the greens and beans are a good source.

But don’t feel that you need to have an enormous amount of calcium. A little bit goes a long way. Researchers have said, if it seems to be the case that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, bringing you that lycopene, if that’s protective; getting away from dairy products and fatty food that seems to be protective.

What if I test it in men who have prostate cancer already? I want to share with you two important studies. One was by a researcher named Gordon Saxe at the University of Massachusetts (USA). It was a small study. He brought in 10 men, and what he was tracking was called PSA doubling time. What is that? PSA. Prostate Specific Antigen.

All this is, is a protein that’s in the blood and it’s made by prostate cells so if it’s going up and up and up and up and up that means there must be prostate cancer somewhere or something abnormal in the prostate that’s causing it to rise. It’s a good indicator of how we’re doing with prostate health. And they measured doubling time. How long does it take for it to go from two to four? Four to eight? Eight to 16? If it doesn’t take much time, that means the cancer is rapidly progressing. Okay.

They brought the men in, they asked them to follow a very low fat vegan diet, meaning no animal products at all, very low in oils. And what they found was that their doubling time, which started out at about 6.5 months, meaning it took that long for it to double, it was stretched out in the course of this study to about 17. 7 months. Meaning their PSA’s on average were rising but very, very slowly.

And there were several men in this study where the PSA actually started to fall. Well that’s encouraging, it looks like things are going in the right direction. So Dr. Dean Ornish, who became famous for showing that a vegetarian diet could actually reverse heart disease, which is a terrific finding, the arteries open up again. He said what happens about prostate cancer? It ought to be helpful there too.

So he brought in 93 men. Everybody had prostate cancer but they were in this group they call “watchful waiting,” that means you’ve got the cancer but it’s not progressing really aggressively. You can wait before you get treatment. The doctor tracks their PSA and if it’s not shooting up too fast they just wait.

In the control group, this group was not asked to make any diet change; the experimental group went on a vegan diet, no animal products at all, no dairy products, that ought to be good right from the standpoint of prostate cancer. Here is what happened.

In the control group, people that didn’t make diet changes their PSA’s did what PSA does in cancer patients, it was rising. In the course of the study it went up about six percent and out of the 49 men in that group six of them couldn’t wait anymore. Their cancer was progressing so aggressively they had to go and have treatment.

But what about the vegan group, these people who learned how to have oatmeal for breakfast, and how to have vegetables and fruits in their diet; how to top their spaghetti, not with that creamy Alfredo sauce but with a tomato sauce that gets away from the dairy and brings in the lycopene. In that group the PSA wasn’t rising, it wasn’t holding steady, it actually on average fell about four percent, in other words they’re getting better. And not one of the men on the vegan diet needed treatment during this research study.

Don’t get me wrong. Prostate cancer like all cancers is a serious condition. We want to have good methods for detecting it; we want to have good methods for treating it. But if we change our diet we really can tackle this epidemic. Thank you very much.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Next episode… Dr. Neal Barnard: Eating Right for Cancer Survival – Part 8 of 8 “Foods and Breast Cancer Survival” Monday, January 17, 2011

Thank you esteemed viewers, for being with us on today’s program. Please join us Monday, January 17, 2011 on Healthy Living for the conclusion of this eight part series. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May your spirit always be filled with vibrancy and vitality.

Welcome intelligent viewers to Healthy Living on Supreme Master Television. According to the World Health Organization, cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Each year over 12 million people across the globe are diagnosed with cancer and 7.6 million succumb to the disease. The numbers are projected to continue rising, with an estimated 12 million deaths by 2030.

Today we have the honor to share the conclusion of an eight part series featuring excerpts from The Cancer Project’s “Eating Right for Cancer Survival,” a two-set DVD of presentations by esteemed nutrition researcher and author Dr. Neal Barnard, MD that is a companion to the book The Cancer Survivor’s Guide written by Dr. Barnard and registered dietician Jennifer Reilly.

Dr. Barnard, a vegan, is the president of The Cancer Project, a US-based non-profit organization advancing cancer prevention and survival through distribution of information on nutrition and research. Since its founding in 2004, the Project has strived to promote the vegan diet as the answer to cancer.

The Cancer Project is a part of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group created by Dr. Barnard in 1985 that is comprised of physicians and concerned citizens in the US wishing to improve public health. The Committee is also actively involved in raising awareness of the benefits of a plant-based diet through such projects as the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart program and seeking to amend federal nutrition guidelines.

Dr. Barnard has served as the principal investigator on many clinical studies examining the links between diet and health and his work has been published in top scientific and medical journals. He is often interviewed by the national media in the US for his perspectives on important issues in nutrition, health and medicine.

We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentation “Foods and Breast Cancer Survival,” a chapter from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD.

Welcome, thanks for joining us. Breast cancer is a serious epidemic, and we’re fighting it on every possible front. There are better methods than ever for detecting cancer, and we have better treatments than ever. But I have to say as a doctor, what I like best is the new method for preventing cancer, because if you prevent it, you never have to treat it, you never have to live with this, and the fear that’s involved with it.

Now we’ve known for a long period of time, that diet does make a big difference. Some of the first clues came from Japan. A woman in Japan, compared to a woman in the United States, she’s less likely to develop cancer, and if she’s got cancer, she’s less likely to die from it. She’s more likely to do well, more likely to survive. Why would that be?

Well, the first clue was, well, women in Japan are thinner, and that’s important. Body fat it’s not just there to store calories, body fat actually is a living organ, it makes things, it makes hormones, it makes estrogens. And estrogens make things grow. At puberty, estrogens are responsible for breast development, and during all of a woman’s cycle, it’s responsible for the thickening of the lining of the uterus every single month.

So if you think of estrogens as making things grow, what does that mean for a cancer cell? What it means is, it may make the cancer cell grow too. If I take a test-tube, put breast cancer cells in it, and add estrogen, the cancer cells grow like crazy, it’s like fertilizer on weeds. So, let’s say a woman has more body fat, she has more estrogen in her blood, that’s asking for the cells to start multiplying and to spread.

So well, does it work? If a woman is thinner, will she actually have less risk of getting cancer or will she, if she has it, will she tend to survive? The answer is yes. There was a big study in Shanghai (China) that looked, not just at women who were quite overweight, but women who had different variations, within what we would think of as normal weight.

Do you know the Body Mass Index, BMI? This is a way of talking about body weight, but adjusting it for your height. So your ideal weight is different if you’re six foot four versus, say five foot three okay? So the way we define it is, a BMI, a Body Mass Index under 25, is what we’re going to call, normal, healthy weight.

So in the study in Shanghai, they had a group of women, everybody already had breast cancer, and the question was, “If they are heavier or thinner, would that affect how they do?” Here’s what they found. The women who had a BMI under 23, thin women, their five-year survival was about 87%.

They then compared them with the women who were between 23 and 25, a little heavier, bit really, but still within normal weight. And their five-year survival was a little bit less, about 84%. And then they looked at the women who were over 25. Not seriously overweight, but just a little bit into overweight. Their five-year survival was down to 80%. So the heavier you go, the more likely you are to be vulnerable to this condition, okay?

Well that’s the first thing, but there’s more to it. It’s not just the fat on your body, it’s the fat on your plate. And researchers found that it doesn’t just affect whether a woman develops cancer, it also affects, whether she does well or not so well.

At the State University of New York in Buffalo (USA), researchers did an important study. They brought in about 900 women, everybody already had breast cancer, and all they did was this: They looked at their diet, and then they looked at who did well, and who didn’t do so well. And what they found was stunning. The risk of dying at any point in time was increased by 40%, for every thousand grams of fat the women ate per month.

Now, let me make this practical for you. If I take a typical American diet, I throw in all the fat from the hamburgers that we might eat, and the French fries and the salad oils and you take all that fat and you add it up.

You compare that to a plant based diet, a vegetarian diet, so there’s no animal fat in it, and a diet where we keep the oils pretty low, those two diets differ, by anywhere from 1000 to 1500 grams of fat every single month. That’s good for a 40 to 60% difference in whether you are dead or alive at any single time point in the future. So it makes a big difference.

We’ve put this to work, sometimes in rather unusual ways. I was sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang. And a young woman said, “Dr. Barnard.” I said, “Yes?” “I can’t get out of bed.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “This happens to me every month. For one day my cramps are so bad, I just can’t function, I can’t get through the day without taking enormous amounts of ibuprofen, and I’m scared about the side effects, and I don’t know what to do. And can you give me a more powerful pain medicine so that I can function.”

I said, “Yes I can. Let me give you some painkillers for a couple of days.” But it suddenly struck me, what are menstrual cramps? Every single month, the amount estrogen in the body rises and then it falls, about two weeks in, that’s when a woman is ovulating. And then the next two weeks the amount of estrogen rises, thickening the lining of the uterus.

What’s it doing that for? Because the uterus is the most optimistic organ in the body. Every single month it’s convinced we’re going to get pregnant for sure, so it gets ready. But then about two weeks before the end of the month, it says “Ah, it didn’t happen.” So at that point, the inner lining of the uterus breaks up, it’s lost in menstrual flow, and very maladjusted chemicals called prostaglandins are released. They cause cramping and they cause headaches and they make you feel crummy.

And so as she’s talking on the phone, I’m thinking, “Wait a minute. From breast cancer research we know that if I cut the fat out of my diet, if I bring in the fiber, I can reduce the amount of estrogen. Less estrogen, (means) less thickening, and less cramps. Let’s try it.”

So I suggested this to her. I said, “Let me give you some painkillers for a couple of days, but we want to do an experiment for about four weeks. How about this, no animal products in your diet. If there are no animal products, there’s no animal fat.” And I said, “And keep the oils low. Throw away your bottles of cooking oil and all that stuff. Don’t eat the greasy potato chips and things. Keep it very basic, very low in fat.” She said, “Well I’ll try anything.”

She calls me up four weeks later, “Dr. Barnard, I just have one question.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Why don’t doctors tell patients about this?” Her period just sneaked up on her, virtually no symptoms at all. And I thought that was intriguing. So I wrote a book that mentioned this and I started getting calls from women who said, “This is really true!” And she also found that if she deviated from her diet early in the month, a big bag of potato chips, something greasy, she would pay for it at the end of the month.

So I did a research study with some colleagues at Georgetown University (USA) and we found indeed it is true. We brought in a group of women who had serious menstrual cramps. We put them on a diet that was vegan and low in fat for two full menstrual cycles. It shortened the number of days of pain. It shortened the intensity of the pain. And PMS (premenstrual syndrome) symptoms, like water retention and bloating and irritability, all these things got better.

What I’m suggesting is just this. The reason I tell you this story is we imagine that our hormones are controlling us. That’s true, but we have a measure of control over them too. It’s just we never had the instruction manual. Well now we know how to do it.

Now there are some times when research brought us in sort of the wrong direction. Do you know the “Women’s Health Initiative?” The “Women’s Health Initiative” was a very large and I think, very well designed research study but it tested a rather modest diet. The idea was if we bring in a group of women, in this case, not quite 50 000 women and if we reduce the fat content of their diet, will that prevent breast cancer?

Well, they didn’t make anybody vegetarian or vegan. They didn’t really cut the fat out to a great degree. The numbers were like this. At the beginning of the study, the average woman going into it was eating about 38% of her calories from fat. That’s kind of high. The national average is closer to 30%. Then as time went on, they were able to reduce the fat content of their diet down to about 24%, which is in the right direction but it didn’t stay there.

As time went on, they were going back up and back up and back up and by the six year point, they were back up to about 29%, which is very much like the national average right now. Well, what happened? First of all, their breast cancer rates dropped just a little, about 9%. So that’s good, it’s in the right direction but it’s not strong enough. With one exception, progesterone receptor negative cancer, that’s one particular type, dropped 24%.

So that’s good, but here’s why the diet didn’t work. They allowed people to keep eating all the foods that make the American diet risky. They said, have the leaner cuts of beef; have chicken without the skin. The leanest beef is 29% fat. Chicken without the skin is 23%. Fish, some fish like salmon is over 50% fat in a typical cut of Chinook salmon.

Broccoli is 8%, beans are 4%, rice is 1% to 5%. Those are the foods, if you really want to test this in a serious way, have people eating the grains and the beans and the vegetables and fruits. So don’t get me wrong, I think the “Women’s Health Initiative” was a great study, but what it proved wasn’t that diet doesn’t work. What it proved is that small diet changes do very little.

Let me tell you about two other studies that really tackle this problem. One was called “The Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study.” And what they wanted to do was to see if diet makes a difference after a woman already has breast cancer.

They brought in not quite 2,500 women. Everybody had breast cancer and they put them on a diet that was pretty low in fat, about 15% of their calories came from fat. That’s about half the American average. And then they tracked how they did as time went on. What they were specifically looking for, was whether a woman was likely to have a cancer recurrence or a new cancer.

Did you know this, that if a woman has already had breast cancer, she’s at higher risk of getting a new cancer? So what they found was the diet worked. The likelihood of getting cancer recurrence or a new cancer was cut by about 24% and when they looked at those that were estrogen receptor negative, that’s a particular type of cancer, they were cut by about 42%. So diet, it’s not perfect but it’s darn good and we’ll take it.

Now there was another study called “The Women’s Healthy Eating & Living Study” or “The WHEL Study.” And they went a step further. It was low in fat but they also made a point of emphasizing vegetables and fruits and juices in particular, like carrot juice and that sort of thing. And it wasn’t quite vegetarian, but it was going a little further in that direction. The study as we’re recording this now is not yet finished, but I want to share with you some early results because they’re exciting.

I’ve been suggesting that if a woman loses weight, brings in the fiber, cuts the fat out of her diet, she’s going to be able to control her hormones. Does it work? They took a sample of 291 of the women in the study and they actually measured their hormones at the beginning and the end. I’m talking about estradiol and estrone, these are the estrogens in a woman’s blood and indeed they dropped quite significantly just from the diet change alone, no medicines, no exercise, nothing, just the diet change.

But then they went further and they looked at the control group that was not asked to make any diet changes. It was a large group of women, about 1,500 women and they varied. Some of them ate more vegetables, some of them ate less and they did a blood test for carotenoids, Beta-carotene and its cousins. You can measure that in a person’s blood. So if somebody said, “I eat a lot of vegetables,” you know, you can actually tell if it’s true or not.

So they measured them, and what they found was that those women who had the most carotenoids in their bloodstream, meaning they had been doing it, they had been eating the vegetables and fruits, they had about a 45% reduction in their likelihood of having cancer come back.

So bottom line is this: We still have good methods for detecting cancer, we have pretty good methods of treating it, but you know what, I never want to use them. I want to see what we can do to keep cancer beyond arm’s length, and to do that we need to just change what’s on our plate. Thank you very much.

Our heartfelt gratitude Dr. Neal Barnard for allowing us to share your excellent and highly informative presentations from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” series with our viewers. By encouraging the adoption of the vegan lifestyle, you and members of The Cancer Project are on the forefront of improving public health in the United States and beyond. We wish you the very best in your future endeavors.

For more details on The Cancer Project, please visit www.CancerProject.org
The two-set DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” and The Cancer Survivor’s Guide, a free to download e-book, are available at the same website

Thank you trusted viewers, for joining us today on Healthy Living. Up next is Science and Spirituality, after Noteworthy News, here on Supreme Master Television. May the entire world soon adopt the compassionate plant-based diet and enjoy the peak of health.