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.