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.