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.