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.