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.