A level-headed look at claims made around vegan diets as well as an in-depth look at research, scientifically valid studies on the topic, studies on angiogenesis, vegan cancer rates and mechanisms that a vegan diet may be helping fight cancer. A whole food vegan diet is advantageous on many levels and has many benefits for fighting cancer by combining the power of anti-angiogenic foods, controlling blood sugar, saturating your body with antioxidants and removing hormones and carcinogens from animal products. Unlike drugs—which tend to only target specific conditions, can have dangerous side effects, and may only treat the symptoms of disease—a healthy diet can benefit all organ systems at once, has good side effects, and may treat the underlying cause of illness.
Children are seven times more likely to develop a brain tumor eating just a single hotdog a week, than using a cell phone. In fact if children insist on wanting to eat a wiener, they are multiplying their odds of getting childhood leukemia by 950%. Diet is the number one cause of cancer; cancer is therefore a preventable disease, but it does require major lifestyle changes. Only 5-10% of cancers is in our genes, in our family history; the other 90-95% of cancer risk is caused by what we expose our bodies to. Of the 90-95%, tobacco contributes about a quarter of the risk in the United States; but diet, if you include alcohol and obesity, makes up about 50% of our cancer risk. Cellphones, air pollution, X-rays, etc. just fits in to that last 10-15%.
A massive study in Canada, reveal that, total meat consumption was directly related to the risk of not only stomach cancer, but rectal cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and leukemia, as well. Alike everybody at this point cancer is present in my family. Periodically, I end up heavily researching it and asking questions like: what would I do if I got cancer at some point? and, is there anything I can do to prevent it in the first place? Despite being super interested in this topic, I have kind of put it off because it is such a charged topic; that is why I have to throw in a disclaimer saying, I am not a medical professional, I am merely a bachelor’s in alternative medicine student and this research is largely speculative. There are not definitive clinical trials on this subject yet, so take it with a grain of salt. Zooming out to the epidemiological evidence, vegans pretty much across the board have lower levels of cancer, especially certain cancers like female reproductive cancers, which is 30% less compared to omnivores.
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Across multiple large studies it appears that the general cancer rate for vegans is about 15% lower; this of course does include everybody that is eating a junky vegan diet. We can all agree that not every vegan diet is going to be helpful against cancer. In terms of my history, a lot of what pushed me toward a vegan died in the first place was studies on cancer; we have Dr. Colin Campbell, who talked about studies where they could turn cancer on and off in rats with animal protein. Obviously that is not super definitive, especially not for humans, but it got me looking into this.
Ornish studies showed a massive slowing of cancer growth in a petri dish, and a increased ability to kill cancer with blood of people put on a plant based diet. To be completely clear it was a quasi plant based diet like 95-99% vegan diet. In this study a vegan diet plus three grams of fish oil, lows cancer by seven times, in comparison to the other diet group. When I became vegan, I had the mentality that 5% or less animal products is okay; but it very quickly became clear that was not practical or achievable; once you open the dam it is over. There is specific reasons why a vegan diet gives one an advantage in the fight against cancer; any can make some particular choices in the realm of a vegan diet to go even further, perhaps further than that 15% lower rate.
Angiogenesis is the creation of new blood cells, which eventually can feed cancer, and anti-angiogenic just prevents that. There are well studied anti-angiogenic foods, and they are not animal products. A study from anti-angiogenic researcher William Lee showed that, if you block angiogenesis and prevent blood vessels from ever reaching cancer cells, tumors simply cannot grow up; but once angiogenesis occurs, cancers can grow exponentially. Resveratrol (the active ingredient in the extract from red grapes), inhibits abnormal angiogenesis by 60%. Ellagic acid in strawberries is anti-angiogenic. The point here is that a vegan diet will naturally push you to eat more anti-angiogenic plant foods; you also have the choice to really go for it with those.
People are kind of avoiding soy beans, but the genistein in it, potently inhibits angiogenesis; which is probably why it is associated with lower breast cancer risk in Japan for example. The power of soy beans is astounding if there was a drug that had the same effect it would be worth billions. Angiogenic foods do the opposite, they grow blood vessels. Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) contributes to the promotion of angiogenesis. Animal protein appears to raise IGF-1 and plant protein appears to lower it. It is no wonder that the vegans in the study had 13% lower IGF-1 levels on average. It is hard to say exactly how much this would affect cancer; maybe, it would be 13% less growth; or it might push over some edge that would prevent cancer from starting, who knows. Cow’s milk, America’s favorite hormone cocktail, appears to raise IGF-1 by about 10%. Estrogen plays a role in breast cancer and other reproductive cancers.
The daily intake of total investigated estrogens through milk, is dramatically more than currently recognized. In fact from another study 60-80% of our dietary intake of all estrogen comes from Dairy. While they do add hormones to some milk that people are consuming, this studies talk about naturally occurring hormones. Dripping organic cow’s milk on prostate cancer cells in a petri dish increases growth rate by 30%; In contrast, almond milk decreases the growth of this cells by 30%. That is not telling us a ton about what is happening in the body, unless somebody gruesomely injects cow’s milk directly into their tumor.
A study that gave people milk to drink, found that it raised their estrone (type of estrogen) by about 25% in men and women; and lowered testosterone in men by 20%. On a vegan diet you dodge all that hormonal manipulation, specifically from dairy; that is probably a large part of why those vegans were recorded having 30% lower female cancer. Antioxidants and DNA. Antioxidants fight oxidative stress; which is essentially a chain reaction that can cause DNA damage, lead to mutations and then lead to cancer. Eating antioxidants is preventing the start of cancer, it is preventing that cancer party.
For example, one reason that red meat is deemed a class 2A carcinogen, is because of the heme iron; heme iron in your colon can oxidize, then rip some DNA apart, and then lead to colorectal cancer; a vegan diet obviously excludes that. In terms of antioxidants in general, this massive study of 3100 foods, establish that plant foods on average have 64 times more antioxidants than animal foods, that is another advantage. Another negative of animal products is the inflammatory molecule Neu5Gc; it incorporates itself into our cells from animal products in our diet, leading to chronic inflammation directly, and the formation of antibodies—which can then lead back to more inflammation, which may explain the increased risk of cancer noted in those consuming animal products. “In contrast, vegetarianism decreases the risk of cancer and heart disease”.
Even though saturated fat in animal products is the usual explanation for that fact, maybe we should start looking into the association between Neu5GC and the incidence of both cancer and heart disease. In addition, there are some other carcinogens in meat like heterocyclic amines, which are caused by cooking meat at high temperatures Blood sugar. It appears that elevated blood sugar levels can also feed cancer from this study enhanced glucose uptake in cancer cells is a well-established hallmark of cancer cells. They are scientists, not English majors. Elevated blood sugar is an established predictor of cancer survival, probably because it fuels cancer growth. Diabetics generally have higher levels of blood sugar throughout the day, and vegans according to one study have as high as 78% lower risk of all diabetes.
This difference is likely from the buildup of animal fat in the muscle cells of people who eat meat and other animal fats; so that, can lead to insulin resistance or gum up the insulin lock, as Neil Barnard puts it, which can make your body not respond appropriately to sugar. This is where choices on a vegan diet come into play. Eating whole food complex carbohydrates are not going to spike your blood sugar; well, perhaps some refined sugar or even a lot of fruit will. A study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8499937 demonstrates that eating a few bananas, blended or not, does not have a negative effect on your blood sugar. Diets like Gerson Therapy include juices that have apple, which can spike your blood sugar; although, the apple juice industry would want you to think otherwise. Oxygenation.
From this study hypoxia [low oxygen] is a critical hallmark of solid tumors and involves enhanced cell survival, angiogenesis, glycolytic metabolism [energy usage] and metastasis [spreading of cancer]. One treatment for cancer is placing people in hyperbaric chambers or high oxygen chambers, which have been shown to raise the oxygen level in your blood. There is studies that show positive results and others that show no noticeable results, but it appears not to be dangerous. The problem is that there is simply so many types of cancer; there are over a hundred different general categories of cancer, so, it could be helping some and not others.
Interestingly, low oxygen levels can also alter epigenetics, or how your genes are expressed, decreasing your ability to suppress cancer. Increased blood oxygen is great, but if your arteries are clogged, is it ever even going to make it to the cancer site? Dr. Esselstyn’s clinical trials of a whole food vegan diet for advanced cardiovascular disease, showed a rapid increase in blood flow; therefore, by clearing those arteries out, the oxygen is more likely to make it to the cancer site, which is obviously great. It is all about whole plant foods, specifically nitrate rich plant foods like chard and beets that can dilate your arteries.
On the opposite end, eating a high animal fat or even and oily meal, can increase fat in the blood, provoking hyperlipidemia (fatty blood or even sludge blood), which can lower the oxygen content in the body. One might call it babe’s revenge. After covering a decent amount of science, an anecdotal cancer reversal story is that of Jeannette, who was essentially sent home to die with cancer that has spread throughout her body; instead, she decided not give up and go on a raw vegan diet, do oxygen therapy and become a runner; amazingly, she reversed it.
A raw diet and the situation definitely has a lot of advantages if you are eating enough calories, for example, it will sort of push you toward more higher antioxidant foods. Perhaps the most amazing part, once healed she and her husband ran a marathon a day every day for 366 days around Australia, just to show people how amazing the diet was. Oxygen was part of her motivation for the exercise. Studies like this show that favorable things are happening with oxygen in your blood after exercise, this is likely part of the reason that exercise is associated with lower cancer rates, in addition to just being healthier.
From this study the group that had the most exercise versus the least exercise, had 20% less cancer which is very notable. Another a remarkable story is Chris who beat cancer at the age of 26. He had colorectal cancer that had metastasized but decide to go on a raw vegan diet, extraordinarily he managed to beat here There are many amazing stories of people reversing their cancer on a vegan diet, but we do not have the clinical trials yet, millions and millions of dollars are needed and they would be quite difficult to orchestrate.
In the end these are just stories albeit amazing stories. It is really important to make scientifically valid claims around vegan diet, so would it be scientifically valid to say that a whole plant based diet cures cancer. Certainly a vegan diet will not always cure cancer or always even help the state of cancer, but in certain cases people have reversed hospice level cancer with a vegan diet. It is definitely optimistic about how diet can help with cancer. Well we cannot say that we have proof that it will reliably reverse cancer, we definitely can say that vegans generally have lower cancer rates.
