I bought the book. It's incredible. I got it last night and have finished over 120+ pages already. I keep picking it up and cannot put it down. It's exactly what I was looking for - an approach to controlling cancer through diet that is founded in science not the ramblings of new-agey feel-good snake oil salesman. The author was a doctor/researcher in neuroscience before he got brain cancer, in fact, he was the director of an entire department at The University of Pittsburgh Medical School. He beat it once, then relapsed, and after a relapse asked his doctor if he could help prevent the cancer from coming back by altering his lifestyle. His oncologist said he could try but it wouldn't make any difference - and that he should just keep coming back every 3 months for scans and if it came back, they would find it early. He thought this was absolute garbage and set off to find out what could be done to prevent the cancer from returning. His books explores his three findings - diet, managing stress, and environmental factors. All of his findings are inspiring, but I am over the moon about his detailed research on how one's diet affects the growth of cancer. The book is written for both those interested in prevention and those already afflicted with cancer (my category). First of all - I am going to make a confession - before yesterday I had no idea how cancer worked. No joke. I bet you could ask most cancer patients and they wouldn't really have much of a clue either. I was schooled last night and can claim ignorance no more. Dr. Servan-Schreiber begins with the basics, explaining in laymans terms how every day our bodies are full of potential cancer, yet very few of them ever take hold. Those that do take hold is why a lot of peoples lives change each year, turning normal people into full time patients (eg.-me). This book is so full of information - I'll have to paraphrase things, overgeneralizing very complicated topics that he takes chapters to explain. The basic gist is that cancer is an inflammation - and this inflammation spreads by hijacking cells and then disarming the cells around it, which prevent it's death. Additionally, it hijacks/re-routes blood vessels, which supply it with new resources to keep it growing. Essentially, it will take over anything in it's path and knows how to guarantee it's immortality. And on top of all this, the cancer gets help from the way most of us eat. From what I have read so far, and this is a rough quote from the book, but a doctor who he interviews says that if we tried to that we could come up with no better diet than the western diet to help cancer thrive. It is the absolute worst in the world - stereotypically it's centerpiece is a piece of meat (corn/soy fed usually which is completely overloaded on omega-6's and full of hormones), with a little bit of vegetables, breads made up of empty/bleached starches, refined sugars, tons of preservatives, high fructose corn syrup, fruits/veg. covered in pesticides, and junk food like chips fried in unhealthy oils. If you are trying to beat cancer on this type of food, you are already at a disadvantage. He goes on to explain the anticancer diet, largely focused on fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grain breads, brown rice, vegetable protiens (soy, tofu, etc), certain herbs and spices, and drinks like filtered water (from a brita or similar), green tea, and red wine. It's nothing outlandish or hard to find. A lot of the choices he suggests are easy as avoiding regular white potatoes ( they spike insulin levels - a no no for cancer) and substituting sweet potatoes instead. Not that difficult right? It's full of things like that - ditch your corn oil and use olive oil. Simple. So - as I was saying, the book is fantastic so far. It reads very easily - and is written so a layman can understand (although he isn't very shy to get technical on the scientific bits of why he suggests what he does - however, if you re-read those sections, they all make sense). The center of the book is great - glossy color pages outlining the anticancer diet, and has a shopping list of anticancer foods which is so helpful to getting started, how to replace foods from a western diet with anticancer foods, and it even has a list of all of the foods suggested and the results of their effects on cancer cells (the results of a study) of all different types of cancer. It's extremely comprehensive and full of solid work. His references alone are about a chapter - and full of scientific studies from Harvard, Yale, etc. to back it up.
The most interesting part of the book so far to me was the discussion of NF-Kappa B. This is a proinflamitory factor on which cancer relies to keep growing/spreading. Essentially it is a protective element for the cancer cells and without this factor, or when it is inhibited, the cancer again becomes "mortal" and additionally cannot create metastases. In an article in the science journal Nature, a researcher from UNC states that "almost every cancer preventative is an inhibitor of NF-Kappa B" and that the entire pharmaceutical industry is looking for drugs that inhibit NF-Kappa B. He goes on to mention that two common items are known for their ability to inhibit NF-Kappa B - green tea, for its catechins, and red wine, for resveratrol. There are a lot more listed later in the book, but I found this pretty interesting that cancer has an Achilles heel - and that there are foods out there, things you can just pop down to the corner shop and pick up that will do this. Sounds too good to be true? Look for yourself:
NF-Kappa B from Wikipedia (look under Clinical Significance)
One of many studies on green tea and NF-Kappa B inhibition/apoptosis from NIH on PubMed
*there are tons more - just from googling "nf kappa b inhibitor green tea cancer" produced lots of results.
Well, I feel like I could carry on here forever. I sat last night with my highlighter and approached this like one of my old science textbooks from university. This book is certainly a launching pad, since the author has served to inspire me to find out as much as I can now about this topic. It's amazing that no one really knows about this - but he explains why. And why? There is no money in it. If you spend millions to discover that berries or turmeric have the ability to stop cancers spread, at the end of the research, there is no payoff since you cannot patent foods. They are out there, free- and have no chance of profit. Most studies are funded by drug companies, which will spend up to a billion on a new drug development. It's crazy, but medical research is largely about profit and often very natural cures are cast aside for this reason alone. It's good I suppose for big pharmaceutical companies bankrolls, but not very good for us. So, you have to take it upon yourself to do the research and get out there and find your own answers, since your oncologist will likely only have three suggestions: chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.
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