Let me explain to you what
it is that I do, because people hear the word nutritionist, and what they
assume is it’s somebody who tells you what to eat, when to eat, how much to
eat, and what to eat. And I don’t do that.
What I really do is I educate people about how foods and different nutritional
supplements can enhance their cancer therapy, can enhance their well being, and
really make a difference in their treatment. The way I go about that is I look
at the process through three different compartments.
The first of those is that
what I want to do is do a foundation protocol
I want to look at a person and say where are you in what you’re
eating where are you in how you approach
self nourishing and taking care of yourself, both through foods and through
relaxation, and through taking care of yourself. If we need to look at how well
you’re digesting that’s important because you’re not only what you eat; you
might eat thing, and if you can’t digest them they’re never going to get into
your system and make a difference. So we first have this foundation aspect that
I look at which is can we make you a little bit healthier? Can we get you
started on some steps to really self nourish and look at what you’re eating and
really take care of yourself?
The second thing I do is I
look at what kind of treatment you’re going to go through: Are you having
surgery scheduled? Are you in radiation right now? Are you in chemotherapy? Are
you doing radiation and chemotherapy together? And I look at what nutrients can
be used during that time. And I teach you about how your nutritional needs
during that time of treatment change, and what you can do to help yourself
during that period of time.
And the third thing that I
do is the thing that I’m most excited about. I have scoured the scientific
literature to learn about what foods and nutrients have scientific evidence
showing that they can help control cancer specifically for the type of cancer
that my client has. And that’s the area that I’ll talk the most about. . . . It
occurs to me, as well, that cancer cells are not some foreign invader from
outside your body. These are cells that are your own cells. They may have lost
their regulatory mechanisms and in some ways they are just much more efficient.
They have done what our society asks us to do. We need to be ultra efficient,
multitask and get as much done as possible. Cancer cells are busy doing that.
But they are our own cells. So by approaching our treatment by attacking and by
doing a war on our own cells, it occurs to me that maybe that isn’t the best
way to heal. So I’ve developed a different kind of model. And I really look at
healing from cancer as sort of like growing an organic garden. For those of you
who grow organic gardens, you’re starting to get a glimmer of oh yeah, I see
what she’s taking about but I often think of that commercial which you probably
have seen where the guy steps out with the little canister and a dandelion or
something pops up and he sprays it and it immediately dies another dandelion
pops up over here and he sprays it and suddenly their popping up all over the
place. If we try to get rid of the pest in the garden, by attacking it, by
burning it or by poisoning it, we don’t get to the root of the problem and the
problem continues.
So what we need to do
instead is approach this from a more holistic organic gardening perspective. We
need to say, for example, what’s the pH of the soil? Are we getting enough
water in the garden? Are there healthy organisms like birds and bees and worms
and other things in the garden? Do we need compost? Are we getting enough or
too much sunshine? Do we need to do companion planting? Are we giving our
garden enough attention and love?. . .because my garden certainly grows a lot more
if I’m present in the garden . . . If I’m present in the garden and I listen to
what the garden wants and give back to the garden, healing really happens. So
this is a nice model; how do we actually apply it? I think the place I’d like
to start is with food. Our food is such an amazing thing. And most dieticians
and nutritionists look at food and say well this has this many calories, and
there are this many grams of vitamin C and it’s a fat, a protein or a
carbohydrate. And really it’s so much more than that.
The experience I had that
taught me how much more was living in New Mexico on a land where we were
self-sufficient. I was living in a canvas teepee and we grew all of our food
during that time. It was really my introduction to organic gardening. And I had
an experience with someone who was really an amazing teacher. We were in the
garden pulling carrots. And I’d picked about five or six carrots, and she turns
and she says to me, put your finger in a carrot hole and I said what and she
said, put your finger in a carrot hole so once you’ve pulled a carrot out,
there’s this little hole there where the carrot was growing, and dutifully I
put my finger in a carrot hole and I pulled it out really fast because there
was some energy there there was something very palpable that I could feel. And
the experience stuck with me for a long time, and it reminded me that every
time I was eating fresh, whole food, that there was an energy. I was taking in
not only calories and fat and protein and all that boring stuff, I was also
taking in that energy. And it was an energy that was very healing to me. And I
guarantee you that if you put your finger in a Twinkie wrapper, you’re not
gonna feel nothing!
So while I first got this
lesson on an energetic level, science is starting to catch up with this. And
probably the experiment that has happened most recently that most inspires me
about this is the brussel sprout experiment . . . Gladys Block, an
epidemiologist down at UCLA, is one of the lead researchers in this particular
experiment. Many of us have heard that the cruciferous vegetables, like
broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower are really healthy and they have vitamins,
minerals and things called phytonutrients that really help to fight cancer.
One of those phytonutrients
is something called sulforaphane- it looks very potent as a cancer protector
and cancer fighter. And so she developed this experiment where they wanted to
see the influence of food on genes. And in particular they were looking at
cancer genes, the genes that promote cancer like oncogenes, and then an
opposing group of genes that we have called tumor-suppressing genes. And they
wanted to see if a food would have any effect on the genetic material. So they
lined up a group of women and they measured these particular genes the
oncogenes and the tumor suppressing genes. Then they randomly divided them into
two groups so that they could have a double blind placebo controlled trial, a
fancy word for the way we do science. And they fed the first group of women real,
honest to goodness, brussel sprouts. They fed them brussel sprouts for about
six weeks.
Their problem was that they
needed to find a placebo for brussel sprouts. The placebo has to look like
brussel sprouts, taste like brussel sprouts, and smell like brussel sprouts,
but it can’t have any vitamins or minerals or sulforaphane in it. Where in the
world are you going to find a placebo for brussel sprouts? Hospital brussel
sprouts. Yes, they cooked them at six in the morning and kept them in those
warming trays for six hours. They were dead no energy left, right? So they fed
the other half of the women the placebo brussel sprouts and they got to the end
of the trial. What they found is that actual, honest to goodness brussel
sprouts actually changed the genetic expression. It downplayed the oncogenes -
the genes that promote cancer. And the tumor suppressing genes, it up-regulated
those. This was the biggest thing I’ve heard in nutrition in a long time. What
this actually means is that your fruits and your vegetables and your healthy
foods are actually talking to your genetic material. When you have the gene for
cancer, you are not stuck with that. That gene has a plural potentiality it can
express itself in many different ways. If you’re eating healthfully, you may be
able to alter that expression in a way that can really make a difference in
your treatment.
What do I mean by eating
healthfully? I mean eating lots of fruits and vegetables. I think fruits and
vegetables should be you know the food pyramid where they have all the grain
foods at the bottom . . . the thing you should be eating he most of is fruits
and vegetables. Because those are where you get your phytonutrients that can
talk to your genes and make a big difference for you. You should be eating
whole, unrefined foods. Just go back 200 or 300 years. If you could have been
eating that food 200 or 300 years ago, it’s probably pretty good food to eat.
If it’s a new fangled invention, it’s probably a good idea to stay away from
it. And my favorite rule, the unpronounceable rule: If you’re reading the
ingredient label and you come across something you cannot pronounce, and even
your Harvard trained friends cannot pronounce, you had better stay away from
that food. So that’s a good place to start.
That’s the food thing.
Another way that we can
influence our organic garden is through inflammation. And this is really a
surprise to people when I talk about this because, Cancer Inflammation, is
there a connection? What’s the connection? This is actually an interesting
thing that I’ve been working on for quite awhile. The relationship between the
inflammatory process and cancer surfaced back in the 1970’s when they were
developing drugs for arthritis and other inflammatory conditions. They did long
term trials to make sure that the new drugs of the time like Advil and
Ibuprofen and such were actually safe to give people. So they had thousands of
people in these trials and they wanted to see what the side effects were. They
get to the end of the trials, two, four and six years later, and one of the
things that they notice is that the individuals who got to take the
anti-inflammatory drugs; their risk of almost every type of cancer is half or
less than half of those who didn’t take the anti-inflammatory drugs.
At the time in the 1970’s,
they didn’t know why this was and they just sort of shelved it. Then more
recently, particularly in the last five years, when we’ve been looking at the
molecular structure of cancer cells, the biology, the physiology of cancer cells,
one of the things that came up is that the enzymes in the body that drive the
inflammatory process also drive cancer growth - so much so that the process of
inflammation is directly linked to the progression and growth of cancer; every
type of cancer that we’ve looked at so far - to suppression of the immune
system, to angiogenesis (that growth of new blood vessels that feeds the growth
of a tumor), and to the spread or metastases of cancer. This link is so strong
that at least eight studies I know of have directly linked the level of
inflammation with prognosis in cancer patients. For example, in a brain tumor
study, people who had stage four brain tumors, and had low levels of
inflammation, were all long-term survivors. Peoples who had high levels of
inflammation did not do so well.
What this means is, if you
have a cancer diagnosis, you should be actively doing something about
inflammation. Can I define inflammation here? I’m not talking about when you
stub your toe and it swells up. That’s a little localized inflammation. What
I’m talking about is a systemic inflammation that you don’t feel and don’t know
you have. There is a simple test that your doctor can run for you, which will
tell you whether you have this systemic inflammation that fosters tumor growth.
The test is called a C Reactive Protein. This will tell you the level of
inflammation that is currently in your body. You want the result of this test
to be less than 1.0. If it’s more than 1.0 you begin to do something. You ask
your doctor for an anti-inflammatory, or you consult with a nutritionist or
herbalist practitioner who can advise you about the different nutritional
supplements or things to do in your diet that will lower your inflammation.
Some treatments raise inflammation.
So, for example, getting radiation therapy will increase your inflammation. If
you take anti-inflammatory agents during your treatment, studies show that your
treatment will work much better for you. Some of the nutritional supplements that are commonly used as
anti-inflammatories are things that naturopaths and other forms of medicine
like Aryuvedic medicine or Chinese medicine have used for this condition for
hundreds of years. Things like Bromelain, which comes from pineapple; or
Curcumin, which is in the news over and over again and has dozens of studies on
its effects on cancer; or Boswellia.
To flush this inflammation
story out a little bit more, without giving too much detail so that I overwhelm
you, inflammation comes from the fats that you eat in your diet. So when we
talked earlier about eating vegetables, that was goal 1 in your diet. Goal 2:
Every fat that you eat becomes the cell membrane of every cell in your body
both your healthy cells and your cancer cells if you have them, which most of
us do. Some fats belong to a family called the Omega 6’s. These are the most
inflammatory types of fats.
The other fats belong to a
family called the Omega 3’s. These are anti-inflammatory. Your Omega 3’s are
cold water fish, flax seed oil, perilla oil (which is difficult to find in the
United States), hemp oil, and olive oil is close to that family - it’s a
neutral antiinflammatory. Everything else is an Omega 6. So the animal source
fats, the dairy fats, and all those fun bottles of canola/soybean/peanut/sesame,
all those other oils that you find on the shelves in the supermarket are Omega
6’s. This is not about vilifying the Omega 6’s. You don’t stop eating all those
bad fats no, no, no. What you’re trying to do is get a balance between these
two families of fats. You’re trying to incorporate more cold water fish or take
a fish oil supplement if you won’t eat fish, and use flax seed oil which you
won’t cook with because it smokes, but you use it for cold uses only like salad
dressing. For a bottle of oil in the house, use olive oil. You want to use
those as your predominant sources of oil.
You want to limit the Omega
6’s. So if you’re choosing dairy products, you get low fat or no-fat. If you’re
eating meat products you choose the leanest cut and you cook it so all of the
fat drips away. And you don’t want bottles of oil in the house that are Wesson or Canola or corn or peanut or
safflower you don’t want those. You want to
use olive oil instead. So
doing an oil change is really goal number 2 with your diet.
Get an oil change please,
that’s goal number 2.Once you have these fats in your cell membrane, there are
two different groups of enzymes that can turn them into the inflammatory
compounds. There’s a group of enzymes called cyclooxygenases or COX that takes
fats and makes them inflammatory. We now have a drug that blocks that: Celebrex
and Vioxx are specific targeters of that group of enzymes, and many doctors are
now using that. There are large scale trials at the NCI for breast cancer, prostate
cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer that are ongoing right now showing that
using Celebrex or Vioxx as an adjunct to your treatment can make a big
difference in how well you do. You can also block those through herbs, like
Bromelain or some type of enzymes like pancreatic enzymes.
If you’re going to use
nutritional supplements, I highly recommend that you see a practitioner who can
screen you and pick the agents that are appropriate for you. And make sure that
you’re not going to run into any drug/nutrient interactions. But there is this
one group of enzymes, the cyclooxygenases; right now the pharmaceutical
industry has a drug that blocks that. Unfortunately there is a whole other
pathway to take those fats and turn them into inflammation. That pathway is
lipoxygenases, not important for you; what’s important for you is to know that
there are two ways to create inflammation. If you take a drug that blocks the
first one, all your fats just go skipping over to the other side and they get
metabolized into the inflammatory compounds over here. So if you’re taking
Celebrex or Vioxx, you should probably talk to someone who’s a practitioner of
nutrition or herbal medicine to learn how to block lipoxygenases. The most
common ways to do that are with the following herbs: Boswellia, which many of
you know is Frankincense, Curcumin or Resveratrol.
This is key like I said, if
you have cancer or if your healing from cancer right now, doing something about
inflammation measuring inflammation with a C-Reactive Protein Test and if it’s
elevated above 1.0, take steps to bring that down. Repeat the test. If it was
high the first time, add some anti-inflammatories and repeat the test in a
couple of weeks. If it’s down then keep that protocol and it’s good. You
probably want to keep running that test on a three-month interval. What if you
don’t have cancer yet, and you’re interested in not getting cancer? Run the
test on an annual basis as part of your physical. Not only can this test help
predict the risk of cancer, it also can help predict the risk of heart disease
and stroke. It’s an important thing to do.
Enough about inflammation
several sentences ago I mentioned a word that is probably new to many of you:
angiogenesis. It’s been big in the headlines a lot the last year or two.
Angiogenesis comes from Latin: angio, which means blood vessel and Genesis, to
create or to produce. A Harvard doctor, Judith Folkman, discovered this about
15 years ago. In his experiments what he noticed is that when you do surgery
and you find a tumor, what you find is that these cells are deeply and richly
vascular, the density of blood vessels around the tumor is much more dense that
you would find anywhere else in the body. Particularly in a well developed
tumor. He wondered about that: why are there all these blood vessels? Because
if you find a small tumor that’s just in its process of getting started, you
don’t find these blood vessels.
So in a series of
experiments, what he was able to determine is that as the tumor progresses, the
supply of blood vessels increases and increases. In further experiments, he
found that if you could stop or halt the process of growing those new blood
vessels, a tumor would sit there about the size of a pencil eraser head, it
would just sit there that size and never grow and never spread. Of course when
he first found this out, do you think the medical establishment applauded him
and said this is wonderful, and we have something new to do about cancer? No,
they just laughed at him and they thought it was crazy. Until the
pharmaceutical companies started coming up with some drugs that target this
angiogenesis process. So many of the new trials are about drugs that can stop
the growth of new blood vessels.
Unfortunately, the body is
redundant, which means that if the body would like to do something it has more
than one way to accomplish that goal. We have all kinds of back up mechanisms
for everything and this is true for angiogenesis as well. There are to date
about 12 to 16 different enzymes that have been linked to this process of
angiogenesis. The pharmaceutical companies are busy targeting them one at a
time to make a difference for cancer patients. So far the trials have been
really disappointing because just targeting 1 of 16 enzymes is not really helpful.
Here’s where nutrition comes
in. Each of these enzymes all of the enzymes that drive angiogenesis require
copper in order to be effective. So Steven Brem at Moffitt University Hospital
down in Southern Florida, initiated a series of experiments where he first took
animals that had various cancers, and he put them on a low cancer diet and gave
them a drug to remove copper from their bodies, just enough so that they were
still healthy and didn’t have copper deficiency disease, but to pull their
copper down as low as possible. In those experiments he found that you could
stop the growth of tumors by taking copper away. So George Burr in Michigan
decided he would follow up with a human experiment. And he took 68 people with
various different cancers, predominantly ovarian, breast, colon, and lung
cancer, and he also put them on a low copper diet and gave them a nutritional supplement to lower their
copper. In everybody whose copper came down, they were able to achieve stable
disease no further growth of cancer.
So this is the third thing I
really want you to take away from today: first was eat your vegetables; get an
oil change and do something about your inflammation; and now, stay away from
copper. If you’re taking nutritional supplements, please read the labels of
your products. If you find copper, stop taking that particular product. The
foods which are highest in copper which are probably wise for you to avoid are
shellfish; the RDA for copper is 1 milligram if you eat an entire lobster tail
you will get somewhere between 36 and 40 grams of copper - stay away from
shellfish; the next, which you’ll be so pleased that I have asked you not to
eat, are organ meats like liver. Organ meats like liver and kidney are also
very rich in copper. These are the foods that are highest in copper.
It’s impossible to go on a
no-copper diet because every food has trace amounts of copper. Well, okay, not
Twinkies, but we certainly don’t want you eating those. If you have copper
water pipes to your house and you’re drinking your tap water, you may want to
get a filter that can remove copper. Some filters that do that are the Britta
filter and the Pur Filter. If you have a different filter, you can call the
company, and ask them for the assay to see if it removes copper.
So that’s the angiogenesis
process and you can see we’re using this organic gardening model we’ve looked
at the pH and compost. We’re looking at all these different variables and what
they can do.
The third thing I want to share
with you is something called oncostasis. In science we’ve learned that you can stop a tumor growing by trying to kill
the cells, but you can also often just quiet the tumor. You can influence it to
just sit there. And this is a really radically different model because the way
that Western medicine works right now is kill, attack, eradicate, shrink the
tumor, get rid of the tumor at all costs . This approach is more like, well
maybe if we don’t get rid of the tumor we can make it just be quite and sit
there.
Cheryl was diagnosed with a
stage 4 brain tumor in October of 1997. At the time of her diagnosis the
doctors told me that she probably had a six-month prognosis. And if she did
aggressive chemotherapy from now until the end she might make it a year.
But she’s now at her
five-year anniversary. Here’s the kicker: we never tried to kill the tumor or
get rid of it. And in fact the spot that the doctors had been calling tumor for
the first two or three years that spot is still there on the MRI. It’s just
sitting there it hasn’t done anything. So when the doctors every time look at
the spot and say, You need to start chemotherapy immediately we say, Yes, we
hear you. Thank you very much. That’s not our choice. It might be somebody
else’s choice and that’s good. But in this particular situation it’s the
perfect example of oncostasis.
There is such a focus in
western medicine on shrinking the tumor and yet if you do a meta-analysis, if
you look at dozens of studies, what you find is that shrinking the tumor is not
correlated with prolonging survival in cancer patients. So perhaps you might
want to think to yourself, What’s my real goal here? Is shrinking the tumor the
most important thing? And in Cheryl’s case we learned it wasn’t the most
important thing. There are lots of different nutritional supplements and herbal
things in foods that have shown an oncostatic effect in test tube experiments
and in animal experiments. In human experiments, something that really stands
out as an oncostatic something that controls or makes the tumor go quiescent is
melatonin: your sleep hormone. At night if you’re sleeping in complete
darkness, you have to be sleeping in complete darkness, if it’s completely
dark, your pineal gland, sort of where your third eye would be, down here in
the center of your head, secretes melatonin.
I have a beautiful story
about melatonin from a buddy researcher of mine, Dr. David Blask in upstate New
York. He was not a melatonin researcher. In fact, he’s a researcher, or was,
for the pharmaceutical agents who made drugs like Tamoxifen and Iressa, breast
cancer drugs. Breast cancer is his specialization. The pharmaceutical company
would develop a new drug for breast cancer and he had a lab with thousands of
lab animals and he would test the drug on breast cancer and report back whether
the drug was working or not.
Well, about twelve years ago
he received a huge grant to build a new facility. And he built this new
million-dollar facility just a gorgeous place and he moved his operation over
to the new lab. When he got to the new lab, something really weird happened.
The drugs that had been working to stop the growth of breast cancer cells in
the old facility were now useless. All those promising drugs that worked, in
the new lab suddenly didn’t work at all. He was tearing his hair out about
this. What was he going to say as the bigwigs in the pharmaceutical companies
came in and asked, how’s our experiment going?
It took him weeks. He was
pacing the hall one night in the new lab, trying to figure out why it could be
that just moving to a better facility would make the drug stop working. He
peered in the room where the animals are kept and noticed that because the new
facility had these large windows, the animals were supposed to be sleeping but
they were getting light from the street lights that were coming in. So he said
maybe this is. it maybe the animals are stressed because they’re exposed to
light at night. So he bought shades and at night everything got closed up and
the animals were sleeping in dark, and low and behold - all the drugs started
working again. So what did Dr. David Blask say? He said, It’s not about the
drugs.
Of course at the time he
didn’t really know what melatonin was, so he went hunting until he found
someone who could explain to him the difference between night and day. The
difference between night and day is melatonin. In further experiments this
doctor has been able to show, and particularly in breast cancer where this
research was first done, that breast cancer cells, the cell membrane of the
cell, is busy and active. It takes in nutrients, it supports the growth, and it
exports waste. When melatonin is present, this cell membrane of breast cancer
cells goes completely quiescent. The cell is basically sleeping. When melatonin
is high we’re sleeping, and what he’s been able to show is cancer cells are
sleeping too. When there’s no melatonin, the cells are busy growing.
So if you’re the type of
person who has very low melatonin, who’s not sleeping in complete darkness, whose
working at night and exposed to light during the night phase, then the cancer
cells are busy growing all the time. Since this time there have been about 68
studies on melatonin, 34 of which have been human studies. They have been done
for every type of cancer from leukemia and lymphoma to lung cancer, breast
cancer, brain cancer; for every type except ovarian cancer do not take
melatonin if you have ovarian cancer, the studies are iffy, they go both ways
but for every other type, humans in these trials who have been given melatonin
supplements at bedtime fair much, much better that those who get placebo; who
don’t get to take actual melatonin.
In your day to day life the
most important thing you can do about this is make sure you’re sleeping in
complete darkness and make sure you go to bed early enough. Don’t stay up
through the night. If you’re working the night shift switch if you can. The
recent trial looked at nurses who worked the night shift and found that their
risk of breast cancer was 2-3 fold higher. Simply because they work under
artificial light and they don’t get their melatonin up where it should be.
I’ve talked a lot about diet
and I’ve shared with you three different factors that could influence cancer. I
hope that one thing you’ve been able to take from this is a new view: not to
see your cancer as a foreign invader that needs to be attacked, eradicated,
poisoned or whatever. But to see these cells as part of your own body who’ve
lost their regulatory influence. And to learn that your diet and your lifestyle
can help return that regulation to those cells to make them part of you again.
I’ll share a fourth
influence or variable with you before I close. And this again is something that
just boggles my mind that this is possible. There’s a process called
differentiation. We talked about how cancer cells were once your own very
healthy cells. Something has happened to them: maybe some damage to the DNA,
maybe some influence on genetic material, so that they’re now behaving in a way
so that they grow uncontrollably. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just get
them to relax and go back to being the way they were before?
I have to use my adolescent
model or analogy here. Normally your cells you get a baby cell that’s born and
it needs to get a set of instructions - basically a job description. It says,
Hello, welcome to the body, you are a healthy liver cell. Your functions are as
follows, and then the cell grows up, or it differentiates to become a healthy
liver cell. In cancer, the cells have regressed and are wild adolescents.
They’re teens who want to go out and party. They don’t want to take on their
job responsibilities and they want to have as many babies as possible. If we
could just influence them a little bit if we could just be good role models. If
we could get them the right job descriptions if we could get them to go back we
could differentiate them. Now this sounds very nice as an analogy, but can you
actually do it? Can you actually make this happen? And the answer is very much
so, yes.
Many nutrients are known to
differentiate cancer cells. There are some that look like they work for almost
every type of cancer; for example Vitamin A is a differentiating agent for
every epithelial type of cancer so basically everything except for some ovarian
cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia. Vitamin D is also a differentiating agent. But
then there are others that are specific to a type of cancer. If it’s ovarian cancer a flavonoid from onions called
Quercetin is a differentiating agent. If it’s a brain cancer an alkaloid from
goldenseal and other herbs is a differentiating agent.
But let’s talk about Vitamin
D since it’s one that seems to be really global. Vitamin D is one of those strange
things. When I was in school they taught me Vitamin D is in milk and it helps
your bones. End of story end of chapter. There’s so much more to Vitamin D
we’ve learned so much more about it. In the cancer environment what we have
learned is that most tumors have receptors for Vitamin D. If those receptors
are latched onto by a Vitamin D molecule, it differentiates the cell. It gives
the cell just the type of role model it needs to grow up and take on a healthy
job description. If there’s a cancer that’s growing very rapidly, and Vitamin D
comes in and sits on the receptors of those cells, it will greatly slow down
the growth of the cell. And if you look at the cell under a microscope, it will
begin to look like a healthy cell. The morphology, the shape, the way that cell
looks will look just like it’s a healthy cell. This is cool and it’s been shown
in test tube experiments and it’s been shown in animal experiments, and right
now there’s tremendous amount of research on this in human experiments.
Paul Trious, who’s a
researcher and oncologist in France, has completed several of these studies. He just recently published a
breast cancer study and also a brain cancer study coming out of his lab the
brain cancer study was the most phenomenal thing I’ve seen in brain cancer
research in years. They took 27 individuals who had completed their radiation,
surgery, and multiple rounds of chemotherapy; these people’s tumors were still
growing. So you get a sense that these are pretty aggressive tumors. The doctor
said we have nothing left to offer these people so Paul, go ahead, you can have
these people for your silly little Vitamin D study. And Paul said thank you. He
took these 27 people and he gave them something called Alphacalcidol: it’s a
prescription form of Vitamin D that breaks down into natural Vitamin D 20
minutes after it’s in your body. And he gave them a dose that was high enough
but didn’t cause any symptoms. Vitamin D can be toxic if you get too high. And
some studies had suggested that you might be able to make a really good defense
against this cancer with Vitamin D, but you’d have to use a dose that was so
toxic that it was useless. So he didn’t do that he used a small enough dose. So
he gave these people this vitamin D and he waited to see what would happen. A
third of the people had a complete response: their tumors shrunk up and were
gone on MRI. These were people who the doctors had given up on, who had
completed all this treatment. He ended up getting four-year survivors,
five-year survivors, and one person was a seven-year survivor. From a type of
tumor that usually has a six-month prognosis. So while this is a small trial,
and we’re waiting on larger trials to confirm the results, you’re talking about
something that’s non-toxic, inexpensive you can get the dose for about $30, and
made this huge difference. The breast cancer study was similar. So this process
of differentiation is very useful as well.
At this point we’ve thrown
out several ideas. We’ve thrown out talking to the genetic machinery of the
cancer cells by eating a healthy diet. And looking at the influence of
inflammation on the cancer cell. And looking at how copper can fuel
angiogenesis and trying to remove copper. And looking at nutrients that can
differentiate the cancer cells: get them to act more mature.
A point I think that’s
really important here is that Western medicine keeps searching for the magic
bullet. The one cancer drug of course every pharmaceutical company wants to
develop that drug and make billions and billions of dollars. But what that then
means is that we keep approaching the problem with the weed mentality: we use
our one insecticide and spray and get everything. You can’t do that. Healing is
so much broader than that. You know this from your own lives. You can’t just
drink carrot juice every morning and get healthy. You can’t just meditate and
do nothing else and get healthy. This is 24 hour, 7 day a week. This involves
everything that you are on every level. And in cancer it’s the same thing.
When you’re talking
nutrition it’s the same thing. What you really want to do for a healthy
treatment . . . is pick up each of these ways of influencing cancer cells in
this organic model and apply all of them. Maybe each of these things that we’ve
talked about has only a 10, 15, 20% effect. But if you have five, six, or seven
of these different variables, you’re really going to grow a beautiful garden.
And that’s what’s important. Because that garden is really about healing.
I think the last thing I
want to say is that I want to acknowledge that I feel like nutrition is
important, but it’s not for everybody. Not everybody comes to my office, and
sometimes family members pull someone in kicking and dragging and I say go
home. Because you can’t force feed healthy foods and have it work for you. You
have to come to this with an open heart. You have to come to your dinner plate
with a very open heart.
There are many different
pathways to healing and that pathway is different for each of us. You have to
honor that. You have to find the treatments where your gut feeling is this is
the right thing for me. If your doctor says well you should do this and your
gut reaction is gasp, don’t do that, or don’t do that yet, and give yourself
some time to come to a place where you come to that treatment with an open
heart about it. And with that I’d like to wish you all a good journey on the
path that you choose for your healing. And thank you for having me here.
author Jeanne Wallace Phd.