Articles about Vitamins

Can Vitamins and Soy Prevent Cancer?

Tens of millions of Americans are now working to prevent cancer by taking supplements and adding functional foods to their diets. $18 billion were spent last year on dietary supplements aimed at preventing cancer, and baby boomers are buying vitamins, minerals, and medicinal herbs in record numbers in order to prevent chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease.

As usual, the cancer industry is positioned strongly against any claims that nutrition has any effect whatsoever on cancer. Ridiculously, Dr. Daniel W. Nixon, president of the Institute for Cancer Prevention in New York, is quoted as saying "Vitamins and minerals are probably more or less worthless as far as cancer prevention is concerned." This is the sort of statement that characterizes the cancer industry -- one that is profoundly ignorant of the relationships between nutrition and cancer and demonstrates the shocking level of nutritional illiteracy that exists in our nation's medical professionals.

The fact is that cancer has everything to do with vitamins, minerals, foods, and nutrition. In fact, most of the cancer we are seeing today is caused by cancer-promoting food ingredients such as sodium nitrate, hydrogenated oils, MSG, artificial food colors and various chemical preservatives. There has even been a link established now between refined foods and cancer. This indicates that foods such as white bread, breakfast cereals, cookies, crackers, and baked goods also promote cancer.

Astoundingly, the spokespeople for the cancer industry in the United States almost never talk about these food additives and their ability to cause cancer in the human body. These toxic ingredients represent the number one cause of cancer in the United States and in other industrialized countries, and yet the cancer industry remains virtually silent on these food ingredients. At the same time, they irresponsibly dismiss the idea that nutrition can prevent or even reverse cancer. In their mind, there's only one way to treat cancer, and that's the way that literally hundreds of scientific studies have proven don't work: chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and radical surgical procedures. In fact, the western approach to treating cancer is all but useless, and the study results speak for themselves in this area.

But let's get right down to it -- do vitamin supplements, mineral supplements, and functional foods such as soy products actually prevent and reverse cancer? I'll give this to you as simply as possible -- yes, they do, but not if you continue to give yourself cancer by eating other foods and food ingredients that cause cancer. You have to think about your cancer risk as being a scale -- this is one of those old style scales, with specimen plates on the left and the right. On one side you must place all of the foods and drinks you are consuming that give you cancer. (Let's say we put those on the left tray.) For most Americans, they eat so many of these foods that their odds of getting cancer are extremely high. In other words, the scale is strongly tipped to the left.

On the right you have to put the vitamins, minerals, medicinal herbs, superfoods, and other substances that prevent cancer. If you load those up with enough quantity to offset the cancer-causing foods and food ingredients on the left, then you can get back to a neutral point. That's the point at which you have relatively low risk of ever being diagnosed with cancer, but you're not exactly 100% protected from it, either.

So which foods actually prevent and reverse cancer? There are many such healing foods. The more common ones include garlic, onions, broccoli, cabbage, berries, cauliflower, any of the sprouts, green food concentrates such as wheat grass, barley grass, and others cereal grasses, superfoods like chlorella and spirulina, healthy oils, and various medicinal herbs. These foods all prevent and even fight cancer by supporting the healthy function of the human immune system.

If you want to get even more aggressive in preventing or treating cancer, you can go to foods and medicinal herbs that actually function as treatments for cancer. These would include raw broccoli juice, which has such a high concentration of powerful cancer-fighting phytochemicals that I believe if it were patentable, drug companies would charge you $100 a pill just to take it. You could also take chlorella and spirulina, both of which have documented powerful anti-cancer effects. Spirulina in particular contains a phytochemical pigment that, when injected into breast cancer tumors in laboratory tests, resulted in the self-destruction of those tumors within a matter of days.

You can also take various medicinal herbs such as graviola or cat's claw. Cat's claw is an Amazon herb that has been shown to be far more effective than chemotherapy in shrinking cancer tumors without any of the negative side effects. There are also other alternative anti-cancer therapies such as Laetrile, made from apricot pits, oxygen therapy, homeopathy, massage therapy, and even energy healing.

Of course, it goes without saying that physical exercise is absolutely necessary for preventing and especially reversing cancer. In fact, I believe that without physical exercise, your nutritional efforts are diminished. Exercise circulates nutrients around your body, and if you're not exercising, you're wasting all the nutrition and medicinal herbs you might be taking in the first place.

The bottom line to all of this is that cancer is quite easily prevented through foods, and even reversed through therapeutic foods, but the cancer industry doesn't want to admit any of that. For some strange reason, the cancer industry is heavily populated with highly intelligent people who refuse to engage that intelligence when it comes to exploring the true causes of health and healing. The fact that there is no official admission that foods have anything whatsoever to do with cancer is just one sign that the cancer industry is ignoring reality.

It's quite strange: when a person is diagnosed with cancer, their oncologists will tell them it doesn't matter what they eat from that point on -- only western medicine can save them, they're told. In fact, that information is not just a lie, it is an evil lie, because it disempowers patients and entraps them in a system of medical distortions that takes away not only their freedom, but also their health.

Overview:

Americans spend $18 billion a year on dietary supplements in the hopes of warding off cancer and other maladies.

No wonder tens of millions of Americans are focusing more attention on cancer prevention as a way to live to a healthy old age.

An estimated 150 million Americans have taken a supplement in the last year, according to the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a Washington-based trade association for the supplement industry.

Baby boomers in particular are popping vitamins, minerals and other herbal concoctions in the hopes of warding off not only cancer, but heart disease, osteoporosis and other maladies as well.

In addition to fueling the growth of dietary supplements, "prevention" is also the driving force behind the fast-growing $4.6 billion functional food industry, also known as nutraceuticals.

In reviewing studies on the effects of vitamins A, C or E, multivitamins with folic acid or combinations of antioxidants, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel convened by the Public Health Service, concluded in 2003 that there was insufficient evidence to recommend vitamin supplements as a way to prevent cancer.

The new program allows certain foods to make "qualified" disease-fighting health claims.

As a result, the St. Louis company Solae petitioned the FDA to allow the soy food manufacturer to tout its supposed cancer-fighting abilities on packaging.

The Solae Company, a joint venture between DuPont and Bunge Limited, refers to 58 studies showing a relationship between soy protein foods and reduced incidence of some cancers, including those of the breast, colon and prostate.

Source: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5235270/