Book review:
Your Life In Your Hands
by
Professor Jane Plant
(Virgin Books)
Jane Plant one of Britain's most eminent scientists, suffered from breast cancer five times before she learned of the relationship between diet and disease.
Your Life in Your Hands shares all she has discovered and experienced in dealing with this illness.
"It is now ten years since my last breast cancer secondaries disappeared followuing a fundamental change in my diet and lifestyle. My cancer had spread to the lymph nodes in my neck, in spite of a radical mastectomy, three further operations, thirty-five radiotherapy treatments, irradiation of my ovaries to induce the menopause and several chemotherapy treatments.
Despite all this treatment, my doctors gave me only three months to live.
I then recalled that people in China, where I had worked had a very low incidence of breast (and prostate) cancer. At that point, I changed my diet and lifestyle, and to everyone's amazement, including I might add, my own, the large cancerous lump in my neck disappeared within 5 weeks.
Since that time I have not even had a scare"
[Jane writing in 1999. (Aug. 2011) Jane is still alive and still free of cancer.]
'Let me finish with a quote from a letter I received recently from one of the followers of my diet, whose secondaries had disappeared...
"My oncologist was a bit miffed when I mentioned your name, and said," If I had a cent for every woman who gives credit to Jane Plant instead of her oncologist I should be a very rich man." '
Milk contains 38 different hormones and growth factors. After all, that's it's job, to make cells grow. But one in particular is attracting a lot of attention - IGF-1...
The more milk you drink, the higher your level...
Milk not only contains IGF-1, a small part of which is absorbed into your blood, but it also stimulates the body to produce more of it's own. It simply does what it is meant to do. Stimulate growth. It also stops overgrowing cells from committing suicide, a process called apoptosis. While you are a growing baby this is good news. But when the only overgrowing cells are cancer cells, this is especially bad news, because IGF-1 has also been found to directly stimulate the growth of cancer cells - Patrick Holford
According to Professor Jeff Holly, from Bristol's University Faculty of Medicine, one of the world's leading experts in IGF-1, "those in the top quarter for blood IGF-1 levels have approximately a three to fourfold increase in risk of breast, prostate or colorectal cancer."
Holly doesn't drink milk and actively discourages anyone with a diagnosis of these cancers to have any dairy produce - Patrick Holford
Background Consumption of high-sugar foods stimulates insulin production, which has been associated with endometrial cancer.
Although a relationship between sucrose, high-sugar food consumption and endometrial cancer risk is biologically plausible, this hypothesis has previously been explored in very few studies.
Methods
We used data from the Swedish Mammography Cohort, including 61 226 women aged 40-74 years. We examined the association between consumption of total sucrose, high-sugar foods (at baseline 1987-90 and 1997) and endometrial cancer risk using Cox proportional hazards models to estimate incidence rate ratios (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI).
Results
During 18.4 years of follow-up, 729 participants were diagnosed with incident endometrial cancer. Total sucrose intake and consumption of sweet buns and cookies was associated with increased risk of endometrial cancer. RRs (with 95% CIs) for consuming more than 35 grams of sucrose/day and consuming sweet buns and cookies more than 3 times/week were 1.36 (1.04-1.77) and 1.42 (1.15-1.75) as compared to less than 15 grams of sucrose/day and consuming sweet buns and cookies less than 0.5 times/week, respectively. RRs for consuming more than 15 grams of sucrose/day as compared to 15 grams or less were 1.97 (1.27-3.04) among obese women and 1.56 (1.20-2.04) among women with low fat intake.
Conclusions
These data indicate that sucrose intake and consumption of sweet buns and cookies may be associated with increased risk of endometrial cancer.
Impact
Given the high intake of sweetened foods, these results have public health implications in terms of prevention of endometrial cancer.
If you want to reduce the amount of insulin growth factor you need to reduce intake of those foods that raise blood glucose high and fast because that requires the production of insulin to correct that problem.
If you have PET scan they use FDG, an analogue of glucose, the concentrations of tracer imaged then give tissue metabolic activity, in terms of regional glucose uptake.
Cancer's burn glucose as their preferred fuel source.
Quote:
Buns can increase cancer risk
Women who are heavy consumers of buns and cakes fall ill more frequently in cervical cancer than women who rarely choose to eat those sugar-rich foods.
Uterine cancer is the fifth most common cancer among women. Every year, nearly 1400 women in Sweden in cervical cancer and about 150 die from the disease. When cervical cancer is detected at an early stage, as it usually does, the prognosis is good. Most common treatment is to surgically remove the entire uterus. Uterine Cancer should not be confused with cervical cancer. Cervical cancer, caused by certain so-called HPV, is a completely different type of cancer.
It appears from a study among more than 61 000 women in Uppsala and V�stmanland, published in the online edition of the prestigious journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
- Our results can be seen as another argument to keep the consumption of sugary foods at all says Professor Alicja Wolk of the Department of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute.
All the women in the study on two occasions with seven years answered a comprehensive questionnaire about their eating habits. Based on survey responses, the researchers have both been able to see how much each woman consumed by various sugary foods and calculate how much sugar she daily received in themselves by them overall.
During the more than 18 years that women in the study followed after the first time, respondents diagnosed 729 of them in cervical cancer.
When the researchers analyzed who had fallen ill, they found that uterine cancer was significantly more common among women who consumed foods with more than 35 grams of sugar per day - both as an additive in coffee or tea and other foods - than among women who consumed less amounts of sugar than that .
The individual sugary foods that were most strongly linked to cervical cancer, buns and cakes.
Among women who stated that they ate pastries and cakes at least three times a week had cervical cancer about 40 percent more common than among women who ate such sugary cakes rarely or every other week.
- For obese women the relationship between high sugar consumption and endometrial cancer was even stronger. For them, the risk of this common form of cancer almost doubles if they consumed more than 15 grams of sugar per day, said Alicja Wolk.
She emphasizes that a study such as this can not prove that you can get uterine cancer by eating lots of sugar.
- That it would indeed be so is in line with several previous studies that demonstrated the close relationship between obesity, which may be closely linked to such called insulin resistance and high insulin levels in the blood, and uterine cancer. When you eat lots of sugar drives the body's insulin production, said Alicja Wolk.
Milk, Dairy and Human Health Pedro Carrera Bastos
this recent presentation from the Ancestral Health Symposium does much to support what knightofalbion is saying, that modern milk isn't good for us and may promote illness.
Bear in mind in the UK we don't use synthetic bovine hormones.
I've already pointed out that I don't actually drink milk myself and as I don't eat cereals either there is none need for it.
My only use of milk comes from yoghurt that is slowly fermented at home.
I also eat cheese but that is from grass fed cows and aged.
I'll be checking my blood glucose levels after yoghurt and cheese consumption and maybe reconsider.
I'll edit this post later or add a reply to the video presentation whenever that becomes available.
Milk, Dairy and Human Health Pedro Carrera Bastos
this recent presentation from the Ancestral Health Symposium does much to support what knightofalbion is saying, that modern milk isn't good for us and may promote illness.
Bear in mind in the UK we don't use synthetic bovine hormones.
I've already pointed out that I don't actually drink milk myself and as I don't eat cereals either there is none need for it.
My only use of milk comes from yoghurt that is slowly fermented at home.
I also eat cheese but that is from grass fed cows and aged.
I'll be checking my blood glucose levels after yoghurt and cheese consumption and maybe reconsider.
I'll edit this post later or add a reply to the video presentation whenever that becomes available.
PS The video presentation is now available here
do bear in mind the huge difference between US dairy production an UK
Pedro Bastos draws attention to the huge increases in milk following hormone use in the USA. In the EU the hormone is banned and our increase in dairy production is much less than UK Average Milk Yield US milk . The average for a single dairy cow in the US in 2007 was 9164.4 kg (20,204 lbs) per year, a KG of milk is slightly less than a litre.
I'm still eating aged cheese and home fermented yoghurt.
Very interesting indeed about milk. I have so many books on health and I can't tell you how many say to avoid dairy. The hormones bring on a new perspective. Colostrum is being promoted by many health professionals for children with immune compromised conditions. Perhaps it would be helpful in these situations. (I hope because my daughter is taking colostrum as a supplement)
I now believe that the link between dairy produce and breast cancer (and probably prostate cancer) is similar to that between smoking and cancer - Professor Jane Plant
Extract from Jane Plant's excellent book 'Prostate Cancer: Understand, Prevent and Overcome'
Over the years, the dairy industry has chosen to increase the average milk yield by selectively breeding from cattle which are better milk producers. This has resulted in the selection of cows which have higher levels of naturally occurring BGH, so that even before the era of rBGH, levels of IGF-1 in milk were increasing. Also, the long-term treatment of cows with the hormone implant oestradiol as a growth promoter increases secretion of IGF-1.
IGF-1 is not destroyed during pasteurisation of milk...
Footnote:
Incidence of breast cancer in the UK in 1940 was 1 in 22.
Incidence of breast cancer in the UK in 2011 is 1 in 8.
Clearly the huge rise in the incidence of breast cancer is not down to genetics, but to failings in diet and lifestyle.
Your Life In Your Hands
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