COMMON CANCERS: BREAST, PROSTATE, LARGE BOWEL 181- "Supercharged" D is responsible for creating a wide variety of
health benefits in the body. Persistently low levels of supercharged
D create an inviting environment for different cancers, autoim-
mune diseases, osteoporosis and other diseases.
The important story here is how the effects of food-both good and
bad-operate through a symphony of coordinated reactions to prevent
diseases like prostate cancer. In discovering the existence of these net-
works, we sometimes wonder which specific function comes first and
which comes next. We tend to think of these reactions within the net-
work as independent. But this surely misses the point. What impresses
me is the multitude of reactions working together in so many ways to
produce the same effect: in this case, to prevent disease.
There is no Single "mechanism" that fully explains what causes dis-
eases such as cancer. Indeed, it would be foolish to even think along
these lines. But what I do know is this: the totality and breadth of the
evidence, operating through highly coordinated networks, supports the
conclusions that consuming dairy and meat are serious risk factors for
prostate cancer.
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
Roughly half a million Americans this year will go to the doctor's office
and be told that they have cancer of the breast, prostate or large bowel.
People who get one of these cancers represent 40% of all new cancer
patients. These three cancers devastate the lives of not only the victims
themselves, but also their family and friends.
When my mother-in-law died of colon cancer at the age of fifty-one,
none of us knew that much about nutrition or what it meant for health.
It wasn't that we didn't care about the health of our loved ones-of
course we did. We just didn't have the information. Yet, over thirty years
later, not much has changed. Of the people you know who have cancer,
or are at risk of haVing cancer, how many of them have considered the
possibility of adopting a whole foods, plant-based diet to improve their
chances? I'm guessing very few of them have done so. Probably they,
too, don't have the information.
Our institutions and infonnation providers are failing us. Even cancer
organizations, at both the national and local level, are reluctant to discuss
or even believe this evidence. Food as a key to health represents a power-
ful challenge to conventional medicine, which is fundamentally built on