Pattaya Today 1
Vol. 8 No. 23 ď ´ 16 - 31 August 2009
Volume 8, Issue 23
16 - 31 August 2009
Can Cancer be reversed
25 BAHT
by what we Eat?
by Eric Bahrt
Can diet reverse cancer?A few months ago I read an article in the "My Life" section of the Bangkok Post about a medical doctor who had lung cancer and was told he only had a few months left to live.The doctor then went on a vegetarian diet and today ,years later,he is still alive and well. That article got me thinking about my friend Ruth Heidrich who in l98l was diagnosed with breast cancer. After having her breasts removed the cancer returned. Ruth then avoided all further conventional treatment and instead embarked on a program in which she combined a low-fat vegan diet with intensive exercise. Not only is Ruth also still alive and well nearly thirty years later,but she went on to become a champion athlete.
But were these two people just lucky?Were their recoveries just medical flukes?Or can this diet really reverse cancer?While many people know that Dr Dean Ornish was able to reverse heart disease in his patients without using medication by putting them in a program which combined a low-fat vegetarian diet with exercise and meditation,fewer people know that in 2004 he tried the same approach with early stage prostate cancer patients.
The one difference between the two programs was that while the heart patients were on a vegetarian but not vegan diet,the cancer patients were on a vegan diet.I speculate that the reason for this difference is that because dairy milk has been linked to increased risk for prostate cancer Ornish insisted that his cancer patients on the veggie diet avoid milk. While none of his 93 cancer patients received any conventional treatment only about half of them were on a vegan diet while the other half continued to eat the way they usually did.The other half also were not told to exercise or meditate. After one year remarkable results could be seen.While
the PSA(which is used to measure prostate cancer development)went down by 4 per cent for the vegan patients it went up 6 per cent for the other patients. The researchers also took flasks of human cancer cells and incubated them with the blood taken from the cancer patients at the year's end. The blood serum taken from the meat-eating patients only weakly inhibited the cancer cells,reducing their growth by only 9 per cent.But the serum taken from those on the vegan diet inhibited cancer growth by 70 per cent! Ornish said:"This is the first randomized trial showing that the progression of prostate cancer can be stopped or even reversed by changing
lifestyle and diet alone". Continued on page 10