Radical Remission

Kelly A. Turner, PhD

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780062268778
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Enfermedades y alergias

In her New York Times bestseller, Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, Dr. Kelly A. Turner, founder of the Radical Remission Project, uncovers nine factors that can lead to a spontaneous remission from cancer—even after conventional medicine has failed.

While getting her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkley, Dr. Turner, a researcher, lecturer, and counselor in integrative oncology, was shocked to discover that no one was studying episodes of radical (or unexpected) remission—when people recover against all odds without the help of conventional medicine, or after conventional medicine has failed. She was so fascinated by this kind of remission that she embarked on a ten month trip around the world, traveling to ten different countries to interview fifty holistic healers and twenty radicalremission cancer survivors about their healing practices and techniques.Her research continued by interviewing over 100 Radical Remission survivors and studying over 1000 of these cases. Her evidence presents nine common themes that she believes may help even terminal patients turn their lives around.

CHAPTER 1

RADICALLY CHANGING YOUR DIET

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

—HIPPOCRATES

Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is heralded as the founder of modern medicine, strongly believed that food has the power to adjust, rebalance, and heal the body. Imagine, then, his disappointment if he were to find out that today’s M.D.’s receive a total of only one week of nutrition education during their four years at medical school.¹ Even at my own recent physical exam, I had to explain to the doctor that, as a vegetarian, I receive plenty of calcium from eating leafy greens (her only suggestion was milk) and plenty of iron from eating beans and seaweed (her only suggestion was red meat). In general, it is not that doctors disbelieve in the healing power of food, but rather that they simply never learned about it.

If doctors were to study nutrition in greater depth, they would find that we are indeed what we eat, because the cells of our food get broken down and transformed into the cells of our bodies. In addition, what we eat and drink directly affects our vessels and tissues, making them more or less inflamed depending on what we put into our bodies. To understand this concept, imagine giving a cup of coffee to a five-year-old. After about ten minutes, you would have no doubt that what we eat and drink directly affects our health.

Our health—and indeed our entire lives—can be seen as the sum of all our moment-to-moment decisions. This includes how we choose to eat and drink, think and feel, act and react, and move and rest on any given day. What makes food so powerful is that it is a very conscious decision. Will I choose a sugary cereal or oatmeal with fruit? Will it be the quick peanut butter and jelly sandwich or the longer-to-make quinoa salad? For most people, there is a nagging doubt underlying these daily food choices, and it whispers, “Does this really matter? Does what I eat really have a vital impact on my health?” The Radical Remission survivors I interview—whose lives are at stake—take that question to the next level. They ask themselves, “Can what I eat help my cancer go into remission?” The answer many of them find is yes.

After analyzing hundreds of Radical Remission cases, one of the nine key factors that consistently comes up over and over again is radically changing one’s diet in order to help heal cancer. What’s more, the majority of the people I study all tend to make the same four dietary changes. They are:

• greatly reducing or eliminating sugar, meat, dairy, and refined foods,

• greatly increasing vegetable and fruit intake,

• eating organic foods, and

• drinking filtered water.

After discussing each of these changes in depth, I will share two Radical Remission stories from people who radically changed their diets in order to heal their breast and prostate cancer, respectively. Finally, we will discuss some simple steps you can take in order to start eating an anticancer diet.

NO SWEETS, NO MEAT, NO DAIRY, NO REFINED FOODS

The vast majority of the Radical Remission survivors I continue to research talk about how they reduce or eliminate sweets (sugar), meat, dairy products, and refined foods from their diets in order to help themselves heal. Let’s start with sugar. There has been a lot of talk about sugar and cancer, and for good reason. It is an indisputable fact that cancer cells consume (i.e., metabolize) sugar—glucose—at a much faster rate than normal cells do. This is precisely how a PET scan (positron emission tomography) works: first, you drink a glass of glucose, and then the scan detects where that glucose is being metabolized the fastest in your body. Those glucose “hot spots” are the areas in your body that are most likely cancerous. While researchers are still not clear whether a high-sugar diet causes cancer, what we do know is that once cancer cells are in your body, they consume anywhere from ten to fifty times more glucose than normal cells do.² Therefore, it makes logical sense for cancer patients to cut as much refined sugar from their diets as possible, in order to avoid “feeding” their cancer cells, and instead rely on the glucose found naturally in vegetables and fruits. Knowing that the average American eats the equivalent of twenty-two teaspoons of sugar a day—when we should only eat six to nine teaspoons at most³—means there is much room for improvement, whether or not we are currently dealing with cancer.

The connection between cancer cells and sugar was first discovered in the 1920s by a doctor named Otto Warburg. Dr. Warburg won a Nobel Prize for discovering that cancer cells get their energy and breathe (i.e., respirate) differently than healthy cells do. Specifically, he noticed that cancer cells get their energy by breaking down unusually large amounts of glucose and that they also breathe without oxygen (known as “anaerobic” respiration). Healthy cells, on the other hand, break down a much smaller amount of glucose and breathe with oxygen (known as “aerobic” respiration). What’s interesting is that cancer cells will still breathe anaerobically even when there is plenty of oxygen around. This led Dr. Warburg to hypothesize that cancer cells must have something wrong with their mitochondria, since that’s the part of the cell where aerobic respiration takes place in healthy cells. Don’t worry if you are having anxious flashbacks to high school biology class—the take-home message is simple: cancer cells behave differently than healthy cells do, and one of the key differences is that they require lots of sugar in order to function. Therefore, cutting refined sugars out of your diet may be a key way to help “starve” a cancer cell.

One Radical Remission survivor who changed his diet—and, in particular, cut sugar from his diet—is a man named “Ron.” Ron was diagnosed with prostate cancer at the age of fifty-four. His blood tests came back positive for prostate cancer (Gleason score of 6 and PSA level of 5.2), and he tested positive for cancer on two out of twelve biopsy samples. Therefore, his doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove his entire prostate. However, Ron had recently heard of someone who had healed his cancer through nutrition, so Ron wanted first to look into that option. There was no integrative oncologist or nutritionist with whom to talk in his rural town, so he started reading books and articles that explained how cancer cells consume lots of sugar and how many typical American foods, such as white potatoes and white bread, contain it. After a few weeks of intense research, Ron decided to postpone the surgery for a little while and try radically changing his diet instead:

Cancer was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, because I was always pretty keen on fitness, but I did not eat that well. I was a big-time sugar junkie. . . . [To get rid of my cancer,] I eliminated sugar and everything white. No white potatoes, no white bread—that sort of thing. And I ate a lot of greens and did a lot of juicing of cabbage, which I still do, but not as frequently as I could. . . . Cancers are anaerobic . . . and glucose is a nitrogen shuttle, which feeds them. So, if you can just cut off that [glucose] shuttle supply, the cancer is not going to make it.

After changing his diet in this way, Ron’s PSA dropped down to a healthy 1.3 in less than a year—and he avoided having his prostate surgically removed, which can have permanent, negative side effects on urinary and sexual function. He has been cancer-free now for more than seven years.

MOVING ON TO dairy products, there are two main reasons that my research subjects suggest that you should reduce or eliminate them from your diet. The first is that dairy is the breast milk of another animal, which means it is packed with hormones and proteins meant to make a baby calf grow—not humans. (Incidentally, we are the only species on the planet that drinks the breast milk of another animal.) What’s more, research has shown that the main protein in cow’s milk, called casein, makes cancer cells grow, both in petri dishes and in lab rats. In fact, researchers have found that they can turn a rat’s cancer on or off simply by feeding, or not feeding, it casein.⁴

The second reason that Radical Remission survivors believe you should cut back on dairy is the unhealthy chemicals found in most U.S. dairy products, such as bovine growth hormones, antibiotics, and pesticides. U.S. milk and dairy products have actually been banned in Europe because our cows have been injected with recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), a hormone that has been linked to cancer in various studies.⁵ In addition, U.S. dairy products contain unhealthy amounts of omega-6 fats (instead of healthy omega-3 fats), because we feed our cows corn instead of their natural diet of grass⁶—and we only do that because corn is cheaper to grow than grass. The problem with omega-6 fats is they have been consistently linked to cancer.⁷

Finally, it is important to remember that dairy products do not provide us with any nutrients we cannot get elsewhere, even though TV commercials may try to convince us otherwise. For example, we can get just as much calcium from leafy greens and turnips and just as much protein from beans and nuts. Taken together, the evidence is mounting to show that dairy may be cancer promoting, whether due to its inherent casein protein or to the bad things we add to it during production. That is why so many of the radical survivors I study drastically reduce or eliminate their dairy consumption, at least until their cancer is completely gone.

Jane Plant is an example of someone who healed her cancer by focusing on eliminating dairy (among other things). Jane was initially diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer at the age of forty-two, when her doctors assured her that a mastectomy would “take care of it.” Unfortunately, they were wrong. Her cancer recurred a total of five different times, and over the course of the next decade she underwent three additional surgeries, thirty-five radiation treatments, and twelve chemotherapy cycles. When her cancer returned for the fifth time and the latest chemotherapy was having no effect on the egg-size, cancer-filled lymph node bulging out of her neck, her doctors informed her that she had only a few months left to live. As a loving mother and accomplished geologist, however, Jane refused to accept their prognosis. Instead, she began using her skills as a geologist to research what might be at the root of her breast cancer. She had already changed her diet such that she was eating plenty of vegetables and whole grains, but her new research led her to believe there was one additional change she needed to make:

In my case, giving up dairy was important. . . . I was having traditional [chemotherapy] treatments at the time, but they weren’t working, and it wasn’t until I gave up dairy that the treatments started working. . . . I think there are lots of things that cause cancer, but I think you’ve got to stop the things that promote it, that make it go. . . . It’s not as simple as just giving up dairy, though. There are other food and lifestyle changes, too.

Jane writes about those other changes in her book Your Life in Your Hands, which was a bestseller in England. In it, she recommends eliminating all dairy products; greatly increasing one’s organic vegetable and fruit intake; eating healthy vegan proteins, such as beans, nuts, and seeds; using healthy oils, herbs, and spices; avoiding refined food products; and drinking filtered, boiled water. She has been cancer-free now for over nineteen years and continues to conduct research on—and stick to—a nondairy, vegetable-rich diet.

THE CASE AGAINST meat consumption typically starts with the argument that we humans were designed for a diet that consists of only about 10 percent meat, which ideally should be wild, lean game meat. Today, the average American diet consists of 15 percent meat, which means the average American eats roughly two hundred pounds of meat per year.⁸ On the other end of the spectrum, proponents of the Paleo, or “caveman,” diet would argue that humans were designed to eat 20 to 40 percent meat. Regardless of what humans were eating thousands of years ago (which is impossible for anyone to prove), at present we are dealing with the modern disease of cancer, and the fact remains that scores of large-scale, well-designed scientific studies have linked regular consumption of meat, especially red meat, to many types of cancer.⁹ In fact, one study showed that eating just two servings of meat a day quadrupled a...