Fighting Cancer with Whole Plant Foods

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The foundation of cancer prevention is plants, not pills.

“Most cancer research is focused on finding cures, rather than finding new ways to prevent disease. The results of these priorities are clear.” It has been nearly 55 years since President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, yet the number of deaths from the most common cancer in the United States has continued unabated.

“We’ve been looking at cancer the wrong way. Breast cancer doesn’t start when a lump is first felt or detected using a mammogram. All common epithelial cancers (lung, colorectal, breast, prostate, pancreas and ovary), which cause many deaths, have a long latency period—often 20 years or more.” So, it’s not like you were healthy one day, then you got cancer the next. You weren’t healthy—you had cancer growing in you for decades. Indeed, “there is a strange notion that people are ‘well’ until they have actual symptoms of invasive cancer,” but “a barn where the hay is smoking before it bursts into flames is not a safe place.”

So, what does this pharmacology professor I’ve been quoting recommend? Drugs, of course. Chemoprevention – putting people on drugs to prevent cancer. The pharmaceutical industry spends tons of money promoting the prevention of heart disease and stroke with statins and blood thinners, so why shouldn’t people take drugs every day for the rest of their lives to prevent cancer?

There has to be a better way.

What about using diet and nutrition to prevent and treat cancer? Well, what kind of cancer? There are more than 200 species. But here’s the key: They all share the same symptoms. In a series of papers that have been cited more than 40,000 times in the biomedical literature, 10 hallmarks of cancer have been identified:

Increased sensitivity to growth factors
Avoiding stress on your body
Avoiding your immune system
To be able to grow forever
Inflammation that promotes tumor growth
The ability to attack and spread
The ability to pool its blood
Collection of DNA mutations
Disarmament is a self-destructive method that exists
Reducing cell metabolism

And, of course, there are classes of drugs to try to fight each one—chemotherapy drugs designed to target each piece of the cancer puzzle. You can see them below and at 2:27 in my video Fight the Ten Symptoms of Cancer with Food.

Now, in reality, there will be drugs that can target multiple symptoms at once, but that’s not how drugs usually work. Indeed, “this need to target many symptoms is one of the main reasons why, in the context of cancer research, there are many supporters of investigating plant foods as they can deliver a cocktail of bioactive compounds” that may target most, if not all, cancer symptoms. Below and 3:00 mine videoyou can see a sample of compounds found in fruits and vegetables—such as berries, green vegetables, and broccoli—that have been shown to target each of the 10 cancer markers, at least in a petri dish.

In addition, they have the qualities of a suitable chemopreventive agent. If you were to design an ideal candidate, you would want it to target cancerous or cancerous cells while leaving normal cells alone, have no side effects, target many types of cancer, can be consumed in everyday food, be readily available almost everywhere, and be inexpensive to implement. Plants meet all these conditions. It’s no wonder that people who eat more plant-based foods tend to have lower rates of cancer.

To be clear, we’re not talking about taking supplements that contain extracts or purified phytochemicals, but rather eating the plant foods themselves—more of a diet-based approach to targeting cancer markers. Food contains thousands of substances that lead to many possible interactions, yet nutritional science “has long been focused on the effects of individual food components.” Yes, this type of reduction method can reveal the role of food or individual nutrients in the development of diseases, but let’s think about what would be the correct research strategy to study the effects of natural bioactive plant compounds in the prevention of diseases. Instead of using phytochemicals to control cancer, why not try whole foods? Sometimes the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, a concept known as food synergy.

Check out this study involving the simultaneous inhibition of a series of cancer cells in breast cancer cells using a phytochemical supercocktail. Two breast cancer cell lines were treated with six different plant compounds individually, then all together, at levels normally found in the blood after eating foods such as broccoli, grapes, soybeans, and turmeric. And although these compounds did not work individually, together they significantly suppressed the proliferation of breast cancer cells by more than 80 percent, inhibited cancer cell invasion and migration, stopped the cancer cells in their tracks, and finally killed them all. The plant compounds did all this without having harmful effects on normal non-cancerous cells used as controls.

It is not surprising that the basis of cancer prevention – based on the review of the most comprehensive report on food and cancer ever published – is not pills, but plants, as you can see below and at 5:28 in my video.