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government, there is a revolving door that provides an additional incentive for nonprofit executives and researchers to tune their actions to an industry-approved key. Those same industries might hire them as lobbyists or “thought leaders,” also known as “key opinion leaders”—prominent physicians or medical researchers who have proven effective at influencing their peers—after their nonprofit stint ends.
But the ACS is one of the big obstacles to reducing cancer rates in this country.
the ACS guides hundreds of millions of dollars per year into cancer screenings and medical research, and almost none into research or advocacy about diet.
try to take advantage of nature’s tools to restore health.
(The more varied the research and interventions, the greater the chance of discovering something new—of stumbling upon a true breakthrough.)
By contrast, the ACS looks for simple solutions involving chemicals used to selectively kill cancer cells, a synthetic approach that ignores nature’s means of restoring and maintaining health.
With one exception—the ACS’s laudable and successful multi-decade crusade against smoking—the research and advocacy ACS funds is all about “preventive screening” (since when is a diagnosis of a late-stage existing condition considered prevention?) and molecular mechanisms of cancer development that might lend themselves to the latest toxic drug or genetic manipulation.
ACS’s diet recommendations (buried several directories deep on their website6) are vague and unthreatening to their funders’ bottom lines.
(How far this organization has strayed from its inception a century ago, when its founder, Frederick Hoffmann, advocated the study of nutrition as a key factor in cancer development!
of dairy products. That’s because there is none. Despite all the evidence, the ACS doesn’t mention avoiding or reducing consumption of milk or cheese, or dairy of any kind, in its recommendations.
increasing their calcium consumption “primarily through food sources such as low-fat or non-fat dairy products.”7
(Just in case you’re wondering if a WFPB diet qualifies as “quackery,” two of ASC’s “Signs of Treatment to Avoid” are: “Does the treatment claim to offer benefits, but no side effects?” and “Do the promoters attack the medical or scientific community?” Talk about being paranoid!)
The AICR’s sole mission was to emphasize the dietary causes of cancer.
I was becoming disenchanted with their focus on highly reductionist research.
The ACS very much supports the treatment of cancer with chemicals, and animal-product-free nutrition does not fit into such plans.
There is impressive evidence that high levels of milk consumption correlate with high rates of MS prevalence, and long-term studies show much lower death rates among MS patients who ate a plant-rich diet (5 percent, compared with 80 percent for those who consumed an unhealthy diet).11
But the MS Society website has almost nothing to say about the role of nutrition in preventing and ameliorating the disease.
What I find especially repugnant about the AND is its stifling influence over nutrition education.
If registered dietitians are complacent, “other groups may gain a competitive advantage.” You must protect “your scope of practice.”
Through its advocacy, public relations, and mandatory education partners, it serves as a front for the food and drug industries and their interests.
Professional societies protect their existence (and present and future funding) by aligning themselves with the traditional food and drug companies and their interests, avoiding as much as possible any mention of the possible health benefits of the WFPB diet.
First, they exploit the perception that they occupy some moral high ground in the battle against disease. To oppose them is to lend support to the enemy: the diseases that threaten us and our loved ones.
As we’ve seen, most people suffering from a disease, as well as their loved ones, cling to hope in the medical establishment.
When AstraZeneca tells us that tamoxifen is a safe and effective treatment for breast cancer, we know that, whether accurate or not, it is self-interested advertising. But when the ACS makes the same claim, we accept it as truth.
I’m sickened by the billions upon billions of dollars and the millions upon millions of volunteer hours that are redirected away from nutrition and toward reductionist, patentable, profit-generating distractions.
And yet they are utterly disempowering. Women with breast cancer, he advises, pray for a breakthrough. Pray for a cure. For your salvation lies
in the hands of those who compound new drugs, who invent new radiation machines, who pioneer new surgical techniques, and who find new ways to manipulate genes.
he’s still selling reductionist treatment as these women’s only hope. Not a word about prevention. About empowerment. About the fact that simple changes in diet may turn off cancer progression.
If we limit our sight to individual players, we’ll never see the big picture. The issue is a systemic one, maintained by interconnected actors, all acting in
their self-interest to further their goals.
The trouble is not, or not always, the actors themselves, or their intrinsic motivations. Instead, it’s the overarching goal of the entire system that’s at f...
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They aren’t “bad apples” in an otherwise good barrel; rather, the barrel itself, the system in which money talks and reductionism is the official language, is the source of the ethical rot.
We must recognize nutrition as a cornerstone of our health-care system, not a footnote.
If we are truly to understand the meaning of nutrition, its effect on the body, and its potential to transform our collective health, we must stop seeing reductionism as the only method by which to achieve progress and start seeing it as a tool, the results of which can only be properly evaluated within a wholistic framework.
And we must be willing to embrace wholism beyond the realm of nutrition.
I am now convinced that there is no healthier way to eat than a whole food, plant-based diet, without added fat, salt, or refined carbohydrates.
It turned out that the activity of any one of these four nutrients could substantially change the activities of the other three, leading to changes in the body’s response to the diseases. When I asked my professor how common interactions like these were for other nutrients, he replied that although they were quite common, they did not get much attention in experimental research; they were too difficult to study and almost impossible to interpret adequately.
In other words, even though we could see the applicability of the wholistic framework, we still had to pursue our research as if reductionism were the whole truth.
And I would not have gained the much deeper understanding and appreciation of our biological complexity that I now possess and seek to share with you.
This understanding of biological complexity was crucial to changing the way I viewed the findings of reductionist studies. It made me realize how important it was to view such findings not as truths that are complete in and of themselves, but as pieces of a larger, more meaningful puzzle.
cancer—has the potential to be either significantly less effective than other ways of addressing the same problem, or even outright dangerous.
We wanted to investigate not single chemical mechanisms, as I had been doing for so many years in the research lab, but patterns of causes and effects that might help explain complex diet-disease relationships.
The first is our reverence for animal protein. Our society believes so passionately in the health value of milk and meat that it is hard for us to conceive that we might be wrong—that these foods might, in fact, be very unhealthy. It is too far outside of what we have been taught for decades for us to believe it easily, no matter how true it may be.
Second is the reductionism paradigm that leads us to focus on parts of things separate from, and to the exclusion of, the whole.
Third is the profit-oriented system that discourages us from behaving in non-reductionist ways.
I have tried for years to enact change from the top down, and it simply doesn’t work.
There are many ways to steer good but inconvenient ideas through a bureaucratic maze that results in watered-down, virtually worthless programs and guidelines bearing little resemblance to the original ideas.
