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April 23 - November 14, 2023
Lymphoma is a blood cancer of lymphocytes, which are specialized types of white blood cells.
Finally, myeloma is a cancer of plasma cells, which are white blood cells that produce antibodies, the proteins that stick to invaders and infected cells to neutralize or tag them for destruction.
Most people with multiple myeloma live for only a few years after diagnosis. Though treatable, multiple myeloma is considered incurable.
If your kidneys do not function properly, metabolic waste products can accumulate in the blood and eventually lead to such symptoms as weakness, shortness of breath, confusion, and abnormal heart rhythms.
Dietary acid load is determined by the balance of acid-inducing foods (such as meats, eggs, and cheese) and base-inducing foods (such as fruits and vegetables).
a higher dietary acid load was associated with significantly higher risk of protein leakage into the urine, an indicator of kidney damage.
Humans evolved eating these alkaline (base-forming) diets over millions of years. Most contemporary diets, on the other hand, produce acid in excess. This switch from base- to acid-forming diets may help explain our modern epidemic of kidney disease.
The chronic, low-grade, metabolic acidosis attributed to a meat-rich diet39 helps explain why people eating plant-based diets appear to have superior kidney function40 and why various plant-based diets have been so successful in treating chronic kidney failure.
If people are unwilling to reduce their meat consumption, they should be encouraged to eat more fruits and vegetables to balance out that acid load.
Having too much phosphorus in the blood may increase the risk of kidney failure, heart failure,
Historically, the only accepted risk factor for kidney cancer has been tobacco use.99 A class of carcinogens in cigarette smoke called nitrosamines are considered to be so harmful that even so-called thirdhand smoke is a concern.
As one of the leading scholars in the tobacco control movement recently wrote, “Carcinogens of this strength in any other consumer product designed for human consumption would be banned immediately.”102 Except for one: meat.
So why are vegetable nitrates and nitrites okay but the same compounds from meat are linked to cancer?110 Because nitrites themselves are not carcinogenic; they turn into carcinogens. Nitrites only become harmful when they turn into nitrosamines and nitrosamides. For them to do that, amines and amides must be present, and amines and amides are found in abundance in animal products.
The scary reality is that what doctors call “early detection” is actually late detection. Modern imaging simply isn’t good enough to detect cancer at its earliest stages, so it can spread long before it’s even spotted. A woman is considered “healthy” until she shows signs or symptoms of breast cancer.
In philosophy, there’s a flawed argument called the appeal-to-nature fallacy, in which someone proposes that something is good merely because it’s natural. In biology, however, this may hold some truth.
Besides helping to regulate your sleep, melatonin is thought to play another role—suppressing cancer growth.
Conversely, women who interrupt their melatonin production by working night shifts appear to be at increased risk for breast cancer.35 Even living on a particularly brightly lit street may affect the risk.
Minimizing melatonin disruption may therefore mean putting curtains on your windows, eating more vegetables, and lowering the curtain on eating too much meat.
The longer meat is cooked, the more HCAs form. This process may explain why eating well-done meat is associated with increased risk of cancers of the breast, colon, esophagus, lung, pancreas, prostate, and stomach.
Cooking meat thoroughly reduces the risk of contracting foodborne infections (see chapter 5), but cooking meat too thoroughly may increase the risk of foodborne carcinogens.
Cancer develops in three major stages: 1) initiation, the irreversible DNA damage that starts the process; 2) promotion, the growth and division of the initiated cell into a tumor; and 3) progression, which can involve the invasion of the tumor into surrounding tissue and metastasis (spread) to other areas of the body.
Tumors may suck up so much cholesterol that cancer patients’ cholesterol levels tend to plummet as their cancer grows.
The cancer protection apples appear to offer is assumed to arise from their antioxidant properties. Apple antioxidants are concentrated in the peel,
This finding suggests that not only might a heaping side of broccoli with your steak decrease carcinogen exposure but also that eating your veggies days or even weeks before the big barbecue may help shore up your defenses.
When people are told that they are cancer-free, it may mean their tumors are gone, but if their stem cells are cancerous, the tumors still might reappear many years later.
Green tea has been associated with about a 30 percent reduction in breast cancer risk.147 Another strong possibility is a relatively high intake of soy, which, if consumed consistently during childhood, may cut the risk of breast cancer later in life by half.
Good mental health isn’t “merely the absence of disease,” though. Just because you’re not depressed doesn’t necessarily mean you’re happy. There are twenty times more studies published on health and depression than there are on health and happiness.
Higher consumption of vegetables may cut the odds of developing depression by as much as 62 percent.
The traditional explanation of how depression works, known as the monoamine theory, proposes that the condition arises out of a chemical imbalance in the brain.
Thus, the theory goes, depression is caused by abnormally low levels of monoamine neurotransmitters due to elevated levels of the neurotransmitter-munching enzyme.
why not just develop a drug that blocks this enzyme? Such drugs do exist, but they have serious risks—not the least of which is the dreaded “cheese effect,” in which eating certain foods (such as certain cheeses, cured meats, and fermented foods) while on the drug can potentially cause fatal brain hemorrhaging.
For your diet to have a meaningful psychological impact, though, you may need to consume approximately seven servings of fruits or eight servings of vegetables each day.
In a yearlong study, about one hundred men and women were randomly assigned to eat either a low-carb or high-carb diet. By the end of the year, the subjects eating the high-carb diets experienced significantly less depression, hostility, and mood disturbance than those in the low-carb group. This result is consistent with studies finding better moods and less anxiety among populations eating diets higher in carbohydrates and lower in fats and protein.
However, saffron may be one of those rare cases in which the natural remedy is more expensive than the drug. Saffron is the world’s most expensive spice.
Avoiding diet soda and those pastel paper packets seems easy enough, but artificial sweeteners are also present in more than six thousand products,56 including breath mints, cereals, chewing gums, jams and jellies, juice drinks, puddings, and even nutritional bars and yogurts.57 This prevalence has led researchers to assert that aspartame “is impossible to completely eradicate from daily encounters.”
Discriminating shoppers make it a priority to read ingredients lists, but the healthiest foods in the supermarket don’t even have them.
Exercise, it seemed, works about as well as medication.
No matter the setting—whether subjects were alone or in a group—exercise appeared to work about as well as drugs at bringing depression into remission.
The pharmaceutical industry is considered one of the most profitable and politically powerful industries in the United States, and mental illness is considered a golden goose: chronic, common, and often treated with multiple drugs.
antidepressants do seem to beat out sugar pills in reducing symptoms in the most severely depressed—perhaps about 10 percent of patients (although admittedly, this statistic also means that about 90 percent of depressed patients may be prescribed medication with negligible benefit).
Major side effects of antidepressants include:
-Sexual disfunction (up to 3/4 of patients)
-Long term weight gain and insomnia
-Withdrawl symptoms after quiting
-Higher likelihood of depression later in the future
Autopsy studies show that about half of men over the age of eighty have prostate cancer.1 Most men die with prostate cancer without ever knowing they had it.
In a paper entitled “Choline Intake and Risk of Lethal Prostate Cancer,” the same Harvard team found that men who consumed the most choline from food also had an increased risk of cancer death.
Bottom line: The evidence suggests that flaxseed is a safe, low-cost source of nutrition and may reduce tumor-proliferation rates.
Some plants may be particularly prostate friendly. Research has found that flaxseeds can be used to treat BPH.
Not surprisingly, the more IGF-1 you have in your bloodstream, the higher your risk for developing cancers, such as prostate cancer.
The oceans are essentially humanity’s sewer; everything eventually flows into the sea.
The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet.
The Institute of Medicine has made suggestions for reducing dioxin exposure, such as trimming fat from meat, including from poultry and fish, and avoiding the recycling of animal fat into gravy.39 Wouldn’t it be more prudent just to trim the amount of animal foods from your diet instead? Researchers have estimated that a plant-based diet could wipe out about 98 percent of your dioxin intake.
Tobacco is part of the nightshade family, the group of plants that includes tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, and peppers. It turns out they all contain nicotine, too, but in such trace amounts
Eating nicotine-rich vegetables, especially peppers, was associated with significantly lower risk of Parkinson’s disease.
