Anticancer. A New Way of Life Quotes

“To say “I love you,” Yanomami Indians of the Amazon say, “Ya pihi irakema,” meaning “I have been contaminated by your being”—a part of you has entered me, and it lives and grows.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer. A New Way of Life

“Statistics are information, not condemnation. The objective, when you have cancer and want to combat fatality, is to make sure you find yourself in the long tail of the curve.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“anunciaba que en esos momentos estaban ya llevándose a cabo más de veinte ensayos clínicos36.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticáncer: Una nueva forma de vida

“Cancer Feeds on Sugar”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer

“Today our bodies still expect a diet similar to the one we had when we ate the products of hunting and gathering.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer

“1. The addition of large quantities of highly refined sugar to our diet. 2. Changes in methods of farming and raising animals and, as a result, in our food. 3. Exposure to a large number of chemical products that didn’t exist before 1940.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer

“is as if the body’s chronic underlying state of inflammation were a major determining factor of health.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer

“the combination of green tea and soy enhances the protective effects observed when each is taken separately. This is true for both prostate and breast cancer. 14,15 In the conclusion of their article, the researchers wrote: “Our study suggests that soy phytochemicals plus green tea may be used as a potentially effective dietary regimen for inhibiting progression of estrogen dependent breast cancer.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“The resistant mice were able to mount a powerful defense, thanks to their immune system, even after cancer had taken hold.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“At a certain age—six months for a mouse, the equivalent of fifty years for a human—the mechanism of resistance is weakened.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“still carry with me the lesson he taught me: On the threshold of death, one can still save one’s life. That gave me enough confidence to take on the task I had to carry out for myself, to be ready when the time came.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“Not everyone follows this route through conscious decision. Sometimes the disease itself leads us there. In Chinese, the notion of “crisis” is written as a combination of the two characters “danger” and “opportunity.” Cancer is so threatening that its effect is blinding; it is hard for us to grasp its creative potential. In many ways, my illness has changed my life for the better, and in a way that I could never have imagined when I thought that I was condemned. It started shortly after the diagnosis.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“These recent findings support the notion that “cancer genes” may not be so harmful if not triggered by our unhealthy lifestyle”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“The best proof of a link between changes in lifestyle and the arrested development of cancer cells is that the more diligently these men had absorbed Dr. Ornish’s advice and applied it to their daily lives, the more active their blood was against the cancer cells!”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“Dr. Ornish set up a complete program of physical and mental health. Over the course of one year, these men followed a vegetarian diet with supplements (the antioxidants vitamins E and C and selenium, and a gram of omega-3 fatty acids a day), physical exercise (thirty minutes of walking, six days a week), practice in stress management (yoga movements, breathing exercises, mental imagery, or progressive relaxation), and one hour of weekly participation in a support group with other patients in the same program.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“But that is precisely the point: If patients are better informed about their disease, if they look after body and mind, and if they are given what they need to improve their health, then they can mobilize the body’s vital functions to fight cancer. They live better, and for longer.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“By participating in certain programs, such as that of the Commonweal Center in California (which we’ll discuss later), patients try to take charge of their cancer, to learn to live in greater harmony with their bodies and their past, to seek peace of mind through yoga and meditation, and to choose foods that fight cancer while avoiding those that promote its development.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“The objective, when you have cancer and want to combat fatality, is to make sure you find yourself in the long tail of the curve.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“The lesson that this great biologist teaches us is simple: Statistics are information, not condemnation.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“In a domain like oncology, two things are continually changing: conventional treatments and our knowledge of what each of us can do individually to reinforce the effect of these treatments. If the circumstances change, the survival curve changes too.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“After all, he had spent his life studying and quantifying natural phenomena. If there was one lesson to be learned from that, it was that there is no fixed rule in nature that applies in like manner to everything. Variation is the very essence of nature.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“But that night I went to sleep, and the next day I was able to go to work and take the necessary steps to begin to face the disease, and to face my life.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“I saw myself like a piece of wood floating down a river, suddenly tossed against the shore, caught in a stagnant pool.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“Throughout the process, the scanner emits a loud clanging sound, like that of a metal staff striking the floor repeatedly. It corresponds to the movements of the electronic magnet that quickly turns on and off to induce variations in the magnetic field in the brain.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“The first part of this book presents a new view of the mechanisms of cancer. This view is based on the fundamental but still little-known workings of the immune system, on the discovery of the inflammatory mechanisms underlying the growth of tumors, and on the possibility of blocking their spread by preventing new blood vessels from nourishing them.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“In these pages I will tell you the story of how I changed from a scientist-researcher, completely ignorant of the body’s natural defenses, to a physician who relies above all on these natural mechanisms.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“At the same time, it is completely unreasonable to rely only on this purely technical approach and neglect the natural capacity of our bodies to protect against tumors. We can take advantage of this natural protection to either prevent the disease or enhance the benefits of treatments.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“All research on cancer concurs: Genetic factors contribute to at most 15 percent of mortalities from cancer. In short, there is no genetic fatality. We can all learn to protect ourselves.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“This study shows that lifestyle is fundamentally involved in vulnerability to cancer.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life

“We all live with myths that undermine our capacity to fight cancer. For example, many of us are convinced that cancer is primarily linked to our genetic makeup, rather than our lifestyle. When we look at the research, however, we can see that the contrary is true.”
― David Servan-Schreiber, Anticancer, a New Way of Life