Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (48 page)

The immune system is an incredibly complex arrangement of parts. It can recognize and remember millions of different enemies, and it can produce secretions and cells to wipe out every one of them. The secret to its success is an elaborate and dynamic communications network. Millions of cells gather like clouds of bees swarming around a honey pot and pass information back and forth.
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They must work together as a team for it to be 100% efficient.

Here is the essential thought to remember: the way we live our lives today depresses the efficiency of the immune system. In addition, lifestyle errors often cause it to go berserk—it attacks friendly cells and ignores enemy ones. Finally, by “living dirty,” we often overload the immune system with too many tasks. We will find many instances of how our weakened, raggle-taggle, overworked immune systems allow disease to take hold. And sometimes our deranged immune systems actually cause disease.

The root cause of cancer is not, then, the various provocative factors (tobacco, radiation, pesticides, etc.), but rather a failure of the immune system. It is this lowering of the defenses that allows cancer to flourish and take hold. When that happens, conventional medicine takes over.

In spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown into the “war on cancer” since the 1970s, progress has been slow. The chief tools are still the same: cut it out, poison it with chemotherapy, or nuke it with radiation. Certainly the techniques have become more targeted and sophisticated and success rates have climbed. There is more focus on detecting cancers early, so that these techniques have a better chance of winning out. Unfortunately, the outlook is often grim for cancers that have spread to other areas of the body (metastasized). In the United States, by the time they are discovered, 72% of lung cancers, 57% of colorectal cancers, and 34% of breast cancers have metastasized.
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Until recently, conventional medicine has not paid a lot of attention to repairing the defenses, let alone mobilizing the body’s remarkable powers of self-repair. Often, cancer patients receive no nutritional or lifestyle advice. Such patients should ask themselves the question: “If I got cancer doing what I was doing before, what should I do differently now?” We would all agree that it would be best if people lived their lives so that their defenses against cancer are invasion-proof. If cancer has taken hold, it is even more important to repair the defenses and keep them that way.

There are three main weaknesses that can arise with the immune system. Two of them, depressed immune system and overloaded immune system, are particularly responsible for allowing cancers to flourish. The way we live often depresses and overloads our immune systems. By correcting these departures from the Savanna Model, we will give ourselves the best chance to avoid cancer and to recover from it.

Cancer Avoidance and Recovery

Strategy 1: Eat a Strictly Low-Glycemic Diet

The way we eat today drives blood sugar and insulin to abnormal, unhealthy levels. This is a common phenomenon: it is estimated that 90% of Americans and 75% of Europeans suffer from it, even though they do not feel it. However, those high insulin levels depress the immune system and allow cancerous growths to flourish. This is the first way in which the Western, high-glycemic diet is a culprit in the cancer epidemic.

The second consequence of a high-glycemic diet is more direct. Let me illustrate it with this example. When doctors want to highlight a cancer on an x-ray, they inject you with glucose. The cancerous cells gorge themselves on the sugar and they light up like a Christmas tree on the x-ray negatives. Cancers need food to survive—and the best food is a rich supply of blood sugar. In the West, we unwittingly oblige by gorging ourselves, and all those pre-cancerous cells in us, on a high-starch, high-sugar diet. By following the Savanna Model feeding pattern, the diet is automatically low glycemic, one that naturally starves cancers of nutrients and avoids undermining the immune system.

Strategy 2: Maintain a Low Percentage of Body Fat

We saw in chapter 1 that cancer is absent from the San Bushman. Moreover, on the height-weight criterion, they have a low body-mass index (BMI), which averages around 19. This is considered to be at the low end of the “healthy” range in the West. In contrast, everything we know about being overweight tells us that it increases dramatically the risk of cancer. In fact, being slightly thinner than “normal” (like the San) is even better. Body mass index is a rather crude rule of thumb, which takes no account of stocky or slender build or degree of muscularity. The really important criterion is the percentage of body fat. The San, with their low BMI of 19, have a body fat percentage of around 10%. Westerners do not need to get that low, but they should aim for a maximum of 15% for men and 20% for women. It is also important to keep up lean muscle mass.

Strategy 3: Eat a Diet Rich in Non-Starchy Plant Food

Most people’s bodies are starved for micronutrients. Non-starchy plant food is where all those tens of thousands of essential immune system–nourishing molecules come from. Thousands of studies confirm the beneficial effect that consumption of various fruits, salads, and vegetables has on cancer prevention and cure. Even the residues from plant food that arrive in the colon have their part to play: the “good” bacteria grow on them and feed the immune system with compounds called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), such as butyrate and propionic acid. These are absorbed through the colon into the bloodstream, where they act to depress cancer cell proliferation. There is a bonus—these SCFAs are also potent “bad” bacteria killers, cleaning up the colon from infection.

Strategy 4: Eat a Low-Fat Diet with Essential Fatty Acids in Balance

The Japanese have the lowest incidence of cancer in the industrialized world. This is due in part to their traditional, very low-fat diet—less than 10% of calories. A low-fat diet is cancer fighting. Furthermore, thanks to the absence of dairy products and animal meat in their traditional diet, their intake of “bad” saturated fats is minimal. Many studies have shown that saturated fats, particularly hydrogenated and trans-fats, are powerful immune depressors, allowing cancers to flourish. Finally, the traditional consumption of oily fish provides them with the “good” omega-3 oils. We are unwittingly depressing our immune system with a diet overloaded with omega-6 oils. Drive these out of your diet and favor the omega-3 oils at every opportunity. But don’t go too far. The ideal is a 1-to-1 balance, but you don’t have to micromanage it—just follow the Savanna Model and the ratio works out just fine.

Strategy 5: Good Colon Health

In chapter 5, we emphasized how the colon, together with its contents of flora, should be functioning as a vital organ, contributing to the body’s healthy operation. The way we eat today does the opposite: it leaves us with rotten colon health. The residues of the food we have eaten are the wrong kind: they nourish “bad” bacteria, yeasts, and funguses. Some kinds of foods destroy the intestinal villi, the incredibly fine hairs that absorb vital nutrients into the bloodstream. Some irritate the stem cells in the colon lining to the point where they become cancerous. Poor combinations of foods (for example, hamburger and bun) deliver poorly digested particles to the colon, where more bad flora feed on them. The immune system is designed to receive nourishment from a well-functioning colon that produces the vital compounds it needs to combat cancer. When they are missing, its efficiency is undermined.

The coup de grace is given by bad bacteria and the antinutrients found in cereals, pulses, and dairy that make the colon “leaky.” Bad bacteria, yeasts, funguses, and even tiny food particles flood into the bloodstream. This is a major challenge to the immune system, which has enough to do fighting off infections and dealing with cancerous cells. When it is overwhelmed, it releases its grip on cancer cells, allowing them to slip through its defenses.

Strategy 6: Physical Activity

Physical activity plays an essential role in maintaining many kinds of body functions. In our ancestral past, a certain level of exercise was, by force of circumstances, occurring day in and day out. The human organism came to depend on it. One of these activities is to pump the circulation of the lymphatic system. Without physical activity, lymph does not circulate, it stagnates. That is bad because the lymphatic system plays an essential role in delivering the immune system’s heavy artillery to the battle front (and carrying away the debris). This is one important, often neglected, aspect of physical activity. Exercise every day, just as happened quite naturally in the daily lives of our ancient ancestors.

Strategy 7: Get Enough Sunshine

In the human homeland, our ancestors were naked and exposed all day to the tropical sun. The San still live that way. Of course, their skin tone (copper color) is particularly adapted to that way of living. Skin color is one of the most obvious ways in which humans vary around the world. As humans spread to less sunny areas, their skin color became lighter, even white. It was necessary to absorb sunlight more readily, particularly as a large percentage of the body had to be covered with clothes. Avoiding sunlight is another unsuspected way we undermine our immune system.

We have overcompensated for fears of skin cancer by staying indoors too much! In a recent study, women who lived in the sunniest parts of the United States had three times less risk of breast cancer compared to those who lived in gloomy, overcast regions.
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In another study, men who had the most exposure to sunlight had the least risk of developing aggressive prostate cancer later in life.
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Other research shows that adults with good levels of vitamin D have half the risk of colon cancer.
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Recent studies reinforce the message: sunshine helps melanoma sufferers recover and it prevents people getting lymphatic cancer.
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Dr. William Grant estimates the yearly toll at 100,000 cases and 40,000 deaths from lack-of-sunshine cancers.
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This is four times the mortality from skin cancer.

One big reason is that people living in gloomy parts of the world are starved of the vital immune system food, vitamin D, sometimes called the sunshine vitamin. People living in sunny areas were producing much higher levels of vitamin D under the influence of sunlight. We don’t need much vitamin D—just 10 to 20 micrograms per day. It is toxic in large quantities. The body sorts this out just fine if the chief source is sunshine. The trick is to get sunlight regularly but avoid burning. A second reason is that sunlight regulates production of hormones such as melatonin and cortisol. When they are not being secreted in the right patterns, the immune system is depressed.

Strategy 8: Reduce Chronic Stress

The folkloric idea that major life stressors, such as divorce, death of a child, or loss of a job, can trigger cancer has yet to be proved. However, an unremitting level of background stress does depress the immune system, making us vulnerable not only to cancer but a wide range of diseases.
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Put another way, we have a stress response designed for the kinds of problems that occurred in savanna life. Most of the time our ancestors were living in harmony with their surroundings, so the stress response was only triggered in short bursts at irregular intervals. Our lives now are a continuous source of mental pressure. Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky observes, “Stress-related disease emerges, predominantly, out of the fact that we so often activate a physiological system that has evolved for responding to acute physical emergencies, but we turn it on for months on end, worrying about mortgages, relationships, and promotions.”
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It is certainly a challenge to restructure our lives so as to limit this level of background or “chronic” stress, but do it we must.

Breast Cancer

Everything said about cancer in general applies to breast cancer in particular. Nevertheless, there are some special considerations. “We are what we eat” might be a cliché, but it is particularly apt for women’s breasts. A woman who eats a lot of saturated fats and trans-fatty acids (hydrogenated fats) has more of those bad fats stored in her breasts. Such women are at a higher risk of developing breast cancer.
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Those who have good levels of the omega-3 oils, whether fish oils or alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), have a lower risk.
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Breast cancers mostly develop from milk-producing cells in the breasts that are stimulated to divide by estrogen. This stimulation occurs through a molecule on their surface called an “estrogen receptor.” The purpose is to multiply milk cells every month in preparation for a possible pregnancy. However, the more estrogen receptors there are, the more likely something will go wrong in a cells and it will multiply out of control. What agent might do this? A major one is the powerful hormone insulin. Abnormally high insulin levels increase the number of estrogen receptors in the breast by a factor of 12.
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With 12 times the number of receptors, there are 12 times as many chances that one of the milk-producing cells will become cancerous. This is another way in which the high-glycemic Western diet particularly encourages breast cancer.