This idea was studied by the same Pritikin Foundation researchers who pitted the blood of individuals before and after a plant-based diet against the growth of prostate cancer cells. This time, they performed the same experiment on the type of normal prostate cells that grow to obstruct urine flow. Within just two weeks, those eating plant-based diets saw their blood acquire the ability to suppress the abnormal growth of noncancerous prostate cells too—and the effect didn’t seem to dissipate with time. The blood of those eating plant-based diets over the long term had the same beneficial effect for up to twenty-eight years straight. So it appears that as long as we continue to eat healthfully, prostate cell-growth rates will continue to go down and stay down.80
Some plants may be particularly prostate friendly. Research has found that flaxseeds can be used to treat BPH. Men given the equivalent of about three tablespoons of flaxseeds a day experienced relief comparable to that provided by commonly prescribed drugs such as Flomax or Proscar81—without the drugs’ side effects, such as lightheadedness or sexual dysfunction.
Is it possible to prevent BPH in the first place? Eating garlic and onions has been associated with significantly lower risk of BPH.82 In general, cooked vegetables may work better than raw ones, and legumes—beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils—have also been associated with lower risk.83 TVP, short for textured vegetable protein, is a soyabean product often used in pasta sauces and veggie chili. I would recommend that type of TVP over the one used in urology, which stands for transurethral vaporization of the prostate.84
IGF-1
Why do people who live to be one hundred or older seem to escape cancer? As you age, your risk of developing and dying from cancer grows every year—until you hit eighty-five or ninety, when, interestingly, your cancer risk begins to drop.85 Indeed, if you don’t get cancer by a certain age, you may never get it. What accounts for this relative resistance to cancer among centenarians? It may have to do with a cancer-promoting growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1).86
Each year, you are reborn. You create and destroy nearly your entire body weight in new cells every year. Every day, about fifty billion of your cells die, and about fifty billion new cells are born to keep you in balance.87 Of course, sometimes you need to grow, as when you’re a baby or during puberty. Your cells don’t become larger when you grow up; they simply become more numerous. An adult may have around forty trillion cells in his or her body, four times more than a child.
Once you’ve gotten through puberty, you no longer need to produce many more cells than you retire. You still need your cells to grow and divide, of course—out with the old, in with the new. You just don’t want to make more cells than you’re putting out to pasture. In adults, extra cell growth can mean the development of tumors.
How does your body keep itself in balance? By sending chemical signals called hormones to all the cells. A key signal is a growth hormone called IGF-1. It sounds like a droid from Star Wars, but IGF-1 is actually a crucial factor in regulating cell growth. Levels go up when you’re a kid in order to power your development, but when you reach adulthood, IGF-1 levels diminish. It’s your body’s cue to stop producing more cells than it kills off.
Should your levels of IGF-1 remain too high when you reach adulthood, however, your cells will constantly receive a message to grow, divide, and keep going and growing. Not surprisingly, the more IGF-1 you have in your bloodstream, the higher your risk for developing cancers, such as prostate cancer.88
There is a rare form of dwarfism called Laron syndrome that is caused by the body’s inability to produce IGF-1. Affected individuals grow to be only a few feet tall, but they also almost never get cancer.89 Laron syndrome is a sort of cancer-proofing mutation, which led scientists to wonder: What if you could get all the IGF-1 you needed as a child to grow to a normal height but then down-regulate this hormone as adults and thereby turn off excess growth signals? It turns out you can do just that—not with surgery or medication but through simple dietary choices.
The release of IGF-1 appears to be triggered by the consumption of animal protein.90 This may explain why you can so dramatically bolster the cancer-fighting power of your bloodstream within weeks of eating a plant-based diet. Remember the experiments in which dripping the blood from people eating healthy diets onto cancer cells wiped more of them out? Well, if you add back to the cancer cells the amount of IGF-1 that left the plant eaters’ systems, guess what happens? The diet-and-exercise effect disappears. The cancer cell growth comes surging back. This is how we suspect plant-based eating boosts our blood defenses: By reducing animal protein intake, we reduce our levels of IGF-1.91
After just eleven days of cutting back on animal protein, your IGF-1 levels can drop by 20 percent, and your levels of IGF-1 binding protein can jump by 50 percent.92 One of the ways your body tries to protect itself from cancer—that is, excessive growth—is by releasing a binding protein into your bloodstream to tie up any excess IGF-1. Think of it as the body’s emergency brake. Even if you’ve managed to down-regulate production of new IGF-1 through diet, what about all that excess IGF-1 still circulating from the bacon and eggs you may have eaten two weeks before? No problem: The liver releases a snatch squad of binding proteins to help take it out of circulation.
How plant focused does a diet have to be to lower IGF-1 levels? Animal protein stimulates IGF-1 production whether it’s the muscle proteins in meat, the egg-white protein in eggs, or the milk proteins in dairy. Vegetarians who include eggs and dairy in their diets don’t seem to achieve a significant reduction in IGF-1. Only men93 and women94 who limit their intake of all animal proteins appear able to significantly drop their levels of the cancer-promoting hormone and raise their levels of the protective binding proteins.
Prostate cancer isn’t inevitable. I once gave a speech in Bellport, New York, about preventing chronic disease through diet. Afterward, an audience member named John was inspired to e-mail me and recount his battle with prostate cancer. Diagnosed at age fifty-two, John had had six needle core biopsies performed, and each showed his cancer to be very aggressive. John’s doctors immediately recommended surgery to remove his entire prostate.
Instead of going under the knife, John decided to switch to a plant-based diet. Eight months later, he had another biopsy. His doctors were astonished to see that only 10 percent of his cancer remained. What’s more, his PSA tests have been completely normal ever since.
John was diagnosed in 1996. After changing his diet, his cancer went away and has stayed away.
John may have just gotten lucky, though. I do not recommend that people ignore their doctors’ advice. Whatever you and your medical team decide together, healthy diet and lifestyle changes can presumably only help. That’s the nice thing about lifestyle interventions—they can be implemented in addition to whatever other treatment options are chosen. In a research setting, that can complicate matters, as you don’t know which action may be responsible for any improvement. But when facing a cancer diagnosis, you may want to opt for all the help you can get. Regardless of whether cancer patients elect for chemo, surgery, or radiation, they can always improve their diets. A prostate-healthy diet is a breast-healthy diet is a heart-healthy diet is a body-healthy diet.
CHAPTER 14
How Not to Die from Parkinson’s Disease
Back in the 1960s at the height of the civil rights movement, my dad was dodging bullets during the Brooklyn riots and setting up shots at just the right angle to best capture images of my mother being arrested at protests and dragged away again and again. His most famous work—one of Esquire’s 1963 Photos of the Year—depicted family friend Mineral Bramletter suspended in a Christlike pose between two white police officers as another cop clutched his throat.
What a cruel twist of fate that a celebrated photojournalist got a disease that caused his hands to shake. For years, my dad suffered at the hands of Parkinson’s. Slowly and all too painfully, he lost the ability to take care of himsel
f, to live his life in any semblance of the way he had before. He became bedridden and compromised in every way imaginable.
After sixteen years of fighting, he went to the hospital one last time. As so often happens with chronic disease, one complication led to another. He got pneumonia and spent his last few weeks on a ventilator, suffering through a painful, prolonged death. The weeks he spent in that hospital bed before he passed were the worst weeks of both his and my life.
Hospitals are terrible places to be and terrible places to die. That is why each of us needs to take care of ourselves.
As my father’s story shows, Parkinson’s can end badly. It is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s is a disabling disorder affecting the speed, quality, and ease of movement. Its hallmark symptoms, which worsen as the disease progresses, include hand tremors, limb stiffness, impaired balance, and difficulty walking. It can also affect mood, thinking, and sleep. Parkinson’s is not currently curable.
The disease is caused by the die-off of specialized nerve cells in a region of the brain that controls movement. It typically presents after age fifty. A history of head trauma can increase risk,1 which may be why heavyweight boxers, including Muhammad Ali, and NFL players, including Hall of Famer Forrest Gregg, have fallen victim to the condition. However, most people may be more likely to develop the disease from toxic pollutants in our environment that can build up in the food supply and eventually affect the brain.
The National Cancer Institute’s 2008/2009 U.S. Presidential Cancer Panel report discussed the degree to which we’re being inundated with industrial chemicals. It concluded:
The American people—even before they are born—are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures. The Panel urges you [Mr. President] most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our Nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.2
In addition to increasing your risk of developing many cancers, industrial pollutants may also play a role in the onset of such brain-deteriorating (neurodegenerative) diseases as Parkinson’s.3 And those toxins are residing in most peoples’ bodies.
Every few years, the CDC measures the levels of chemical pollutants in the bodies of thousands of Americans from across the country. According to the agency’s findings, the bodies of most women in the United States are contaminated with heavy metals, along with a number of toxic solvents, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, fire retardants, chemicals from plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and banned pesticides such as DDT 4 (publicized by American biologist Rachel Carson in her 1962 bestseller Silent Spring).
In many cases, 99–100 percent of the hundreds of women tested were found to have detectable levels of these pollutants circulating in their bloodstreams. Pregnant women were found to harbor, on average, up to fifty different chemicals.5 Could the presence of these potential toxicants in their bodies mean that they’re also being passed on to their children? Researchers decided to put that question to the test by measuring pollutant levels right at delivery in the babies’ umbilical cord blood. (As soon as the cord is cut, a little blood can be squirted into a vial.) After studying more than three hundred women who had recently given birth, researchers found that 95 percent of umbilical cord samples showed detectable DDT residues.6 And this is now decades after the pesticide was banned.
What about men? Men tend to have even higher levels of certain pollutants than women. A clue to solving this mystery was found when breast-feeding history was taken into account. Women who never breast-fed had about the same level of certain toxicants in their bodies as men, but the longer they breast-fed their children, the lower their levels fell, suggesting that they were detoxing themselves by passing the pollution down to their children.7
It appears that blood levels of some pollutants in women may drop by nearly half during pregnancy,8 in part because their bodies pass them off through the placenta.9 That may be why breast milk concentrations of pollutants appear higher after the first pregnancy than in subsequent ones.10 This could explain why birth order was found to be a significant predictor of pollutant levels in young people. Basically, firstborn kids may get first dibs on mum’s store of toxic waste, leaving less for their baby brothers and sisters.11
Even mothers who were breast-fed as infants themselves tend to have higher levels of pollutants in their own breast milk when they grow up, suggesting a multigenerational passing down of these chemicals.12 In other words, what you eat now may affect the levels of toxic chemicals in your grandchildren. When it comes to feeding babies, breast is still best—absolutely13—but rather than detoxing into our children, we should strive not to “tox” ourselves in the first place.
In 2012, researchers from the University of California–Davis, published an analysis of the diets of California kids aged two to seven. (Children are thought to be especially vulnerable to chemicals in the diet because they are still growing, and thus they have a comparatively greater intake of food and fluids relative to their weight.) Chemicals and heavy metals in children’s bodies from the foods they ate were indeed found to exceed safety levels by a larger margin than in adults. Cancer risk ratios, for instance, were exceeded by a factor of up to one hundred or more. For every child studied, benchmark levels were surpassed for arsenic, the banned pesticide dieldrin, and potentially highly toxic industrial by-products called dioxins. They were also too high for DDE, a by-product of DDT.14
Which foods contributed the most heavy metals? The number-one food source of arsenic was poultry among preschoolers and, for their parents, tuna.15 The top source for lead? Dairy. For mercury? Seafood.16
Those concerned about exposing their children to mercury-containing vaccines should know that eating just a single serving of fish each week during pregnancy can lead to more mercury in their infant’s body than injecting them directly with about a dozen mercury-containing vaccines.17 You should strive to minimize mercury exposure, but the benefits of vaccination far exceed the risks. The same cannot be said for tuna.18
Where in the food supply are these pollutants found? Today, most DDT comes from meat, particularly fish.19 The oceans are essentially humanity’s sewer; everything eventually flows into the sea. The same is true when it comes to dietary exposure to PCBs—another set of banned chemicals, once widely used as insulating fluid in electrical equipment. A study of more than twelve thousand food and feed samples across eighteen countries found that the highest PCB contamination was found in fish and fish oil, followed by eggs, dairy, and then other meats. The lowest contamination was found at the bottom of the food chain, in plants.20
Hexachlorobenzene, another pesticide banned nearly a half century ago, today may be found mainly in dairy and meat, including fish.21 Perfluorochemicals, or PFCs? Overwhelmingly found in fish and other meats.22 As for dioxins, in the United States, the most concentrated sources may be butter, followed by eggs, and then processed meat.23 The levels in eggs may help explain why one study found that eating more than half an egg a day was associated with about two to three times higher odds for cancers of the mouth, colon, bladder, prostate, and breast compared to those who didn’t eat eggs at all.24
If women want to clean up their diets before conception, how long does it take for these pollutants to leave their systems? To find out, researchers asked people to eat one large serving a week of tuna or other high-mercury fish for fourteen weeks to boost their levels of the heavy metal and then stop. By measuring how fast the subjects’ mercury levels dropped, the scientists were able to calculate the half-life of mercury in the body.25 The subjects appeared to be able to clear about half the mercury from their bodies within two months. This result suggests that within a year of stopping fish consumption, the body can detox nearly 99 percent of it. Unfortunately, other industrial pollutants in fish can take longer for our bodies to get rid of; the half-lives for certain
dioxins, PCBs, and DDT byproducts found in fish are as long as ten years.26 So to get that same 99 percent drop, it could take more than a century—a long time to delay having your first child.
By now you are probably wondering how these chemicals get into your food in the first place. One reason is that we’ve so thoroughly polluted our planet that the chemicals can just come down in the rain. For example, scientists have reported eight different pesticides contaminating the snow-packed peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.27 Once pollutants get into the soil, they can work their way up the food chain at increasing concentrations. Consider that before she’s slaughtered for meat, a dairy cow may eat seventy-five thousand pounds’ worth of plants. The chemicals in the plants can get stored in her fat and build up in her body. So when it comes to many of the fat-soluble pesticides and pollutants, every time you eat a burger, you are, in effect, eating everything that burger ate. 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.
Reducing Dioxin Intake
Dioxins are highly toxic pollutants that accumulate in the fat of animal tissue, such that about 95 percent of human exposure comes from eating animal products.28 Sometimes that’s because of contaminated animal feed. In the 1990s, for example, a supermarket survey found that the highest concentration of dioxins was found in farm-raised catfish.29 Apparently, the catfish were provided feed mixed with an anticaking agent laced with dioxins that may have originated from sewage sludge.30
That same feed was given to chickens, affecting approximately 5 percent of U.S. poultry production at the time.31 That would mean that people ate hundreds of millions of contaminated chickens.32 Of course, if it was in the chickens, then it was also in their eggs. Indeed, elevated dioxins levels were found in U.S. eggs too.33 The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated that less than 1 percent of feed was contaminated, but 1 percent of egg production would mean more than a million tainted eggs per day. But the catfish contamination was even more widespread: More than one-third of all U.S. farm-raised catfish tested were found to be contaminated with dioxins.34
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