Cancer Prevention

Cancer Prevention

It gives me great pleasure to be alive and well in my late sixties. I must admit that I had a hard time during my 65th year. You see, I was haunted by one disturbing health statistic in my family. My father and two of his brothers all died at age 65 of colon cancer or cancer of the gastrointestinal tract. Now it so happens that they also retired at that age, so I decided that I was going to try another tactic. Maybe if I didn't retire, I wouldn't die, either. So I worked
another year at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and made it to 66 without developing colon cancer.

In truth, I think I do know why my dad and uncles developed their cancers and I did not. They all grew up as good old boys in rural Alabama, eating what rednecks used to eat--a high-fiber, low-fat country diet. But then they became successful insurance salesmen and began eating more meat and potatoes (more meat than potatoes).

I think that changing their diet like that killed them. It's as simple as that. It was especially bad that they abandoned the cornbread, peas, cabbage, green beans, lima beans and collard and turnip greens of their youth. Rebellious son that I am, I cut way down on the meats and returned to all the high-fiber, low-fat foods that my dad had stopped eating. It turns out that this is a diet rich in cancer-preventing chemicals from plants (phytochemicals).

Food as Preventive Medicine

You're probably expecting me to discuss a number of individual herbs in this chapter, as I do in all the other chapters, but I simply can't do that here. One definition of herb--the one I favor--is any plant that can be used as a healing agent. As our understanding of the healing power of plants continues to grow, so does the number of plants that can be called herbs. If these days the definition embraces many of our foods, so be it.

When it comes to preventing cancer, the key seems to be eating as wide a variety of fruits and vegetables as possible. In a sense, then, if you want to lower your risk of cancer, you can create a whole diet--excluding or minimizing meats and dairy products--that consists of healing herbs. So singling out individual plants would be giving you a false picture of how to use herbs to prevent cancer.

I was one of the first of the high-fiber "flakes," back before nutritionists discovered the importance of what they used to call roughage. As a matter of fact, my everyday diet turned out to be higher in fiber than the high-fiber diets that were fed to the volunteers in five formal USDA studies. I know, because I was one of the subjects in those studies.

Of course, I can't prove that my dad's high-fat diet killed him, nor that my plant-based diet has spared me from becoming a cancer statistic. But the research is very clear. As fat and meat consumption increases, cancer rates rise. But as fruit and vegetable consumption increases, thereby lowering fat in the diet and increasing the amount of fiber and helpful phytochemicals, cancer rates fall.

Fighting the Wrong Battles

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has been waging its war on cancer for 30 years now. But in every year reported up until 1996, cancer deaths were increasing, according to NCI statistics. Some of the increases have to do with the fact that fewer people are dying of heart disease and stroke, so they live long enough to get cancer. But consider-
ing all the money and all the effort this country has invested in beating cancer, we don't have a whole lot to show for it.

Over the years, many new chemotherapy drugs have been developed, and some work pretty well to extend life, although they don't cure cancer. And some of the best of those new chemotherapeutics come from plants: Taxol, a treatment for ovarian and breast cancer, originally from the Pacific yew tree; etoposide, a treatment for testicular cancer and small-cell lung cancer, from the mayapple; and vinblastine and vincristine, which treat Hodgkin's disease, leukemias and lymphomas, both from the Madagascar periwinkle.

But as far as I'm concerned, something is very wrong with the way the NCI has approached cancer. The vast majority of NCI research money--our tax dollars--has gone for the development of chemotherapeutics, with comparatively little devoted to prevention.

Chemotherapeutics have their place in the grand scheme of things, but they're not cures. They are usually life-extenders that add a few months or years to average survival. But those months or years are often lower-quality time because of the many side effects that chemotherapy drugs cause.

From 1977 to 1982, I was involved with the NCI's cancer screening program, a multiyear effort that investigated the cancer treatment potential of thousands of plant compounds and gave us the ones mentioned above. I've also been involved with the embryonic Designer Food Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is attempting to design foods high in healthful phytochemicals that prevent cancer.

I have a greater respect for the potential of the food program than I do for the results of the drug-finding program. Clearly, cancer prevention programs can save more lives than treatment programs can, and at a fraction of the cost. Still the 30-year-old cure-oriented war on cancer gets the most tax dollars, while prevention programs get very little.

Almost all of my documents on cancer have to do with prevention. Yes, by all means, let us develop effective, gentle treatments, but I think it's more important, and more cost-effective, to work to prevent this disease.

Green Pharmacy for Cancer Prevention

Twenty years ago, long before scientists reached a consensus on the fact that a diet high in fruits and vegetables helps prevent cancer, and long before the NIH began urging everyone to "strive for five"--five servings of fruits and vegetables a day--Prevention magazine asked me for ideas on cancer prevention. I came up with several: a big green salad or coleslaw (coleslaw being a redneck favorite in my family), a big bowl of minestrone soup and a Cancer Prevention Herbal Salad.

I'm sure you know how to make a fine green salad, and plenty of good slaw and minestrone recipes are available, so I won't dwell on them here except to say that it's impossible to use too many different vegetables. Try to include as great a variety of fruits and vegetables in these dishes--and in your diet--as you possibly can.

My herbal salad recipe is a little more obscure, so I'll discuss it more fully.

Cancer Prevention Herbal Salad. At the core of the recipe are several plants I lifted (with thanks) from Jonathan Hartwell's ethnobotanical classic Plants Used against Cancer, a compendium of about 3,000 plants cited in the medical-folkloric literature for treating cancer. More than half of Hartwell's plants turned out to contain a compound useful in the treatment of some types of cancers, at least in the test tube.

My Cancer Prevention Herbal Salad now includes garlic, onions, red peppers, tomatoes, red clover flowers, chopped cooked beets, fresh calendula flowers, celery, fresh chicory flowers, chives, cucumbers, cumin, peanuts, pokesalad, purslane and sage.

In addition, I came up with a cancer prevention dressing to use with this salad. It includes flaxseed oil, evening primrose oil, garlic, rosemary, a dash of lemon juice and that Latin American favorite, hot peppers.

Fifteen years after I developed my salad, late in 1989, Herbert Pierson, Ph.D., of the NIH called to invite my participation in the Designer Food Program for cancer prevention. This was a major national effort to manipulate foods to increase their content of nutraceuticals (nutrients with medicinal value). The idea was to enhance the amount of cancer-fighting chemicals in foods, either by manipulating the plants' genes or by coming up with necessary techniques that would preserve or enhance the desired medicinal effects.

Dr. Pierson was most interested in my database of medicinal phytochemicals in food plants and herbs, which includes anti-cancer compounds--the same ever-evolving database on which this book is based. He invited me to attend a meeting where experts would explain the cancer-prevention benefits of various plants.

Imagine my delight when my colleagues and fellow researchers spoke about the anti-cancer phytochemicals that they were finding in plants. My fellow scientists gave presentations on the sulfides in garlic, the capsaicin in red peppers, the limonene in citrus fruits and the lycopene in tomatoes. They touted the cancer-fighting potential of such herbs as flax, licorice and rosemary. (Ever since that conference, I've been adding rosemary to my salad dressing.)

The Designer Food Program clearly had a lot going for it. I got excited about the program and eagerly anticipated five years of helping the NIH in this area. But alas, Dr. Pierson left the NIH, and the program now seems much less visible and exciting.

Fortunately, research on the medicinal potential of foods is going forward in other programs and institutions throughout the nation. Over the next several years, you'll be hearing a lot more about nutraceuticals, phytochemicals and meals that heal. Foods and traditional medicinal herbs clearly have healing properties, including the ability to prevent cancer.