Breast Cancer Awareness Month,* sadly, has become a time of increasing awareness not of the preventable causes of breast cancer, but of the breast cancer industry's insatiable need to both raise money for research into a pharmaceutical cure, and to promote its primary means of "prevention": early detection via x-ray mammography.
On first account, a pharmaceutical "cure" is as unlikely as it is oxymoronic. Drugs do not cure disease anymore than bullets cure war. Beneath modern medicine's showy display of diagnostic contraptions, heroic "life-saving" procedures, and an armory of exotic drugs of strange origin and power, it is always the body's ability to heal itself - beneath the pomp and circumstance - that is truly responsible for medicine's apparent successes. Too often, in spite of what medicine does to "treat" or "save" the body, it is the body which against invasive chemical and surgical medical interventions, silently treats and saves itself.
If it were not for the body's truly miraculous self-healing abilities, and the ceaseless self-correction process that occurs each and every moment within each and every cell in our bodies, it would die within a matter of hours. The mystery is not in how our body succumbs to cancer; rather the mystery is in how, after years and even decades of chemical exposure and nutrient deprivation our bodies prevail against cancer for so long.
The primary causes of breast cancer: nutritional deficiencies, exposure to environmental toxicity, inflammation, estrogen dominance and the resultant breakdown in genetic integrity and immune surveillance, are entirely overlooked by this fixation on drug therapy and its would-be "magic bullets."
Billions of dollars are raised and funneled towards drug research, when the lowly turmeric plant, the humble cabbage and the unassuming bowl of miso soup may offer far more promise at preventing and treating breast cancer than all the toximolecular drugs on the market put together.
When it comes to the breast cancer industry's emphasis on equating "prevention" with "early detection" through x-ray mammography, nowhere is the inherently pathological ideology of allopathic medicine more clearly evident. Not only is the very ionizing radiation used to discern pathological lesions in breast tissue one of the very risk factors for the development of breast cancer, but the identification of the word "prevention" with "early detection," is a disingenuous way of saying that all we can do to prevent breast cancer is to detect its inevitable presence sooner than would be possible without this technology.
If women succumb to the idea of prevention as doing nothing but waiting for the detection of the disease, many will find a similarly deranged logic reemerge later when the self-fulfilling prophecy of prevention-through-doing-nothing is fulfilled and "treatment" is now required. "Treatment," when not strictly surgical, involves the use of very powerful chemicals and high doses of ionizing radiation which "poison" the cancer cells. The obvious problem with these approaches is that the application of either form of death energy is not suitably selective, and in the long run, many women die sooner from the side effects of toximolecular "therapy" than from the cancer itself.
Why is the obvious question never asked: if exposure to the genotoxic and immune system disabling effects of chemicals and radiation is causative in breast cancer, then why is blasting the body with more poisonous chemicals and radiation considered sound treatment? The answer to this question has much more to do with ignorance than it does an intentional desire to do harm. But the results are the same: unnecessary pain, suffering and death.
Faced with a situation where medieval notions of prevention and treatment of breast cancer are the norm, it is no wonder that when polled over 40% of women believe they will contract breast cancer sometime in their life - well over three times their actual risk. After all, have any of them been given a sense that there is something they can do to actually prevent their disease other than "watchful waiting"?
Obfuscating the real preventative measures available to women to combat breast cancer, and all cancers for that matter, trusted "authoritative" sources like the Susan G. Komen Foundation publish irresponsible statements like this:
"It is unclear what the exact relationship is between eating fruits and vegetables and breast cancer risk...little, if any link was found between the two in a pooled analysis that combined data from eight large studies."
Have we really come to the point where the commonsense consumption of fruits and vegetables in the prevention of disease can so matter-of-factly be called into question? Do we really need placebo controlled, clinical trials to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that our bodies can benefit from the phytonutrients and antioxidants in fruits and vegetables in the prevention of cancer?
Examples like these make it increasingly apparent that orthodox medicine, and the world view it represents, are approaching a theoretical end-time perhaps most accurately described as Pharmageddon. Within the horizon of this perspective vitamins are considered toxic, fruits and vegetables simply a source of caloric content (a poor one, at that), and drugs are understood as the only legitimate and for that matter, legal, way to combat disease. Are we really at the tipping point, or is there still hope?
Thanks to thousands of scientific studies extant today on the therapeutic effects of foods, herbs and spices on breast health, we still have a fighting chance to let sanity and good sense inform our decisions about what we use as our medicine. Modern science has increasingly confirmed the veracity of the Hippocratean phrase: "let food be thy medicine," and until a prescription is required to obtain and consume organic food, we have quite an amazing arsenal at our disposal.
1) Cruciferous Vegetables, such as broccoli, kale, collards, cabbage and cauliflower contain a variety of powerful anti-cancer phytochemicals. The isothiocynanate sulfurane and the glucosinolate indole-3 carbinol, in particular, have demonstrated significant in vitro and in vivo activity against breast cancer. Large population studies have demonstrated that those who are in the top quarter percentile of cruciferous vegetable consumption have 50% less chance of developing breast cancer than those in the lowest quarter percentile. This sort of risk reduction is impossible for a drug, and so, it is often played down, lest the oxymoronic farce of pharmaceutical prevention be revealed for what it is.
2) The Estrogen Connection. Most breast cancer is estrogen receptor positive. For this reason reducing the effects of endogenously created estrogen, and reducing exposure to exogenously created estrogen (e.g. dairy consumption, hormone replace therapy) and estrogen-mimicking molecules (e.g. the leaching of bisphenol-A from plastics, and paraben preservatives in body care products) is crucial in reducing breast cancer risk. Supporting estrogen metabolism with the indole-3 carbinol in cruciferous vegetables, blocking the conversion of androgens into estrogen with aromatase inhibiting foods like white button mushrooms and pomegranate, or aromatase inhibiting herbs like hops, red clover, and grapeseed, and reducing estradiol binding to breast cell receptors with flaxseed lignan and the soy isoflavone genistein, are all ways in which natural substances have been demonstrated to prevent and inhibit breast cancer.
3) Inflammation: the Cox-2 enzyme is over-expressed in most breast cancers, and plays a key role in metastasis. This enzyme's job is to literally burn (oxidize) arachadonic acid, which is its main source of fuel. This process of combustion results in the production of the pro-inflammatory eicosanoid known as prostaglandin E2, which is found in high levels in malignant breast tumors. This entire inflammatory cascade depends on the production of arachadonic acid from the consumption of high levels of polyunsaturated omega 6 fatty acids found in all of those "healthy" grains, seeds and beans (e.g. soy, peanut) we've been told to consume by public and private health organizations. It is excess omega 6 fatty acid consumption, unopposed by sufficient levels of the omega 3 fatty acids, that literally provides the fuel that cancer ultimately feeds off of.
4) The Problem with Calcium: Women are told to consume massive amounts of fossilized calcium/chalk in order to prevent osteoporosis, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence demonstrating that thinning and porous bones are caused by a limestone deficiency. Where does all this calcium go? The body in the attempt to protect itself from biologically inappropriate forms of calcium shunts excess into the bone, where through stimulating the bone-building cells (osteoblasts) to replicate prematurely, the replicative potential (i.e. the fixed number of replication cycles available to the osteoblasts throughout one's lifetime) is prematurely exhausted. Although this may contribute to the production of denser bone earlier in life, the bone may not be stronger (glass is dense, but structurally weak), and the pace of bone formation later in life will be outstripped by bone resorption, resulting in higher facture rates, which is exactly the case in high calcium consuming cultures.
Shunting calcium into the bone as a protective mechanism is inefficient and results in the elimination of calcium via other channels, e.g. excreting it through the kidneys, perhaps contributing to the narrowing and calcification of the artery leading to the kidney (nephropathy), and calcification within the kidney itself (kidney stones). The inability to fully rid the body of excess calcium via the bones or excretion via the kidneys and bowel may lead to the deposition of calcium crystals in the joints (osteoarthritis) and the arteries (calcification of the fibrous cap on the atheroma), and arguably into the soft tissue of breasts.
The most common type of breast cancer in American women - mammary ductal carcinoma - is usually discovered in x-ray mammograms by the presence of very small specks of calcium known as microcalcifications. It is likely that in susceptible individuals limestone (calcium carbonate, and the various chelate forms: citrate, gluconate, etc) and bonemeal supplements (also known as calcium phosphorous or calcium hydroxapatite) will not only lead to the calcification of breast tissue, but may exert proliferative effects on that tissue. This theory has gained support by a Queensland researcher, Won Jae Lee, who has identified a mechanism by which excess calcium acts as a mitogen (i.e. stimulating cell division) capable of signaling breast cells to proliferate uncontrollably. By inhibiting the calcium signaling Lee was able to dramatically block the growth of these cancers. Although these findings do not prove calcium supplements cause breast cancer, it raises the possibility that changing the amount and type of calcium in the diet may have profound effects on reducing breast cancer risk.
Numerous other natural substances have demonstrated profound activity against breast cancer, including but not limited to: vitamin D, melatonin, DHEA, black cohosh, red clover, skullcap, cranberry, cats claw, grapeseed, inositol hexaphosphate, walnuts and many more.
Much of the research on the healing effects of foods, herbs, vitamins and spices in the prevention and treatment of breast cancer is available on Medline today. This biomedical database contains most the world's combined scientific resources going back over half a century on the evidence proving the safety and efficacy of natural substances in the treatment of disease. You are welcome to visit my new consumer advocacy website, www.PatientHealThyself.info, which provides free access to the Medline database, in a well-organized and carefully selected manner.
* AstraZeneca, which manufactures breast cancer drugs Arimidex and Tamoxifen, founded the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the year 1985. The aim of the NBCAM from the start has been to promote mammography as the most effective weapon in the fight against breast cancer. (source: http://www.nbcam.org/about_faq.cfm)
Sayer Ji is a philosopher of nutrition and nutrition educator. Visit http://www.patienthealthyself.info for strictly scientific information on the therapeutic effects of herbs, foods, spices and vitamins. Without freedom of information, there can be no health freedom.
