We are now pleased to show Dr. Barnard’s presentations “Maintaining a Healthy Weight” and “Foods and Prostate Cancer Survival,” two chapters from the “Eating Right for Cancer Survival” DVD. Maintaining a Healthy Weight from the DVD “Eating Right for Cancer Survival”
One of the most important things that a healthy person can do to avoid getting cancer is to keep their body weight down to normal limits. And one of the most important things that a person who has been diagnosed with cancer can do, is to keep excess weight away as well, because the heavier you are, not only are you more likely to develop cancer, if you have it already, you are more likely to succumb to it.
What is body fat doing to us? Body fat is not just stored energy, body fat is a living organ and body fat actually makes estrogen, you can see this on the beach. If you look at a guy who’s developed a little bit of extra body fat, and he’s now pretty chunky, he has breast development, that’s not just fat, that’s breast tissue that came because his body fat is building estrogens and estrogens is causing the development of breasts in a man, and ultimately it will cause impotence.
And if he loses weight those estrogens diminish and those problems will tend to reverse. Now this happens in women as well, both women and men. And in women the concern is that if there’s more and more estrogen coursing through your blood, all it takes is one cancer cell, and that estrogen causes the cell to grow.
Researchers have long known that Japanese woman are less likely than Western woman to develop breast cancer and if they have breast cancer they are much more likely to survive it. Well the fact that they are generally slimmer than Western people could be a big part of the reason.
Researchers have discovered that indeed their hormones are somewhat lower levels compared to other folks, there’s less fuel for the cancer cells to grow. And it isn’t just a question of, am I massively overweight versus moderately overweight? It even makes a difference when a person is different gradations of normal weight.
There was study in Shanghai (China) that looked at individuals of different body weights and we would consider them all pretty much normal. They were using the BMI. Do you know what I’m talking about, body mass index? The body mass index or BMI is a way of measuring your weight, but adjusting for your height. Because what’s an ideal weight for you depends on how tall you are.
And an optimal body weight, people would say is under 25. If you’re over 25 BMI that’s going to be mildly overweight. If you’re over 30 that would be called obese. Okay, that’s our frame of reference. The study in Shanghai, they looked at women, everybody had breast cancer, but some had a BMI under 23, that means they’re thin women, and their five-year survival rate was about 87%.
But they then looked at those women who were between 23 and 25, they’re still normal weight but they’re just a little bit heavier. Their five-year survival rate wasn’t 87%; it was down to about 84%. Then they looked at those whose body weight was over 25, in the mildly overweight area and their five- year survival rate was down to about 80%. You get the picture?
The heavier you are the greater your likelihood of succumbing to this condition, so you want to stay down to a healthy kind of weight. So when people are overweight what do they do? Often they don’t know what to do, so they stop eating. You skip meals, you starve yourself, and you go on a punishing low calorie diet. And regrettably that’s not going to last.
For any of you who, you know this is true, if you’ve ever been on this kind of diet, “I’m really going to starve it off!” We end up rebounding, hunger takes over and you’re going to end up binging and putting back however much weight you lost and then some. So don’t do that.
Look around the world and eat the way thin people eat. The thinnest people on the planet live in Asia, vegetarians are also thin. And they have different characteristics compared to what we have in Western countries. They’re eating diets that are first of all much lower in fat; they’re not eating lots of meat and cheese and fried foods, they’re eating rice, vegetables. And if they’re eating meat it’s little tiny amounts, used as a flavoring.
Of course this is all changing, as diets are westernizing, meat is coming in, dairy products are coming in to Asian countries, with this unfortunate process of the westernization of the diet.
But, when researchers have put that kind of diet to a test, amongst Western populations, “Let’s eat a plant-based diet,” they find that people lose weight in a healthful kind of way. My research group did a study in women who had moderate to severe weight problems, and we asked them to follow a diet that was vegan, and low in fat.
That was the whole diet, just avoid the animal products, so there’s no animal fat, and keep the vegetable oils low. Now when you take those out of the diet, that makes room for vegetables, fruits, beans and grains that are high in fiber. So the diet’s filling, low in fat. What happened?
As time went by, the women lost weight week after week after week, the average weight loss was about a pound week. Doesn’t sound like much, except, after a year, 52-weeks in a year, you’re talking serious weight loss and that’s exactly what we saw. So the nice thing about this is, you don’t have to starve, you don’t have to exercise necessarily, exercise is good, but if you’re not able to for whatever reason, your joints are bad, your heart is bad, you can still lose weight.
So, to put this all together, what is a weight-loss regiment? A good weight loss diet is the same kind of diet that’s good to keep your cholesterol down, to reduce your cancer risk overall. It’s getting away from the animal products. That means avoiding the meats and the dairy products and the eggs. And in the process, you’re not just avoiding their fat, you’re avoiding their cholesterol, and you’re making room for the high fiber foods.
Keep the oils very low, every gram of oil, every gram of any kind of fat has nine calories. Those calories have your name on them, and if you eat them it will straight to your thighs. Instead, bring in the high fiber foods, the high carbohydrate beans, vegetables and fruits. Carbohydrates have only four calories in a gram. So, that’s a healthful regiment.
And don’t go off on high-protein diets, the low carbohydrate (diets), you know what I’m talking about, they’ve been very popular, they cause short-term weight loss. But over the long run, people tend not to do very well on them, and they have, unfortunately, some rather bad side effects.
Because the diets are so low in carbohydrates, people are avoiding starchy vegetables, they’re avoiding fruits, they’re avoiding breads, they’re avoiding pasta, they’re avoiding rice, and instead, they are eating, meat and eggs and cheese. Some people’s cholesterol will fall, if they’re losing weight on it, but others, their cholesterol is up. About one in three low-carbohydrate dieters, has their cholesterol go up, sometimes it goes right up through the roof. You don’t want to be one of them. And you don’t need that kind of approach.
So, it’s a good idea, to follow a plant-based diet, bring the exercise into it, exercise is good. Exercise, well, for a couple of reasons, it burns calories, it’s also impossible to eat potato chips while you’re out running. So, bring it in, in a good way.
And if you have any kind of health condition, definitely see your doctor first. You want to make sure your heart is up to it, you want to make sure your joints are up to it, and the rest of your body is up to it. But when got your green light, go ahead.
How do you start? I start small. About a half hour walk every day, and I don’t mean a trudge, I mean a brisk walk, and then gradually build up from there. And then, if you want to do more than that, go ahead. If you want to do resistance training, you know what I mean, like weight training, go see a professional and get a good regiment that’s tailored for your own needs.
Put it together, and you’ve got a really good weight loss program, because you’re on foods that are going to work for you, plus an exercise program that works for you as well. And that’s the best prescription for weight control. Thank you very much.
“Food and Prostate Cancer Survival” is the next lecture by Dr. Barnard.
Food and Prostate Cancer Survival from the DVD “Food and Prostate Cancer Survival”
Halo and welcome. Prostate cancer is a leading killer and it doesn’t have to be, because if we take lessons from around the world and people who follow different kinds of diets, we get clues about how we can actually reduce the likelihood that this will happen in our own lives.
And for men who already have prostate cancer, there’s a lot they can do to hold it beyond arm’s length. Let me share with you a couple of things, first of all the good news. There is something in foods that is actually protective against prostate cancer and that is the red coloring in tomatoes. Anybody know what that’s called?
Lycopene.
Very good, lycopene, lycopene, l-y-c-o-p-e-n-e. Lycopene is a cousin of beta-carotene. In the same way as carrots get their orange color from beta-carotene, a tomato gets its red color from lycopene. It’s a powerful antioxidant.
And studies have shown that men who have just two tomato servings per week have about 23% less risk of prostate cancer compared to other men. Men who have 10 or more servings per week, have a 35% reduction in their likelihood of ever developing this disease compared to men who get less.
And the nice thing is, it happens even with spaghetti sauce, salsa, all that you don’t think of these as healthy foods but they’ve got a lot of lycopene in them and it will pass into your bloodstream and it will protect you.
Now there are some things that aren’t so healthful. Milk products surprisingly enough are associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer. And this first came out of studies comparing different countries.
Countries like Thailand, Japan, and China. On a traditional diet there is very little dairy products, very little milk, very little of any kind of dairy products in their diet. You compare that to Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, lots of dairy products and you see a clear pattern the more dairy men eat the more prostate cancer risk they have.
So researches at Harvard (University, USA) said “That’s interesting. But would that be true in this country?” And so they did a study called The Physicians’ Health Study. They took about 21,000 men, everybody is a physician, everybody is healthy, and nobody’s got cancer. They look at their diets.
And what they find is exactly what we find comparing different countries, that those men who had the most dairy products as part of their regular diet two and a half servings or more per day, they had about a 34% increased risk of developing prostate cancer. Well that’s intriguing, seems to confirm the finding.
They did another study called The Health Professionals Follow up Study. These were health professionals who were not physicians, and what they found was exactly the same thing. Among about 48,000 men, those who consumed more than two glasses of milk per day had in this case about 60% higher risk of prostate cancer compared to other men. How can that be?
We’re talking about milk. We grew up with this, our parents wanted us to consume it, you go to the school lunch line, and they want you to have it. It’s heavily promoted. Why is it linked with cancer? Well there are several possible reasons but the one that people have really zeroed in on the most is something called IGF-1, Insulin-like Growth Factor number 1.
What’s IGF-1? This is a bit of a mouthful, they should have invented a shorter name for it, but that’s the name we’re stuck with. Insulin-like, means like insulin. It puts sugar into cells. But it’s a growth factor; that means if I mix IGF-1 with prostate cancer cells in the test tube, they grow like crazy. I think of it as fertilizer on weeds.
So if a man is avoiding milk, where is he going to get his calcium? Well, I like to think of two sources, the greens and the beans. When I say greens, what do I mean? Green vegetables, broccoli, kale, collard greens; just about any of the green vegetables, they’ve got a lot of calcium, one exception spinach. Spinach is a very selfish vegetable. It’s got calcium but it won’t let you have it. It has calcium, it’s just not absorbable.
But the others, they actually have a higher absorption rate, a higher absorption percentage than milk does. Broccoli more than 50% of the calcium in broccoli is absorbed, for milk it’s about 32%. So the greens are good. The beans are good as well. Just about any of the beans. They’ve got lots of calcium in them and the greens and beans are a good source.
But don’t feel that you need to have an enormous amount of calcium. A little bit goes a long way. Researchers have said, if it seems to be the case that a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, bringing you that lycopene, if that’s protective; getting away from dairy products and fatty food that seems to be protective.
What if I test it in men who have prostate cancer already? I want to share with you two important studies. One was by a researcher named Gordon Saxe at the University of Massachusetts (USA). It was a small study. He brought in 10 men, and what he was tracking was called PSA doubling time. What is that? PSA. Prostate Specific Antigen.
All this is, is a protein that’s in the blood and it’s made by prostate cells so if it’s going up and up and up and up and up that means there must be prostate cancer somewhere or something abnormal in the prostate that’s causing it to rise. It’s a good indicator of how we’re doing with prostate health. And they measured doubling time. How long does it take for it to go from two to four? Four to eight? Eight to 16? If it doesn’t take much time, that means the cancer is rapidly progressing. Okay.
They brought the men in, they asked them to follow a very low fat vegan diet, meaning no animal products at all, very low in oils. And what they found was that their doubling time, which started out at about 6.5 months, meaning it took that long for it to double, it was stretched out in the course of this study to about 17. 7 months. Meaning their PSA’s on average were rising but very, very slowly.
And there were several men in this study where the PSA actually started to fall. Well that’s encouraging, it looks like things are going in the right direction. So Dr. Dean Ornish, who became famous for showing that a vegetarian diet could actually reverse heart disease, which is a terrific finding, the arteries open up again. He said what happens about prostate cancer? It ought to be helpful there too.
So he brought in 93 men. Everybody had prostate cancer but they were in this group they call “watchful waiting,” that means you’ve got the cancer but it’s not progressing really aggressively. You can wait before you get treatment. The doctor tracks their PSA and if it’s not shooting up too fast they just wait.
In the control group, this group was not asked to make any diet change; the experimental group went on a vegan diet, no animal products at all, no dairy products, that ought to be good right from the standpoint of prostate cancer. Here is what happened.
In the control group, people that didn’t make diet changes their PSA’s did what PSA does in cancer patients, it was rising. In the course of the study it went up about six percent and out of the 49 men in that group six of them couldn’t wait anymore. Their cancer was progressing so aggressively they had to go and have treatment.
But what about the vegan group, these people who learned how to have oatmeal for breakfast, and how to have vegetables and fruits in their diet; how to top their spaghetti, not with that creamy Alfredo sauce but with a tomato sauce that gets away from the dairy and brings in the lycopene. In that group the PSA wasn’t rising, it wasn’t holding steady, it actually on average fell about four percent, in other words they’re getting better. And not one of the men on the vegan diet needed treatment during this research study.
Don’t get me wrong. Prostate cancer like all cancers is a serious condition. We want to have good methods for detecting it; we want to have good methods for treating it. But if we change our diet we really can tackle this epidemic. Thank you very much.
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