What Causes Cancer?

The answer to "What causes cancer?" is, "Many things." There is, for instance .........

* Smoking and other forms of tobacco usage

* Excessive consumption of alcohol

* Excessive exposure to sunlight

* Exposure to any number of toxic chemicals, such as Dioxin

* Exposure to Radiation, such as X-rays

Unless one decides to live in a bubble, there are too many things to avoid that can cause cancer. Even our own body produces "free radicals" which can cause mutations to occur inside our cells, but our bodies--if they are properly fed--have a way to neutralize all these things that we know cause cancer to start.

Perhaps a better question than "What causes cancer," is the question, "How can we strengthen our bodies' natural defenses against the growth of cancer, for the times we inevitably come into contact with a cancer-causing substance or x-ray?"

One means of defense against what causes cancer are the antioxidants, a group of substances that neutralize free radicals. Some antioxidants are produced by our body and some we must eat in our food or get from supplements.

A couple of the internally-produced antioxidants are Vitamin D and Super Oxide Dismutase (SOD). Vitamins C and E and the element selenium are antioxidant that we must consume--we cannot make them (though many animals CAN make their own Vitamin C).

A very interesting discovery has been made by several cancer researchers, but it has received very little attention from the many people who are trying to find not only what causes cancer, but also, the cure for cancer.

The discovery, by Dr. T. Colin Campbell and a team of scientists, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, and others, is that the level of protein and the type of protein in our diet are the critical factors which can cause cancer to begin to grow in our body.

After more than thirty years of the War Against Cancer--and billions of dollars of federally and privately funded research--you would think scientists would be racing each other to see who could turn this discovery into some practical application that could be sold to those who have cancer. Unfortunately, this has not happened.

You see, there are several wealthy industries that don't want you to even consider that the typical high-protein/high-fat Western diet is the controlling factor that promotes the growth of cancer, once it has been initiated.

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A Little Background To Help You Understand What Causes Cancer

* There are three stages in a cancer's life process: Initiation, Promotion, and Progression. * If cancer is viewed like a seed for growing a new lawn, you could view planting the seed as the stage of Initiation * Like a seed that won't begin to grow until it is watered and warmed by the sun, cancer will not enter the next stage of Promotion until the conditions are right.

* Cancer--like the seed--can remain dormant for years until the conditions are right for it to enter the growth stage called Promotion

* Promotion, when the cancer begins to grow into tumors is the critical phase. If cancer is initiated by one of the many carcinogens...and then, if it enters the stage called Promotion, THEN and only then, do we begin to have a problem.

* Once Promotion of the cancer occurs, then the cancer grows in one location until it gains enough momentum to begin jumping to other parts of the victim's body. That stage is called Progression. Then, it is very difficult to stop the cancer from taking over the victim's body and eventually killing its host.

So, do you see how the Promotion stage is the key to arresting cancer before it even begins to cause damage?

Of course, we want to avoid any exposure to carcinogens like cigarette smoke, dioxin, or excessive exposure to the sun, but this is not always possible. So our key line of defense between us and what causes cancer is to somehow stop the Promotion of cancer growth.

This is where our story of What Causes Cancer gets really interesting, thanks to many years of research by T. Colin Campbell, PhD, one of the world's leading cancer scientists.

In a series of carefully-constructed experiments where laboratory animals were dosed with very potent carcinogens to initiate cancer, it was found that Progression didn't even occur when the levels of protein in the rats' diet was kept to 5% of their calorie intake. Rats that were fed at a 20% level of protein, however, all saw the Promotion(growth) of the cancer take place.

Now...The Rest of the Story

If, halfway through the experiment, the high-protein rats' food blend was reduced to 5% protein, the cancer growth was dramatically slowed. When the higher level of protein feed was resumed, cancer growth resumed.

Variations on the experiment were done to confirm the original findings: some experiments used mice instead of rats; some used different toxins to initiate the cancer; some tried different protein in the diet of the animals to see if that had an effect, i.e., if it could be the cause of the Progression of cancer.

Here is another interesting finding of this research, which has gone through the careful process of peer-review for publication in very conservative scientific journals:

If the laboratory animals were fed vegetable-source protein, such as soy bean protein or wheat gluten, NO cancer Promotion was seen. Get that? The cancer didn't begin to grow, no matter what level of vegetable protein was fed to the lab animals.

Lab rats and mice are used in experiments to give us an idea of how disease begins in humans because their metabolism is similar to ours. We humans typically eat 20% or more protein in our daily diets. It is difficult not to get more than the 5% protein level needed for healthy cell growth, even with a vegetarian diet. With a diet containing meat, fish, poultry, milk products, and/or eggs (along with vegetables and starches and sugars in a normal Western diet), it would be nearly impossible to consume only 5% of our calories as protein.

So these experiments, which have been confirmed by large population studies of people in 170 counties of rural China over a period of more than 24 years, offer some blockbuster information about what causes cancer and, more importantly, what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones.

Let me just add a couple of points before concluding this page. Dr. Campbell has had a long and respected career as a scientist. He has testified before Congress on the subject of diet and disease. He has authored and co-authored more than 350 research publications during his 45 year career in science. He is not a "diet author" out to earn his fortune through selling some new diet program. He came into the field of cancer research by way of trying to find new ways to increase the protein consumption for children and adults in impoverished developing countries like the Phillipines and Haiti.

What he found was that those children who got the most protein, typically from meat, got the most cancer. These were, ironically, children from the wealthier families who ate what would be considered in the U.S. to be a healthier diet.

T. Colin Campbell was raised on a dairy farm, eating the typical American diet. He was as surprised as anyone when he saw the inescapable conclusion his research revealed. Nevertheless, he took the logical step to eliminate animal protein sources from his diet and he and his wife raised a healthy family on a whole-food, plant-based diet.

If you find this startling information hard to believe because you have not heard about it on the evening news or read about Dr. Campbell's findings in TIME Magazine, consider this: If the mainstream Media told the public that eating animal protein is what causes cancer to grow, a lot of their major advertisers--the Meat and Dairy Industries and the Pharmaceutical Drug makers, as well as many oncologists whose incomes depend on selling current treatments--would be extremely unhappy. They might sue; they would certainly stop advertising with that publication. The Mainstream Media know this--they won't rock the boat.

I am not suggesting any treatment option by recommending that you read Dr. Campbell's book, The China Study (2007). I am merely letting you know that, at the highest level of cancer research, more is known about what causes cancer to grow than we are being told. Please read this clearly written masterpiece on the subject of how our diet affects our health, and then draw your own conclusions.

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