Cancer & Diet

Oh dear....  Here is a link to a Podcast from Radio 4 (thanks Gary H).  It is about 13.5Mb and is 28 minutes long.  Some of this is interesting but some I find a bit concerning - especially this fallacy of a balanced diet.  I think that some of the stuff in the Podcast still isn't actually right as I tend to believe that we (as a species) haven't evolved to be able to eat fruit that isn't seasonal - you can get bananas all year round as you can many fruits.  

Grains are also available year round but have only been for a small fraction of our time on earth.  Processed carbohydrates and man made foods have also only been around for a very short time - perhaps 70 years or so.  Man has been on the earth for, it is thought, around 2,500,000 years and evolved through eating a high protein base diet which helped build large brains and so bring about intelligence and as time went on language and great motor skills.  Man is a hunter gatherer and existed on his ability to hunt game and live off the land.  The better he was the more he ate but you can imagine that often man would go hungry and that there would be famine and feast times.  Crops of berries and fruits and grains and vegetables would only be available in season and these would be a supplement to not part of the day to day diet.  

The 5.2 diet is gaining traction as it tries to replicate something that is somewhere akin to the natural diet of man.  My 4HB diet is also similar in some ways too emphasising the use of proteins and vegetables in the diet but removing all man made processed and non natural foods as possible.  

As I've often said my Doctors are great at treating the cancer and getting rid of it.  They only ever told me to "eat healthily" and then I had to ask what I could do.  They treat the disease and no one considers where diet has any bearing.  In fact, it is only my own desire to never want to get cancer again and to do everything in my power to make myself better and to keep myself well.  

The more I investigate the more I firmly believe that our modern lifestyle and diet are major contributory factors towards modern diseases such as Diabetes, Cancers and Obesity are somehow linked to the availability of food to us these days, the production of processed foods and the prevalent inclusion of carbohydrates in our diet.  Now - I'm no doctor or specialist I can only put my beliefs down to the results of my investigations and added some logic to those arguments tabled.  

I find that people still thinking that bread and cereal, pasta and potatoes can be called healthy is somewhat concerning.  This stuff is all sold as healthy.  Have a read of the label and suddenly it doesn't look that good.  You have to buy into the marketing that eating processed carbohydrates can be anything other than damaging in the long term.  

Much of my early efforts to eat healthily led to me firmly believing that carbohydrates and fruits were the way to go after all they are the base of the food triangle they show and our Government peddle on the TV etc.  What happened was that I overdid the fruit and the carbohydrates and pushed myself to pre-diabetic blood-glucose levels and was warned off these.  The annoying thing is that this is standard knowledge and balanced diets show a heavy leaning towards fruit, cereals and grains and vegetables (not all good ones) and meat and the like are very low down the order.  What is wrong here?

I'm not going to put all the answers over in one blog post but I do think that the way that we can now have plentiful food available to us does make us overeat - we feel hungry we just go to the cupboard or to the shop and we aren't hungry anymore.  Before we'd have to wait until we caught or found something and perhaps sometimes we would gorge ourselves on it.  The true use of insulin and fat storage can then be seen when you can't use all the food you have, you can store a bit and use it when times were a little harder.  We live in the land of Eden where we have a never ending supply of food but really is that a good thing?  More musings later.  Enjoy the podcast although some parts didn't ring true of me but I would like to see more work and advice available.

I also need to think through my views on some food stuffs - like Bacon and processed meats again - especially as I vilified them because I thought my recurrence (which wasn't) may have been through eating them.   Another post on that once I've thought it through.