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The Impacts of Plant-Based Diets on Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer
"Impacts of Plant-Based Diets
on Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer" There appears to be
a significant protective effect of a vegetarian diet for heart disease
and all cancers combined, particularly for those eating vegan,
but that’s for total cancer. What about breast cancer
and prostate cancer specifically? There’s been about a half dozen studies
on breast cancer risk and various plant-based dietary patterns,
and they all found lower risk, as expected. In some studies, vegetarians
had less than half the odds of breast cancer
compared to nonvegetarians, suggesting vegetarian diets
show a protective role against breast cancer risk. In another study, eating
a nonvegetarian diet was one of the important risk factors, nearly tripling the odds
of breast cancer. In the California Teachers Study, a more plant-based pattern was associated
with a significant reduction in breast cancer risk as well.
So, even trending in that direction
towards a greater consumption of, for example, fruits
and vegetables is associated with a reduced
breast cancer risk, particularly for the hardest
to treat tumors, which is interesting, offering a potential
avenue for prevention. Some of the reductions in risk
were only statistically significant if you included the weight loss benefits
of plant-based eating and associated lifestyle factors
and other reductions of risk, not statistically significant regardless. Lower risk but not significant. Lower risk but not significant,
meaning like in half of these studies, the lower risk may have just been
statistical flukes by chance.
Okay, but this, for example,
was for vegetarians. Do vegan women do any better? Vegetarian diets seem to offer
protection from cancers of the gastrointestinal tract;
whereas vegan diets seem to confer lower risk of all cancers
put together and female-specific cancers,
in particular, which included breast cancer
but also included cervical, endometrial, and ovarian cancer. After a few more years, they were able
to tease out the breast cancer data, and vegans showed consistently
lower risk estimates, but not statistically significantly. So, one study in India even suggested
that vegetarians who eat eggs have lower risk
than vegetarians who don’t.
But, put all the studies on egg intake
and breast cancer together, and eating like one egg a day—
five or more eggs a week— appears to increase
breast cancer risk compared to not eating
any eggs at all. An increase of five eggs
a week was also associated with a 47 percent increase
in fatal prostate cancer. In general, if you look
at the effect of plant- and animal-based foods
on prostate cancer risk, most studies showed that plant-based
foods are associated with either decreased
or neutral risk of prostate cancer, whereas animal-based foods,
particularly dairy products, are associated with either
increased or neutral risk. The dairy and eggs may be why all
three studies on prostate cancer in vegans found decreased risk, but half of the vegetarian
studies showed no change. It’s not just about avoiding
meat, though. Vegetables and beans specifically
were also associated with lower risk, and the same
with breast cancer. High intakes of vegetables and pulses,
like beans, lentils, and chickpeas, were associated with protection
against breast cancer. We’re talking about half
the odds of breast cancer eating four or more
vegetable dishes a day or a daily serving
of beans or lentils, regardless of whether you eat meat.
Note this is one of the studies
that only showed that non-statistically significant drop
in risk among vegetarians; so, it may be better
to be a meat-eater who eats lots of greens and beans
compared to a vegetarian who instead eats lots of junk. Now, diet recommendations should go
beyond just pushing a specific array of foods and really just
promote the overall benefits of eating more
whole plant foods in general. But what happens if you do
just push more veggies? You don’t know…until
you put it to the test: "Effect of a Behavioral Intervention
to Increase Vegetable Consumption on Cancer Progression Among Men
With Early-Stage Prostate Cancer." Oh, that’s exciting, trying
increased vegetable intake to not just prevent
but treat cancer. Men with biopsy-proven prostate cancer
were randomized to an encouragement to eat seven
or more servings of vegetables a day.
Nice! And the control group
was just given some generic dietary info. And…among men with early-stage
prostate cancer under active surveillance,
a behavioral intervention that increased vegetable consumption
did not significantly reduce the risk of prostate cancer progression. Bummer. But wait a second. The trial wasn’t testing
increased vegetable consumption, but the effect of advice
to eat more vegetables. Did they actually do it? The behavioral intervention
in this study produced robust, sustained increases in
vegetable intake for two years, the researchers wrote. But alas,
it still didn’t work. At the end of those two years,
they were eating two more servings. Wait, just two, not seven? And so, the difference
between the vegetable group and the control group
was less than two servings.
They were also supposed to get at least
two servings of tomatoes a day, and two servings of broccoli-
type cruciferous vegetables every day; yet, they ended up only eating
about an ounce of cruciferous, and less than a tenth
of a serving of tomatoes. So, with so little dietary change,
it’s no wonder there was so little change
in the cancer. Though it’s possible
you also have to cut down on animal foods. In this three-month study for men
who had prostate cancer come back after surgery
and radiation, they were able to boost plant foods,
restrict animal foods, actually eat some more tomatoes. And the average PSA
doubling time (meaning how fast
the tumor was growing) slowed from about 22 months
to 59 months. So, doubling in less than two years
to then taking nearly five years.
All just from a three-
month dietary intervention, whereas the control group
didn’t change. Now, slowing down
a tumor is nice, but how about reversing its growth
or shrinking it down? Are strict vegetarians protected
against prostate cancer? Yes, those eating strictly plant-
based diets have only a fraction of the risk of getting it
in the first place, but that’s not the half of it. Yes, the Ornish study. I’ve talked about this before, notable in my How Not
to Die from Cancer video. Randomize men with prostate cancer
to a diet packed with fruits, vegetables,
whole grains, and beans and tumors on average
appeared to shrink, as noted by PSA trending down, while the control group’s cancer
continued to grow. Drip some blood from the plant-
based group on some prostate cancer growing in a petri dish,
and the plant-based blood suppressed the cancer growth
almost eight times better.
And the more
they stuck to their diet, the more their bloodstream
suppressed the cancer growth..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Plant-Based Protein: Are Pea and Soy Protein Isolates Harmful?
"Plant-Based Protein: Are Pea
and Soy Protein Isolates Harmful?" So, are these plant-based
burgers healthy or not? And the answer is…
compared to what? Eating is kind of a zero-sum game;
every food has an opportunity cost. I mean, every time we
put something in our mouth it’s a lost opportunity to put
something even healthier in our mouth. So, if you want to know
if something is healthy, you have to compare it to
what you’d be eating instead. So, for example,
are eggs healthy? Compared to a breakfast
link sausage? Yes! But compared to oatmeal?
Not even close. But look, sausage is considered
a group 1 carcinogen. In other words, we know consumption
of processed meat causes cancer. Each 50-gram serving a day,
that’s a single breakfast link, was linked to an 18% higher
risk of colorectal cancer. So, the risk of getting colorectal
cancer eating one link a day is about the same as the increased
risk of lung cancer you’d get breathing secondhand smoke all
day living with a smoking spouse.
So, compared to sausage,
eggs are healthy, but compared to oatmeal,
eggs are not. So, when it comes to Beyond Meat
and Impossible Burger, yeah, they may be better in
that they have less saturated fat, but, hey, you want
less saturated fat? Plant-based meat
alternatives are no match for unprocessed plant foods,
such as beans or lentils. And a bean burrito or lentil
soup could certainly fill the same culinary niche
as a lunchtime burger. But if you are going to
have some kind of burger, it’s easy to argue that the
plant-based versions are healthier. There is a sodium issue, and
it’s not that much, if any, lower, in saturated fat, since
they use coconut oil, which is basically just
as bad as animal fat; there’s not much
advantage on that front. Though the total protein is
similar across the board, does this matter? Or Is there any
advantage to eating plant protein over animal protein?
Let’s look at the association between animal and plant
protein intake and mortality.
In the twin Harvard cohorts,
following more than 100,000 men and women over decades, “…after
adjusting for other dietary and lifestyle factors, animal
protein intake was associated with a higher risk [of] mortality,
particularly [dying from cardiovascular disease], whereas
higher plant protein intake was associated with
[a] lower all-cause mortality”, meaning a lower risk of dying
from all causes put together. So, “replacing animal protein
of various origins with plant protein was associated
with lower mortality”, especially if you’re replacing
processed meat and egg protein, which were the worst. But when
it comes to living a longer life, plant protein sources beat out
each and every animal protein source. Not just better
than bacon and eggs, but better than burgers, chicken,
turkey, fish, and dairy protein. Together with other studies, these
“findings support the importance of protein sources for the
long-term health outcome and suggest plants constitute
a preferred protein source compared [to] animal foods.” Why? Well, unlike animal protein, plant
protein has not been associated with increased levels
of the cancer-promoting growth hormone IGF-1, for example.
Now, soy protein is similar
enough to animal protein that at high enough doses, like eating
two Impossible Burgers a day, you may bump your IGF-1. But the only reason we care
about IGF-1 is cancer risk, and if anything, higher soy
intake is associated with a decreased risk of cancer. For example, a recent systematic
review and meta-analysis found that soy protein intake was
associated with a decreased risk in breast cancer mortality;
we’re talking “a 12 percent reduction in breast cancer death
[associated with] each 5-gram-a-day increase in soy protein intake.” But the high soy groups
in these studies were on the order of
more than 16 grams a day, associated with a
whopping 62% lower risk of dying from breast cancer.
More than 10 grams of soy
protein a day may be good, associated with cutting
breast cancer mortality risk nearly in half, and getting
more than 16 grams a day may be better, which is like
one Impossible Burger a day. But we simply don’t know what happens at consumption levels far above that. Plant protein has also been
linked to lower blood pressure, reduced LDL cholesterol, and
improved insulin sensitivity. No wonder “substitution of
plant protein for animal protein has been related to a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease
and type 2 diabetes.” Indeed, 21 different studies following
nearly a half million people, and “high… animal protein
intakes [were] associated with an increased risk of [type 2 diabetes], whereas [even just] moderate
plant protein intake is associated with a decreased
risk of [type 2 diabetes].” OK, but these were just
observational studies. They all tried to control for other
dietary and lifestyle factors, but you can’t prove cause-and-effect,
until…you put it to the test.
The “Effect of Replacing Animal
Protein with Plant Protein on [blood sugar] Control in
Diabetes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of
Randomized Controlled Trials.” Even just switching out about
a third of your protein from animal to plant sources
yielded significant improvements in long-term blood sugar control,
and fasting blood sugars, and insulin. You can do the same thing
looking at cholesterol.
Here’s a systematic review and
meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on the effect
of plant protein on blood fats. And indeed, swapping in plant
protein for animal protein decreases LDL cholesterol,
and this benefit occurs whether you start out at high
cholesterol or low cholesterol, whether you’re swapping out
dairy, or meat, and eggs, and whether you’re swapping in
soy or other plant proteins. We’ve known about the beneficial
effects of soy on cholesterol going back nearly 40 years, but
other sources of plant protein can do it as well. Yeah, but
we’re not swapping beans for beef. These products are mostly
just isolated plant proteins, mostly pea protein isolate
in the case of Beyond, and concentrated soy protein
in the case of Impossible.
If you just isolate out
the plant proteins themselves are you still going to get benefits? Yes, surprisingly. Check it out. Interestingly, the researchers
concluded, that they did not find a significant difference between
protein isolate products and whole food sources, “suggesting
that the cholesterol-lowering effects are at least, in part, attributable to the plant protein
itself rather than just the associated nutrients.” So, it’s not just because
plant protein travels with fiber or less saturated fat. Plant proteins break down
into a different distribution of amino acids; and so, it’s
like if you give people arginine, an amino acid found
more in plant foods, that alone can bring
down people’s cholesterol. And even plant protein concentrates
used in these products aren’t pure protein, retaining
a few active compounds such as phytosterols and antioxidants, which also can have beneficial effects..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Can Alzheimer’s Disease Be Reversed with a Plant Based Diet?
"Can Alzheimer's Disease Be Reversed
with a Plant Based Diet?" Dr. Dean Ornish was
the first to show, in a randomized
controlled trial, that a plant-based diet
and lifestyle program could apparently reverse
the progression of our number one killer,
heart disease. Opening up arteries without
drugs, without surgery. Then, he showed the same
plant-based program could potentially
reverse the course of early-stage
prostate cancer and also elongate
telomeres, suggesting an anti-
aging effect as well. But when he told me
he was going to see if he could reverse the progression
of Alzheimer's disease, I was skeptical. Surely, he was biting off a little
more than he could chew. Dementia is the most
feared condition of later life. There’s a common
misconception that we have no control over whether we
develop dementia, but the good news is that although Alzheimer’s
may be incurable, at least it is preventable. There is an emerging consensus that “what’s good for our hearts
is also good for our heads,” because clogging of the
arteries inside the brain with atherosclerotic plaque
is thought to play a role in the development of
Alzheimer’s dementia.
This is what our cerebral
arteries should look like: open, clean, and
allowing blood to flow throughout our brain. This is what atherosclerosis
in our head looks like: clogged with cholesterol,
closing off our arteries, and clamping down
on blood flow. What kind of brain arteries do
you want in your head? Too much cholesterol
in our blood is unanimously recognized
to be a risk factor for the development
of Alzheimer’s disease. Those with a total cholesterol
of 225 mg/dL or more may have nearly
25 times the odds of ending up with amyloid
plaques in their brain 10 to 15 years later. After all, what is the
Alzheimer’s gene, APOE? It codes for the major cholesterol
carrier inside the brain. This may explain the
so-called Nigerian paradox: They have among the highest
rates of the Alzheimer’s gene but some of the lowest
rates of Alzheimer’s disease. How is that possible? Genes load the gun,
but lifestyle pulls the trigger. The paradox may be explained
by their low cholesterol levels, probably due to their
diets low in animal fat. So, in terms of dietary guidelines
for the prevention of Alzheimer’s, we should center our
diets around vegetables, legumes, fruits,
and whole grains.
In other words, the dietary
pillar of lifestyle medicine: whole food,
plant-based nutrition. Or, if that’s too complicated,
"plants, plants, and more plants." That may help explain
why vegetarians may be up to three times less likely
to become demented later in life. But it’s not all-or-nothing. Even just substituting 5%
of animal protein with plant protein appears to significantly reduce
the risk of dying from dementia. But prevention isn’t sexy. When prevention works,
nothing happens, but the same diet and lifestyle
that helps prevent heart disease was proven to
help reverse it. Until then, it was believed
that heart disease progression could only be slowed,
not stopped or reversed, similar to how Alzheimer’s
disease is viewed today. So, what if you put
people with Alzheimer’s on the same plant-
based program? You don’t know until
you put it to the test. A randomized,
controlled, phase 2 clinical trial to see if the progression
of Alzheimer’s disease may be slowed, stopped,
or perhaps even reversed.
They randomized about
50 men and women diagnosed with early-
stage Alzheimer’s to either make no lifestyle
changes for 20 weeks or eat a whole food,
plant-based diet (with supplements
like vitamin B12), moderate exercise (like walking half
an hour a day), stress management (like relaxing with
breathing exercises), and getting group
support (over Zoom). They measured
standard tests of cognition and function
before and after in each group, as well as objective
experimental biomarkers of disease progression. On the Clinical Dementia
Rating Global scale, which is used to stage
the severity of dementia, the control group
continued to get worse, but the diet and lifestyle
group started to get better. People diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s getting better? The same seemed to
happen when measured with the Alzheimer’s Disease
Assessment Scale, though this did not reach
statistical significance. Using what’s called the Clinical Dementia Rating
Sum of Boxes scoring, both groups
continued to deteriorate, but the decline was significantly
less in the healthy living group. Overall, using
what’s called the Clinical Global Impression
of Change scoring, most of the people in the
control group kept getting worse and none showed any improvement,
which is what you'd expect with Alzheimer's, whereas about 40% of those
in the diet and lifestyle group appeared to be getting
better within five months of eating and
living healthier.
Why did some get
better and others not? Well, the more they complied
with the recommendations, the greater the beneficial impact
on their cognition and function. This helps to
explain why studies of less-intensive
lifestyle interventions were not sufficient to
stop disease progression, let alone actually improve
cognition and function. The biggest limitation
of the study is that, unlike drug trials where
you can give people a disguised placebo
sugar pill, when a study involves major
diet and lifestyle changes, you can’t rule out
the placebo effect, especially for self-
reported, subjective “How’s your memory been?”
type-questions. But the researchers
also measured objective investigational biomarkers
of disease progression and saw the same
trajectory— improvements in the
interventional group and worsening in
the control group, with the same apparent
dose-response effect, meaning the more they improved
their diet and lifestyle, the more dramatic the effect.
Compare that to the
latest Alzheimer’s drugs, which may not
even work at all. All you may get
for your $56,000 is a one-in-three chance of
swelling or bleeding in your brain. When the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration approved the
drug anyway, the head of the American
Geriatrics Society replied, “My head just exploded.” The bottom line is
there is only one diet that's ever been shown to help
reverse our leading cause of death, heart disease,
in the majority of patients: a plant-based diet. If that’s all a plant-
based diet could do— reverse the number one
killer of men and women, then shouldn’t that be the default
diet until proven otherwise? And the fact that it
can also be so effective in preventing, arresting,
and reversing the progression of
other leading killers, like high blood pressure,
type 2 diabetes, and now maybe even early-
stage Alzheimer’s disease would seem to make the
case for plant-based eating simply overwhelming..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Why Might Vegetarians Have Less HPV?
"Why Might Vegetarians
Have Less HPV?" Cervical cancer is now considered a
sexually transmitted disease, originally suspected as such
as it was supposedly found less in nuns and
more in prostitutes, but now we have DNA fingerprinting
proof that virtually all cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus,
human papilloma virus, which also causes cancers of the penis,
vagina, vulva, and throat.
HPV is considered a necessary,
but not sufficient cause of cancer. Most young women contract HPV,
but most don't get cervical cancer, because their immune systems
are able to clear out the virus. 70% of women clear the infection within
1 year and more than 90% within 2 years before the virus can
cause cancer, unless you're immuno-
compromised or something. Well, if that's the case, may
maybe those with particularly strong immune systems
might clear the virus even faster. That's what may be behind this new
study that found that vegetarian women appear to have significantly
lower infection rates with HPV.
It's one of many studies reporting
that vegetarians have lower risk of HPV infection thought to be because of the presence of more fruits
and vegetables in their diet, which are rich sources of
all sorts of good phytonutrients. So for example, if you take a bunch
of women with cancer-causing strains of HPV infecting
their cervix and follow them out,
and retest at 3 months, and then 9 months, while analyzing
their diets, what do you find? Higher levels of vegetable
consumption may cut the risk of HPV
persistence in half, double one's likelihood of clearing this
potentially cancer-causing infection. And "higher" levels just meant
like 2 or more servings a day! What do antioxidants in plants
have to do with viral diseases? Different antioxidants affect
different viruses in different ways, but against HPV…don't you know that electrophoretic
mobility super shift assays showed "irrespective of enhanced c-fos
expression, c-jun was phosphorylated and became primarily
heterodimerized with fra-1", "which was also induced
after PDTC incubation"…I mean duh! I had to read this
paper like 5 times! Long story short: antioxidants
appear to suppress the activation of critical segments
of the virus' DNA.
Maybe that's why smearing green tea
on genital warts – also caused by HPV – has been found so effective
in clearing them. In terms of preventing cervical cancer:
through their role as antioxidants, pytonutrients like lutein, found
in dark green leafy vegetables; and lycopene, the red pigment in
tomatoes, may decrease viral load, thereby decreasing persistence
and progression to disease. Whereas the protective associations
may be due to their antioxidant properties. They have all sorts of other wonderful
effects, so who knows… who cares! Bottom line: "higher
consumption of vegetables may decrease risk
of HPV persistence," which may help explain
why this 2013 study found vegan women
have significantly lower rates of all female cancers combined,
including cancer of the cervix.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube