surviveCANCER
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.: nutritionChanging your diet is one of the most intense and effective ways you can wage war against the disease ravaging your body. If you starve your body of the nutrients that it needs to stay healthy, you'll feel weak, depressed, lethargic, and could even die. Cancer is the same way. If you starve it, it will eventually wither away, at least to a state where it's not winning. Scientific research has yielded some amazing data in this area. Unfortunately, most doctors never receive more than a few hours of instructional material over their entire course of study on proper nutrition. While barely receiving the Cliffs Notes© version of nutrition, medical students are indoctrinated in the "science" of prescribing medicines. Learning how to balance your body's pH and utilizing natural vitamins and minerals are crucial to your success. When I was first diagnosed with terminal cancer, I started looking at diet because of interviewing a number of cancer survivors as well as their families and friends. All of those that pursued natural healing methods had altered their diets, some quite significantly. I ultimately became on of those who changed a lot. I did not have a lot of time when I first began the quest for health as terminal cancer seems to put a finite time limitation on time you can throw at a subject and the learning had to come on a number of fronts. I purchased a large number of books and started reading. There are hundreds upon hundreds of books out there that deal with diet for every conceivable reason up to and including cancer control. The more I initially looked, the more confused I became. Among the tomes I purchased were books published by some of the most prestigious cancer clinics and hospitals in the world. Even those had so many glaringly obvious contradictions to common sense, I was even more confused than when I started. I then researched both individual food stuffs, allergy testing of foods, and a number of general concepts about how phytonutrients (the stuff that hides in plants your body uses to maintain its health) boost the body's immune system and generally support your wellbeing. I came across the works of Dr. D'Amado on blood type diets. I attempted to follow that path, but in the process of testing myself for food allergies as well as just the basics of what would be most beneficial to my body, I came to the conclusion that this was not right either. It really became a frustrating, exhausting exercise in futility. When the dust finally settled, the short course on eating right for cancer is a diet that consists primarily of vegetables. I will personally never become a vegetarian as far as I can determine at this point, but the amount of meat eaten and the frequency at which I eat meat has been very dramatically altered. From a cancer fighting standpoint, you are probably best off as close to vegetarian as possible. If you are to eat meat, limit it to a few times per week and not more than 4 to 6 ounces at a time. Organically raised meats are best. Fish is better than beef is better than chicken (poultry), but even that is debatable by many people. A couple of more words here about vegetables. There is also a great raging debate over VEGAN (raw only vegetable eaters) and the rest of the world. Many things are better for you raw. Some are not. Tomatoes and spinach, for instance, have many properties that are enhanced by cooking. Most vegetables do not and are in fact damaged by the typical pressure cooking or boiling that most people do. I prefer to steam vegetables I do not cook simply because I prefer cooked and steaming does not damage things (anywhere near as much as just boiling the life out of them) comparatively speaking. So raw probably is better for most things, but not all. Steaming is definitely better than boiling them to death and what you choose to do is up to you, but eat lots of bright vegetables and fruits and you are on the winning side of the diet issue. There is much to learn in this area as most people, myself included, had an abysmal diet up to the point that cancer was detected. How fast you change, and maybe more importantly, if you change both what and the way you eat will make a profound difference in your chance for survival. The average American consumes 1 1/2 cups of fruit and vegetables a day when you should be upwards of 10, 12 or more cups per day. Herein is the simplest of all things you can do for yourself. Just eat the right stuff. It will, in many cases, turn out to be one of the toughest challenges many people face. Your pallet rules your actions. How, and realistically if, you can control it, it will go a long way towards putting your cancer in remission. If you cannot eat right to help your body; if you will not eat right to help your body, then don't waste your time reading the rest of this page. You and you alone are responsible for your actions. You need to be in charge of helping your body to control the cancer inside you. You cannot wish it away. You cannot ignore it. You must fight and fight hard to control it no matter what course of medical action you take. Here is a little factoid worth remembering the next time you chat with your doctor about nutrition and he looks at you like you are nuts: Seventy percent of all diseases, not just cancer, have nutrition linked to them; yet only 31 of the 125 medical schools in the U.S. require future doctors to have at least one course in nutrition. The average curriculum time for all doctors from all schools is a whopping 2.5 credit hours of study. You can do more than that in one month just on the internet in general reading for your own situation. As of this writing, there are now more than 5,000 scientifically conducted medical studies completed that in fact link cancer to patient nutrition. Up to 1/3 of all cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute are directly related to nutritional imbalance. Yet according to the National Cancer Institute, over 83% of all doctors in the U.S. still make no connection to nutrition and your potential for cancer survival.
General Concepts
Diet is a broad subject that concerns everything you eat in whatever form you take it. More on that in a little bit. In retrospect to where I am at today, the single greatest advances in the curbing of my cancer came when I started juicing vegetables and then when I added juicing beets to the regimen. The vitamins, minerals, and supplements were beneficial. The Rife equipment was beneficial. The single biggest bang for the buck, so to speak, came with the juicing regimens I established for myself and continue to do to this day. Late in my program, I came across a book entitled, The Breuss Cancer Cure which details the work of Rudolph Breuss, an Austrian healer who devoted over 50 years of his life to treating people with cancer and other "incurable" diseases with juice and tea regimens. Had I found his book when I was first starting out, I would have followed it, especially after the dramatic results I saw with just the green juices I created. His total reliance upon juices to cure cancer amaze me. I have read enough other reports on his work to be more than a little impressed. I have even recommended this to a number of terminal people I am now consulting with on their conditions and with some additional supplementation have seen some interesting possibilities. Regardless of what stage your cancer is, this protocol can be of significant benefit. You will still need to alter your lifestyle and maintain a healthy diet regimen from here on out. You still need to strongly consider vitamins, minerals, and supplements to bring your body to a normal condition is as short a time as possible. You still need to be in charge of your life and controlling the factors that determine health and safety for you. But this is a really great place to jumpstart the process. As mentioned in other places on this website, your immune system is your first line defense mechanism for keeping you healthy. It is just that simple. It is not the food you eat or the environment or your good or bad habits. It is your own body's immune system. Now, what you eat, the environment, and what other things you do that tax your body's ability to fight diseases including cancer is what we have to work on to get your body to heal you. Common sense says that you should do the things that help your body fight cancer. Again we have the basic problem of knowledge and its application. Do not fall into the pit of knowing but not utilizing that knowledge. This section is devoted to what your diet can do to help you. Do not expect diet alone to cure. It almost certainly will not. Never say never, but... So what is needed? What is the effect of external influences on my body? Do I have to do this forever? There could be hundreds of questions racing though your mind about these and related subjects. We will try to answer some of them here. What is offered up are suggestions for you to consider. Not everything will work for everyone the same way. All of these things are factors in getting rid of cancer in general. We all have cancer in common. We need to look at what we can do on a daily basis to begin the healing process. Remember, what is being offered here will not hurt you in any way, regardless of what forms of treatment you seek for your cancer. Regular allopathic (conventional) medical protocols or natural regimens all will be enhanced by your actions here. Let's talk a moment about free radicals. The basic definition in our very limited medical dictionary states, "In very simple terms, they are a highly reactive chemical particles in your body that oxidize (burn) just about anything they come in contact with. Extremely damaging to body cells and DNA." Every time we take a bite of food, a breath of air, a drink, we produce free radicals. Every time we are exposed to tobacco smoke, rancid oils and fats, smog, pesticides, radiation, chemotherapy, sunshine, and even malnourishment, our bodies can and will produce extra free radicals. Free radicals are unstable oxygen atoms. Under normal circumstances, our immune systems utilize some free radicals to kill invaders (bacteria and viral infections). This is why oncologists get upset at the thought of you taking antioxidant supplements. The issue with that is however, that not only do the chemotherapy drugs generate some free radicals, they generate hundreds of times more than your body can tolerate and they attack everything, not just the cancer. The older we get, the fewer enzymes and hormones our bodies produce to keep naturally occurring free radicals in check. If our immune systems become too weak for any number of reasons including the natural aging process, free radical production runs amok and now instead of fighting diseases, free radicals destroy DNA and cell membranes as well as turn a number of body substances into carcinogens (cancer-causing agents). Before we start chasing rabbits as to what constitutes the "best" type of diet, I want to throw out a couple of types of self testing for you to consider. Unless you go to a medical practitioner and be literally tested for everything you eat which could cost a small fortune, I can lend some quick assistance. It will take time, but it is not hard to do and costs are minimal (just the food you would eat anyhow and one vitamin). And as long as you are focusing on getting your body repaired, it only makes sense that you would try to consume those things which will do your body the most good. It makes little sense to eat foods that can, because of your personal physiology, detract from your wellness plan. Dr. Coca's Pulse Test for Food Allergies Now to the issue of testing individual foods for maximum body support. Dr. Arthur Coca developed a testing program to help his wife who was having severe food allergy problems. During his research, he discovered that pulse rates changed when foods had an adverse effect on his wife. To make a long story short, this system seems to work well on myself and I see no reason it should not work on others. It just takes time to test your individual foods. You need to begin with keeping a record of your resting pulse in the morning while still laying down. Keep this up for at least a week. It should remain relatively stable. Test one, if your pulse rate does not exceed 84 in the morning, the chances are you have very few food allergies, if any. You also need to test and record your pulse just before you eat a meal and finally at bedtime. There are several ways to test pulse. Two fingers on your wrist at the artery leading into your thumb is typical. You can also feel the carotid artery in your neck, just below your jawbone. Or, if you have a wrist type blood pressure monitor that also gives pulse readings, this is adequate. When you are ready to test foods for allergies, start with one single food. Whether it is a banana, or glass of milk, or a piece of steak, does not matter. Test your pulse just before eating. Eat one thing. Test it again 1/2 hour after eating. If your pulse rate climbs more than 4 or 5 beats at most, your body is fighting the food you ate (you are having an allergic reaction) and you should not be consuming it as it is more injurious to your body than helpful. Wait at least 2hours before testing another food and then repeat the process. It is ideally best to only test one foodstuff a day, but if you are careful about what you are doing and do not do anything that would raise blood pressure and pulse rate as the day goes on such as physical exercise, this can be done a number of times. It is also best if doing a multiple number of tests during the day to not plan on eating regular meals as that will also effect your responses. If you get an allergic type response, you should not test the rest of the day so that your body can purge itself. I have done this test also and have found that, for the most part, things I really like to eat I test normally with except for 2 favorites which for the sake of killing off my cancer, I will give up. Things that I have never really cared for typically did not test well. The question here is whether or not a certain amount of predisposition to personal likes and dislikes shades the results. I am trying to be very analytical about this and until I have some feedback from others, I honestly can't render an opinion other than about my own reactions; but I will for the sake of argument accept this as a valid test until proven otherwise. I will give you one personal example of the power of food allergies and how they can effect the body. For over 20 years I had fought a continual problem with my feet splitting open, more typically in the winter, nevertheless on and off throughout the year. By accident, I happened to ask a doctor (not my regular physician who only wanted to prescribe hydrocortisone cream) one day about this and his response was to have me stop drinking coffee for a couple of months. I asked if I could still drink it and just make it decaffeinated and he told me the issue was not the caffeine but rather the oils in the coffee. I then also took a homeopathic remedy consisting of a very minute amount of sulfur for 2 weeks. My feet cleared and for over 3 years now the splits and bleeding and pain have not returned. This took how much effort on the part of my immune system to continually fight when all I had to do was change an eating pattern? That is the point of testing. I think that if you have a number of allergies such as this that your body is fighting, there is little doubt that it is an extra strain on the immune system that you do not need. You should do everything in your power to be sure that you are helping yourself heal yourself as much as possible. These simple tests are enough to get you on the way to finding the right foods for you. Remember, what is right for you is not necessarily right for anyone else and the best way to determine that is to test yourself. And, just because you happen to fall into a specific category whether or not is by blood or metabolic definition, does not mean that you are not allergic to a specific food type. That is why you should test yourself or have yourself tested. Uniqueness has its price. Make a list of foods that you can eat without reactions as noted above and then you have something to discuss with your doctor. Now, use him as a guide to help refine what you eat and when you eat it and how to prepare it most beneficially. This is a prime example of taking charge of your own health. You need to be involved because absolutely nobody else out there has anywhere near as much vested interest in your life as you do. For a place to start your investigation, the following vegetables all have well known phytochemicals that are beneficial to fighting cancer. There are many more to try, but begin here: Artichokes, beets, beet greens, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, celery, garlic (fresh cloves), kale, onions, parsley, purple cabbage, romaine lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, tomatoes, turnip greens. There are a number of fruits that are also beneficial, but their use should be severely curtailed while tumors are not under control simply because of the high sugar content (fructose) that can act to feed the tumors. Blackberries, blueberries, cherries (tart), cranberries, grapes, grapefruit, McIntosh apples, oranges, pineapple, raspberries, red currants, strawberries. You can eat them, but do not gorge. If you make juice out of them, be sure to cut that juice one to one or more with water to reduce the sugar hit to your body. One of the best books I know of to own is called Alkalize or Die by Broody. It does not go into the specifics of what foods are best for what type, but he makes a very strong case for why you need to have your body running on an alkalized food regimen. See reference materials for these and other items on nutrition.
The Basics of Nutrient Values For Disease Fighting Factoid time: Over one half million cases of cancer could be prevented each year simply by observing proper diet, exercising regularly, maintaining proper body weight, and not smoking. How do you stack up against this description? As long as we are asking questions, lets try a couple more... Do you frequently eat snack foods such as chips, dips, ice cream, pop corn, candy, soda pop (sugar or artificially sweetened)? Do you regularly eat french fries, onion rings, deep fried chicken or other meats (including fish), barbequed beef/pork/chicken, "wholesome deserts" such as cakes, home made cookies, and pies? Do you consume 2 ounces or more of any form of alcohol daily whether it is beer, wine, or hard liquor? Do you consume more than one, 8 ounce glass of milk of any fat content or one cup of coffee on a daily basis? Congratulations! You loose the health lottery. Just like me and 60+% of the American population today probably do 2/3 or more of these acts every single day. All of these things consumed on a regular basis increase the risk of getting cancer by 5 fold. Continuing to do them after cancer is discovered will reduce you chances of survival by 70%. Might be time to consider a lifestyle change. Again, doing them does not guarantee getting cancer or any other terminal illness. Doing them once you have cancer does not guarantee to worsen your condition; but the odds of things are stacked pretty heavily against having a long, disease free life. The choice is yours. Fat is fat is fat; right? WRONG! Your body needs fat for a number of functions, but all fats are not created equal. Lets look at the bad one first; Omega 6. It is important to stress here that the body does utilize omega-6 fats for more a dozen different essential functions. Omega-6 fats occur naturally in all grains and most vegetables. Consumption of these oils from natural substances in the amounts contained in the natural substances are both good and appropriate for your body. No one has any argument with this statement. As a matter of fact, these commercially processed oils are touted as "being good for you" by no less than the American Heart Association; safflower oil, corn oil, peanut oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil, and canola oil. OOPS! The problem is with the extreme quantities of these oils we are consuming, not just their consumption. A good thing in excess is frequently not quite so good for you. The primary reason for this journey into a discussion on fat is that most people, myself included, actually need to understand why and how our favorite foods are literally killing us. One or more of these common oils are found in virtually every single piece of processed food in the grocery store today. Every time you pick up a frozen dinner, a piece of lunch meat, nearly every type of cheese, many frozen deserts, canned goods, baked goods, etc..., you are eating some form omega 6 fat. So what? Lets look at just 4 of the more than 1700 studies done in the last 20 years on these oils. See reference materials for full detailed listing of article publication specs noted here. Diets high in omega-6 fats are known to suppress your immunity functions by producing a very powerful substance known as prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Suppression of immune functions can activate latent (dormant or sleeping) forms of cancer. {Journal of Molecular Medicine, 1996} Omega-6 fats can bring on severe inflammation which is a proven tumor growth factor. {Mutagenesis, 1999} In testing omega-6 fats on animals, the test results of 97 studies were combined looking for commonalities. It was found in every case that in the presence of omega-6 oils there was a significant increase in tumor growth. {American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1995} A study of 217 men already diagnosed with prostate cancer were found to have high intake levels of omega-6 oils. {Journal of American College of Nutrition, 1999} This should be enough of a start to get your attention. Breast cancers have literally dozens of studies that link them with high intakes of omega-6 fats, and on and on the list goes. One final specific comment on omega-6 oils. If you have cancer and you consume higher than naturally occurring levels of omega-6 oils in your diet, then the omega-6 will be broken down as a by-product of the tumor development and growth. The resulting action is the development of arachidonic acid in your body cells. This substance then converts through metabolism in inflammatory eicosanoids. Guess what? This metabolic action has been tracked in a large number of studies to an increase in both primary tumor growth and metastases. Again, it is important to realize that just omega-6 fats in and of themselves probably did not cause the cancer to begin. You can never say never, but... There were a number of other nutritional factors that also played a part in all of these tumor studies. There were also a number of other factors within the subjects of these studies that also needed to be quantified. However, noting just the contributory effects of omega-6 oils to an increase in cancer activity, there is genuine cause for concern. Omega-6 oils are contributors to the internal body environment that allows cancer to propagate. And if you are trying to fight cancer already present or are trying to reduce the things that contribute to its being able to get a foothold in your life, then the severe restriction of omega-6 oils in your diet is certainly worth the effort. Can I ever eat any and survive? Yes, of course. Allow me to restate my position about this group of fats as noted a short while ago. Omega-6 oils are contained naturally in many things we consume. What we are concerned with here is with the inordinate amount of extra oil intake such as found with deep fried foods and all the excessive exposure to unneeded amounts in pre-processed/pre-packaged items on grocery store shelves today. Just how insidious is the problem? Walk in to any hospital in the U.S. and guess what you will find being used in food preparation for every single patient, visitor and staff member. Good fats: Omega-3 is our friend, as far as fats go. But because of its very fragility, virtually all of them are stripped from processed foods. Why? They easily turn rancid and can cause bad taste as well as be harmful to your body. This is why, for instance, flaxseed oil should be kept refrigerated and have a shelf life labeled right on the container to protect the quality of the omega-3 found in it. Back when cattle were still free range fed on pastures, omega-3 oils were found in the meats we consumed. But with today's feeder lot production of meats that derive their weight gains primarily from grains, this no longer happens. A common knee-jerk reaction to discovering the bad news/good news about omega 6 and 3 oils is that people run out and purchase fish oil gel cap supplements or flax seed oils but never reduce the intake of omega-6 from their diets. Failure to reduce the omega-6 intake will greatly suppress the body's ability to assimilate omega-3 oils and the effort becomes an exercise in futility. Two years is the timeframe generally considered necessary to remove excess omega-6 fats from your body's cells. Yet within as little as 2 to 3 months if intake of omega-6 oils is severely restricted, omega-3 oils can begin to enter the body cell structure and help repair the damage already done. HINT: the quicker you quit using omega-6 oils, the quicker omega-3 oils can help. Omega-3 oils have many cancer fighting aspects. I will list just a couple of examples, although there are more than 60 studies to draw information from. Omega-3 oils help to build up the immune system by strengthening cellular immunity. {British Lancet Pharmacol, 1999} If you remember back in the Immune System section I mentioned the condition called angiogenesis, or the ability of a tumor to grow its own blood supply system. DHA, a component of omega-3 oils, is a key player in the destruction of those jellyfish-like tentacles that feed a tumor. The only oils I cook with today are cold pressed olive oil or virgin coconut oil. They do stand up to the heat of a frying pan without breaking down and do not have omega-6 properties. Olive oil is also a source for squaline which as noted above in the omeag-3 discussion, fights the process known as angiogenesis. I also use olive oil as a salad dressing. Lets give you a rundown on the "big 5" of phytochemicals you can draw on from fruits and vegetables readily available in your local store. Note: organic is best if you can find it. Allium is found in chives, onions, garlic, and leeks. These are natural antibiotics and also activate body enzymes that attack cancer-causing substances. Caroteniods (beta-carotene, lutein,lycopene) are found in apricots, broccoli, cantaloupe, spinach, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. These are antioxidants that attack free radicals. Flavonoids (more than 2600 known) are found in berries, broccoli, carrots, citrus fruits, onions, peppers, soybeans, tea, tomatoes, and yams, plus all other fruits vegetables you can name. They are the compounds that give each of these foods their color and taste. They are very powerful antioxidants. Juicing is what most effectively releases their properties for assimilation into your body. Glucosinolates have 2 very important phytochemicals, isothiocyanates and indoles in their corner. These are found in the cruciferous vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. They trigger production of protective enzymes, stimulate the immune system, destroy estrogen, and attack pre-cancerous cell mutations. Polyphenols are found in blackberries, blueberries, grapes, green tea, raspberries, soybeans, and strawberries. They help prevent the alteration of foodstuffs into carcinogens. They also hlep prevent cancerous mutations. In our upcoming workbook entitled A Study Guide To Surviving Cancer, I will get into greater depth on the top 20 or so individual fruits and vegetables and what they specifically offer you in the way of cancer fighting properties. You have enough information here to begin a very successful, natural fight against your cancer. Use the knowledge wisely. Get additional information anywhere you can. Consult with your health practitioner, friends, family. Learn all you can, its your life at stake. Once again, whether you choose allopathic, naturopathic or a combination of medical disciplines, your diet will work with them to build up your body. Everybody needs to do this. Everybody can do this, if they choose to. Let's shift gears and head to another subject--fiber. The average American diet consumes less than 15 grams of fiber per day. Your body requires on average a minimum of 40 grams of fiber per day. This is not a commercial for Metamucil but only because many people are allergic to psyllium husks. Fiber is what old people take to keep regular, right? WRONG! Fiber, if it is not now, will become your friend for a number of reasons. High fiber diets or diets supplemented with additional fiber protect against the following non-cancer health issues; heart disease, diverticulosis (inverted polyps in the intestines), and obesity. It reduces cholesterol in the blood, acts as a modifier to blood pressure to keep it uniform, levels out bloods sugar levels, and reduces the risks of ulcers. As to cancer, fiber is a positive factor in lowering estrogen levels to fight breast and prostate cancers. It reduces the risk of intestinal, mouth, rectal, stomach, and thyroid cancers. In all cases, all types of cancer it helps detoxify the body by pushing fats and toxins through the colon before they are allowed to be re-absorbed into the body. If food stays too long in the stomach, toxins begin to leech back into the body. It is crucial to evacuate the stomach as soon as possible once digestion is complete. There are two kinds of fiber, soluble and insoluble. As noted above, insoluble fiber acts like a scrub brush inside the colon to clean out bacteria and toxins before they can be re-absorbed into your system. You should realistically have at least 3 bowel movements a day. If you have one or less, you are allowing toxicity to build that will ultimately harm your body in potentially many ways. Insoluble fiber has other functions as well. As the body breaks it down during the digestive process, insoluble fiber becomes one of several short chain fatty acids. The most critical of these is N-butyrate. This particular fatty acid is the single most important sustenance for the cells lining the digestive tract. When the substance is low, there tends to be a number of diseases that gain a foothold, one of which is colon cancer. N-butyrate is a very, very powerful anti-cancer substance. It works synergistically with vitamin E and a number of flavonoids. Soluble fibers have a different purpose, but every bit as important. As it is fermented in the colon, the beneficial bacteria Lactobacillus and bifidobacterum are able to grow. These bacteria are the cornerstone of good digestive health. They also suppress the growth of pathogenic (the bad stuff) bacteria and yeasts. As a side light, these 2 bacteria also work to support the immune system. Isn't it amazing the complexity God built into our bodies? How anyone can stand back and look at the incalculable interactions going on every second we are alive and come up with the conclusion that this is a random chance of nature, is beyond me. The evidence of design (creation) absolutely dictates that accidental happenchance (evolution) could not possibly take place in this fashion. I am only going to throw in a couple of words here about wheat and gluten. Virtually every cancer diet I have looked at has lots of bread and wheat based starches/carbohydrates in it. Take a long look at eating wheat products before you continue doing such. Gluten is one of those things that makes your body work hard. It produces an acid base histamine (something you get with allergies). It also is a contributory factor in clogging arteries. Even if these things do not play a part in your life, it is one less thing for your body to work against. Cancer forces changes and like it or not, if you don't make the changes to help your body fight the disease, you by default help your cancer to grow. Hardest thing I have had to do with the changes I have made was to quit eating regular wheat products. That is the only, single dietary change that I can tell that has made a difference in how I feel. The rest of the things I am doing is because they are logical choices based upon many hours of research. Next stop is a very brief discussion about water. Right from the tap? Right out of a bottle? "No" to the first and "Probably not" on the second. There are a number of books written on the subject, so I am not going to spend more than a few sentences on this topic right now. The water you drink does two critical functions. It re-hydrates you and it flushes toxins from your body. As to re-hydration, you use water to breathe, sweat, and evacuate your system. All three of these functions draw fluids out of your body where they are stored in various cells. In order to keep cells elastic and alive, for that matter, they need water on a continual and regular basis. As to evacuation, if your kidneys are functioning correctly and you are taking in enough water to sustain you, you should be passing somewhere between 70-76% as urine during the course of a day. You should drink close to a gallon of water a day, as a rule. A good basic formula for the absolute minimum consumption level is to take your body weight in pounds and divide by 2 and use that number as the minimum ounces of water to consume. If you weigh 140 pounds for instance, divide that by 2 = 70 pounds. Then the minimum you should drink daily is 70 ounces of water. However, minimums do nothing more than provide proper cell hydration and minimal evacuation. When fighting cancer, the volume needs to be greater because we need to concentrate on getting toxins, including dead cancer cells, flushed out of your body. That is the second critical function that water has. Every single cell in your body needs water to keep it healthy. Every single cell in your body also needs water to clean it out on a regular basis. A safer number for cancer victims is to go up to 75% in the formula rather than 50 percent. Even then, test and see if you should be drinking more. There is, of course, like anything, a limit to how much water you should consume. If you consume too much, especially with a meal, you will tend to flush the nutrients right on out of the stomach before they ever get the opportunity to be utilized. So, the second reasonable suggestion about water intake is not to drink it directly with a meal, but rather 10 minutes before and 20 minutes after. I personally will have a sip or two quite frequently with a meal, but I no longer down glass-fulls of liquid while I dine. Bad form. Again this is a conscious choice you must make if you want nutrients to be best utilized by your body. Back to the question first stated. What kind of water? Pure water; that is water totally clean of anything other than the molecular structure of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. Most types of filtration systems can remove almost all impurities, but not fluoride. Only reverse osmosis (RO) and distilling truly purify water. Even distilling should be run through a carbon filter after condensation to remove any volatiles. Is there a preference between RO and distilled? In my estimation, yes. The distilling process also leaves water with a very, very slight negative electrical charge where RO does not. In the distilling process, some of the water ionizes leaving hydrogen (H) molecules which carry a slight positive charge and a hydroxyl of hydrogen and oxygen (HO) with a negative charge. The hydrogen molecules tend to leave the water and the hydroxyl tends to remain behind. This very slight negative charge is a bonus in that it acts similar to a magnet in attracting toxic substances from the body's cells which are slightly positive. Using RO water is not a show stopper by any means. Using distilled water is just a little better.
The final topic within the rundown of basic nutrient values is sort of a simple recap of what not to have. This really is the biggest problem when looking at most diet plan structures I have seen thus far. There is very little discussion of what to avoid and why. We have already looked at fats that are part of the food additives and have lightly touched on fluoride. We'll look at fluoride first and then do a quick rundown on other food additives, followed by dairy products, and last but not least, a quick visit to snack foods. Fluoride, the savior of teeth, is the poison in toothpaste that requires a warning label placed on every single tube of fluoride laden tooth paste marketed in the United States. Why in the world do you want to put something in your body that is a known poison? From the back of a tube of Colgate tooth paste: WARNING: KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN UNDER 6 YEARS OF AGE. IF MORE THAN USED FOR BRUSHING IS ACCIDENTALLY SWALLOWED, GET MEDICAL HELP OR CONTACT POISON CONTROL CENTER RIGHT AWAY. Try this out for size. From Cellular Biological Toxicology of 1988 come the following statistic: Fluoride can boost the effect of carcinogens and increase tumor growth by up to 25%. And the volumes being discussed are use levels, not gallons, or tank car loads, but minute amounts as found in city drinking water. That scary enough or would you like another? How about this...Cancer death rates were noted as significantly higher in cities with fluoridated water when compared to untreated drinking water in other cities. For people over the age of 65, the rates were higher yet. The problem here is that even in the minute amounts of fluoride put in water, it can damage the DNA repair enzymes. Because cancer is an attack on the DNA structure of a cell, you have significantly contributed to the development and/or spread of cancer. The tragedy here comes when other comparisons of cities with and without fluoridated water are made. There is a statistically significant difference of cavities in teeth with the looser being fluoridated water supplies. Why? Fluoride attacks the natural enamel on teeth which in turn exposes the softer tooth core which in turn is more vulnerable to decay. This is known as dental fluorosis. When the actual statistics for tooth decay are studied in detail, the drop in cavities began prior to the addition of fluoride to drinking water supplies. This is because better hygiene in general was being practiced along with improved nutrition. One final shot. Fluoride can and does accumulate in the bones and levels can get so high that bone deterioration is a direct result. The process is known as skeletal fluorosis. Where does this leave us? Lets try the following course of action. If you can't or won't filter or distill your water, then at the very least, you should avoid all fluoride toothpastes, dental fluoride treatment programs, and fluoride tablets. A short course in food additives needs also to be addressed. Almost all additives today that are put in food products aside from the fats previously discussed are complex chemical compounds. Because all of these compounds are not in a natural state, the body must literally tear them apart (detoxify) in order to handle them during the digestive process. This extra effort is another strain on a cancer victim's already overburdened detox system. This extra effort can easily detract from the detoxifying action of attacking and disposing of carcinogens. The FDA does test for carcinogens of individual components, but as of yet, they do not look at the synergistic effect of these complex chemicals and the potential for their combinations to end up as a carcinogen. Again, don't make your body work any harder than necessary by your doing things to it that can be changed simply by improving your diet. The less it does to fight what you eat, the more it can do to fight your cancer. Its a little thing, but a lot of little things can add up in a hurry. In relation to food additives, we need to address the glutamate family including such things as MSG and hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, our old friend the synthetic sweetener aspartame, and cystame. All of these additives can damage nerve cells ultimately causing brain damage. Aside from contributing to cardiac issues and nervous system damage, glutamates have a major effect on existing brain tumors. Last word on glutamates comes with their pain properties. Glutamates are neurotransmitters. What this means is that by blocking them, you can reduce/relieve some pain sensations. By eliminating them from your diet, you will help to reduce overall pain levels in your body. A quick look at dairy products is next. This refers to cow's milk products. Milk contains a very, very large protein molecule directly linked to dairy allergies and child onset diabetes. The relationship to diabetes has to do with many factors including the predisposition toward the disease, but there are now a number of studies that do provide a direct link. I will not get into a discussion on this problem, but if interested you can do some research for yourself. Again, the allergy factor of milk products is cause for concern. We are looking at your immune system tying up valuable resources that should be devoted to fighting cancer, not your eating habits. Don't create more problems for yourself. CHANGE THE DIET! Dairy cattle are carriers of a number of cancer viruses, primarily lymphoma and leukemia. These two diseases are the single most prevalent infections in cattle today. Nearly 60% of all cattle in the U.S. are infected as of this writing. People living in areas where the animal infection rates are high, have a disproportionately high level of occurrences of lymphoid leukemia. Pasteurization, killer of diseases? Not necessarily. The reason milk spoils so fast is that even though pasteurized, it still retains active bacteria. Last but not least on the list is snack foods that are typically given to cancer patients to help with maintaining weight while facing conventional medical treatments. Just look at the vending machines or snack bars in any hospital. Look at the things given to patients in hospital rooms that are either waiting for or recovering from surgery. Cakes, soda pop both sugar and artificially sweetened, muffins, ice cream, biscuits, rolls and margarine, peanut butter crackers, cheesecake, jello with cool whip topping, potato chips, etc... Go ahead, feed my tumors, tax my immune system, harm me, see if I care. I trust your judgment... Many of these items not only contain omega-6 fats, but are cooked in them as well plus the can contain MSG or any number of other synthetic flavor or color enhancers. What can I say, I have eaten my share of this stuff, but not again, not with what I know now.
Its really terrible to start caring about nutrition this late in life, but later is better than never. As I have discovered, there is much here to comprehend and part of the process is not only what you eat, but how you eat any food in combination with other foods. Is this the only diet plan that will work for cancer? It is not, especially if you will not adhere to it. There are many, many things you can do including continue on with what you are currently doing. You can follow these principles to the letter or most of the time or some of the time. That is for you and you alone to decide. When I decided to chuck most of conventional medical wisdom out the window as not being viable options for me, I made a full and complete commitment to do whatever it takes to beat what I have, or at least be satisfied with the knowledge that if I survive more than 3.4 years, I have surpassed the norm of cancer survival by conventional treatment. If I make it past 5 years, I will statistically have beaten all projections and will have done it without massive amounts of surgery and pain and suffering. Is changing what I eat and how I eat worth the effort? Ask me that question in 2011. If you are facing terminal status where conventional medical wisdom only offers a forestalling of the inevitable, would changing your diet be worth the effort over giving up? Again, I cannot make that decision for you. If your status is not terminal and conventional medicine offers reasonable choices for your situation, does altering how you eat and what you eat make sense to you if you are building up your body to sustain you through the fight? That's your call. If you are not the cancer victim, but part of the immediate family that is living with cancer, are you willing to help by at least helping to support the decisions necessary to change dietary plans? Supporting the one with cancer is not always easy either. Changing everyone's dietary lifestyle may be too far to go in your case, but can you help with meal preparation or at least mental support and encouragement? It is tough to stand in the gap by yourself. My wife has been more supportive than you could possibly comprehend. It is impossible for me to fathom how I would have done this website as well as made all the changes if she had not stood beside me. Her admonition was simply, "Whatever you choose to do, I will back you completely." There is little more I could ask than that. How you combine the foods you eat tends to fly in the face of most dietary schemes. It is based upon some reasonable practices involving how foods are processed inside your stomach. It is a huge change that is a mental challenge for many, many people. What you eat is one of the very most powerful mental obstacles to hurdle in this very upside-down world you are now in. In a nutshell what I will present here is a very, very basic outline of things you should combine and things you should not. Once again, what you choose to do is beyond my control. I can only make some suggestions based upon my studies and what appears to be helping me. There are 4 simple rules. Rule #1. Do not mix proteins with starches. To me, there was nothing better than a good hamburger on an even better fresh, home-made bun. This also does in meat and cheese on pizza, a good sub sandwich, etc... Why you ask? Proteins require acids in the stomach to break them down into usable nutrients. Starches require alkalis in the stomach to break them down. If you had high school chemistry, you will remember that when you combine an acid and an alkali (providing an explosion or some other disastrous experience does not occur), you will get a neutralized substance. Acids and alkalis cancel themselves out. Well, the same thing happens in your stomach. You get no digestive action going on and your meal pretty much lays there and rots until it is moved through your bowels. Rule #2. Fruits do not combine with anything and even some fruits don't combine with other fruits. So much for fruit cocktail. Do not combine sweet and acid fruits. Same problem as combining starches and proteins. They will counteract themselves in your digestive track and very little nutrient is taken in by your body. Fruits and starches are a problem. Fruit can turn to simple sugars in your mouth as you chew them. They are very quick assimilated into your bloodstream both in your mouth and your stomach. Starches are on the other end of the spectrum from a digestive standpoint. They begin the digestive process in the mouth with the enzyme Ptyalin and finish up in the stomach at a much, much slower pace. The disparity in digestive action as well as specific enzymes involved will lead to overall digestive problems. Don't do this to yourself. You can write off that great strawberry jam on toast, jelly filled doughnuts, etc... if you wish to help yourself and not your cancer. One more time. Fruits and proteins do not go hand in hand. Proteins take a long time digesting. Fruit is quick. If the fruit sugars have to wait to be assimilated through the stomach walls while the proteins are broken down during the digestive process, the fruit will rot as it lays there. Not a pretty picture. Avocados are an exception to this rule. Don't eat fruits and vegetables together. Wayne Pickering makes this notation on his food chart that fruits are cleaners and vegetables are builders. You do not clean your house and build it at the same time. Tomatoes are the exception to this rule. They combine will with a number of different things including egg plant, lettuce, cucumbers, bell peppers, etc... I can't make this choice about fruits for you either. I can show you what I have learned and hopefully you will learn from what I show, but the choice is yours whether or not you will choose to support your body's fight against cancer. Rule #3. Melons comprise rule number 3 all on their own. They are already in the simplest state that a food can be in and will literally rot in your stomach when combined with anything else just because they digest quicker. Therefore, you need a minimum of 1 hour either before or after you eat anything else to have any form of melon. Two hours is better yet. Rule #4. The fourth and final rule comes with desserts. Very sweet things, especially refined sugars, will turn into alcohols and vinegars in your stomach and you have just done in the digestive process. To me, this was almost but not quite as nasty as giving up a good sandwich. One final time. if you allow your pallet to rule you based upon the way you used to eat, you have taken one of the biggest weapons to your surviving cancer taken right out of your arsenal. The time of year also has an effect on the types of foods and ratios of acid to alkali to fats you should be consuming. A note here about fats as covered elsewhere. Not all fats are equal. You need fats to keep your body functioning properly, but omega 6 fats (saturated fats , solid shortenings, safflower oil, peanut oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, canola oil) need to be severely limited. Omega 3 fats are the good ones and utilizing supplements such as cold pressed flax seed oil is one way of getting the good/proper oils you need. The only oil I cook with is cold pressed olive oil. Again, processing plays a big part in retained nutritional value. The label must absolutely say "COLD PRESSED". Spring allowances run in the ranges of 20-25% acid (protein), 60-80% alkaline (fruits and vegetables) and 5-10 % fats. Summer allowances run in the ranges of 10-20% acid (protein), 80-90% alkaline (fruits and vegetables) and 5% fats. Fall allowances run in the ranges of 20-30% acid (protein), 60-70% alkaline (fruits and vegetables) and 10% fats. Winter allowances run in the ranges of 25-40% acid (protein), 50-60% alkaline (fruits and vegetables) and 15% fats. Your body can be harmed by too much alkali just as it can be harmed by too much acid, so it really is important to keep everything in balance. This is what pH testing is all about - maintaining the proper pH-balanced levels throughout your system. Keep in mind that you generally do not want very complex meals because of the potential disparity in digestive times. It is not good to eat things that break down in an hour's time such as sea kelp with something else such as turnips that take 4 hours to digest. (Personally I don't like turnips, so that is not one of those things that would concern me.) There are a number of websites I came across that list whether or not food is alkaline or acid base and how long they take to digest. You can also purchase a food combining chart by Wayne Pickering that lists most of the common things on it. Here are a few basics to keep in mind about food types and digestive times: Beet greens, sea kelp, alfalfa sprouts and mung bean sprouts all digest in less than 2 hours for vegetables. Avocados and olives are proteins that digest in less than 2 hours. Burdock, all kinds of regular potatoes, all kinds of rice, and lima beans for starches all break down in about 2 hours. Only watermelon digests quicker than 2 hours in the melon grouping. Mangos, lemons, raspberries, grapes, and papaya in the fruits all digest in under 2 hours. Barley, buckwheat, corn, oats and water chestnuts in the starch grouping all require more than 3 hours to digest. Bamboo shoots, green beans, green peas, okra, eggplant, mustard greens, all require more than 3 1/4 hours to digest, Filberts, hickory, and pistachio nuts all require over 3 hours for digestion. Persimmons are the only fruit that takes longer than 3 hours. Pretty much everything else in fruits, vegetables, proteins, and starches break down inside the stomach within 2 1/2 t0 3 1/4 hours. Again, this is far from a comprehensive list, but it should be adequate to give you a starting point. Everything in all categories is alkaline based with the following exceptions, avocado, coconut, lentils, peanuts, corn, winter (hard) squash, all grains except millet, dried beans, rhubarb, all forms of cress, caraway, brussels sprouts, cranberries, currants, plums, and blueberries. All meat and dairy products are acid based. All meats, dairy, and other animal proteins except pork digest in roughly 3 hours. Pork is a standout taking between 9 and 18 hours to fully digest. It is by far the hardest of all foodstuffs of any kind to be utilized by your body and should be avoided by all cancer patients simply from the great strain it puts on your liver, kidneys and other internal organs during the digestive process. The first time I heard about this, there was quite a mixture of emotions. I am old enough to remember Jack Lelane as the commensurate health and fitness "nut" nearly 50 years ago. He was big into juicing then and still is in his late 90's. At any rate, until cancer happened, juicing did not happen in my life. Of all the doctors and people in general I talked to, absolutely nobody mentioned this to me INITIALLY other than my pastor telling me about a relative who did it because he had cancer. Once I looked into it and then mentioned it to a number of people in the health industry, the response was somewhat different. It ranged from having no benefit when talking with 4 MDs, to "yes we do it ourselves." Oh well... I read a lot about it, mostly after I went and purchased a juicer. I might have done things a little differently had I read more about it before I bought, but probably not. When I went back and interviewed the people I originally talked to about cancer, all the natural people were aware of juicing and most (16 of 18) did it as part of the program. None of the allopathically-treated people did any form of juicing or juice therapy. In retrospect, with my cancer temporarily (unknown how long this will actually last) under control, I am going through the different sections and updating them with research uncovered and additional thoughts on subjects. The area of juicing is becoming a greater part of the way I can see fighting cancer most effectively. In the piles of debris I call an office, are scores of books on every conceivable subject relating to diet and cancer. On the top of the pile is a book by Rudolph Breuss about curing cancer with a juice fast. Oh how I wish I had found this when I was first researching this topic. I would have done it in a heartbeat. When I started juicing, I did two distinct things. First is beets. Actually I am discussing it first, but did not start doing them until April, 2005. This I am now doing every day and in addition the following discussion about other vegetable combinations I now do every other day. Just do not have enough time to cram it all in. Beets, as someone told me, has quite a history of fighting cancer all through Europe. I plugged it in to a search engine and sure enough, there is tons of information. A lot of junk science, but a lot of good stuff as well. There is even a company that exports beet juice to America in 10 oz bottles for roughly $5.50 as of this writing. For $5.50 per bottle per day, I can juice a lot of beets which is exactly what I do. Ten ounces of beet juice, 2 oz carrot juice, 2 stalks of celery, and a small cucumber (pickle size) is what I combine, some for flavor and some for phytonutrients. Although this breaks with the rule I generally impose upon myself about doing the same thing every day, I do make the exception because of the published documentation I have read about the cancer fighting properties of beets. In addition to the above mentioned beets, typically what I juice for myself is 1/2 head of Romaine lettuce, 6 tightly packed cups of baby leaf spinach, a cup of kale or Swiss chard, 4 or 5 sprigs of parsley, some cilantro if it is in the refrigerator, 1 stalk celery, 1 carrot (go light on carrots as they are very sweet and you do not need to add the extra sugar to your diet), and 4 fresh garlic cloves. This will produce about 10 to 12 ounces of juice. Occasionally and that means rarely, throw in an apple for good measure. You can vary this mixture based upon what is in your refrigerator as found in the earlier list of vegetables provided or whatever you were able to add to my list with your own research. The key here is that any bright colored vegetable has much to add. Next I add about 8 ounces of crushed tomatoes and mix it all together. Drink the mix, straining out the pulp. In all you should be taking a minimum of 16 ounces of juice per day. There are several cancer protocols out there based upon juicing and those typically run 24-32 ounces of just juice per day. But because of the high level of supplementation I am doing, juicing is effective in the above described range per day. I have what everyone around me is sure to call a "cast iron stomach." I could count the times in my life when I have had indigestion (other than when sick) and have fingers left over. My wife, however, made a discovery about what I am juicing and that became what is above when I say, "Throw the pulp away." For whatever reason, this mix above when combined with the pulp, has an incredible "bite". I notice a little tingling in my mouth, but it sits really heavy in Beverly's stomach. It could be the garlic. I firmly believe it is impossible to have too much garlic in almost anything. My wife does not share that opinion. Garlic oil can be very intense. It is quite possible that when released and combined back with other things above including the parsley and cilantro, it develops a bitterness. What I do, instead of just drinking the juice, is to take the pulp and put it back in. I eat it with a spoon. You are getting over 95% of all available nutrients in the vegetables plus fully usable fiber that would otherwise need to be artificially added to your diet. One of the inherent problems with juicing comes with the volume of food and the time it takes to prepare. I juice once a day, but I have the luxury of time to do that. You can juice once a week and then freeze daily portions. Juiced foods just sitting around will tend to loose their nutrient values. Freezing will protect virtually all of it. If you are working, you need to carry a cooler bag or have access to a refrigerator at work. Take your glass of juice or bowl of "sludge" and a muffin or slice of rice and bean bread to go with it. It is not difficult or impossible to adapt. It is your life in the balance. You can do this, if you choose to. As disgusting as this may sound; 1. the above juice and pulp mix actually tastes pretty good; 2 it will do more to build up your body than any other single food source you can come up with. When combined with good supplements, more people have turned cancer around by juicing their vegetables than by any other means. It will not cure cancer, but it certainly will a very long way in helping your body fight back. There are over 5,000 known photochemicals in bright vegetables and they are the single biggest source of immune system support there is. (Sadly, only a few dozen of these flavinoids have been studied in great depth.) Worse case scenario, I would rather ingest a bowl of my juice and fiber mix daily for the rest of my life, than have both my kidneys cut out and possibly spend the rest of my life on hemodialysis. That to me is a no-brainer. Lets devote a few sentences to juicing equipment. First, regardless of what you purchase, buy the best you can afford. Look for warranties on the overall machine and even more importantly, the motor unit. Purchase nothing with less than a 4 year life, and preferably lifetime on the motor. It will extricate lots and lots of juice from fiber over its lifetime and you need something that will just run, and run, and run. Be sure that it is easy to clean, simple to operate and is not overly loud to operate. There are five primary types to choose from. The masticating juicer literally chews its way through the food and then squeezes the pulp it created. It runs at a low RPM, high torque and produces a very high quality juice. These do best with vegetables. The twin gear press literally has a pair of close meshing gears through which food is pushed and crushed. It produces very high quality juice. This type of juicer can work well with wheatgrass. These do best with vegetables. Centrifugal juicers generally are capable of only making one or 2 quarts of juice at a time. The spin at a relatively high RPM (typically 3600). They periodically must be stopped and the pulp removed. These work well with fruits as well as vegetables. Because of the higher speed, they do not produce quite as good a quality of juice in that they can damage some of the nutrients by overheating them during the extraction process. The centrifugal ejection juicers operate also at a higher rate of speed (typically 6300 rpm). Instead of having to tear down every little while to clean out, they can run nearly indefinitely as they eject the fiber after extracting the juice. They can do fruits as well as vegetables. Generally these units do not extract as much juice from the pulp as other types. The final type of juicer is one devoted to juicing wheatgrass. There are both manual and electric models available. One last thing to note here is that there are also juicing blenders that simply break the food up to extract the juice, but leave it intact with the fiber. This would probably suit me better than what I do, but I do also create fresh pure juices and I do not have counter space for two machines or a pocket book that is all that deep. Buy the best you can afford that will do the most things you need and adapt to the situation. Other than the Breuss book, I have yet to find a book on juicing that really deals with cancer. Most books, including the ones I own, show mixtures that frequently combine the wrong produce and vegetables to be properly digested. The taste may be great, but we need to be more concerned about how your body is healed. That is not to say that you have to eat things that taste bad in order for them to be good for you. The thing to note here is that I am trying to rotate the foods as much as possible as well as giving you a balanced selection. The theory here is borrowed from Theron Randolph's 4 day rotation diet. The concept is quite simple and has been born out by research. Simply put, each food you consume is attacked by a different combination of enzymes. If you continually eat the same foods, day after day, the body has little chance to recover and you end up depleting specific enzymes which in turn reduces the body's ability to assimilate nutrients from what you are eating. If you rotate the foods you eat so that every 4 or 5 days you repeat a pattern, your body can naturally rebuild its digestive system to its greatest potential. This becomes a very important factor the older you get. Fighting a life-threatening disease adds a whole new dimension to the problem. I am making this choice consciously to help my body as much as I can. Every little bit I can do to take my body's burden and shift it to fighting cancer instead of overcoming thins I am doing, is to me, a step in the right direction. This is a big change, yet it really is a little thing to do. It harms nothing other than my perception of taste that will alter in a matter of days. We will modify this because cancer seems to make up its own rules. Some things become a daily routine such as juicing vegetables. Because we are supplementing diet with many additional enzymes, we can be somewhat less diligent in rotation, but it again is not license to just do as we wish. The closer you can stay to a reasonable process, the better off your system will be. Note that just eating one vegetable, the same vegetable, every day is not doing much for you. In fact, it can be harmful. Too much of any one thing is not good for your body. Do not attempt to juice only carrots or only spinach or only cucumbers or only any other vegetable you can think of and plan on being successful. It will not happen, I guarantee it. Understand that there is no limit to what you can make for yourself. I simply listed 4 days worth of ideas. Not everything you will eat will be the most beneficial to your body. The trick is to make as much as possible highly beneficial to fighting cancer and building up your body. The rest just needs to act as food in general. Try to steer away from foods that are injurious to your immune system and body in general. Worry about cheating on your diet when you have things under control. Right now it is more important to control your cancer. Again, like so much with fighting cancer and living from day to day, this will not work for you if you do not wish it to or do not want to make the changes. I can only suggest based on what I have read and tried thus far for myself. How or what you choose to eat and justify that decision is your business. Changing your tastes for food and living with the inconvenience of having to do some of these things is something you will have to struggle through on your own. It is a decision that is not easy or simple for most people. Can you have a regular life and do things like this? Yes, with a little creativity in how you approach it. You can shift meal types. You can break them up. You most certainly will be "brown bagging" rather than running out to the golden arches steak house. You will question your sanity at times. You will be tempted much of the time. Ultimately you are your own worst enemy and best friend all rolled into one when it comes to eating. I did not bother to mention snacks between meals, etc... Anything you decide to do about snacking should be raw vegetables or fruits only. You need all the available nutrients you can get and snacking on whatever raw fits your style is what to do. I have never been much of one to do that prior to this, and the change is quite an experience. I usually am so busy that I just don't even think about doing it, let alone take the time to munch away on a piece of celery, an apple, a banana, a carrot, or whatever. Its not that I don't like things like that, I frankly forget to do them, unless I am behind the wheel, driving somewhere. I then snack all the time. My stepfather once told me that he never saw anyone fall asleep driving if they were busy eating something. I tend to believe that statement and having driven well over 1,000,000 miles in my lifetime, I can say I have had lots of time to snack. Day 1 Breakfast:
Lunch:
Dinner:
Day 2 Breakfast:
Lunch:
Dinner:
Day 3 Breakfast:
Lunch:
Dinner:
Day 4 Breakfast:
Lunch:
Dinner:
As you may have noticed, I listed a number of different things to drink. I personally only drink water. It is the single most important thing you can do to help keep your body hydrated and to help flush toxins. Many, many people need to vary what they drink to enjoy eating. That's fine. Go for it. But if you do, then still plan on drinking water as outlined previously. Again, I noted drinks with meals. These items should not be consumed while you are dining, but either before or after so as to allow the maximum amount of digestive action to occur and the maximum amount of nutrient transfer to happen.
There is much to consider about what you eat and how to mix it all up. Maybe working with food combinations seems too difficult or perhaps not worth the effort to you. Remember that this is not just an exercise to do something different with your life. My hours of reading have shown only one thing, nobody's concept of what is right matches anyone else's. There could well be a reason for that. We are all different. Yet when I look at things, I am searching for a pattern, a continuity. I see a majority of diets leaning toward vegetarianism. That is a reasonable step. Whether or not I ever completely become a vegetarian is doubtful. With what I have learned, I can enjoy meat and overcome its negatives by simply adjusting another part of my diet. I certainly cut the amounts of meat I eat. It now becomes more of a condiment than a centerpiece. I frankly feel no different in how I feel. Again, if there was a sudden or dramatic change in feeling, I would probably have stayed completely vegetarian. I did not experience that. I see a number of people juicing. I don't see everyone doing that, but I have read extensively and that has a great deal of merit, so I began doing it by the end of the 1st week of my research. I will continue that for the balance of my life. I changed what I combine as food stuffs. I have not seen a lot of reference to that, but the logic of how it works and why is instantly apparent to me, based upon nearly 30 years of my work-life involved with engineering and scientific research. The chemical reactions that take place in the body during the digestion process shows me, without a doubt, that simply changing the pattern of what I eat with what, makes my body work less hard and provides more nutrients. It is a no-brainer for me, simply because of the scientific aspect of what is happening. The goal here is to make everything as easy as possible for the body to tolerate, not prove that it can do the work in spite of you. I noticed that most diet books have many, many days of meal plans laid out in them. I at first thought that was to keep boredom out of the eating plan and keep people interested because the diet could vary. That may be why most plans do such. Yet both in professional medical journals and a couple of obscure, out of print books on eating patterns, I came across a logical reason to vary the diet. Your body reacts to what is put in it, by how frequently it is put into it. If you have ever lived on a farm, or raised a garden, you will learn the benefits of crop rotation or you will not be farming very long. Soil depletes because you leech all the nutrients out of it by raising only one crop year after year after year in the same place. Look at what happened to the southern half of the U.S. with cotton production in the 1800's if you need a more vivid picture. I can easily envision the same thing happening inside my body by never varying my diet. The enzymes that break down your food during the digestive process are manufactured by your body. Every food you take in requires a different set of enzymes. If you continually use the same ones, your body never has the chance to fully recover its store of them. Consequently, you will never get the full benefit of what you eat simply because the body is partially depleted in the mechanism that releases the nutrients from the food you ingested. Yet, if you eat different things every day and then repeat a pattern after 4 or 5 days, your body has a chance to recover and you get the full benefit of what you are eating. By using the very heavy enzyme supplementation I have noted in my regimen, I can temporarily circumvent the internal rebuilding process. Yet if I just not eat the same couple of things day after day after day, I am again helping my body to fight the disease within me. It is not a big thing to do. It is not hard to do. It may not even help much, but I would rather help just a little than to not help at all. Does that make sense to you? It did to me. My only goal was to show you that there are other ways to think about what you do to help your body. To me, every little change I can make that has a potential benefit is worth investigating, at the very least. If it comes even remotely close to being logical, I will try it. Cancer is not a science experiment gone astray inside your body. You do not have the luxury of trying one thing to see if it works and if it doesn't, in 6 months trying something else. You search for the best possible combination of reasonable, body-supportive actions you can find and you do them all at the same time. As long as they do not conflict with one-another and you can modify your life to work them in and still do whatever is necessary to maintain your family and yourself through this major crisis, you do it. I honestly do not care what thing or combination of things drives the cancer from my body. I only care that the cancer does not literally eat me alive. Be creative in what you do for meals. Life does not have to be boring. I have only scratched the surface as to what to eat because I just have not yet had time to work up what I think are appealing foods. Start with your favorite dishes and modify them to fit the food rules I have laid out. That is what I am doing with what I am showing in the recipe section of this website. It is not difficult, it just takes a little time to work out the details. Good luck.
NOTICE: Under no circumstance is there any claim of any kind being made or implied that what I have chosen to do for myself has any merit to anyone other than me. This website or any printed matter I generate as a result of this website is not to be intended or in any way considered a substitute for the services of a medical professional. I am not to be considered in any way responsible for any consequences incurred by those who choose to employ the remedies or treatments I have reported. I make no claim that cancer is curable, least of all by me. I make no claim as to being able to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure any disease or infirmity of any type. It is strongly recommended and encouraged that everyone visiting this sight devote time to researching all possible treatment options that make sense to them and that they avail themselves of the expertise of those who are experienced in the treatment and “cure” of cancer; and that they seek whatever additional help and support their conditions warrant.
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We purchased a small home distiller that has been very economical to use and the
amount of junk it removes from the water is beyond description. We are on a
private well and are not city water. I always thought what we had was better
than city, but it was an eye opener when I saw just how much particulate was
removed with every single gallon. Pictured here is one gallon's worth of residue
inside our distiller. Note we have a softener and a manganese peroxide treatment
hooked up to our water on a well that is 95 feet deep. After seeing this, I have
little desire to drink anything straight out of the tap. Note: the inside of
this tank is bright stainless steel when clean.