This section is review of Diet therapies used as alternative therapies in cancer treatment and while It is widely accepted that a healthy diet can prevent cancer and there is good research that it can prevent cancer recurrence and increase survival times, the key question is 'Is it wise to use them as alternative therapies?'
If poor diet causes cancer, why couldn't a good diet cure it?
This section looks at Diet Therapies mainly used as Alternative Cancer Treatments - although there is little reason why most could not all be used as Complementary and Integrative Cancer Therapies too.
In the Complementary and Integrative cancer treatment section you will see we write extensively about The Rainbow Diet, having researched the research from Harvard, UCLA and others into the colourful Mediterranean Diet and its significant health benefits.
In our view, it is the most important diet to employ when building a programme to try to beat cancer. However, we would not advocate that it alone is used, nor should it be considered an Alternative Cancer Treatment.
Click Here to look into diet as a part of your Complementary and Integrative cancer treatment programme.
The World Health Organisation repeatedly reports that poor diet can cause cancer - the issue then is why wouldn't a good diet correct a cancer, or at least prevent its return after mainstream treatment? The American Cancer Society actually prepared a report in 2012 pointing out that in research studies since 2006 there was overwhelming evidence that good diet could increase survival times and even prevent a cancer returning.
But, the sad fact is that many people play at changing their diet - they go vegetarian when they have cancer despite their being not one jot of research evidence that this will increase survival. They start eating apricot kernels, or beetroot, or cabbage, because of something a friend told them, or that they read in the paper. "Well it worked for that Hungarian guy!"
This is why Chris Woollams researched and wrote the Rainbow Diet - and how it can help you beat cancer. Most people with cancer end up doing a bit of this and a bit of that without knowing why. And this strategy is extremely unlikely to do any good at all.
So could someone correct their cancer using diet alone?
Many people who develop cancer are nutritionally deficient. Women with breast cancer are invariably low in blood vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin B-12, omega-3 and minerals from magnesium to selenium. They are often low on oxygen in the blood, with high blood sugar and salt levels. This translates into an acid body with acid cells.
So we start this section with an article explaining how many people claim acid bodies make you ill and how the truth is that you need an acid gut but alkaline mitochondria.
To further increase your understanding of some of the issues involved, we have added articles about the role of your liver, how it becomes increasingly toxic during a cancer, and what you can do to Strengthen your Liver.
Individual Diet Therapies
But this section of our website concerns alternative cancer therapies, not complementary diet therapies used to support and enhance orthodox programmes. Although, in reality, many diet therapies can be used as complementary or alternative treatments. Lets start with the most controversial.
The obvious place to start is with the Ketogenic Diet (or Keto). We find this flawed as we will explain.
Always contentious with the orthodox medical profession is The Gerson Therapy. Usually, though, it is attacked ignorantly - in press comment we have seen professors talk about How could coffee enemas beat cancer? or Vitamin C cannot beat cancer. The Gerson Therapy makes no such claims about either. It is a diet therapy aimed at rebalancing your body back to the state nature intended. After 50 years or more, there is really only very limited research on whether this could be a cancer cure.
We add The Plaskett Therapy as this UK nutritional expert criticised the Gerson Therapy for being out of date in the 1990s and suggested his own modifications. Over the last few years Charlotte Gerson has modified the Gerson Therapy (named after her father, Dr Max Gerson, who originally developed it and wrote a book based on 50 case histories with cancer patients) in line with new research and knowledge.
Then we have Dr Gonzalez in New York and his Diet Therapy which can used 120 supplements each designed to correct some failing in your body. The focus of his therapy is Pancreatic Enzymes. He conducted his own preliminary Clinical Trials on his therapy, to great effect. Further Independent Clinical Trials were all but useless, according to Gonzalez, as the recruitment of cancer patients was incomplete and the research tarnished!
Next, we cover a treatment used at the moment only for hormone driven prostate cancer - Professor Ben Pfeifers Protocol - using specific foods and supplements to correct certain causal issues. Swiss Clinical Trials are claimed and Bart's Hospital in London experimented with it although it all seems to have gone quiet; apparently Pfeifer is talking about adapting it to breast cancer and some others.
Next, we look at Hoxsey - often dubbed The quack who cured cancer after a journalist sent to write an article rubbishing him became a convert! Hoxsey's formula uses a combination of herbs, each of which seemed to have some positive effect against steps in the cancer process.
Unproven, or disproven?
And, in just this little review, you can see the problem. There is so little research and what there is, always has an element of controversy about it.
As happens so often with alternative therapies, there are staunch advocates and naysayers exchanging blows. A search on google will find websites extolling the virtues of diet therapies while others claim almost unthinkingly that all these therapies are of no merit; unproven, or disproven, as one skeptic claimed. How do either group of reviews help the cancer patient?
We are not here to take sides; we do not endorse or promote. We provide information that is already in the public domain so you understand what the treatment supposedly entails, what its limitations are, whether or not there is research, and so on. We just pull it all together so that patients can find it easily.
We do not recommend any of these therapies; we do not give advice; nor do we intend (as one skepti-twaddle article wrote about CANCERactive) to write in glowing terms. We try to tell you like it is - its up to you to decide what you want to do with the information.
Remember too, at CANCERactive we believe cancer is a multi-step process and we know of no single treatment - vitamin, drug, diet therapy or whatever - that currently is a cure for all these steps. Obviously a diet therapy could include foods that might tackle each of the steps, so the potential is there. But is the delivery?
This section tells you simply what diet therapies exist as supposedly Alternative cancer treatments - over to you!
At last, the definitive, research-based book on how to build a diet to help beat cancer. Click here to read about it.