It seems to be breast-cancer awareness month -- you know, that time of year when you haven't already spent your money on loved-ones, so you theoretically have more to donate to the paychecks of executives of charity organizations and their pet researchers....
In honor of this horrible and avoidable disease, and the organizations which milk the bereaved families and survivors of it, one of the "Primal" Docs has posted a list of things to do, for "Keeping Your Breasts Healthy Naturally." PRIMAL, MY ASS. It's the same old tired worthless BULLSHIT.
Number Eight was the first item which inspired my extreme annoyance -- make sure to eat plenty of those healthyfruitsandvegetables, kiddies! ...Oh, except for the fact that we have REAL DATA which demonstrate that HF&V don't actually do diddly-squat to improve health.... Petro wrote about this YEARS ago. But the authoress-ND claims we should also cut back on meat and dairy because, "a more plant-based diet helps to reduce your risk and protect your body from many types of cancers" <-- this is a FUCKING LIE, and she should know it.
Number Nine was the icing on the cake. We should be "keeping ... healthy" by TESTING, because self-exams (shown to be worthless) and mammograms (DON'T GET ME STARTED) are PREVENTIVE MEASURES in maintaining health. Yeah, jolts of radiation, soft-tissue trauma, stress, and frequent invasive treatments caused by the false-positives and those conditions which didn't require intervention in the first place, ... yeah, they sure do help keep you healthy!
Give her credit, she did actually mention iodine, and considering the load of fatuity in that article, it was a distinct surprise. What she didn't go on to explain is that after the thyroid, the breasts hold the most iodine in the body -- something about breast tissue requires a lot, and if you have a lot of breast tissue, you probably require more than you'll find in your diet. Oh, but she COULD NOT RESIST the mid-twentieth-century-questionable-science of warning us that we should never never supplement iodine without consulting our physicians, because as you know, we laypeople are way too stoopid to even dream of trying to be responsible for our own health! Self-treatment, after all, comes from Satan just like Halloween and birth-control and working outside the HO-O-O-O-OME.... (sorry, I couldn't resist -- I watched a bunch of Mrs. Betty Bowers' videos yesterday.)
Cancer is an ugly subject, and I ardently despise those in the field who cling to their paradigms and academic kingdoms, denying the distressed and suffering patients the opportunity to use KNOWN helpful, healthful, HARMLESS techniques to improve their conditions because they're "unproven." Well, certain treatments ARE KNOWN to be deleterious to health (chemo, radiation), and they insist on using those anyway. It's the same in Alzheimers -- over and over it's shown that STOPPING SUGAR and reducing total carbohydrates are supportive of health. The reason there's no "proof" of the efficacy of a ketogenic diet is that the pharmaceutical industry damn well doesn't want there to be any!
Just because in some studies, dying patients refuse to give up their treats (their LAST PLEASURE), doesn't mean that others wouldn't feel the "sacrifice" is worthwhile. We see this BS ALL ... THE ... TIME about LC being "unsustainable" but that's only true in people who demand their starches and sugars -- motivated individuals seem to find it pretty easy to continue for life. For crisesake, give patients the OPTION of trying it! Improving quality-of-life by ceasing to consume a toxic dietary superfluity has got to be the first step -- not telling us to load up on FRUITS cuz maybe we'll glean a little antioxidant or polyphenol from some tired strawberry that was picked green two thousand miles away, and has been sitting in a ripeness-retarding gas bubble for the last few weeks....
When people face a life-threatening illness, that is NOT the time to milk them and the system for every nickel you can squeeze out, testing and poisoning and overprescribing ... though that's exactly what some medical-industrialists seem to do. No, building up the patient's endogenous resources should be the first step. The PD who wrote the article went to lots of lengths to get women to dump things like BPA and other xenoestrogenic compounds out of our environments. She stresses the problem of estrogen-dominance, without addressing the fact that such a situation means there's something else awry in the body.
How much money is squandered through the emotional appeals of cancer societies and heart associations, and all the other similar social vampires? How many people have died unnecessarily, because the system would rather poison them than advise them to cut out starches and sugars, and eat more lamb?
How might society improve, if EVERYBODY took a vitamin-mineral supplement, as shown to be helpful in that prison study?
Our health-care systems would be a lot less over-burdened if the standard advice were first-things-first and FIRST do no harm, but when society DENIES that sugar is deleterious to health for financial reasons, we start being out-of-step with nature ... and it just goes downhill from there.
If I were diagnosed with a cancer, I would stay away from a dairy, especially the one with most casein.
ReplyDelete:-) i don't use a lot of dairy as a generality, but of course if i had cancer i'd be a lot MORE careful than i am already!
DeleteI think it was Taleb who said he never donates money to charities with staff drawing a salary. I wouldn't go quite that far, but I no longer give to most health oriented charities (eg cancer research). I feel a bit like a Harris-like medical nihilist.
ReplyDeleteStill, I feel a little uncomfortable and selfish walking past the collectors outside our supermarket where there seem to be collectors for some charity or other every week. I did give some for women's refuge the other day - at least that has a practical application. The rest, yes, pretty much social vampires.
As for the plant-based diet bit, what do you expect when paleo heroes like the good doctor claim we are obligatory omnivores. Just a few days ago: "we have to consume both plants and animals for good multi-generational health. We can subsist on plant-only or animal-only diets for years at a time, but when it comes to long-term health and reproduction, both diet styles fall short" I have nothing against plants whatsoever, but it's quite a claim. Rather delusional.
yes, that "obligate omnivore" stuff chapped my hide, too -- animal flesh has never made me ill, but plant-foods sure have! I couldn't give a flip if people say they feel the need for vegetables, but when they say EVERYONE does...???
Deletei've become a lot more picky about who i give money to, as well. I'd SO much rather give it -- or better yet, give supplies -- to animal shelters than organized charities!
I like his "meat" posts, at least he is telling that meat is necessary, and there are many vegetarians and sitting on a fence people in his audience. I guess SG is socially close to vegetarians, and not the one himself only because he does think it is unhealthy.
DeleteAbout he need for vegetables. I remember how strongly we craved first fresh produce after long winter when only pickled and canned vegetables and fruits were available, with the exception of winter apples and cabbage from cold storage facilities, and citrus fruits from faraway places. Somehow oranges didn't satisfy the crave for fresh cucumbers, lettuce,chives, first reddishes, may be it was more in that longing for fresh green things than the interest in a variety.
Now I want to have more fermented vegetables at a winter time. Tomorrow I will be making the first sauerkraut in a season - we will have fist cool several days in a row in a North Florida, cold temperature fermentation produces the best taste in a cabbage.
i haven't read his blog for years -- not since he pissed me off so much for removing a bunch of posts from his archives without saying anything about it.... :-) at least when the more intellectually-honest ones change their minds, they state it and move on!
Deletehis more recent photographs show him LOOKING like a vegetarian, less square-jawed and hardy, and more fine-drawn and ascetic! since it began around the time of his introduction of the "food reward hypothesis" i can't help but conclude the idea was a bad one! even if i COULD lose weight on his plan, i wouldn't want to lose my healthy look like he did.
There are interesting things from time to time on Stephan's blog, even though I often don't agree with him. I also like his leveled writing style.
DeleteHe is very concerned about ethic of meat productions and environment, as it is clear from his first post about meat. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2014/10/is-meat-unhealthy-part-i.html#more.
I am way more thick-skinned. Thinking about how intelligent pigs are will never stop me from roasting Boston butt or eating polska kielbasa..
Next door, Marin County has one of the highest breast cancer rates in the country. It's also home to some of the wealthiest people in the country, it's got fairly clean air and light industry ruling out many urban pollutants.
ReplyDeleteSo why are the breast cancer so high. Many women in Marin County adopt a kind of "earth momma" persona. They eat a vegetarian diet very high in "healthy whole grains" and they work out a lot. They breast feed exclusively which is supposed to be preventative.
My personal opinion is that it's their supposedly healthy diets, but nobody studies that because surely that diet "can't possibly be unhealthy."
Not sure how applicable it is to humans, but my dog lived with oral melanoma for a year without medication or radiation--just grain-free dog food and some Chinese herbs. The vet was amazed--she said he'd live about 3 months without treatment.
Delete:-) Jan, that's why it makes me so mad that "HF&V" are so highly touted for health! all these people who work so hard to eat right and exercise are making themselves sick, and it's directly the fault of bad advice! if they were TOLD to cut out sugars and eat their butter, they WOULD, because they're certainly conscientious about following a more spartan regimen!
DeleteLori, i think it's absolutely positively applicable! :-D
DeleteI stopped reading at least one LC blog because most people there proudly claimed they atet almost like rabbits(as much vegetables as they can staff inside themselves+ some meat and fat), and are healthy for that reason.
DeleteLori, we had a dog with oral melanoma, too. They cut it out, but no chemo or radiation. She lived another two good years with us until the mets spread all over her body and into her brain. We didn't feed her well--canned dog food and kibble because we didn't know any better. I often wonder how she would have done if we had.
DeleteWhen my mom had her uterus and ovaries removed (she didn't have a cancer), I had a chance to look at many females who were around her in the onco-gynecology department of the hospital. It is the standard in Russia to spend at least two weeks in a hospital when having even a minor surgery. There were a lot of older women who were substantially overweight and diabetic, which was not surprising for me, but to my surprise I also met there enough females in early 40-s/ late 30, who were very thin, pale, weak. Mom was in the same room with one of such females. My mom could walk three days earlier than her neighbor after the same surgery despite being more than 30 years older. The lady told me how diligent she was about not gaining any weight , eating everything low-fat and a lot of salads, regularly skipping meals and going to gym instead when scale went up even slightly, but her muscle tone was visibly on a small side.I guess such people weaken their immune system by the stress of under-nourishment. She also told me that not long before her diagnosis she developed suddenly a strangely and an abnormal desire for sweets, she was buying daily a box of chocolate candies in a groceries store, ate it on her way home and discarded the empty box in a garbage container near her apartment building, without gaining weight. I thought her cancer behaved like a fetus posing own demands on her body. It is a sad story to remember. Modern standard for a women body costs health and even lives especially among ambitious and successful females. They feel that they would be looked down if they were not rail thin and starve themselves.
ReplyDeletewhat a sad story, indeed -- and your "fetus example" is an excellent analogy. like bad dietary advice, i get mad that so many people work SO HARD (especially women) to try to be healthy and thin, and then they're blamed for being weak-willed and lazy.... grrrrrr!
DeleteTess, I haven't read up on it at all, so I ask from a position of not being knowledgeable....if you don't believe in mammograms, besides dietary, how would you recommend a woman best do preventative or early detection? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI believe they're doing ultrasounds these days....
DeleteI had an ultra sound as a back-up. Still test of choice here in sunny So. CAL is the mammo. I'm years overdue. :(
ReplyDelete