What matters most? What you eat or what you don't eat?

Good question.

To help answer the question, I'd like you to consider watching a couple of movies, and then reading a couple of books.

"Food Inc." - Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser (2009)
"Healing Cancer From Inside Out" - Mike Anderson (2008)
"Eat to Live" by Dr. Joel Fuhrman
"The China Study" by Dr. T. Colin Campbell

We're all going to come up with different conclusions, especially if we do more research beyond this. I encourage you to find more information in the ocean of data that's out there. But, I'd like to provide my personal conclusions, and the actions I'll take in my personal life.

What matters most is what you DONT eat, especially if you're talking about cancer and other diseases. Cancer requires a specific environment to exist, based almost exclusively on one's diet. And the common thread is animal products and the proteins that come from them. Suffice it to say, if you completely eliminate all animal products from your diet (dairy, milk, cheese, eggs, chicken, beef, pork, fish), you can prevent or reverse the effects of cancer and other disease. Did I read that right? We know what causes cancer and there's a cure for it, and it's not a magic pill that takes 500 continuous doses that cost $5000 per dose? Yes, that's right.

You'll ask why, you'll question, and that's good. You should question, you should never trust anything you read, you should find out for yourself. It has to do with the pancreatic enzymes your body produces, and how they are meant to break down the protective protein layer of cancer cells. Once the protein layer is broken down, your immune system kills the cancer cells. When you eat animal proteins, these enzymes are diverted to break the animal proteins down, instead of breaking down the cancer cells. And when you eat animal proteins regularly in mass, then the protein layers of cancer cells are not broken down, and they multiply, causing cancer. Vegetable proteins, on the other hand, do not require any pancreatic enzymes to be diverted, they are most easily assimilated and digested by the body. So, if have cancer, and you stop eating animal proteins, your pancreatic enzymes will go back and break down the protective protein layers of the cancerous tumor cells, and your immune system will kill the cancer cells, and reduce the cancerous tumors, until they are completely eliminated.

My brother, who is 8 years older than me, has been a lifelong smoker. Just a few weeks ago, at the behest of so many people who care about him in our family, he quit smoking. He's done it before, but he said this time, he's serious. We'll see. It's better not to smoke, than to smoke, right? Or so I thought.

Consider this. Just 30 years ago, there were (let's assume the numbers for the sake of argument) 10 million smokers and 2.5 million cases of lung cancer. Since then, there has been a huge emphasis to tax tobacco, have non-smoking zones everywhere, and literally denounce smoking. Today, there are 5 million smokers, half of what we had 30 years ago. So, what do you think happened to number of cases of lung cancer? Cut in half? You'd think. It went down 0.5%, to 2.4875 million lung cancer cases. Huh?

So, I tell my brother this, and tell him that it's his diet of dairy and animal proteins, and not the smoking that he should worry about. He's incredulous, and he should be, and says "So, what, you want me to start smoking again?" I respond, "From the data, it's better that you smoke, if that meant cutting out the animal proteins completely." He doesn't believe me, thinks it crazy to not eat meat and drink milk.

Think about this...

1.) Why do you drink milk? And eat dairy products?
2.) Why do you eat meat, eggs, etc.?

If the answer is for the calcium and protein, then re-think your diet. You can get calcium and protein from a plant-based diet, in a more efficient package, and without any of the side effects and disease causing ailments. If the answer is cereal (for milk), then consider an alternative (rice, soy, or almond milk). If the answer is taste, then consider changing "taste" to "how you feel" afterwards. Try to cut out meat for a few weeks, and see how you feel. "Taste" is so temporary, lasts a few seconds. "Feel" last hours, days, months, years.

I miss my father very much. And I know for sure he ate animal proteins, which were likely the cause of his cancer and death. And even at his late stage, it's possible we could've saved him, if we knew then what we know now. No guarantees, but at the same time, chemotherapy provided no guarantees and weakened him greatly. The doctor's diagnosis was that he had 2-3 months to live, and he was right. Once the chemo started, he was right. But, if we knew there was an alternative, at least to try, maybe he'd be here today, playing with my daughters, the grandkids he never met, and joking with me like he always did, with a smile and a laugh.

I have been a quasi-vegetarian (which we'll discuss in a later post) for a while now, eating meat rarely, and now I'm what I would call "animal-protein free" or "severely animal-protein limited". Heck, once in a long while, if there's a mass craving, then just eat it and move on, no big deal. But, get back to the core and understand why.

Please. Watch the movies, read the books. Come to your own conclusions. Make changes in your life if you see fit, and share what you've learned.