Cancer: disease of civilisation

Part 3: Where does the fault lie?

As far as conventional medicine is concerned, the preferred methods for treating cancer are surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. Cancer cells are removed or their growth slowed -- but no attempt is made to eliminate the disease by strengthening the body's natural defence, the immune system. Indeed, chemotherapy and radiation, by compromising the immune system, do exactly the opposite.

Not surprisingly, many scientists have been profoundly disappointed in the trend of cancer research and its lack of success since the end of the nineteenth century. In the preface to his book, Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure, Dr. Alexander Berglas of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, wrote in 1957 'Over the years, cancer research has become the domain of specialists in various fields. Despite the outstanding contributions of these scientists, we have been getting farther and farther away from our goal, the curing of cancer.'[1]

More than 30 years in the field of cancer research convinced Berglas that the methods of research 'had the peculiar result of becoming an obstacle to the study of the whole', and that to continue as they were, 'is not to our advantage'. 'I have come to the conclusion', he wrote, 'that cancer may perhaps be just another intelligible natural process whose cause is to be found in our environment and mode of life.' Berglas was writing particularly of the foods we eat and the way in which they are grown and prepared.

Interestingly, under 'Prediction of Cancer Mortality', Berglas says the National Cancer Institute of the United States predicted (presumably in 1956) that '32%, of new?born children are expected to contract cancer during their lifetime'. That estimate is remarkably accurate.

As to the contrast between 'civilised' and 'uncivilised' countries since 1900, Dr. Berglas wrote: 'Accounts of regions free from cancer reveal the influence of civilization on the processes of cancer. . . . We are faced with the grim prospect that the advance of cancer and of civilization parallel each other.'

Are primitive peoples permanently cancer free?

The answer to this question from eye witnesses at the time is unanimously, No. Primitive peoples have no more immunity to cancers than we have. Once introduced to 'civilised' foods they succumb to the disease as readily as we do. While there were no known cases of cancer when Dr Albert Schweitzer first went to in Gabon, he noted sadly that: 'In the course of the years we have seen cases of cancer in growing numbers in our region. My observations incline me to attribute this to the fact that the natives were living more and more after the manner of the whites . . .'

But what aspect of our diet causes cancer?

When it comes to possible dietary causes of cancer, frontier doctors have written apparently contrary views based on their own experiences: when they could find no cancer among vegetarian cultures they were prone to warn against meat; and where no cancers were discovered among meat eaters they tended to caution against mixed or vegetarian diets.

Major General Sir Robert McCarrison, a British army doctor who worked predominantly in the Indian sub-continent, warned against meat as probably being the cancer-causing agent. McCarrison was particularly impressed with the health of the Hunzas, a people who live in a secluded valley in the Karakorum Mountains. He attributed their health to their mainly vegetarian diet. A typical statement appears in McCarrison's Studies in Deficiency Disease published in 1921. After quoting, with approval, the famous Danish nutritionist, Dr. Mikkel Hindhede, to the effect that 'The principal cause of death lies in food and drink,' McCarrison wrote of the Hunza:

'My own experience provides an example of a race, unsurpassed in perfection of physique and in freedom from disease in general, whose sole food consists to this day of grains, vegetables, and fruits, with a certain amount of milk and butter, and goat's meat only on feast days. . . . Amongst these people the span of life is extraordinarily long; and such service as I was able to render them during seven years spent in their midst was confined chiefly to the treatment of accidental lesions, the removal of senile cataract, plastic operations for granular eyelids, or the treatment of maladies wholly unconnected with food supply.'

But many more have pointed out that, before they started to get cancer in the twentieth century, the traditional diet of the Inuit came entirely from animal sources and contained no plant material at all. And, actually, cataract at least is connected with 'food supply'.

It is always suggested when diseases such as cancer start appearing after people adopt a 'healthy' Western diet that, as these diseases are generally diseases of old age, their appearance must be because these peoples are living longer. But that's an excuse not borne out by evidence. Dr. Diamond Jenness, in his book, The Copper Eskimos, says: 'Amongst adults, death was nearly always due to natural causes, either old age or the perils that are inseparable from life in the Arctic!' And Dr. Henry W. Greist, in his Seventeen Years with the Eskimos, speaking of the ancestors of those north Alaskans among whom he was first able to diagnose cancer in 1933, says: 'the Eskimo of the far North was healthy . . . He lived to a very great age!'

So what is the answer? The difference in health patterns between primitive and civilised peoples seems to lie in two directions: Firstly, infants are reared in primitive societies as Nature intended them to be reared: at the breast; and secondly, the people live on the unsophisticated — and unprocessed — foods of Nature.

McCarrison discusses these at length:

'I don't suppose that one in every thousand of them has ever seen a tinned salmon, a chocolate, or a patent infant food, nor that as much sugar is imported into their country in a year as is used in a moderately sized hotel of this city in a single day . . . enforced restriction to unsophisticated foodstuffs of Nature is compatible with fertility, long life, continued vigour, perfect physique, and a remarkable freedom from digestive and gastrointestinal disorders, and from cancer.'

But the food of civilised societies is very different. We are no longer content with such unsophisticated natural foods. McCarrison declared that we 'prefer preserved, purified, polished, pickled and canned' food. He goes on (about 'civilised' food):

'One way or another, by desiccation, by chemicals, by heating, by freezing and thawing, by oxidation and decomposition, by milling and polishing, he applies the principles of his civilization — the elimination of the natural and substitution of the artificial — to the foods he eats and the fluids he drinks. With such skill does he do so that he often converts his food into a "dead" fuel mass . . . in consequence of food habits they have fostered, normal bodily function cannot be sustained . . .'

That was written over three-quarters of a century ago. Not only is the situation no better now, has deteriorated even further. Today, relatively few people eat food that hasn't been massively processed and denatured. And, apart from '5 portions of fruit and vegetables', all the foods regarded as 'healthy' by conventional nutritionists are processed: the cereals, bread, pasta, polyunsaturated vegetable margarines and oils, low-fat dairy products, soya. Of the tens of thousands of different food products sold in supermarkets, only a very small proportion are really fit for human consumption.

References

[1]. Berglas, Dr. Alexander. Cancer: Nature, Cause and Cure. Paris, 1957.

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4: Part 5

"One must attend in medical practice not primarily to plausible theories but to experience combined with reason." Hippocrates

BARRY'S BOOKS

New book in Dutch

Cancer: disease of civilisation

Part 3: Where does the fault lie?

Are primitive peoples permanently cancer free?

But what aspect of our diet causes cancer?

References

Related Articles