Breast cancer—more confusion & false hope about genetics

Posted on 09/29/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

While continuing to keep the number one cause a secret

Walk for the cure, hope & pray for a miracle, get routine screenings and keep on doing what you’re doing—while everyone in the huge cancer industry keeps getting paid.

All week long, we’ve been hearing about the new findings on breast cancer that “are fundamentally reshaping the scientific understanding of the disease.” It’s been in all the newspapers and on the morning and evening news of every network. You would think that someone had discovered a pill that would have ended all cancer forever.

Apparently, the researchers have identified four genetically distinct types of the cancer. That means that, depending on every person’s genetics, they think that they will be able to deliver a custom drug to every individual. So what does all of this mean? Five things come to mind:

  1. To the average viewer, “No need for me to change anything that I’m doing, because there’s going to be a drug coming out soon that will knock out my cancer if it’s diagnosed. Isn’t modern medicine a wonderful thing?”
  2. It reinforces the treatment paradigm that has not worked for 41 years (when we declared war on cancer) and that is watch your risk factors, get screened regularly and take action (drug, chemo, surgery, radiation) after you are diagnosed.
  3. It means continuation of the “status quo” with regards to our vast inter-connected system of food-science-medicine-government-insurance-media. No lifestyle changes necessary—which is just the way the system likes it. Everyone continues to get paid as usual.
  4. It means that the cost of health care keeps going up at the same torrid pace. Do you think creating custom drugs for everyone is going to be a bargain? These are exactly the kinds of things that will bring our cost of health care to the previously predicted 31% by 2035. When does the madness end?
  5. Finally, it means that millions of people will suffer and die needlessly from preventable diseases—because they were never told the truth about the leading cause of  breast cancer, all other cancers, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and every other chronic disease known to mankind.

It’s the food!

Meanwhile Gina Kolata of the New York Times writes that this wonderful news has “electrified” the field. This, in spite of the fact that any transformative new treatments are an unspecified number of  “years” away from reality. From Gina’a article:

Researchers and patient advocates caution that it will still take years to translate the new insights into transformative new treatments. Even within the four major types of breast cancer, individual tumors appear to be driven by their own sets of genetic changes. A wide variety of drugs will most likely need to be developed to tailor medicines to individual tumors.

The study was part of the NIH Cancer Genome Atlas. NIH HQ in Bethesda, MD — where not a single one of the 27 institutes is devoted to nutrition. Imagine the billions of tax dollars that are spent without ever telling us exactly what we need to do to be healthy.

A few excerpts (See link below) from all of those great minds who will spend their entire lives searching for the cure; almost like fiddling while Rome burns…

  • “This is the road map for how we might cure breast cancer in the future,” said Dr. Matthew Ellis of Washington University, a researcher for the study.
  • “There are a lot of steps that turn basic science into clinically meaningful results,” said Karuna Jaggar, executive director of Breast Cancer Action, an advocacy group. “It is the ‘stay tuned’ story.”
  • “We now have a good view of what goes wrong in breast cancer,” said Joe Gray, a genetic expert at Oregon Health & Science University, who was not involved in the study. “We haven’t had that before.”
  • “There has never been a breast cancer genomics project on this scale,” said the atlas’s program director, Brad Ozenberger of the National Institutes of Health.
  • “It’s incredible,” said Dr. James Ingle of the Mayo Clinic, one of the study’s 348 authors, of the ovarian cancer connection. “It raises the possibility that there may be a common cause.”
  • “We are really getting at the roots of these cancers,” said Dr. Charles Perou of the University of North Carolina, who is the lead author of the study.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry, Cornell University—author of The China Study

The Bottom Line. The entire system is excruciatingly frustrating and is incapable of fixing itself. Too much money riding on maintaining the status quo. We’ll need independent leadership to re-awaken the world to the incredible power of a whole foods, plant-based diet.

I should add that “the food” may not be the answer to preventing all cancer, but the percent preventable (with an optimal diet from birth) is very likely to be north of 75%. Dr. Campbell summed up our system dilemma in The China Study:

The entire system—government, science, medicine, industry and media—promotes profits over health, technology over food and confusion over clarity. Most, but not all, of the confusion about nutrition is created in legal, fully disclosed ways and is disseminated by unsuspecting, well-intentioned people, whether they are researchers, politicians or journalists.

Consecutive daily blogs (numerals from New Mexico)

The most damaging aspect of the system is not sensational, nor is it likely to create much of a stir upon its discovery. It is a silent enemy that few people see and understand.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

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Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Cancer | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Connecting the dots: FOOD . Obesity . Diabetes . Alzheimer’s!

Posted on 09/27/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

Mark Bittman. Is Alzheimer’s “Type 3 Diabetes”? New York Times

In Mark’s 9-25-12 article (See link below), he hit the nail on the head when he said, “The idea that Alzheimer’s might be Type 3 diabetes has been around since 2005, but the connection between poor diet and Alzheimer’s is becoming more convincing.”

Mark Bittman, New York Times

Amen to that news. Once again, Mark distinguishes himself as the ONLY mainstream journalist out there who continues to share the deadly news about our many food-driven, non-communicable diseases. As for connecting the dots, here’s what he had to say:

Let’s connect the dots: We know that the American diet is a fast track not only to obesity but to Type 2 diabetes and other preventable, non-communicable diseases, which now account for more deaths worldwide than all other causes combined.

We also already know that people with diabetes are at least twice as likely to get Alzheimer’s, and that obesity alone increases the risk of impaired brain function.

He went on to say that roughly one third of all Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic and commented that those conditions are treatable but incurable. On that point I would disagree and so would all five of the pioneering medical doctors (in our book) who’ve been reversing (curing) type 2 diabetes for many decades—with nothing but a simple shift to a whole foods, plant-based diet. Here’s what one of them had to say on the cover of our book:

“What’s good for you is also good for our planet. Although heart disease and diabetes kill more people each year worldwide than all other diseases combined, these are completely preventable and even reversible for at least 95% of people today by changing our diet and lifestyle. This book shows you how.”

—DEAN ORNISH, MD, Founder, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco; and author of The Spectrum and Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease

I’ll bet you fifty bucks you won’t find out exactly what you need to do to prevent this horrible disease on their website. They will no doubt recommend the same disease-promoting “lean meat and low-fat dairy” garbage that you’ll hear from the ACS, AHA and the ADA.

I am not sure why Mark continues to call these diseases incurable. Certainly, we don’t hear much about that fact from mainstream medicine; they prefer to talk about spending money “managing” your diseases with drugs, surgery and other expensive and invasive means.

But the reality is that you can simply get rid of those diseases in 95% of the cases. Esselstyn, Furhman, Barnard, McDougall AND Ornish all agree on that.

Aside from that one point, Mark’s article is brilliant. It is somewhat of a primer on what Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are all about and the staggering prediction of a great many more cases of Type 3 diabetes (Alzheimer’s) as our baby boomers approach their 70s and 80s. He writes:

If the rate of Alzheimer’s rises in lockstep with Type 2 diabetes, which has nearly tripled in the United States in the last 40 years, we will shortly see a devastatingly high percentage of our population with not only failing bodies but brains.

Even for the lucky ones this is terrible news, because 5.4 million Americans (nearly 2 percent, for those keeping score at home) have the disease, the care for which — along with other dementias — will cost around $200 billion this year.

The link between diet and dementia negates our notion of Alzheimer’s as a condition that befalls us by chance. Adopting a sane diet, a diet contrary to the standard American diet (which I like to refer to as SAD), would appear to give you a far better shot at avoiding diabetes in all of its forms, along with its dreaded complications.

Dr. Neal Barnard wrote an entire book about reversing diabetes—and it’s nothing new.

For your convenience, I have provided the source article along withe a few of my earlier blogs on diabetes and Alzheimer’s:

Sane Diet? As for Mark’s recommendation of a “sane” diet, provided here is exactly what that means. Quite simply, try to get the vast majority of your calories from whole, plant-based foods. Find out how to do that in this handy kit:

Consecutive daily blogs (numerals today from Spain)

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Alzheimer's Disease, Diabetes, Obesity | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Arnold Schwarzenegger and the 10,000 hour rule of success

Posted on 09/27/2012 by J. Morris Hicks

A challenging new role for the terminator? Read on.

What’s on tap next for the former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California?

On Monday morning (9-23-12), I heard Leslie Stahl talking about the former California governor’s new “tell all” book, Total Recall. With the book raising a bit of a controversy among family members and others, CBS This Morning co-hosts Charlie Rose & Nora O’Donnell were both asking, “Why in the world is he doing this? Why dredge all of this old news up again? What’s in it for him?”

Leslie responded, “He’s looking for a fourth act.” She then noted that he’d reached the world class level in three totally different fields of endeavor: bodybuilding, acting and politics—although one could argue that the last two are quite similar. She also mentioned the 10,000-hour rule, made famous by author Malcolm Gladwell, who claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

4th Act? At this point I was thinking, maybe Arnold’s fourth act could be tackling the world-saving task of helping to lead the human race back to the natural diet for our species. For our health, for the cost of health care, for the environment, for the critters and for the longterm sustainability of the human race. So, I am thinking:

“Why don’t we hire the Terminator for the world’s most important task?”

When Leslie Stahl mentioned a “4th act” for the governor, I immediately thought of one.

But does he have the 10,000 hours of experience and what does he know about the natural diet for our species? Let’s take a look at the second question first.

A brief internet search reveals that he probably knows very little about what we really should be eating. He’s probably not read The China Study and he probably believes that our most important nutrient is protein—from animals.

But, after reading a handful of books and visiting with a few people like Bill Clinton, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tony Gonzalez, T. Colin Campbell, Caldwell Esselstyn and Dean Ornish—the terminator will know all he needs to know about the optimal, whole foods, plant-based diet for humans. Like me, he will probably experience a blinding flash of the obvious fairly early in this orientation phase—at which time, he will probably say, “Oh my God, we’re eating the wrong food!”

But what about the 10,000 hours? He doesn’t need to have 10,000 hours of training in plant-based nutrition to be the leader; he just needs to “get it,” regardless of how few hours it might take. Primarily what he needs he already has: leadership skills, international recognition and the ability to sell his ideas to others. Leslie Stahl, who just interviewed him for 60 Minutes said that he was one of the most charming, interesting and witty people that she’d ever met.

As the “Terminator,” he is probably one of the most recognizable faces in the world.

The Bottom Line. We need an internationally recognized person who is ready to take the lead and make this Harmony Project the number one priority in his life. He will then recruit other leaders who will help in spreading this world-changing message around the globe.

FYI, the Harmony Project is what I call the collective process of rapidly moving the human race in the direction of living in harmony with the rest of the planet. And the single most important step that we can take is moving rapidly in the direction of a whole foods, plant-based diet.

Maybe someone who reads this blog can get it in the hands of the former governor. Maybe he’ll “get it” and maybe he won’t, but it’s worth a shot. If he’s looking for a fourth act that will dwarf the combined significance of his first three, this one could be it—and it would certainly enable him to fulfill his most famous promise:

I’ll Be Back!

If so, welcome back Mr. Governor. It will be fun working with you as we all work together to lead the world in the implementation of the simple truths found in this handy kit. Hasta La Vista, Baby!

Consecutive daily blogs. (No endorsement of the product; just acknowledging their providing today’s numerals.)

One more thing. As for the 10,000 hour rule, I believe that I am there in my new career. After almost ten years of studying, writing, speaking, blogging and coaching—I proclaim to have reached the 10,,000 hour level today—with the posting of my 600th consecutive daily blog.

That works out to only 2 hours, 47 minutes per day since I started in November of 2002. I also believe that my 10,000 hours in this new career exceeds the combined total time invested in earning my engineering degree and my MBA.

As for The Harmony Project mentioned earlier, a tour of these earlier blogs will give you a good idea of the kind of international leadership that is needed—urgently. Okay, maybe Arnold is a long shot. Maybe not. Will someone please forward this blog to someone who knows Arnold? And tell him we’ve got an idea for his 4th Act.

Handy 4-piece take-charge-of-your-health kit—from Amazon.com

Want to find out how healthy your family is eating? Take our free 4Leaf Diagnostic Survey. It takes less than five minutes and you can score it yourself. After taking the survey, please give me your feedback as it will be helpful in the development of our future 4Leaf app for smartphones. Send feedback to jmorrishicks@me.com

International. We’re now reaching people in over 100 countries. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter or get daily blog notices by “following” us in the top of the right-hand column. For occasional updates, join our periodic mailing list.

To order more of my favorite books—visit our online BookStore now

J. Morris Hicks, working daily to promote health, hope and harmony on planet Earth.

For help in your own quest to take charge of your health, you might find some useful information at our 4Leaf page or some great recipes at Lisa’s 4Leaf Kitchen.

Got a question? Let me hear from you at jmorrishicks@me.com. Or give me a call on my cell at 917-399-9700.

SHARE and rate this post below.

Blogging daily at hpjmh.com…from the seaside village of Stonington, Connecticut – Be well and have a great day.

—J. Morris Hicks, board member, T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Posted in Activism & Leadership, Celebrities | 8 Comments