Cancer Prevention by Changing Diet
New Webpage added May 17, 2009
How do you prevent cancer in your own life? Or, for example, if you are a thirty five year old woman and you recently found out that your sixty year old mother has breast cancer, what do you do? Obviously, if you smoke, you should stop smoking. How would you change your diet? I¹m not sure that the National Cancer Institute can give you a good answer to that question. The National Cancer Institute has asked the National Academy of Sciences to write reports on diet and cancer. The National Academy of Sciences dutifully puts a report into a book. Even if you were to read this book, you would find it incomplete because more research is needed. But the book sits on library shelves. The average American does not receive good answers to what is most important to do if you wish to prevent cancer in your own life.
There are chemicals in food which cause cancer. The best way to study them would be to feed experimental animals these cancer causing substances over the lifespan at the levels human beings actually take in and then see which ones are most important. Believe it or not, this has never been done. There are no tests of dietary cancer causing chemicals at the levels at which they occur in human food.
I was at the National Cancer Institute as a research fellow in 1989-91 and I studied the reports on all the chemicals which occur in food and which may be important in human cancer. If you were to study all these chemicals, this is what you might find.
There is one main group of chemicals to worry about. These chemicals are called the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. They are formed whenever there is incomplete combusion or burning. This incomplete burning also occurs in cigarettes. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are the main cancer causers in cigarettes. But such incomplete burning also takes place in charcoal grills and in the smoking of food. The fat drops on the charcoal, partially burns and spatters up onto the meat. Charcoal grilled meat contains large quantitites of such chemicals.
Why are these chemicals, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons so bad? The body thinks they are cholesterol and pumps them everywhere. They last in the body a long time, up to a month. That is a long time for cancer causing chemicals. They are very potent at causing cancer but probably worst of all is that they taste good, so you don¹t realize what you are taking in.
There is no other class of chemicals which human beings take in which share these characteristics.
How much of these chemicals are in food. A 1.1 kilogram (2.4 pound) charcoal grilled steak contains as much cancer causing chemical as 600 cigarettes (Ref. 1).
Let us look at smoked food. The amount of cancer causing chemicals in 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of smoked trout is the same as that contained in 250 cigarettes.
If you were to eat 5 1/2 pound charcoal grilled hamburgers per month, you would taking in the equivalent cancer causing chemicals to 600 cigarettes, or 1 pack per day. If you were to take in 2.2 pounds of smoked fish or meat in the same month, this would be equivalent to 8 cigarettes per day.
Charcoal grills are everywhere as are gas grills. Many people eat smoked foods. Should we wonder why there is a cancer problem in the United States.
When I was first reading these reports, I called an FDA chemist about them. I asked why there is no publicized warning. The FDA makes sure that food companies do not add these chemicals to foods. For example, they will test foods such as barbecue sauce to make sure that such chemicals have not been added. But the FDA chemist told me that the use of charcoal grills is a human behavior and they have nothing to do with that. I have never heard the National Cancer Institute put out a warning that eating charcoal grilled meat is one of the worst things you can do if you have a family history of cancer.
If our government was serious about reducing cancer rates in this country, they should do the following. They should warn people that anyone with a family history of cancer or anyone concerned about cancer should avoid eating charcoal grilled meat and smoked foods. Gas grills are only minimally better than charcoal grills and should also be avoided. If the government were to issue such warnings, cancer rates will go down.
Ref. 1. Linjinsky, W. and P. Shubik. Benzo(a)pyrene and other polynuclear hydrocarbons in Charcoal-Broiled Meat. Science 145:53-55, 1964.
Ref. 2. Bailey, E. J. and N. Dungal. Polcyclic hydrocarbons in Icelandic smoked food. British Journal of Cancer. 12:348 -350, 1958.
