Nutrition
Diet & the healing of cancer
Introductory caveat
Adelle Davis used to say that she never saw anyone get cancer who drank a quart of milk daily, as she did. She stopped saying that when she died of cancer in 1974, leaving behind her a trail of ten million books and a following that was large, devoted, and misinformed.Stephen Barrett, M.D., in Quackwatch on nutritional & dietary oversimplifications
More from Stephen Barrett on Adelle Davis: ”Adelle Davis (1904-1974) was the first ‘health authority’ among modern food faddists who had any formal professional background. She was trained in dietetics and nutrition at the University of California at Berkeley, and got an M.S. degree in biochemistry from the University of Southern California in 1938.
Despite this training, she promoted hundreds of nutritional tidbits and theories that were unfounded. At the 1969 White House Conference on Food and Nutrition, the panel on deception and misinformation agreed that Davis was probably the most damaging source of false nutrition information in the nation.
Most of her ideas were harmless unless carried to extremes, but some were very dangerous. For example, she recommended magnesium as a treatment for epilepsy, potassium chloride for certain patients with kidney disease, and megadoses of vitamins A and D for other conditions...
Davis's most popular book was Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit. George Mann, M.D., Sc.D., of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine undertook the fatiguing task of documenting the book's errors and found an average of one mistake per page...
Gordon Schectman, a researcher at Columbia University's Institute of Human Nutrition, compared 201 statements in Chapter 5 with the publications cited to back them up. He concluded that only thirty (27%) of these statements were supported by the references and that 112 (56%) were either contradicted or not related.
Little Eliza Young ... during her first year of life ... was given ‘generous amounts’ of vitamin A as recommended in Let's Have Healthy Children. As a result, according to the suit filed in 1971 against Davis and her publisher, Eliza's growth was permanently stunted. The estate of Adelle Davis settled in 1976 for $150,000.
Two-month-old Ryan Pitzer was even less fortunate. According to the suit filed by his parents, Ryan was killed in 1978 by the administration of potassium chloride for colic as suggested in the same book. The suit was settled out of court for a total of $160,000-$25,000 from the publisher, $75,000 from Davis's estate, and $60,000 from the potassium product's manufacturer. After the suit was filed, the book was recalled from bookstores, but it was reissued after changes were made by a physician allied with the health-food industry.”
After this introductory caveat meant to illustrate that there may be more nonsense or (sometimes dangerous) half-truths spread in the field of nutrition than in (m)any other field(s) of human exploration, here is a collection of findings on nutrition and health which strives to be more scientifically sound.
Diet after all does seem to play an absolutely pivotal role in both health maintenance and recovery. Often dietary improvements and physical and environmental detoxification alone will heal a person of serious and less serious disease, while sometimes (much) more will be needed for healing cancer and other illness (and for the latter, see for instance Emotions, Healing Cancer & Your Mind, Spirituality, Energetics, Geopathic Stress and Herbs & Supplements.)
Since the nutritional items frequently described as cancer-curative are minerals and trace elements, omega3 fatty acids, raw organic food as well as some supplements (and of course detoxification), all of these receive particular attention on this site. See e.g. Budwig diet, The importance of minerals and trace elements for health and cancer prevention, Healing mineral & trace element deficiencies etc.
... and for the best, easiest, and least expensive ways I know to heal cancer
after studying the subject for some twenty years, click here.
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