Antioxidants and Cancer: Have we got it Backwards?
pipeline.corante.com
pipeline.corante.com
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.
We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and other antioxidants in pill form. The news there is not so good, it seems vitamin pills may be worse then useless.
With cancer it's more complicated. Some vitamins like C and D have proven anti-cancer properties but in doses that would kill you. In low doses C might actually be helping some cancers, as they can use it as well as healthy cells.
In summary:
Backward? No.
Oversimplified? Yes, it is complicated.
Maybe check out http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2007/12/fruit-and-veg... It is a blog post but it seems to have reasonable sourcing. However, I do agree with your conclusion: it's complicated!
I don't see why one should necessarily assume that the diets might prevent cancer before it happens will cure cancer once it happens, yet it seems like the article is making something like an argument for this...
But plants did not evolve fruits to make animals healthier. Plants evolved fruits so that animals can spread the seeds.
claims like x improves y are abundant. sadly we don't often see the %quantitative improvements and fall into "every little bit helps"
then we get another claim like "a prevents b", then blindly follows. while a and x are good in its own rights, the 'interaction' effect is so complicated that taking them will become net negative
Interesting random blog page describing research that shows a fruit- and vegetable-rich diet may actually be bad for you: http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/phytochemical-fallacie...
(And some going the other way, too.)
> Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead.
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world.
>After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants.
and this couldn't have anything to do with anything else? environment? lifestyle? genetics? affluence? etc.? there's more than one way to get cancer, diet alone will not save you.
Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later:
Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.
The evolutionary history of cooking
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html
goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
Remember that by definition we only eat the edible fruits!!! Most plants bear some kind of fruit and most of them are inedible to humans.
I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to take a look at cancer rates in Ireland (pre-potato famine). Most of the farmers/serfs there had a diet of mostly potatoes as I understand it. Did they have higher or lower cancer rates?
I like Michael Pollan's simple advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
One other thing, from a behavioral perspective, if you come out with a new health food, people don't stop eating bad food and start eating more health food, they just add the health food on top of the crap.
conclusion? eat whole food, plant-based diet
and we don't need labels like vegetarian/vegan. why? because eating fried fries, potatoe chips, smoking, drinking, sodas, candies ... while correctly not including animals ... are not healthy
have you read the china study yet? if you haven't, please restrain from commenting, thx