1 Cancer, Diet, and Macrobiotics Nearly sixty years ago, when I first came to the United States, the expected rate of people who would get cancer in their lifetime was about one out of eight. Today this rate has risen to nearly one in two men and one in three women (see Table 1). This year more than 559,000 Americans will die of cancer, and another 1,445,000 new cases will be detected. After decades of increasing mortality rates, the number of deaths from cancer has declined slightly for the first time, reflecting changes in dietary practice, less smoking, and better medical treatment. Altogether, more than 100 million Americans now living will eventually get the disease. Along with cardiovascular disease and medical error, cancer is one of the three major causes of death in modern society. While the mortality rate from some cancers-for example, stomach, cervix, and rectum-has declined in the United States, it has steeply risen for others, notably lung, melanoma, prostate, multiple myloma, and brain tumors (see Table 2). Despite ever more sophisticated methods of diagnosis and treatment, the consensus is that the War on Cancer declared in 1971 is being lost.
"My overall assessment is that the national cancer program must be judged a qualified failure," Dr. John Bailer, who served on the staff of the National Cancer Institute for twenty years and was editor of the New En gland Journal of Medicine, contends. "The five-year survival statistics of the American Cancer Society are very misleading. They now count things that are not cancer, and, because we are able to diagnose at an earlier stage of the disease, patients falsely appear to live longer. Our whole cancer research in the past twenty years has been a total failure. More people over thirty are dying from cancer than ever before . More women with mild or benign diseases are being included in statistics and reported as being 'cured.' When government officials point to survival figures and say they are winning the war against cancer they are using those survival rates improperly.
" The United States is not unique in losing the battle against cancer. Infact, among the nations of the world, it ranks in the middle. Twenty-three of the fifty countries recently surveyed had higher mortality rates than the United States for cancer among men, and sixteen had higher rates among women. Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Luxembourg had the highest death rates for men, while Denmark, Scotland, and Hungary had the highest for women. Clearly, cancer is one of the great levelers of the modern age. It strikes high and low, rich and poor, male and female, young and old, black and white, Westerner and Easterner, Democrat and Republican, Muslim and Jew, saint and sinner. There is hardly a family today untouched. Despite the optimistic reports of the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society, the nation has yet to develop a solid campaign of primary prevention.
The focus remains on diagnosis and screening (which are often harmful and cancer-causing in themselves) and on treatment with drugs, surgery, and radiation, which have also been implicated in increasing the risk of the disease. According to the International Agency for Research in Cancer, "Eighty to 90 percent of human cancer is determined environmentally and thus theoretically avoidable. These include the modern diet high in animal products and low in whole grains, fresh fruits, and vegetables; excessive exposure to sunlight, workplace hazards, pollution, toxic products; artificial electromagnetic radiation; and exposure to medical procedures and pharmaceuticals." "Despite the general recognition that 85 percent of all cancers is caused by environmental influences," Hans Ruesch, a medical historian, notes, "less than 10 percent of the National Cancer Institute bud get is given to environmental causes. And despite the recognition that the majority of environmental causes are linked to nutrition, less than 1 percent of the NCI bud get is devoted to nutrition studies." "In our culture, treating disease is enormously profitable," Dr. Robert Sharpe points out. The market in cancer therapies in the United States, Europe, and Japan makes tens of billions of dollars profit annually and is growing at over 10 percent each year.
"Preventing the disease benefits no one except the patient. Just as the drug industry thrives on the 'pill for every ill' mentality, so many of the leading medical charities are financially sustained by the dream of a miracle cure, just around the corner." OTHER HEALTH TRENDS Other chronic and degenerative illnesses are also on the rise. In the last twenty-five years, AIDS has spread around the world, affecting tens of millions of people. Though primarily an immune-deficiency disorder, AIDS is related to cancer, and many AIDS patients come down with Kaposi's sarcoma (a form of skin cancer), lymphoma, and other malignancies. One of the most dramatic increases in recent decades has been in the area of sexual disorders. According to the British Medical Association, the number of new cases of venereal disease has risen 1,700 percent since 1957. In the United States, syphilis rose one-third between 2007 and 2008.
Around the world, herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have assumed epidemic proportions. This year it was widely reported in the United States that one in four teenage girls had an STD. Infertility is also on the rise. Over the last sixty-five years, average sperm counts in American males have dropped dramatically. An analysis of data collected from 1938 to 1990 by the National Institutes of Health indicates that sperm densities in the United States have exhibited an average annual decrease of 1.5 million sperm per milliliter of collected sample, or about 1.5 percent per year. Those in European countries have declined at about twice that rate (3.
1 percent per year). Another study of otherwise healthy college males showed that 23 percent were functionally sterile. The number of cesarean sections has doubled in the last ten years, accounting for 30 percent of all births. The risk of death for C-sections is also about four times higher than for vaginal births even if there is no medical emergency. Women are also about three times as liable to suffer severe complications or experience difficulties during subsequent births. Moreover, more than 550,000 American women, many of childbearing age, currently have their ovaries or uteruses surgically removed each year, primarily because of cancer or the fear of cancer. Many of these are prophylactic operations in completely healthy women who have been told that their risk of developing cancer will be reduced. By age sixty-five, a majority of American women have lost their wombs.
Similar trends are now spreading worldwide. According to many medical experts, more than 90 percent of hysterectomies are unnecessary, and about 40 percent of the time, the ovaries are also needlessly removed during this procedure. In the last few years, obesity has been declared the world's number one health problem by the World Health Organization. It is an underlying condition not only for heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and many other ills, but also for many cancers, including breast cancer, colon cancer, and cancer of the esophagus, thyroid, kidney, uterus, and gall bladder. In the United States, about two out of three adults are overweight or obese, and one of every three children falls into one of these brackets. A host of new diseases has developed to challenge medical science and global health. Avian flu, SARS, and other acute respiratory diseases have killed hundreds of people, threatening to turn into worldwide pandemics. Meanwhile, old illnesses are coming back in more virulent form.
New varieties of multiple-drug resistant pneumonia and staph and other common infections have been reported for which there is no medical relief available. Overprescription of antibiotics, antivirals, and other pharmaceuticals has enabled new, more deadly strains of microbes to evolve. Malaria, once believed to have been eradicated by modern medicine, has also proved invulnerable to many drugs and is spreading, with 2.7 million deaths annually. Tuberculosis, also once believed to have been conquered by new wonder drugs after World War II, has returned in new, virulent forms and causes an estimated 521,000 deaths globally each year. Even the common cold, despite a much publicized medical campaign begun under President John F. Kennedy, remains largely immune to effective treatment. In fact, few major sicknesses, if any, can really be cured by modern methods.
In some cases pain and other discomfort can be relieved and the symptoms temporarily diminished or controlled, but, fundamentally, illness cannot be cured. Prescription drugs, over-the-counter medications, and a host of treatments and procedures, including surgery and radiation, offer at best temporarily relief and, at worst, push the imbalance deeper into the body where it manifests in more serious form later. Altogether, disease accounts for about 80 percent of all deaths worldwide. The rest are caused primarily by accident-often resulting from physical or mental decline-and social violence, including war, crime, and abuse and neglect of children, spouses, and the elderly. In the United States, more people have died in recent decades from homicide than have died on the battlefronts of foreign wars. Violence and terrorism are also on the rise in other parts of the world. Like the human family, the planet as a whole is in urgent need of healing. The natural environment is being destroyed by the unchecked spread-metastases-of technology, development, and urbanization.
Tropical rain forests and millions of spe.