Today was a rather uneventful day. I did contact a number of my patients and found out that most of them had been approved for the grants that I applied for last week. I have helped to raise almost  $6,000, bringing me more than half way to my goal of $10,000. The most significant event of the day was a lecture that I attended. The subject of the speech was nutritional intervention therapy. I hoped that by attending, I could learn some alternative tactics for helping patients battle cancer.

I immediately knew that it would be an interesting meeting because the speaker spent the first fifteen minutes prefacing the lecture by saying that his research is quite controversial. His research supposedly proved that all animal-based products were a major factor in the development and progression of cancer. In one of his tests, he exposed two groups of rats to large amount of a known cancer-causing carcinogen. He then fed one group a 5% protein diet and the other group a 20% protein diet for 100 weeks or about two years. The results are extremely conclusive; all of the rats in the 20% protein group died and none of the rats in the 5% protein group died. When examining the rats’ on a molecular level,  substantial evidence was shown within the first few days. While cancer cells were quickly developing in the doomed group, the other rats were becoming healthier and staying cancer-free. Years later, he tested humans that had different stages of a variety of cancers. His results were almost identical, the less animal-based proteins that were consumed, the better the patient’s outcome was.

This caused him to develop his idea for an unprocessed, whole-food, plant-based diet. To quote the speaker, “casein is the most significant carcinogen that we consume.” Casein makes up 80% of the protein in cow’s milk. This diet is supposed to prevent and/or cure not only cancer but a variety of diseases including both types of diabetes, and heart problems. Now with that being said, I believe that this is completely absurd. The results of his studies were too perfect to be true. Researchers seldom get that conclusive evidence for their thesis. I am not the only person who believes this either. Once I told Trish, she emailed the Penn oncology nutrition specialists and told them about this man’s research. She agreed that the results were most likely not true.

Despite what I and some of the other doctors believe, this raises a few very important questions. What if? What if he is right about everything that he researched? What if I just learned the remedy for some of the worst diseases afflicting humans today? This is obviously worth pondering. The benefits clearly outweigh the almost non-existent risks. In the future, I would like to try to only eating a whole-food, plant-based, not processed diet for a period of time. Who knows what benefits it could have for me and the worst thing that could possibly happen would be that I don’t like the diet and I switch back. That doesn’t seem too bad.

-Matt