REFLEXION ON BREAST CANCER AND DAIRY PRODUCTS
By Christian Domergue

We received a few days ago a newsletter having to do with breast cancer and dairy. I thought the subject was interesting. Of course I checked its "author" and was reassured to learn that Professor Jane Plant Ph.D., C.B.E., is one of Britain's most distinguished scientists.
She is chief scientist of the British Geological Survey and continues to sit on many influential government and international committees. In 1999, she was awarded Britain's most prestigious honor, the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Prize. Professor Plant lives in Nottingham with her husband and children.

Her theory is that since women in China rarely get breast cancer it could be due to the fact that the Chinese very rarely drink milk (or dairy products in general). This by the way is changing as more and more Chinese think it is "cool" to act and eat like westerners! What is happening in Japan is most probably going to happen in China... read on:

"Up to a fifth of Japanese children aged from five to 12 who are overweight suffer, or are at risk of developing, metabolic syndrome, a range of symptoms including high cholesterol and large waistlines, according to a study released last week. Left untreated, it can lead to serious illnesses such as strokes and heart disease. Nationwide, the condition afflicts an estimated 23 million Japanese, the health ministry warns.

Although middle-aged 'salarymen' are at greatest risk, children as young as nine are now suffering from type-2 diabetes, a phenomenon unheard of in Japan only a few years ago. Experts say the looming health crisis is being fomented by a surge in demand for highly calorific food sold by the top US food chains." The Observer, Sunday 8 April 2007

Going back to the relation between breast cancer and dairy, one has to be careful not to think that a miracle cure for one can be a miracle cure for all!
However, it is true that:
a) dairy product are acidic (as is most of the food served in the U.S.).
b) uncontrolled acidity is the cause of many illnesses (so is high alkalinity). Proper pH balance is key to good health.
High acidity can affect all major body systems, especially the digestive, intestinal, circulatory, respiratory and immune systems. A pH-balanced environment maintains proper metabolic function and allows the body to function optimally. It also maintains alkaline reserves that are used to meet emergency demands.

I remember Dr. Jack Richason N.D. telling me that he had never seen a cancer patient who did not have a very acidic body.

Most people who have unbalanced pH are "acidic." This condition forces the body to borrow calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium - from vital organs and bones to buffer the acid and safely remove it from the body. This process can weaken these organs and bones over time.

Acidosis may lead to serious health concerns and affect most body systems.
Cardiovascular weakness - Weight gain
Bladder and kidney concerns - Immune deficiency
Acceleration of free radical damage - Structural system weakness, including brittle bones and hip fractures
Joint discomfort and other discomfort associated with lactic acid buildup - Low energy.

Back to breast cancer and dairy products

Now that we know the effects of acidity we can understand that it can be one of the "root" cause of cancer or of any other diseases.
A weakened immune system is the door opened to health related problems (so is the acceleration of free radical damages).
Cancer, in my opinion, might be caused, in part, by: too much acidity in the body, trauma (particularly breast cancer), fear, heredity, chemicals environment etc.
What is certain, though, is that the body, your body is perfectly equipped to handle and fix any diseases in most cases. This, we must always keep in mind. Personal -positive- attitude when faced with a major disease is key to solving any major health issue.

So, what Professor Jane Pant did with success is threefold:
1. Attitude... she decided to fight, looked for a possible reason as to "why" dit it happen to her?
2. She controlled her body pH and stopped eating ALL dairy products.
3. Meditation: Daily she spent sometimes with herself AND the higher Power. This is most important.
Deep inside an individual is often hidden the reason(s) as to why one catches a major disease. Trying to find out this reason (trauma, anger, revenge, hatred, family dispute...) and positively deal with it is essential to heal. That is why meditation is so important.
Meditation might lead one to wisely surrender oneself to the Higher Power of the spiritual world.
"Without spirituality it is difficult to achieve full recovery." (David R. Hawkins M.D.).

Let's read what Jane Plant had to say about her very successful fight against breast cancer.

Excerpt from Jane Plant's book: Your Life Is In Your Hands

Why Women In China Do Not Get Breast Cancer?
By Prof. Jane Plant, PhD, CBE
'an astonishing book....it could save your life' - Sunday People
'amazing...her message is one that every woman must read' - Daily Mail
'indispensible reading' - Professor Devra Lee Davies (US National Cancer Institute)

I had no alternative but to die or to try to find a cure for myself. I am a scientist – surely there was a rational explanation for this cruel illness that affects one in 12 women in the UK?
I had suffered the loss of one breast, and undergone radiotherapy. I was now receiving painful chemotherapy, and had been seen by some of the country’s most eminent specialists. But, deep down, I felt certain I was facing death. I had a loving husband, a beautiful home and two young children to care for. I desperately wanted to live.

Fortunately, this desire drove me to unearth the facts, some of which were known only to a handful of scientists at the time.

Anyone who has come into contact with breast cancer will know that certain risk factors – such as increasing age, early onset of womanhood, late onset of menopause and a family history of breast cancer – are completely out of our control. But there are many risk factors, which we can control easily.

These “controllable” risk factors readily translate into simple changes that we can all make in our day-to-day lives to help prevent or treat breast cancer. My message is that even advanced breast cancer can be overcome because I have done it.

The first clue to understanding what was promoting my breast cancer came when my husband Peter, who was also a scientist, arrived back from working in China while I was being plugged in for a chemotherapy session.

He had brought with him cards and letters, as well as some amazing herbal suppositories, sent by my friends and science colleagues in China.

The suppositories were sent to me as a cure for breast cancer. Despite the awfulness of the situation, we both had a good belly laugh, and I remember saying that this was the treatment for breast cancer in China, then it was little wonder that Chinese women avoided getting the disease. Those words echoed in my mind. Why didn’t Chinese women in China get breast cancer? I had collaborated once with Chinese colleagues on a study of links between soil chemistry and disease, and I remembered some of the statistics.

The disease was virtually non-existent throughout the whole country. Only one in 10,000 women in China will die from it, compared to that terrible figure of one in 12 in Britain and the even grimmer average of one in 10 across most Western countries. It is not just a matter of China being a more rural country, with less urban pollution. In highly urbanized Hong Kong, the rate rises to 34 women in every 10,000 but still puts the West to shame. The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have similar rates. And remember, both cities were attacked with nuclear weapons, so in addition to the usual pollution-related cancers, one would also expect to find some radiation-related cases, too.

The conclusion we can draw from these statistics strikes you with some force. If a Western woman were to move to industrialized, irradiated Hiroshima, she would slash her risk of contracting breast cancer by half. Obviously this is absurd. It seemed obvious to me that some lifestyle factor not related to pollution, urbanization or the environment is seriously increasing the Western woman’s chance of contracting breast cancer.

I then discovered that whatever causes the huge differences in breast cancer rates between oriental and Western countries, it isn’t genetic.

Scientific research showed that when Chinese or Japanese people move to the West, within one or two generations their rates of breast cancer approach those of their host community.

The same thing happens when oriental people adopt a completely Western lifestyle in Hong Kong. In fact, the slang name for breast cancer in China translates as ‘Rich Woman’s Disease’. This is because, in China , only the better off can afford to eat what is termed ‘ Hong Kong food’.

The Chinese describe all Western food, including everything from ice cream and chocolate bars to spaghetti and feta cheese, as “Hong Kong food”, because of its availability in the former British colony and its scarcity, in the past, in mainland China.

So it made perfect sense to me that whatever was causing my breast cancer and the shockingly high incidence in this country generally, it was almost certainly something to do with our better-off, middle-class, Western lifestyle. There is an important point for men here, too. I have observed in my research that much of the data about prostate cancer leads to similar conclusions.

According to figures from the World Health Organization, the number of men contracting prostate cancer in rural China is negligible, only 0.5 men in every 100,000. In England, Scotland and Wales, however, this figure is 70 times higher. Like breast cancer, it is a middle-class disease that primarily attacks the wealthier and higher socio-economic groups, those that can afford to eat rich foods.

I remember saying to my husband, “Come on Peter, you have just come back from China. What is it about the Chinese way of life that is so different?”

Why don’t they get breast cancer?’ We decided to utilize our joint scientific backgrounds and approach it logically.

We examined scientific data that pointed us in the general direction of fats in diets. Researchers had discovered in the 1980s that only l4% of calories in the average Chinese diet were from fat, compared to almost 36% in the West. But the diet I had been living on for years before I contracted breast cancer was very low in fat and high in fibre. Besides, I knew as a scientist that fat intake in adults has not been shown to increase risk for breast cancer in most investigations that have followed large groups of women for up to a dozen years.

Then one day something rather special happened. Peter and I have worked together so closely over the years that I am not sure which one of us first said: “The Chinese don’t eat dairy produce!”

It is hard to explain to a non-scientist the sudden mental and emotional ‘buzz’ you get when you know you have had an important insight. It’s as if you have had a lot of pieces of a jigsaw in your mind, and suddenly, in a few seconds, they all fall into place and the whole picture is clear.

Suddenly I recalled how many Chinese people were physically unable to tolerate milk, how the Chinese people I had worked with had always said that milk was only for babies, and how one of my close friends, who is of Chinese origin, always politely turned down the cheese course at dinner parties.

I knew of no Chinese people who lived a traditional Chinese life who ever used cow or other dairy food to feed their babies. The tradition was to use a wet nurse but never, ever, dairy products.

Culturally, the Chinese find our Western preoccupation with milk and milk products very strange. I remember entertaining a large delegation of Chinese scientists shortly after the ending of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s.

On advice from the Foreign Office, we had asked the caterer to provide a pudding that contained a lot of ice cream. After inquiring what the pudding consisted of, all of the Chinese, including their interpreter, politely but firmly refused to eat it, and they could not be persuaded to change their minds.

At the time we were all delighted and ate extra portions!

Milk, I discovered, is one of the most common causes of food allergy. Over 70% of the world’s population are unable to digest the milk sugar, lactose, which has led nutritionists to believe that this is the normal condition for adults, not some sort of deficiency. Perhaps nature is trying to tell us that we are eating the wrong food.

Before I had breast cancer for the first time, I had eaten a lot of dairy produce, such as skimmed milk, low-fat cheese and yogurt. I had used it as my main source of protein. I also ate cheap but lean minced beef, which I now realized was probably often ground-up dairy cow.

In order to cope with the chemotherapy I received for my fifth case of cancer, I had been eating organic yogurts as a way of helping my digestive tract to recover and repopulate my gut with ‘good’ bacteria.

Recently, I discovered that way back in 1989 yogurt had been implicated in ovarian cancer . Dr Daniel Cramer of Harvard University studied hundreds of women with ovarian cancer, and had them record in detail what they normally ate. wish I’d been made aware of his findings when he had first discovered them.

Following Peter’s and my insight into the Chinese diet, I decided to give up not just yogurt but all dairy produce immediately. Cheese, butter, milk and Even many proprietary brands of margarine marketed as soya, sunflower or olive oil spreads yogurt and anything else that contained dairy produce - it went down the sink or in the rubbish.
It is surprising how many products, including commercial soups, biscuits and cakes, contain some form of dairy produce. can contain dairy produce. I therefore became an avid reader of the small print on food labels.

Up to this point, I had been steadfastly measuring the progress of my fifth cancerous lump with calipers and plotting the results. Despite all the encouraging comments and positive feedback from my doctors and nurses, my own precise observations told me the bitter truth.

My first chemotherapy sessions had produced no effect – the lump was still the same size.
Then I eliminated dairy products. Within days, the lump started to shrink. About two weeks after my second chemotherapy session and one week after giving up dairy produce, the lump in my neck started to itch. Then it began to soften and to reduce in size. The line on the graph, which had shown no change, was now pointing downwards as the tumor got smaller and smaller.

And, very significantly, I noted that instead of declining exponentially (a graceful curve) as cancer is meant to do, the tumor’s decrease in size was plotted on a straight line heading off the bottom of the graph, indicating a cure, not suppression (or remission) of the tumor.

One Saturday afternoon after about six weeks of excluding all dairy produce from my diet, I practiced an hour of meditation then felt for what was left of the lump. I couldn’t find it. Yet I was very experienced at detecting cancerous lumps – I had discovered all five cancers on my own. I went downstairs and asked my husband to feel my neck. He could not find any trace of the lump either.

On the following Thursday I was due to be seen by my cancer specialist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He examined me thoroughly, especially my neck where the tumor had been. He was initially bemused and then delighted as he said, “I cannot find it.”
None of my doctors, it appeared, had expected someone with my type and stage of cancer (which had clearly spread to the lymph system) to survive, let alone be so hale and hearty.

My specialist was as overjoyed as I was. When I first discussed my ideas with him he was understandably skeptical. But I understand that he now uses maps showing cancer mortality in China in his lectures, and recommends a non-dairy diet to his cancer patients.

I now believe that the link between dairy produce and breast cancer is similar to the link between smoking and lung cancer. I believe that identifying the link between breast cancer and dairy produce, and then developing a diet specifically targeted at maintaining the health of my breast and hormone system, cured me.

It was difficult for me, as it may be for you, to accept that a substance as ‘natural’ as milk might have such ominous health implications. But I am a living proof that it works and, starting from tomorrow, I shall reveal the secrets of my revolutionary action plan.

"Professor Plant courageously tells a compelling and very personal story on breast cancer that is a must-read, not only for women interested in this disease but also for the scientific and medical communities, who should sit up and take notice. It is time that the long-alleged nutritional worthiness of dairy be brought up for discussion." --T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, project director of the China-Oxford-Cornell Diet and Health Project, joint chairman of the Diet and Cancer Project of the American Institute for Cancer Research, and co-chairman of the World Cancer Research Fund.

"This important, provocative book by an impressive author cannot be ignored. Through this breathtaking personal odyssey, Jane Plant forces us all to think differently about the causes of breast cancer. Indispensable reading." --Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., Clinton Administration appointee to the National Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, visiting professor, Carnegie Mellon University

"Dr. Jane Plant provides a much-needed challenge to the conventional paradigm in dealing with the epidemic of breast cancer. This authoritative, well-researched but easily read text finally provides a focus on the powerful science of disease prevention. Here are the tools allowing women the ability to reduce their risk." --David Perlmutter, M.D., director of the Permutter Health Center, Naples, Florida

"[This book] should be read by every...woman wishing to avoid breast cancer and to live life to her fullest potential. The book is well documented and easy to read. Your doctor should be recommending it to you." --John McDougall, M.D., medical director of the McDougall Program, St. Helena Hospital, Napa Valley, California