Step 1: How to prevent cancer with diet!
Warning: You may experience increased energy, mental clarity and may start to express great health!
I can hear those of you who have worked with me saying… ‘but you said, there was no one diet for everyone, no one size fits all’ and you are right!
Some people have deficiencies, diseases, intolerances, allergies and are missing parts of their digestive system that makes their individual needs different. I hope that those people are all working with a registered nutrition professional to find the right diet for them!
The healthiest diet for them will always be a modified version of the following diet though, (If you are following a vegan diet, even with cancer, then reconsider and work with an integrative metabolic nutritionist, there are a few of us around!). I will explain why as we work through this series of articles.
This information is based on a typical human, on what we know is evolutionarily right for us all. If we had all followed this diet from year dot, we would be looking at a very different picture of general, public health, right now.
Avoid grains!
I don’t care what the latest food pyramid or official ‘nutri-score’ guideline says (which was influenced by grain and seed oil manufacturers), we didn’t evolve to eat grains as a part of our main diet. The odd handful once in a while, maybe when we came across some edible grains. Imagine the labour for a regular handful of wild grains vs the intense nutrition of eating one mammoth or wild fish!
Our genes cannot have their fullest healthiest expression with a grain based diet. The earliest known human fossil, from a human very similar to us, using stone tools is from about 300,000 years ago. Just for interest, that represents about 1% of the history of the planet. (Earth Now, 2018) We tend to think of our Paleolithic ancestors as being around 10,000 years old but humans are way more ancient than that.
We’ve evolved on this earthy mothership for hundreds of thousands of years. For all of that time, our diet was fish, eggs, meat - anything we could find to forage, catch and kill and eat. Wild plants, roots and whatever wild fruits and berries we found. These wild plants and fruits were not growing in perfect rows, sprayed with pesticides and bloated from excess water content, devoid of nutrients, grown in barren, over-farmed soil.
They were hardy, dense and bitter leaves and wild herbs, they were sour apples and wild berries. There was no such thing as a seedless grape, a clementine or a cavendish banana. There was also no such thing as an orange (and tasteless) uniform, standard carrot or modern potatoes and tomatoes.
We hadn’t begun to farm yet. We lived in harmony with the earth and wild humans enjoyed near perfect human health. While we have found some evidence that cancers existed, they were not a regular occurrence at all and certainly not one in two of us, as is predicted by 2030. (Medical News Today)
Then, we were most likely to die of a broken bone or injury, than chronic disease. The farming of grains was introduced to modern man a mere 4-6000 years ago and research has shown over and over across populations, how the introduction of grains was instantly associated with poorer health and lowered height. (Science Daily, 2011).
When I work with people in my clinic and they stop eating grains on their own personalised diet plans, they universally start to improve. I have never worked with one person who saw an improvement in their health by introducing grains. Put simply, humans didn’t evolve on grains.
Cows evolved to eat grass and herbs and we evolved to eat meat (and a few plants).
There is a reason that grains are called cattle food since wheat and other grains are really, just a cheap filler food, they help cows to get fat (and humans too).
We also don’t want to eat cows or chickens that are eating grains as they also take on the inflammatory oils and negative health consequences from eating this kind of ‘filler food’ that plumps out their muscles with fat as a result of their own dietary carbohydrate consumption being too high (from the grains).
This extra weight = more profit for the producer. Always follow the money…
You are what you eat, eats.
(M Pollen - The Omnivores’ Dilemma)
Avoiding grains is possibly one of the biggest health hacks you could start doing today, and yes, I mean whole grains too. Grains are Wheat, Rye, Barley (this includes bread, pasta and cous cous which are made of wheat). They contain digestion-inhibiting proteins like lectins, high amounts of inflammation causing omega 6 oils and they are also anti-nutrient, meaning they use up the nutrients present in your body to be digested, so they strip you of nourishment.
And most of us make grains our dietary staple…..
Get food that nourishes you instead! You deserve better than fillers!
Still fancy that plastic wrapped roll?
So what nourishes you? I will write about this over the coming few days. Then I will continue to share with you the best nutritional supplements in the fight against cancer.
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Thank you for subscribing to my substack as I write this series of articles that will reveal the right evolutionary diet for humans and that is of course, by default, The Cancer Prevention Diet.
4500 new followers this week and going strong... Next article on how to balance protein in your diet, for cancer, coming up shortly.
Great article, Amanda.
At 77 yrs, I'm only just beginning to appreciate what a healthy diet is.
Our media is full of advice on what to eat to improve health outcomes.
But I have concluded that a healthy diet is not about what we should eat, as this is highly disguised as promoting commercial interests, not your health.
No, a healthy diet describes, from all foods that are available to us, those which should NOT be eaten (or drinken).
I consider myself fortunate indeed to have consumed so much unhealthy food in my lifetime, and be still standing to tell my tale.
But a low carb diet at my age has given me new hope and new lease of life to pursue my self employed career.
And there's still room for improvement!