Why We Lost the War on Cancer 

Cancer is currently the second leading cause of death in the U.S., and, by the year 2000, is expected to become the number-one killer. This year, over one million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer, and 600,000 will die of the disease. Despite an ever-rising cancer rate, modern medicine offers little hope in the way of treatment. For example, of the 50% of cancer patients treated with chemotherapy, no more than 5% are helped. Surprisingly, a way to prevent cancer was discovered over 50 years, but the medical profession ignored it. 

In the 1920s, '30s and '40s, scientists were actively investigating the connection between diet and cancer. Epidemiological studies and animal experiments indicated that there was a diet that could protect against cancer—one high in certain micronutrients and low in fat and calories—but the findings were never put into practice. Why? After World War II, byproducts of the military's poison gas experiments began to be used as chemotherapy, and this profitable, career-advancing, high-tech cancer treatment became fashionable. There were few rewards, either economically or career-wise, for suggesting people change their diets to avoid cancer. 

For the next 30 years, while the medical profession was ignoring unprofitable but effective dietary approaches, the fast food industry institutionalized the unhealthy dietary patterns that previous research had warned against. In the 1970s, research again began to focus on prevention, and the importance of diet and lifestyle was rediscovered.  

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it has been known for several decades that 80–90% of cancers are linked to preventable environmental factors such as poor diet, pollution, cigarette smoking and other lifestyle practices. But shifting the emphasis from treatment to prevention at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) would mean a major disruption in the research community and in the businesses that fund that community.  

There is a great financial incentive to maintain the status quo regarding cancer. Over $1 trillion has been spent on cancer research and treatment, and the current cost is $110 billion per year—more than 2% of the Gross National Product. The average cancer patient spends in excess of $100,000 treating his or her disease, and more people make a living from conventional cancer research and prevention on an annual basis than die of the disease. 

Alternative therapies, which are generally nontoxic and inexpensive, present another threat to the fat profits supplied by conventional cancer treatment, and, consequently, they have been the targets of vigorous attacks by officials and agencies aligned with conventional medicine. Tactics used against alternative therapy practitioners include repeated rejection of innovative research proposals, distribution of blacklists, legal prosecution of progressive clinicians, revocation of licenses by medical boards, and guns-drawn raids on alternative medicine offices.  Based on information in: Nutrition Science News, Sept 1997