Would you eat meat if you had cancer?

Posted on November 23, 2015 by Dr. G

This morning, a friend of mine asked me, “If you had cancer, would you continue to eat meat?” My answer was, unequivocally, YES.

Yesterday, my patient Stephanie told me that the children in her school were moving toward vegetarianism after watching the documentary film Forks Over Knives. She asked me for my thoughts on the subject.

Earlier this week, I had another patient tell me that she recently decided to introduce animal products to her diet after 10 years of being vegan.

When a single topic comes up in conversation three times in one week, it’s a good idea to stop and process it for a while. There may be a bigger meaning here. I am going to do my best to address the topic of eating meat as a clinician, as an educator, as a student, and as someone who tries to practice rational thought and common sense. I will try to avoid my bias as an unapologetic consumer of animal products.

Let’s start with common sense.

Be conscious about your diet.

If your starting point is the standard American diet (S.A.D.), then any conscious decision to eat in an attempt to be a healthier person is going to result in positive effects that will be visible and measureable.

If you choose a new way of eating that is no longer the S.A.D., the benefits will be fairly obvious. You may choose a vegetarian diet, vegan diet, paleo diet, macrobiotic diet, metabolic typing diet, RAW diet, blood type diet, Suzanne Somers diet, Scarsdale diet, Atkins diet, autoimmune diet…the list goes on. In the first year, you will likely notice a positive result as defined by you and maybe even your doctor. Weight loss, increased energy, improved blood markers, and/or reduced need for medications.

The S.A.D. means something different to everyone. Whether you are a minority living in urban NYC with a poor socioeconomic background, a suburban middle- or upper-class caucasian, or you are from the southwestern U.S. of Mexican and/or Native descent; regardless of the type of “Standard American” you are, you all have one thing in common: You do not pay much attention to what you eat. You eat what you like, when you like it, and thoughts of health are secondary to thoughts of desire, cravings, habit, culture and pleasure.

The mere act of making a decision to be conscious about what you eat will result in an improvement no matter the choices you make. That is why there is so much validation for so many different ways of eating.

WHY we should or shouldn’t eat meat.

The evolutionary record is clear about how we evolved as a species and where we reside in the food chain. The sun supplies the light needed for photosynthesis to occur, vegetation grows as a result of plants being able to utilize light, carbon, water and nitrogen. Herbivores (animals that are naturally vegetarian) eat the vegetation, then we, the omnivores, eat the herbivore. The herbivore transmutes the vegetation into the protein, fat and nutrients we benefit from the most.

Animals supply us with:

• Fat in the form of EPA/DHA.  Two types of Omega-3 fats not found in vegetarian sources. There are vegetarian sources of Omega-3 fats but they only benefit us if we can convert them. This conversion is impossible in the worst case and inefficient in the best case. DHA is a type of fat that is one of the only molecules in nature that has remained unchanged for 600 million years, meaning the use of DHA by eukaryotic cells (the type of cells that make up the human body) has been untouched by evolution.

• Iron in a form we call Heme.  Heme is a form of iron we absorb at a rate of 10%, whereas the iron found in vegetarian sources is absorbed at a rate of 1%. Iron is essential to health because our red blood cells can only carry oxygen to the cells that need it if they contain iron. Which cells need oxygen? All of them. The most oxygen-sensitive organ in the body is your brain. By the way, the most oxygen-sensitive bodily process we have is producing stomach acid. Stomach acid breaks down proteins found in animal products. Lack of oxygen due to iron deficiency is called anemia. Anemia can kill and cause tremendous suffering. Iron supplementation is far inferior to heme ingestion (animal products).

• Vitamin B12.  This is a nutrient found in animal products that is also very important in the production of red blood cells, the cells that deliver oxygen. If B12 is deficient, the red blood cell cannot properly mature, resulting in large red blood cells that inefficiently deliver oxygen. This is a different type of anemia called megaloblastic anemia. Anemia, even in its mildest forms, should never be untreated because of how important it is for our brain to produce energy.

When people feel a lack of energy, it is often due to a decrease in the ability to produce energy, resulting in both mental and physical fatigue. Our brain is the most important organ in our body and anything that supports the brain should be desired, and anything that inhibits optimal brain function should be avoided.

The food chain: The importance of animal FAT.

It’s a common misconception that eating meat is important for dietary protein only. The truth is that it’s the fat that we need the most. Protein is important, but adequate amounts can be found in non-animal sources. When we look at the fossil record and we study where humans came from, we can see that the first farmers were grass farmers. When the earliest humans wanted to improve their hunting grounds, they would use fire to burn down a forest, which would result in the growth of grasses. The grasses would attract the animals that eat grass. The animals would turn the grass into the EPA/DHA omega-3 fat that we need and the human would kill the animal and eat its flesh and fat (EPA/DHA). Our brain is nearly 60% fat. The predominant fat is DHA. DHA is unique because of the role it plays in the production of energy by the mitochondria of our cells. We did not develop such incredible mental abilities so we could sneak up on a carrot. We needed to be able to take down a mammoth so our tribe could eat and thrive.

Mitochondria are the energy factories of our cells. The most active cells have the most mitochondria. These cells reside in our brain and heart. Mitochondria produce energy by allowing high-energy electrons to to be used to make high energy bonds (phosphate bonds known as ATP). DHA is essential to this process.

It is commonly believed that the expansion and growth of the human brain directly correlates with our consumption of DHA, found in animal fat only. This is why supplementing with fish oil omega-3 is better than supplementing with flaxseed oil (vegetarian source) omega-3. Vegetarian source omega-3 fat is not DHA.

Chronic vegetarianism and veganism results in low energy states of health. This was traditionally understood due to the lack of iron and B12 affecting the red blood cells’ ability to deliver oxygen to our cells. Now we know that lack of DHA type omega-3 fat plays a role.

So, how can meat and animal products be bad for us?

Now that we know why eating meat is important to our health, let’s discuss what can interfere with us benefitting from a diet rich in the above nutrients.

When an animal eats grass, it makes omega-3 EPA/DHA fat. Fat that is essential to human health. There are 3 types of omega fat. Omega-3, Omega-6 and Omega-9. They are all essential, meaning we must find them in our diet. Vegetable oils are omega-6, olive oil is an example of omega-9, and the omega-3’s we discussed as being animal source (EPA/DHA) or vegetarian source (nuts and seeds) which can be converted to EPA/DHA but very inefficiently, leaving us deficient.

The ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 should be as close to 1:1 as possible, the best one can hope for would be 1:1.8. The average American is 1:30, which means we are toxic with omega-6.

When an animal like a cow or deer eats green vegetation like grass and leaves, it will produce omega-3 (EPA/DHA) in its muscle tissue. If the animal is fed grains, like corn (which is the feed of choice for all farm-raised animals in the industrialised world), the animal will make omega-6 fat and the amount of fat is excessive. Excessive omega-6 or imbalance of omega-3 and omega-6 ratio has been implicated in human toxicity that could be correlated to increasing the risk of disease, cancer being just one of several chronic diseases.

Eating grass-fed beef is becoming increasingly popular for the health benefits. Some people feel that the meat is less tasty than the grain-fed beef and that it lacks the marbleized appearance touted by most popular steakhouses as being a virtue of a good steak house. The reason marbleized meat looks the way it does is because of the high percentage of omega-6 (toxic) fat.  High fat content can be more tasty. This is in contradiction to the fact that Argentina is famous for their steaks and they are a country that outlawed feeding cows anything but grass. Leaner meats may require some lower heat and slower cooking techniques.

Beef distributors are trying to capitalize on the healthy meat craze by feeding their cows grass their whole life and then for the last 2 weeks of the cow’s life they get them to gain a couple hundred pounds of fat by feeding them grain. This way they increase the yield (more pounds of beef sold per head of cattle), increase the fat content (taste) and unfortunately increase the toxic omega-6 content to unacceptable percentages and ratios. This way they can advertise “grass-fed” and still sell the same poor quality food.

When purchasing grass fed beef, it MUST say GRASS-FED AND FINISHED for you to gain the benefits of eating a healthy meat diet.

What about a vegan diet?

People have different reasons for being vegan or vegetarian. I support most of the reasons. If the reason is environmental, I agree that factory farming practices are terrible for the environment. If the reasons are based on inhumane treatment, I respect that and understand that we should respect life and that until an animal is sacrificed, it should have lived a life consistent with its genetics and evolution. Our current factory-based farming practices are terribly inhumane.

The only reason for being a vegetarian/vegan I disagree with are reasons related to health because of the nutrients I discussed above that are essential to human health. After interviewing hundreds–if not thousands–of vegetarian patients over the years, I have discovered that many are not “vegetable-tarians,” they are “grain-atarians.”  Humans are not designed to eat grains in quantity because of many reasons. Grains, and legumes for that matter, contain anti-nutrients that prevent absorption of important nutrients. They contain phytates that actually result in the loss of minerals like calcium and magnesium. Grains include foods derived from wheat, rice, corn, and oats, to name a few. Dr. Perlmutter in his book Grain Brain goes into detail about the negative physiological effect of a grain rich diet.

Grains for our animals:

When the animals we eat are raised in a factory farm and processed with profit as the primary concern, not our health, they are fed grain, specifically corn. Animals would never eat corn; corn is the only grain that requires an opposing thumb to access. Think about what the corncob looks like when it grows and what is required to expose the cobb. When we feed cows corn, they can become 1500 lbs in just 18 months when they are sacrificed, just as they are getting sick from that unnatural diet. A grass-fed cow would take about 5 years to be fully grown, and would probably not exceed 800-1000 pounds. You can see the profit incentive there.

Grains like wheat, corn and rice are considered commodities, unlike vegetables which are perishable. The grains are treated like non-perishables, meaning they are stored in silos and tankers for over a year in some cases. They are shipped around the world like oil is. There is also a tremendous amount of government subsidies for corn, making it the cheapest way to make feed.

The majority of packaged processed food is primarily made with grains, and then we eat factory-based meats that are just vehicles for processing more grains. I do not think it should be common practice to use animals to process more cheap grains.

When trying to avoid chronic disease and cancer, our goal should be to avoid the consumption of grains and unhealthy animals who are fed grains (usually laden with antibiotics and hormones).

My answer to the question at the beginning of this post is YES, I would eat meats if I wanted to give myself optimal nutrition while struggling with cancer. I would eat meats that were healthy (grass-fed and finished beef that is hormone and antibiotic free), pastured organic poultry, wild-caught fish low in accumulated heavy metals like mercury. And yes, we have figured out how to feed corn to farm-raised fish…how sick is that?

I would encourage those who watch and are inspired by food documentaries to watch Food, Inc. and read Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, where he details how vegetables and meat are supposed to be grown and farmed and conducts a thorough investigation.

So what about cancer?

I don’t ask the question, “How can I treat my cancer with food?” I ask the question, “How can I give my body optimal nutrition while I am engaged in a struggle to overcome such a disease?”

The questions I ask are:

• What toxicities (either physical, chemical, or mental) can I remove?
• What can I do to give my body the optimal environment it needs to thrive? (That includes nutritional environment, emotional/mental environment and physical environment)

Cancer is a disease that requires optimal nutrition and function of the brain and immune system. Cancer by definition is an immune system disease. It is well known that the foods that challenge our immune system the most are foods that are in the grain category and should thus be avoided along with any other documented food sensitivity you may have.

Supporting brain nutrition and energy production capabilities will ensure proper gut function and immune regulation. The relationship between your brain and gut is well documented in previous posts and another book by neurologist Dr. Perlmutter called Brainmaker. Therefore, a diet rich in healthy meats is a must. No one would question the value of a vegetable-rich diet as well. Healthy meats and vegetables should make up the bulk of a diet that supports growth, healing and repair.

Optimal nutrition for an individual depends on where that person lives and what time of the year it is. If you live along the equator, you would benefit from a lower animal product diet (as low as 5%) and a higher vegetarian-based diet. If you live in the arctic regions, your diet should probably be mostly animal products–up to 90% blubber if you are Inuit (the native people of the most northern climates). If it is winter in the northern hemisphere, you will eat more animal products, since your nervous system is programmed to recognize the season and adjust physiology accordingly. The summer months will see an increase for your needs for food that grows in the longer light cycles, like fruits and vegetables. This concept is outlined in my November 2015 health tip of the month video clip.

No individual blog post is complete enough to cover all of the issues associated with a topic. We did not go into the aspects of cured meat, and other methods of cooking or processing meat.  Some of these issues are related to possible cancer concerns. If you have a specific question, please post it in the comments below so I can provide more complete answers for you. If you like, you can add your thoughts and ideas for us to expand on as well.