It’s Time For Nutrition To Get The Respect It Deserves When It Comes To Cancer Research

T Colin Campbell has been trying to convince the cancer research community to design and conduct randomized controlled human intervention trials on the effect of whole food plant based diets in the treatment of cancer.

You might be wondering why Dr. Campbell is calling for randomized controlled nutrition trials when he has written extensively that he does not believe that this type of trial is the most reliable approach to establish a causal relationship between diet and disease. (For more information on correlations-based ecological studies vs. randomized controlled trials click here).

However, Dr. Campbell fears whole food, plant-based (WFPB) nutrition will not be taken seriously by most oncologists and other medical professionals until research on WFPB diets includes rigorous human intervention studies.

In his recently published article entitled “Controlling Cancer – Isn’t It Time to Try Something New?” Dr. Campbell briefly discusses the success that Irish physician John Kelly claims he’s seen in cancer patients who have adopted WFPB diets.

In this podcast, Dr. Kelly discusses how both his personal experience and T. Colin Campbell’s research on diet and cancer led him to be an advocate of WFPB diets. He states that his patients who use WFPB diets as an adjunct to conventional care fare better than those patients who do not change their diets.

Although many oncologists admit that diet has an important role to play in the treatment of many cancers, Dr. Kelly is disappointed that WFPB diets are not emphasized nearly enough. He, like Dr. Campbell, would like to see WFPB diets put to the test in randomized control trials so the field of oncology will take notice.

One oncologist appearing on the podcast agreed that red meat and processed meats should be limited, but she stated that she did not restrict dairy products. She states that studies supporting WFPB diets have been inconsistent.  I wish she had cited  specific studies because very often people mistakenly attribute the results of studies involving vegetarian and vegan diets to WFPB diets. Dr. John McDougall has written and spoken at length about this error in thinking. Vegetarian and vegan diets in most studies fall far short of qualifying as WFPB diets.

I wish Dr. Kelly had brought up Dr. Dean Ornish’s research on prostate cancer. Dr. Ornish directed the first randomized control trial demonstrating  that a WFPB diet, along with other lifestyle changes, can stop or reverse the progression of early-stage prostate cancer. I would have liked to have heard the oncologist’s response to this study.

The DNA sequencing of the human genome has resulted in the march towards personalized cancer therapy – which is a treatment that is tailored to abnormal genes in an individual’s particular tumor. Sounds promising, but I doubt it will be the panacea that many geneticists expect it to be.

There are around 200 different types of human cancer so it is highly unlikely that science will ever discover one cure for all of them. Genetic research now receives the lion’s share of cancer funding from the National Institute of Health (NIH). I’ve expressed my concern about this in an earlier article.

It appears clear that diets dominated by fruits, veggies, whole grains and beans can reduce cancer mortality rates. More research is necessary to learn how effective or how limited diet can be in preventing and treating various cancers. Hopefully, Dr. Kelly and Dr. Campbell will persuade the National Institute of Health to steer more funding from genetic and pharmaceutical research towards nutrition research.