This would be fair enough if the medical community was actually offering treatments that worked. Unfortunately some of them have been shown to be medically ineffective. An important medical paper in 2004 showed that chemotherapy only increased the average 5 year survival rates by just over 2% (reference below).

Chemotherapy for breast cancer, for example, has an average increased 5-year survival rate of only 1.5%. A number of cancers (soft tissue sarcoma, melanoma of skin, uterus, prostate, bladder, kidney and multiple myeloma) were shown to have no increase in survival due to chemotherapy at all.

Doctors often talk about patients having unrealistic expectations about the efficacy of drugs, but to my way of thinking they only have themselves to blame. None of the doctors I work closely with in our medical school had ever spoken to patients about the low effectiveness of chemotherapy. In fact only one of them knew exactly how ineffective the drugs actually were.

If we take the breast cancer example again – women with breast cancer have a 78-85% 5-year survival rate in Australia, of which only 1.5% was due to chemotherapy. None of my friends who have had breast cancer were told that the average length of survival for breast cancer is 20 years nor about the high survival rate, nor about the low impact of chemotherapy. All believed that they needed chemotherapy to have any hope of survival.

The flip side of this terrible situation is that if only 1.5% of survivors are due to chemotherapy, then 76.5-83.5% is due to other things. Surgery and radiotherapy will play some part. But so too, does the body’s natural ability to heal. If you really want to keep on living it makes sense to spend a little time exploring those aspects of healing, known to science and to our cultural traditions which will improve our quality of life, and hopefully, our longevity.

There is much known to science but a lot of this is tucked away in health psychology text books and journals. Some of this is known through pop psychology but may not be accurate. For example, it is often believed that to survive you have to be positive all the time. My own research has shown that this is not the case, however being positive most of the time is one of the characteristics of survivors.

Governmental bodies and anti-scam scientists are particularly hard on those who promote supplements suggesting that all people are after is making money out of the sick. No doubt this is sometimes the case. But what excuse is there for promoting chemotherapy as THE answer to cancer when it only increases survival by an average of just over 2% and in some cases, is not of benefit at all. Who benefits from this? Who is paid the big money?

As a researcher I have to say that it is highly unlikely that just one supplement, herb, fancy berry from the highlands of somewhere will be sufficient to make the difference of life or death. However there are some good scientific pointers to suggest that avoiding sugar and flour which feed cancers, adding anti cancer foods of brightly colored vegetables and fruit, adding some supplements proven to be advantageous, taking regular exercise, and undertaking certain self care activities would definitely be positive to health. And many regions around the world have their traditional cancer remedies, their natural cancer treatments which might be good to add to your overall regimen. Check out all of your options and don’t let yourself be bullied by anyone.

Reference: Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clinical Oncology 2004;16:549-560. This is reasonably readable and anyone with cancer should get a copy (try your university medical library – they can download it for you). It isn’t very chatty, mostly just how they came to the figures for each of the main cancers.

Many doctors are wedded to the fast effects of antibiotics. They really, really want any and every drug to be as effective as antibiotics were when they were first used. And if foods cannot give that sort of effect with the majority of people then a goodly number of them will dismiss the impact of food as being “not really important”.

However there are many drugs which are not very effective. For example chemotherapy increases survival overall at the 5-year stage by only just over 2%, with it being ineffective in many cancers, despite its ongoing use. With this in mind, any “natural” activity without negative side effects should be embraced with open arms.

There are many foods which have been shown in epidemiological studies to reduce the chances of getting cancer by 25%, 50%, 75% and sometimes even more when you compare high consuming groups with low consuming groups.

There are foods which seem to prevent cells from mutating into cancer cells. There are foods which encourage mutated cells to die off. There are foods which stop the cancer cells from growing, or reduce the speed of growth and foods which stop the cancer cells from moving around the body. In biomedical words foods can be antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, anti-mutagenic, encouraging apoptosis, cytotoxic, with antimetastatic effects. Of course not all fruit and vegetables have all these effects, but they have enough to be useful.

So which are the most important vegetables and fruits? I would urge you to go for variety and not get hung up on just one or two thinking that will be enough. Plants act synergistically. That is, they work better when you eat a number of them together.

Having said that, the onion family are reported to have some of the strongest effects in preventing cancer. As I trawled through the medical literature there was a huge interest in tomatoes and the cruciferous vegetables, but when I compared the numbers in the studies it seemed that onions, garlic and others in the allium family (like leeks and chives) had the greatest effectiveness.

Tomatoes are good, and so are the cruciferous vegetables – cabbage, red cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, arugula, beet greens, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, garden cress, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, radishes, rutabaga, Swiss chard and turnips.

Lettuce, carrots, summer and winter squash, oranges, lemons, blueberries, dark raspberries, grapes, cucurmin (of curry fame) and herbs (such as oregano, rosemary and thyme) have all been shown to improve immune functioning and are associated with reduced numbers of cases of cancer in epidemiological studies.

So what does this mean in practice? Ideally fresh fruit and vegetables should be part of every meal. If you can’t make it three meals a day, then settle for fruit and vegetables taking up three quarters of your plate at two meals each day.

We are talking about eating – this is not medicine, except that these foods do you good. It is important to choose foods that you enjoy. I really do not like curries or pepper. I do not do well on Indian food, so I do not eat it very often. I was brought up on North European foods and really enjoy those fruit and vegetables my family has eaten for generations. So start by eating fruits and vegetables you enjoy, then go for a little variety and try some that are new to you.

If you are wedded to fried chips, packet foods and hamburgers it might take a little getting used to have three quarters of your plate with fresh vegetables (cooked and raw) with fruit for dessert, but give it a go. It might take a few weeks for your body to develop the enzymes needed to digest your new diet, but once that has happened your body will love you for this change. And as a natural cancer treatment it is both enjoyable and of no more cost than other types of eating.