Lovin' It Low Carb

I saw some thought-provoking blogs and articles about National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, that I’d like to share with you.

Whatever you think about disease awareness in general, or National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in particular, here are a few articles and blogs to spark your thinking about Awareness Campaigns. The writers make some compelling points.

 

Are you wearing your pink ribbon for Breast Cancer Awareness Month? These women probably aren’t (LA Times)

Happy Breast Cancer Awareness Month, everyone! Well, not so happy for some people who are frankly sick of the whole pinkwashing phenomenon. They think there are better ways to bring attention to the need for research dollars and preventive care than offering up rosy Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets.

 

The downside of awareness campaigns (LA Times)

The stark reality is that in the 26 years since the campaign began, deaths from breast cancer have dropped only slightly — about 2% per year, starting in 1990. According to the National Breast Cancer Coalition in Washington, D.C., 117 women in the U.S. died of breast cancer every day in 1991; today that number is 110.

“It’s a common problem with disease awareness campaigns and patient advocacy groups,” he says. “If you look into their funding sources, you’ll often find a pharmaceutical company or device maker who stands to benefit from an expansion in the number of people with the condition.”

Indeed, some critics object to messages that emphasize the need for women to “take charge” of their breast health because they imply that women are at fault if they get the disease, says Angela Wall, communications manager for Breast Cancer Action, a San Francisco-based advocacy group. “We walk down a very dangerous path when we say it’s about women being proactive, because then we’re blaming women for a disease that they have absolutely no control over,” she says.

… the more we screen, the more women we subject to surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for cancers that never would have harmed them. A paper published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that for every life saved by a screening mammogram, five to 15 other women needlessly became diagnosed and treated.

“You see this message that the best prevention is early detection, but that’s not prevention, that’s finding a cancer that’s already there,” [Dr. Susan] Love says. “Early detection is a really nice message — it makes you feel in control, but it doesn’t address our current understanding of how cancer works.”

[Dr.] Love is … cultivating research aimed at identifying breast cancer’s causes so that women might someday have real control over the risks. … By shifting the focus from early detection to prevention, “we can be the generation that stops it.”

 

Why I Don’t Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Do we need pink M&Ms to remind us about an epidemic that threatens one out of every eight women throughout their lifetime? These cause marketing opportunities are great for corporations who want to improve their image — but for women affected by breast cancer, they fail to address the source of the epidemic and are therefore a source of intense frustration.

To … actually make a difference to someone who has cancer, I suggest making a direct donation to any of the groups that Siel cites in her post (below). Not only do you know exactly who got the money and how much, but you can also write the donation off on your taxes.

 

Think Before You Pink — or why buying stuff hasn’t cured cancer

Will we cure cancer by — buying stuff? Feel-good pink products — from yogurt cups to teddy bears — are now ubiquitous, promising to send a portion of what you spend on your purchase towards funding cancer research. But many environmentalists concerned about over-consumerism and product safety are raising questions about whether all these pink product purchases are in fact a positive step for human health.

Buy a pink ribbon Swiffer, for example, and a mere 2 cents gets sent to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, points out Kate Dailey in Newsweek: “I would have to buy 500 Swiffer wet thingies to make a $10 donation.”

So if you’d like to donate $10 to fight breast cancer, don’t buy 500 Swiffers. Instead, consider donating that money directly to groups like Breast Cancer Action, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, and Environmental Working Group — all of which work to limit environmental exposures that put people at risk for breast cancer. That way, more money will go towards reducing the number of people who get cancer in the first place, less to companies cashing in on a do-gooder campaign.

 

Diagnostic Tests

Maybe it’s because I worked for a manufacturer of diagnostic tests for 17 years…

I listened to corporate messages at Townhall Meetings for years, about how better diagnostic tests fight disease through: prevention, detection, and monitoring.

On the PREVENTION slide, they always talked about EARLY detection…

Um, that’s NOT prevention folks!

Mammograms do not prevent breast cancer. They detect it. And they can monitor the size of tumors during treatment. Screening and detection – even EARLY detection – as important as they may be, are not prevention.

If I am going to contribute money towards anything related to breast cancer, it would be for research into PREVENTION and CURE.

Maybe a fund for the poor, to pay for cancer treatments they can’t afford, and otherwise would not receive. According to the Pink Ribbon website, their campaign does that.

I don’t want to contribute even one penny to an information campaign that simply tells people to get their routine screening tests, as if that empowers them to “beat cancer,” because it most certainly does not.

I would be more willing to fund an information campaign that gave more complete information about routine screening tests, as well as alternatives, and the relative risks of having or not having the tests.

I want information to help ME make MY OWN decision, based on my own values and preferences.

I do not want to fund an information campaign that simply tells me what one segment of modern medicine commands me to do. It is my life that is at stake. It should be my decision to follow, or not to follow, AMA guidelines for routine cancer screening tests, vaccinations or low-fat nutrition.

 

If you do want to be screened for breast cancer, are mammograms your only choice? No.

Women have been poked, prodded, crushed and subjected to radiation for routine female cancer screening tests for many years now.

Some experts are starting to question if the amount of radiation received in annual mammograms is really safe. Recent changes in guidelines have reduced routine mammogram screening from every year to every two years, and they are starting ten years later, at age 50 instead of age 40.

Potentially dangerous mammograms are not the only choice. Many believe they are not even the best choice!

Thermography is considered by many experts to be a safer alternative to mammography. There is no radiation involved. No pain for the patient. And according to research done as early as the 1970’s and 1980’s, thermography’s accuracy and reliability is remarkable.

So, why don’t we hear more about thermography during Breast Cancer Awareness Month???

Check out what Christiane Northrup, M.D. says in her article The Best Breast Test:

Every year when Breast Cancer Awareness Month (October) comes around I am a saddened and surprised that thermography hasn’t become more popular.

Part of this is my mindset. I’d rather focus on breast health and ways to prevent breast cancer at the cellular level than put the emphasis on testing and retesting until you finally do find something to poke, prod, cut out, or radiate.

That’s why I’ve renamed October Breast Health Awareness Month.

Studies show that a thermogram identifies precancerous or cancerous cells earlier, produces unambiguous results, which cuts down on additional testing—and it doesn’t hurt the body. Isn’t this what women really want?

With thermography as your regular screening tool, it’s likely that you would have the opportunity to make adjustments to your diet, beliefs, and lifestyle to transform your cells before they became cancerous. Talk about true prevention.

Now THAT sounds really helpful doesn’t it?? Finding out that you have a few abnormal cells, BEFORE THEY BECOME MALIGNANT. BEFORE they become CANCER!!

A diagnostic test that can screen for PRE-CANCEROUS cells… which enables you to make lifestyle changes that could actually PREVENT CANCER.

That’s awesome!

I strongly encourage you to read the entire article. Dr. Northrup has a lot to say that we need to hear!!

 

Dr. Joseph Mercola is also a big advocate of using thermography for breast cancer screening.

Check out his recent article, The Cancer Test that’s a Death Trap…, in which he examines some of the dangers of mammography and reveals potential financial ties between the American Cancer Society and those who profit the most from mammograms.

Be sure to read the part about “Mammogram Risks You Probably Haven’t Heard Of …”:

A mammogram uses ionizing radiation at a relatively high dose, which in and of itself can contribute to the development of breast cancer. Mammograms expose your body to radiation that can be 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray, which we know poses a cancer risk.

“If a woman follows the current guidelines for premenopausal screening, over a 10 year period she would receive a total dosage of about 5 rads. This approximates the level of exposure to radiation of a Japanese woman one mile from the epicenter of atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

… mammography also compresses your breasts tightly, which could lead to a dangerous spread of cancerous cells, should they exist.

If you can afford it, or if you insurance will cover it, you may want to consider getting a thermogram instead of a mammogram next time you are up for routine screening.

 

And if you don’t want to be screened?

Don’t!

One screening test that I definitely avoid is the cholesterol test. I have no use for the information. I don’t have the test. Nothing I can tell from this test would change my behavior or my diet. I will not go on statins under any normal circumstances.

I do reserve the right to succumb at gunpoint, but I think that’s a long way off!

 

Companies that sell diagnostic devices, including lab tests, need to make a profit. One of the ways they do that is to convince more people they need to take their tests, and maybe take them many times.

But diagnostic tests DO NOT prevent the disease they are testing for.

This is why it is so brilliant to test for non-cancerous abnormal cells, which have the potential to become cancer, instead of screening for cancerous tumors! Diagnostic tests may be able to help us PREVENT CANCER if we can develop screening tests that truly detect trouble at the cellular level, before it becomes cancerous!

Still, it does look like most of our disease awareness campaign dollars go to manufacturers’ bottom lines.

The tiny bit of our awareness campaign dollars that fund the actual “awareness campaign,” usually goes into an information campaign: to make people aware of the diagnostic tests available to get diagnosed and perhaps even the drugs and procedures available to get treated.

And oftentimes, as is true in breast cancer screening, the AMA’s favorite test is the only one we are made aware of. Why don’t we hear more about thermographic breast cancer screening?!?!

Do disease awarenenss campaigns contribute any money to real research into the causes of disease and real-life means of prevention?

Do they make you aware of the various risks that may be associated with the prescribed drugs and procedures?

Do they inform you about alternative (non-mainstream, non-AMA-approved) medical answers to the issues under discussion?

 

There is some evidence, which, oversimplified, tells us that cancer cells feed on sugar. The low-carb diet eliminates most of that sugar. While no good clinical studies (that I know of) prove that the low-carb diet prevents cancer, it makes bio-chemical sense to me.

Personally, if I’m betting my health on a hypothesis – and I am – I’ll bet on that one. I’m putting my money, and my life, on the low-carb diet.

 

Conflict of Interest?

AstraZeneca is the founding sponsor of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. AstraZeneca manufactures four types of drugs that are used to treat breast cancer: Arimidex (anastrozole), Faslodex (fulvestrant), Nolvadex, Istubal, Valodex (tamoxifen citrate), Zoladex (goserelin acetate).

The more people you screen for cancer, the more cases you are going to find. And the earlier you diagnose, the less you know about the cancer you are diagnosing.

If you believe the second LA Times article quoted above (The downside of awareness campaigns), the early screening techniques we employ (self exams and mammograms) are good at finding the types of cancers that would not end up requiring the most aggressive treatments.

They are much less effective at very early detection of the cancers that will ravage you no matter what you do.

But nobody is going to take a “wait and see” approach when it comes to breast cancer. All cases are treated as the most aggressive type.

So, no matter how you slice it, increased screening is going to increase diagnoses, which is going to increase treatments, which is going to increase sales of the drugs that are used to treat breast cancer.

I’m sure profit is not the ONLY motivation behind developing cancer treatment drugs. But it’s got to be one of the main ones. If it weren’t, more people would be working in the unprofitable business of finding causes and real CURES, wouldn’t they?

Isn’t that what we all want?

 

Routine Screening

I’m not totally against all routine screening. And I’m not against all diagnostic tests. Recent advances in diagnostic medicine have made amazing contributions to our medical knowledge base.

 

This is my first home glucose meter.

 

Case Study: a test for insulin

For example, diabetics and low-carbers talk a lot about blood glucose and insulin levels. We couldn’t know anything about glucose or insulin levels if somebody had not learned to test them in the first place.

In fact, when my company commercialized its first insulin test, there was no perceived need for the test diagnostically. Diabetes was diagnosed and managed with blood sugar levels alone. Home monitoring was in its infancy.

They were expecting to create a market for the insulin test. That’s just good business: anticipating the needs of your demographic and filling them as they become apparent. So, they were hoping to create the need as their test became available.

 

What happened?

Well, the market did not adopt the insulin test as part of the screening process for diabetes. I think that’s where the big money would have been.

But the insulin test enabled us to discover insulin resistance and its involvement in (what we now call) Type 2 Diabetes.

It had been assumed that high blood sugar was caused by not having enough insulin. Through insulin testing, we learned that there was a type of diabetes (Type 2 Diabetes) that existed with both high blood sugar and high insulin.

Type 2 Diabetics had become resistant to their own insulin. This discovery enabled us to develop more effective therapies for treating T2D that do not involve simply pumping more and more insulin into our systems, like my mother and grandmother had done.

We have discovered one of the greatest benefits of the low-carb diet: it can treat Type 2 Diabetes and reverse many of its symptoms without expensive or invasive medical treatments. The low-carb diet lowers blood levels of both glucose and insulin!

And we now know that low insulin is one of the main bio-markers for health and longevity.

High insulin does even more damage to our bodies than the high blood sugar does, so there is good reason to keep both as low as possible within the normal range.

We know this because somebody developed a diagnostic test. My company was just one of many who worked on the insulin angle in those days.

 

As always, I hope the articles and quotes in this post make you think.

Don’t let AMA cancer screening guidelines, USDA nutritional guidelines or any other “official” guidelines determine your health and longevity!

Your health belongs to you. If you want to keep it, you may have to be the one to manage it. Get involved. Learn about it. Take charge of it.

Make your own choices about your health and your healthcare.

Even if you disagree with me and my low-carb lifetsyle.

Do what works for you!

 

Lovin’ It Low Carb
Ramona Denton