“Over the last several decades, medicine has waged a major war against cancer, concentrating on earlier diagnosis and improved therapy. The war is not being won. Nevertheless, medicine shows few signs of admitting that its strategy may be flawed. In this it resembles a World War I general who stated: ‘Casualties: huge. Ground gained: negligible. Conclusion: press on.’”

If you look at the contribution of cancer-killing chemo to five-year survival in cancer patients, it’s on the order of only about 2%. Now, there’s some pediatric cancers we’ve gotten good at treating, and testicular cancer and Hodgkin’s disease are exceptions, but if you look at our most common cancers—colon, lung, breast, and prostate—the success rate is only about 1%. Meaning like, out of nearly 14,000 colon cancer patients, only 146 lived out five years thanks to chemotherapy. So, the chance of survival benefit is like one in a hundred, but doctors don’t tell patients that. “…New chemotherapy drugs are promoted as…major breakthroughs, only to be later quietly rejected.” “The minimal impact on survival in the more common cancers conflicts with the perceptions of many patients who feel they are receiving a treatment that will significantly enhance their chances of cure.”

“Cancer is largely a preventable disease,” but it does “require…major lifestyle changes.” Of the millions diagnosed with cancer every year, as many as 90 to 95% of cancers are caused by “lifestyle factors,” and only 5% to 10% caused by bad genes. We know this because of “enormous differences in the incidence of different forms of cancer” around the world, which then change when people move from one place to another. So, for example, breast cancer rates differ by an order of magnitude, with the lowest rates in parts of Africa and Asia, until they move and start eating and living like Americans, Argentinians, Europeans, or Australians.

Most importantly, though, a healthy lifestyle can nip it in the bud, whereas early diagnosis and treatment by definition doesn’t change the cancer rate; doesn’t change the number of people getting cancer in the first place. In terms of cancer prevention and treatment with nutrition, the consumption of animal-based food components has been historically “associated with increased cancer risk while certain plant-based food components have been associated with decreasing risk.”

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Yes, ultimately “cancer development” may “primarily be a nutrition-responsive disease,” but we’re not talking about nutritional supplements, but rather “whole, intact food.”