Selenium cuts prostate cancer AND BPH....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 6-3-2014

Dr Al Sears is far from perfect.  But on most subjects he is right at the state of the art and clearly has the goal of helping people take control of their lives and stay healthy.

Furthermore, he must have a first rate research team finding him useful things that do this that he can email those on his email list.

Since he is a man and knows many of the men on his list want to avoid prostate issues, he does cover it from time to time.

1.  I already know a large number of things which I do that prevent cancer, prevent prostate cancer, prevent cancers from spreading, and prevent the aggressive kind of prostate cancer that can actually kill you.  I cover those in brief in part 3 of this post.

2.  From time to time I’ve seen coverage that getting enough – but NOT too much – of the mineral, selenium helps prevent cancers.

So I’ve taken 200 mcg a day of selenium in yeast for quite some time.

More recently, I read that getting enough selenium helped boost male libido AND that eating a brazil nut a day actually was enough more bioavailable than the supplement, if you want the beneficial effects of selenium, it’s best to eat a Brazil nut a day.

Since then I do both.

NOW I find out from Dr Sears that I may have cut back my possible prostate cancer by up to an additional 50%!

Even better, though I have BPH, I may have less and have fewer urinary problems because I’ve done that!

Here’s what research Dr Sears reported in his email about 5 weeks ago:

                                                                                                                                   

“….Today I want to tell you about one of the simplest ways you can keep your prostate healthy and protected. I’m talking about the mineral selenium.

In a study done at Harvard, where they were looking at results from the famous, Physicians' Health Study, Harvard researchers found that men who got the most selenium had the healthiest prostates.

This was true even for men with high PSA levels. If they were in the group with the most selenium, their prostate cancer risk dropped by 50%.1

The remarkable mineral selenium (Se) suppresses tumors (gold), kills cancer cells (pink), protects cells (green), and helps cells work better and stay young.

Source: Cancer Res. Apr 1, 2009; 69(7): 2699–2703.

A 50 percent lower risk shows up in many clinical trials for selenium and prostate health.

One study took 1,300 men and split them in two groups. The first took 200 mcg of selenium a day, the second got a sugar pill. The authors called the results “striking.” The overall risk of prostate cancer was almost 50 percent lower in the selenium group.2

Another eight-year clinical trial of over 5,000 men found similar results: those with normal PSA levels at the beginning of the study who took selenium saw their risk for prostate cancer drop more than fifty percent.3

Selenium is even protective if you already have prostate cancer, according to The Netherlands Cohort Study of almost 60,000 men. The data was presented at a recent American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting.

The Swedish and British researchers officially published those results last month. As I read the study, what I found most interesting was that as you get more selenium, your risk for prostate problems drops.

People with the highest selenium had the lowest risk for prostate cancer.4

Geographic studies have found that in parts of the world where soil and diet are low in selenium, rates of prostate cancer are significantly higher.5

In fact, “Keshan’s disease” is named after a province in China where people weren’t getting enough selenium.

Men should be especially careful about getting enough selenium. It’s your prostate’s best defense.

In a new animal study, selenium stopped prostate bloating and growth. Selenium prevented the animals from getting BPH,6 which is an enlargement of the prostate that makes you have to pee all the time. BPH can lead to LUTS (lower urinary tract symptoms), which can lead to prostate cancer.7

You should get at least 30 micrograms and up to 200 micrograms of selenium a day.

It’s a small amount, but that doesn’t make it easy to get. We can’t get selenium in high amounts in fruits and vegetables anymore because of soil depletion.

The best foods for selenium are organ meats from grass-fed animals, garlic, nuts or fish.

Fish is loaded with selenium. You can get all the selenium you need from a can of tuna or a serving of swordfish. If you are concerned about mercury in big fish like tuna or swordfish, you can go with cod. Three ounces of cod has 32 mcg of selenium.

Organ meats like chicken livers or turkey and chicken giblets have a lot of selenium, too. For instance, one chicken liver will give you 140 micrograms of selenium. Muscle meat has less selenium. Three ounces of cooked beef have 35 mcg.

One medium egg has 14 mcg of selenium.

If liver and eggs aren’t your speed, you can eat some nuts. An ounce of walnuts has 5 micrograms. Almonds have a little less. A cup of almonds gives you 2.5 mcg.

One variety of nut offers a full day’s worth of selenium in just one bite. It’s the Brazil nut. Brazil nuts grow in the Brazilian jungle where the soil is rich in the anti-cancer mineral. Just one single Brazil nut eaten right out of the shell will provide you with 100 mcg of selenium.”

Since I take 200 mcg of Selenium and average eating a Brazil nut a day and eat Salmon, Eggs from hens fed on pasture, and nuts, and chicken livers at times, my selenium is likely at the top of the range that is safe.

That’s why I REALLY liked this statement:  “People with the highest selenium had the lowest risk for prostate cancer.”

3.  Are there really that many more ways to prevent prostate cancer and aggressive prostate cancer in addition to selenium?

YES. 

Here’s a fast list:  I already know a large number of things which I do that prevent cancer, prevent prostate cancer, prevent cancers from spreading, and prevent the aggressive kind of prostate cancer that can actually kill you. 

a)  Ways to prevent cancer:

Get your exposure to second hand smoke, nicotine, and tobacco products down to as close to zero as you possibly can manage!

This stuff is remarkably potent as a cancer causing agent.  It causes about 30% of all cancers.  Worse, up to half the people in Oncology wards in hospitals with serious cancer are there because of tobacco or tobacco smoke exposure!

The tobacco itself is carcinogenic we recently found it as it contains the radioactive element Polonium.  So if you breathe its smoke or use some kind of smokeless tobacco that touches it to the mucous membranes in your mouth, nose, or throat, the radioactive Polonium in it goes everywhere in your body that your blood does.  So any kind of cancer anywhere in your body from brain to pancreas to colon to leg bone cancers can be from tobacco or tobacco smoke exposure.

Tobacco smoke has dozens of carcinogenic compounds in it.  And the hot smoke from using a cigarette lighter has about 10 times that many and they are even more carcinogenic.  (Smokers who use lighters are MUCH more likely to get lung cancer than those who use matches.)

Take curcumin from turmeric or eat curries with a high turmeric content both with black pepper.  This prevents  many cancers, lower your chronic inflammation which also has heart protective effects.  Doing this ALSO helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease and lowers your LDL cholesterol.

Take 3,000 to 5,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.  Doing that has a dramatic number of health benefits. 

(Taking vitamin D2 is at least a third less effective and unlike D3 taking extra may not be totally safe. 

People routinely get that much D3 from sunlight exposure and some even get four times that much during summers with no ill effects.)

That much D3 makes your immune system so much more capable of killing harmful things and so much better at recognizing what to kill it is far more likely to kill off developing or developed cancers than if you didn’t have that much.  At the same time, you are less likely to get or continue having autoimmune disease if you take that much D3.

Eat a lot of raw and lightly cooked cruciferous vegetables.  And eat a lot of onions and garlic or take deodorized garlic.

Both kinds of vegetables prevent cancer and the more often you eat them, the better they work!

Eating that many vegetables also cuts your chance of dying from any cause by 42% and 24% of that is from cutting your risk of death from heart disease.

Avoid any pesticides or herbicides in your home and yard that you can; eat animal protein foods and their fats only from animals NOT fed grains heavily sprayed with pesticides or herbicides as it bioconcentrates in their fat; and mostly buy only organic produce.  Wild caught fish, and meat and grain and eggs and dairy from animals only fed their natural diets that have NOT been sprayed avoids that problem.

Avoid industrial carcinogens and solvents and all excess radiation.

Exercise regularly most days of every week without totally overdoing the intensity.  Doing that slows aging which prevents cancer and lowers chronic inflammation which help prevent cancers.

Doing it all can be a challenge.

But taking the curcumin with black pepper, taking the D3, and eating the organic vegetables, and exercising ARE doable and have so many other benefits, please consider doing them all.

b) Ways to prevent prostate cancer.

Eat cooked tomatoes or purred tomatoes with a health OK oil or fat such as extra virgin olive oil or avocados &/or take 30 mg a day of lycopene.  Both things prevent prostate cancer and stop slow growing prostate cancer from growing.

Eat nuts and avocados and use extra virgin olive oil and take vitamin E as alpha and mixed tocopherols from natural sources.  The gamma tocopherol and other tocopherols you get by doing this prevent prostate cancer.  That DOES work and has been tested to do so.

AND, do NOT take the cheap artificial alpha tocopherol as good studies found it may slightly increase prostate cancer instead.  NOTE that the headlines saying vitamin E caused prostate cancer were totally inaccurate.  They tested the cheap and harmful substitute only!

Take 3 mg a day of boron.  Dr Sears found a study saying doing so also cut prostate cancer in half!

c)  Ways to prevent aggressive prostate cancer:

Eating raw broccoli florets or cauliflower florets at least once a week cuts your chances of getting the aggressive form of prostate cancer in half. 

(Since I read that, I have eaten raw broccoli florets an average of more than once a day!)

d) Way to prevent metastatic cancers:

On Tuesday 5-13 last month, we posted on the discovery that if you cause your HDL to be high and your LDL low, it blocks cancers from spreading out and moving to other locations.  And, we posted about a dozen ways that work to do both!

Can you prevent or slow down slow growing prostate cancer?

Yes.  True you may already have it when you start these actions or get it some way you didn’t cover.  But you can get your chances of success to over 90%.

Can you avoid aggressive prostate cancer? 

Yes.  True you may already have it when you start these actions or get it some way you didn’t cover.  But you can get your chances of success to over 90%.

Limit cancers two ways....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 4-22-2014

In fighting cancers there are two goals.  Kill it where it is.  And keep it from going anywhere else!

(Of course not getting it to begin with helps.  To the extent you can, avoid tobacco products and tobacco smoke 100 % of the time.  And, avoid pesticides and herbicides in your home, yard, and food.)

1.  We’ve known for many years now that turmeric and its active ingredient curcumin have anticancer effects.  It turns down inflammation, boosts your immune system to help it kill cancers and lowers LDL cholesterol.  NOW new research finds curcumin kills cancer cells directly too!

2.  About a month ago, and again more recently information has been published to show how powerful stopping high chronic inflammation is in fighting aggressive and spreading cancer both by preventing its formation and its spread.

a) Medical News Today had this:

“A growing body of evidence suggests that inflammatory reactions promote such cellular transformation. The protein interleukin 6 (IL-6) is known to a play a significant role in inflammatory signaling. IL-6 is a cytokine, a signal molecule that is produced and secreted both by immune cells and by tumor cells and binds specifically to a receptor (IL-6R) that is found on the surfaces of many cell types.

"As we have now shown, even brief exposure to IL-6 can lead to long-lasting alterations in colon cancer cells that enhance their mobility and thus increase their metastasizing potential," says Heiko Hermeking of LMU's Institute of Pathology.”

Novel feedback mechanism discovered that provides a mechanistic link between

chronic inflammation and carcinogenesis

http://mnt.to/l/4mg9

Malignant tumors pose a major threat to survival largely because they shed

mobile cells that can form secondary tumors in other tissues.

b) More recently, another online news story appeared that showed that high chronic inflammation also powered the aggressive kind of prostate cancer specifically.

[The list of things you CAN do to limit high chronic inflammation is long but all completely doable. 

Eat no corn oil or soy oil and almost no canola oil.  To the extent you can, eat no animals or poultry or farmed fish that has been fed soy and corn and other grains.  And, if you must do so sometimes, eat as little of the fat from such animals as you can because that’s where the omega 6 oils and herbicides and pesticides best avoided are concentrated.

Use less oil in general and use extra virgin olive oil or some organic coconut oil or butter or cream from animals fed only grass and their native diets.  Eat some meat from animals fed only grass and their native diets.   Eat eggs from hens fed only on pasture.

Eat wild caught fish. Take purified omega 3 and DHA supplements which are ANTI-inflammatory.

Eat more plant proteins other than NOT grains:  Eat nuts, beans and lentils, mushrooms, and dark green vegetables.  Eliminate ALL refined grain foods.  Eliminate any wheat. And limit or eliminate other whole grains or have them rarely. Quinoa is a grain like seed that IS OK to eat in moderation.

Eat absolutely ZERO hydrogenated oils.  The oils used are high in omega 6 oils and the hydrogenation makes them even more inflammatory!)

Eat ginger and use it as a spice!  It adds flavor and a mild heat and lowers LDL cholesterol and lowers inflammation too!

Eat lots of vegetables and beans and lentils and take probiotics and take at least 300 mg a day of niacin after a large meal.  (Fiber plus probiotics causes anti-inflammatory changes in your immune system; and taking niacin does this too but uses a different pathway.)

Surprisingly, if you don’t overdo it excessively and build up your intensity gradually enough, regular, vigorous exercise also lowers inflammation. 

In fact exercise down-regulates a gene that promotes cancer that’s the same one curcumin down-regulates.]

So you can lower or prevent chronic inflammation in many ways that work.

We now know that makes it MUCH less likely any cancer you get will spread all over and kill you when you do that.

3.  It would also be good to kill cancer where it is initially and before it grows large enough to harm you or spread all over.

Why eat curries that contain turmeric along with black pepper a few times a month or a week?  And why take turmeric or curcumin supplements with black pepper every day?

(Studies found that adding the black pepper multiplied the effect of the curcumin.  One found a 200 to one effect!  I ALWAYS add the black pepper myself after reading that.  Even if the multiple is not always quite that high, adding black pepper clearly has a very large, positive effect.)

We just saw that curcumin strongly assists you in keeping any cancer you get from spreading to other locations from where it starts.

Also about a month ago, I got this in an email from Steve & Becky Holman  

“….curcumin has emerged as a potent multimodal cancer-preventing agent, with 240 published studies appearing in the global scientific literature in the past year alone." [Life Extension Magazine, March '11]

Curcumin can block inflammatory molecules that cause cancer to proliferate.

In fact…

"Curcumin regulates tumor suppressor pathways and triggers mitochondrial-mediated death in tumor tissue, thereby increasing the death of cancer cells."

They also said they saw a study that taking 1,000 mg a day of curcumin helped lift depression.

I added the bolding of the key statement.  Besides its anti-inflammatory effects that help keep cancer cells from spreading, curcumin helps your body kill them where they are already!

Cut colon cancer risk & inflammation 4 ways....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 2-4-2014

(Actually there are 8 ways.  The four reported by the new study.  Two highly desirable ones that also work well for one of the other 4 methods in the study.  And there are two more in this post.)

A couple of weeks ago a study was reported that may wind up being extremely important for several reasons.

The researchers started with the finding that people who ate a high fiber diet tended to be less likely than those not doing it to get colon cancer.

They missed a reason that we will end this post with.

But they apparently did find a major reason that does help explain the finding.  And, there are 4 ways you can maximize the effect they found.

That’s really great because high chronic inflammation also:

Helps cause heart disease;

Helps CAUSE osteoarthritis and make it hurt more once you have it;

& it helps cause other cancers or make them more aggressive in addition to colon cancer.

It was reported in Medical News Today  about two weeks ago & the link is in this post just after two quotes.

1.  What they found was that a high fiber diet and a probiotic bacteria that thrives on a high fiber diet produce butyrate which lowers inflammation through its action on the immune system.

“The digestion of fiber leads to the production of butyrate - a short-chain fatty acid. Previous research by Dr. Singh revealed that butyrate activates the Gpr109a receptor.

But he says that this only seems to happen in the colon and that a high-fiber diet significantly increases butyrate levels in this area.

Butyrate triggers the Gpr109a receptor in immune cells - macrophages and dendritic cells - in the colon.

Dr. Singh explains that these immune cells produce anti-inflammatory molecules and transmit signals to T cells - white blood cells that play a major role in the immune system - which also causes the T cells to produce anti-inflammatory molecules.”

2.  They also found that taking niacin had the same anti-inflammatory effect on the immune system.

They somehow thought to check and found that in mice with no probiotic bacteria as people taking antibiotics would be that giving them niacin had the same result.

“…on giving niacin to mice who had no healthy colonic bacteria - because it had been destroyed by antibiotics - the researchers found the vitamin pushed immune cells into an anti-inflammatory mode.”

Here’s the link to the whole article:

Vitamin B3, fiber 'protects against colon cancer and inflammation'

http://mnt.to/l/4k3V

A new study helps to explain why a diet high in fiber can protect against colon

inflammation and cancer, but it also suggests that niacin, or vitamin B3, may

have a similar effect.

So there are four ways to get this effect:

a)  Eat a high fiber diet including lots of vegetables, beans, and higher fiber fruit. 

b)  Ensure you have probiotic bacteria in your colon. Avoid sucralose totally because it kills your probiotic bacteria; avoid taking antibiotics when you can; and take probiotics daily as a supplement.  And work to avoid eating animal protein from those routinely given antibiotics.

c)  Consider eating some butter and cheese from cows fed only grass.  Butyrate is in butterfat I understand.  There is a reason the words sound the same. Avoid eating them after using high heat which has other problems.  And eat them in moderation.

Those three actions help create the conditions the researchers found caused the immune system to lower inflammation.

d) If you don’t take statins, consider taking 300 mg of niacin right after breakfast and lunch – or after your two biggest meals of the day.  For most people that delivers enough niacin to be effective but avoids most of the problem with the flushing effect.  (In some people taking both niacin and statins is harmful.  And, in everyone who exercises taking statins is harmful we now know.)

This inflammation lowering effect apparently is one of the reasons that taking niacin is so heart protective and has been found to cut the overall death rate of people who take it!

Based on niacin’s ability to increase HDL, lower LDL, and lower triglycerides, this means that it lowers the amount of the small particle LDL that causes heart disease.  NOW we know it also lowers high chronic inflammation too!  That’s extremely good news since high chronic inflammation also causes and worsens heart disease.

So besides this anti-cancer effect, taking niacin is unusually effective at helping you avoid heart disease.

The four other things to add are:

a) Avoid eating hugely too much omega six oil by NOT eating the foods that contain high levels of it such as eating grains and too much sugar and fats from animals fed grains;  & avoid using oils like canola, soy, corn, and safflower that are high in omega 6 oils instead.  Use only extra virgin olive oil instead; and either eat animal protein foods from wild caught or 100% naturally fed animals or eat only the most no fat, fat reduced animal proteins from animals fed grains and do it far less often.

b) Take DHA and omega 3 supplements daily and eat wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils and low in mercury two to three times a week.

Those two things together also lower chronic inflammation far below what it is for people who do none of these things.  They cause you to have a close to one to one balance between your omega 6 and your omega 3 oils and DHA also has added benefits on your brain and nerves.

Here’s the part the fiber researchers missed.

What kinds of fiber foods you eat can also help prevent cancer!

There are two kinds that do so unusually well.  So for your high fiber be sure eat some once a week or even two or three a day once you build up to it.

c)  Cruciferous vegetables that are eaten raw or very lightly cooked, ideally some of each, have multiple micronutrients proven to prevent cancer or make cancers less aggressive.  Men who eat raw broccoli or cauliflower florets at least once a week, cut their risk for aggressive prostate cancer in half as just one example. Kale, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and water cress are just a few more kinds. 

d)  Many vegetables have literally hundreds of kinds of carotenes.  And those that do, the more you eat them, the healthier you look because of the rosy glow it gives your skin, the healthier you ARE in every way, and the fewer cancers you get or keep going!

Broccoli and kale and other dark green cruciferous vegetables fit in BOTH of these groups!

Other vegetables that are high in carotenes include carrots, sweet potatoes, yams, and squashes – particularly pumpkin.

And, for best bioavailability of the carotenes either eat them with extra virgin olive oil or cook them or both.

Does that mean that eating both of those kinds of vegetables as a way to get your high fiber intake is highly effective at helping you avoid cancer?

That’s EXACTLY what that means!

It doesn’t hurt that eating those vegetables protects your health in other ways and makes it much more doable to avoid gaining excess fat or take it off permanently!  

New ways to get extra cancer protection from cruciferous vegetables....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 8-13-2013

Raw cruciferous vegetables such as raw broccoli florets and raw cauliflower florets and kale or water cress in salads and the diced cabbage in coleslaw are all unusually effective cancer preventers.  Men who eat raw broccoli florets and raw cauliflower florets have cut their chances of getting the aggressive form of prostate cancer in half for example.

But I just learned two other ways to get extra cancer protection from cruciferous vegetables.

1.    It may well work as well or better for lightly steamed broccoli or cauliflower.  It seems that doing so helps release an anticancer ingredient, myrosinase.

2.  BUT frozen and more fully cooked broccoli or cauliflower tend to lose some of this cancer protective ability.   (The processors flash heat frozen vegetables a lot just before they freeze it)

However, if you eat frozen or cooked broccoli or cauliflower, or other cruciferous vegetable it may restore its ability to prevent cancer and add more.

It seems if you add even a little of another raw cruciferous vegetable to the cooked or heated frozen broccoli or cauliflower, or other cruciferous vegetable not only do you get its cancer protection, it interacts with what the cooked or frozen one has left to partially or fully restore its cancer preventive qualities too.

That means you can add a raw cruciferous vegetable and even get creative with it such as diced Daikon radish or even mustard to cooked broccoli or cauliflower to restore the anticancer effect!

The raw one has some cancer prevention by itself AND it may link with the remaining phytonutrient in the cooked or frozen broccoli to even restore the anticancer effect there too!

Here’s the Medical News Today story I saw on that:

Scientists put cancer-fighting power back into frozen broccoli

http://mnt.to/a/4gb4

There was bad news, then good news from University of Illinois broccoli 

researchers this month. In the first study, they learned that frozen broccoli 

lacks the ability to form sulforaphane, the cancer-fighting phytochemical in 

fresh broccoli.

They say that “consumers can spice up their frozen, cooked broccoli with another food that contains myrosinase to bring the frozen cancer-fighting super-food up to nutritional speed.”

"Try teaming frozen broccoli with raw radishes, cabbage, arugula, watercress, horseradish, spicy mustard, or wasabi to give those bioactive compounds a boost," one woman expert advised.   

Possible new breakthrough in cancer treatments....

Today's Post:  Friday, 9-7-2012

If this research tests as safe to use with no "gotcha" side effects, it could be a VERY big deal.

There are two problems with chemo. 

It harms the rest of the patient -- not just his or her cancer cells.  With some cancers, if you use enough chemo to kill the cancer cells off well, you can wind up killing the patient or causing permanent harm to their health or brain.

And, often cancer cells that survive then restart the cancer even if lots of chemo was used.

But if you could use ten percent chemo as much that would slash the harm to the patient.  And, if the chemo was 100 times as effective so 10% had a permanent kill rate of cancer cells ten times as effective, you could solve both problems at once.

Even using half the chemo but with 5 times the effect for a chemo version 10 times as powerful would help enormously.

New research has found a way that in the initial tests not only has done this but tested as both killing the cancer and preventing its recurrence.

(I'd heard that heating the patient while they have chemo can help with this and/or that also taking immune system boosters like vitamin D3 and astragalus and agaricus blazei at the same time and after the chemo can help. The effectiveness of these in cutting the recurrence rate is apparently due to your empowered and boosted immune system killing off the cancer’s trial restarts when they are still small.  Taking these also seems to have some protective effect for the patient from any damage from the chemo.

It’s also been reported that in addition to making the patient feel more in control and its other health benefits that for people who are fighting cancer, doing regular exercise can reduce recurrence.

But each of those work sometimes in some people much better than others and sometimes not very well in other people.)

If this new research works in other cancers as well as it did in the cancers they tried it on and turns out to have no serious or permanent side effects, separately adding that big a jump in effectiveness in the chemo itself too would be a HUGE advantage!

Medical News today had a study in a story dated, Tues, Sept 4, 2012 in an email earlier this week

It seems that researchers at the University of Missouri tested a way to make chemo more effective and reported it to be 10 times more effective than currently used chemotherapy in tests to kill breast cancer, lung cancer, and colon cancer tumors.

Their study was published in the American Chemical Society Journal of Medicinal Chemistry,

They added a kind of chemical structure using Carboranes which are clusters containing the elements boron, carbon and hydrogen.   They found adding the carboranes to the chemo did help the drug to bind more tightly to cancer cells and did more effectively destroy the cancer cells they tested it on.

Mark W. Lee Jr., assistant professor of chemistry in College of Arts and Science and his colleagues used carboranes to build new drugs that aimed to shut off a cancer cell's energy production which reliably kills the cells and prevents them from replicating apparently.

By increasing the binding strength of the drug with the carboranes, they also found that a smaller dose worked which both minimized likely side effects and while still increasing the effectiveness of the drug in killing cancer cells. With the carboranes, Lee found the drug to be able to bind 10 times more powerfully to the cancer cells.

Lee also said this: 

"Too often, after radiation or chemotherapy, cancer cells repair themselves and reinvade the body." & "This drug not only selectively shuts off the energy production for the cancer cells, but it also inhibits the processes that allow those cancer cells to repair themselves.

When we tested our carborane-based drugs, we found that they were unimaginably potent. So far, we have tested this on breast, lung and colon cancer, all with exceptional results."

He added that new drugs based on the technique his lab has pioneered could be “many thousands of times more potent than the drugs that are used in the clinics today."

Wow!

My only worry is that adding this kind of superglue to the chemo might wind up having the drug stick to cells that are not cancerous with bad effects.

This might mean that also adding the methods of using a patient’s immune system to only deliver the drug to the cancer cells might be needed.

Or it may be that the drug is so effective and the amount is so small where it kills 100 % of the cancer cells even if it kills healthy cells but it may only kill one out of 500 healthy cells or less, that the actual side effects turn out to not be that bad.

If that second possibility is the case or they already have a way to mostly or only deliver the drug to the cancer cells or they can use immune system targeting to deliver the chemo to cancer cells, this could be a truly huge breakthrough.

Since it looks as if it might well be that good, I hope some of millions of dollars targeted for cancer research can be used to cut the time needed to test this method and get it into wide use by ten or twenty times less than what has been standard procedure if it tests out as well as it sounds like it might.

Meanwhile, what else can you do to prevent cancer until then?

Check and consider using the methods listed in my post, “Ways to prevent, slow, or stop prostate cancer....”which appeared on Friday, 7-13-2012.

This lists many effective ways to prevent all cancers.  In addition, many of the methods to prevent prostate cancer and to prevent aggressive prostate cancer are effective against all cancers.

Many of these methods also work to help prevent cancer recurrence too.

Whether, in you, these methods cut your risk of cancer by 70% or 99.97 %, these methods are effective enough, they are each worth trying!

Ways to prevent, slow, or stop prostate cancer....

Today's Post:  Friday, 7-13-2012

It’s not widely known yet but:  

1.  Most cancers can be prevented.  If you use all the methods that prevent cancers and don’t get any cancer, you won’t get prostate cancer.

2.  There are several specific ways now known to prevent prostate cancer specifically. You can also use those.

3.  Then too, there are two kinds of prostate cancer, the slow growing kind and the aggressive kind that will metastasize and start trying to kill you in multiple places. 

If you only get the slow growing kind and stop it from growing much and you avoid getting the aggressive kind too, you can even get prostate cancer without it being that harmful or needing treatment.  

There is a way I just found out about to stop slow growing prostate cancer from growing much.

And, there are also several known ways to prevent aggressive prostate cancer or make it far less likely.

The even better news is that almost all of these ways have abundant other health benefits too.

Since my Dad and both my Grandfathers got prostate cancer, I do my best to use all these methods and now use them all except the one I just found out about and don’t yet know for sure I need.  (That’s the method that stops prostate cancer from growing.)

This post covers those methods in reverse order.

The new information that caused me to do this post was in an article I got from Newsmax on Wednesday this week, “Ancient Remedy Stops Prostate Cancer”   by Sylvia Booth Hubbard.

I.  It seems that research done at the Ben May Department for Cancer Research and Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology in Chicago found that taking Caffeic acid phenethyl ester from bee propolis stopped prostate cancer from growing as long as it was continued.  (It didn’t kill the cancer. It just prevented it from growing any more.  So in this research when the propolis compound was discontinued the prostate cancer resumed growing.)

It’s not yet been studied to see if taking bee propolis as a supplement would have this effect.  And some people develop allergies to propolis since it contains flower pollens collected by the bees who make it.

But the rest of the news on Caffeic acid phenethyl ester is actually even better.  So it may go into use as an anticancer drug at some point.

Wikipedia has this:  "Propolis' use in inhibiting tumorigenesis has been studied in mice in Japan.[30]In pre-clinical models of human breast cancer, propolis induces cell cycle arrest, apoptosis and reduces expression of growth and transcription factors, including NF-?B. Notably, caffeic acid phenethyl ester down-regulates mdr-1 gene, considered responsible for the resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapeutic agents.”

That could be huge news. 

a) If caffeic acid phenethyl ester plus the right chemotherapy can kill prostate cancer, it may well mean that it will become possible to treat aggressive prostate cancer more successfully. 

b) And, it may also mean that aggressive prostate cancer can be effectively treated WITHOUT the radiation and surgery that often ruins the sex lives and quality of life otherwise in people who get it!

So there is new hope for both people with slow growing and with aggressive prostate cancer.

II. Also, on stopping or slowing the growth of slow growing prostate cancer, there was some research a few years ago showing that taking 30 mg a day of a lycopene supplement tended to slow existing prostate cancer and lower the PSA readings of people who took it.  That research made the cover of TIME Magazine shortly after it was announced.

(Lycopene is a carotene in tomatoes and some other red or red orange fruits and vegetables.  Research found that men who ate cooked tomato products often were far less likely to get prostate cancer. 

Since then, other research found that both eating cooked foods with carotenes and eating foods with carotenes along with an oil, ideally extra virgin olive oil, caused more of the carotenes to become absorbed and used in the body.

Does that mean that it’s protective for men to eat pasta sauce with extra virgin olive oil a few times a week?  That’s exactly what it means. 

(Since I learned all this, I’ve taken 30 mg a day of lycopene and eaten pasta sauce with extra virgin olive oil several times a week.)

The Newsmax article also had that mice fed walnuts every day at an amount equal in humans to 3 ounces a day got prostate cancer that was half as big and grew 30 percent more slowly than mice fed no walnuts.  This research was done at the University of California though the article didn’t say which campus. 

Walnuts are a superfood and eating them also helps prevent heart disease. They make a much less fattening snack than cookies or potato chips too!   The only bad news is that some people are allergic to them and can‘t eat walnuts or other tree nuts safely.

III. Wouldn’t it be nice to slash the risk that any prostate cancer you get be the dangerous and aggressive kind too?

It turns out there is a whole list of things you can do that tested out as doing that.

One study found that men who ate either raw broccoli florets or raw cauliflower florets at least once a week, cut their risk of getting aggressive prostate cancer in half. 

(I’ve eaten raw, organic broccoli florets at least 5 times every week ever since I learned that!)

What’s nice is that for people who dislike the taste or broccoli, is that raw cauliflower also works.

I’d been taking 3 mg a day of boron  for a few years ever since I read that doing so helped people be more alert when I read that Dr Al Sears had found research that had tested doing so and found that this too cut the risk of getting aggressive prostate cancer in half!  (Needless to say, I still take boron!)

The recent Newsmax article also had that researchers at UCSF found that men who eat one or two servings of fatty fish each week have a 63 percent lower risk of getting aggressive prostate cancer. 

(I eat 3 large servings of canned wild caught salmon a week and take omega 3 oil supplements every day for other reasons.  So I found that very good news indeed!) 

The Newsmax article also had that a Harvard study found that men who ate 3 servings of fish a week wound up with a 40% less chance of getting late stage and advanced prostate cancer.

But note that doing this set of things while completely avoiding oils high in omega 6 such as corn and soy and eating refined grains or much fat from animals fed grains ALSO lowers chronic inflammation. 

Lowering chronic inflammation or preventing it from getting high also has been found to help prevent ALL cancers AND heart disease.

(What do you eat instead of oils high in omega 6?  Extra virgin olive oil has by far the best health promoting track record.  But small amounts of real butter from cows fed only grass are likely OK.  And some research supports using coconut oil on occasion.)

Doing all 3 of these things: eating raw broccoli or cauliflower plus taking boron plus the high omega 3 intake clearly cuts your risk of getting aggressive prostate cancer a lot. 

My guess is that it likely tests at about 80 % less and that it is well over 63%.  But if these effects are independent and these effects multiply – which is possible – doing all 3 cuts your risk of aggressive prostate cancer by 97.7 percent!

IV. There are also more things you can do that are known to make getting any prostate cancer more likely.

We’ve covered tomatoes and lycopene.

Here are some more:

The Newsmax article had that researchers at Stanford University found eating just two Brazil nuts each day decreased the odds of developing prostate cancer up to from what it would other wise be to a fifth as much.  So if the risk is normally 30 to 60%, doing this drops it to the 6 to 12% range.  That’s a truly huge difference. 

Tim Ferris, in his Four Hour Body book said that he found that eating about that many Brazil nuts was a more effective delivery system for selenium than taking the supplement and that in his case it also enhanced his libido!

(I take 200 mcg a day of selenium.  But it’s a supplement that it is unwise to overdose on by very much.  So I eat two or three Brazil nuts on some days since I read Tim Ferris’s book. But I only do it about 3 times a week.  From what I’ve read eating more would be a bit dangerous.)

The Newsmax article had that researchers in China found that men who at the most garlic and onions and similar foods cut their risk of getting prostate cancer in half. The men who ate the most scallions, green onions, cut their risk by 70%!

(Green onions are a common ingredient in Chinese cooking and foods.)

This one is even more important because eating these foods cuts your risk of getting ANY cancer AND eating these foods or taking deodorized garlic supplements also boosts your beneficial HDL and cuts your risk of heart disease!

V.  Why not also do the things that prevent ALL cancers?

Besides eating in a way that minimizes omega 6 intake and taking in ample omega 3 oils and eating onions and garlic and related foods or deodorized garlic supplements, there is a large list of these.

And several of them are dramatically effective.

The big ones are zero tobacco exposure, taking ample vitamin D3, regular exercise, and eating and/or taking turmeric with black pepper.

How big is doing all of these?

From what I’ve read, just doing those four things cuts your risk of getting ANY cancer by up top 90 percent.

a)  The biggest and worst risk of tobacco smoke is its dramatic effectiveness in producing heart disease, heart attacks, ED, and strokes.  (Hardly any smokers know this; but doctors do.)

That said the cancer risk of tobacco smoke and using other tobacco products is HUGE.

Some studies find that 30 % of ALL cancers are caused by tobacco use.  And that may be an estimate that’s too low!  One oncologist told me that half the cancer patients in his hospital were smokers.

We now know why. 

If you put tobacco in your mouth or breathe the smoke, the radioactive element, polonium, goes into your blood stream.  That can cause any kind of cancer anywhere in your body your blood goes to.  Unfortunately, it often does.  (Polonium is in tobacco because it’s in the fertilizer used to grow tobacco.) 

Does that mean you can get prostate cancer from smoking or second hand smoke or taking snuff?  That’s exactly what that means!

In addition, lighting cigarettes and cigars and pipes with a lighter produces even more carcinogenic compounds than are usually in tobacco smoke.  And few people today use matches.

b)  One study found that 60% of people who have cancer were deficient in vitamin D.  Other studies have found that taking 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 cuts the risk of many kinds of cancer.  (Taking that much D3 also helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease.) 

Vitamin D3 is critical to the optimum functioning of your immune system. That’s likely why it has such an anticancer effect. And, it makes vaccines more effective and helps stop infections too.

It also helps prevent osteoporosis.

Taking that much vitamin D3 is extremely cheap compared to the cost of treating the diseases it prevents.

I’ve not yet seen a study on the effect of taking that much vitamin D3 for 10 years on the risk of getting prostate cancer.  But I’d bet good money the effect would be quite large!

You can take that much D3 for something like $15 a month today.

c)  Besides slowing aging and protecting your heart and helping you be less fat, regular exercise also helps prevent all cancers.  Regular exercise even has been found to help people with cancer become cancer free with fewer people getting their cancer back later.

Dr Jack Farquhar of Stanford said research found regular exercise down regulates a gene, P53, that apparently acts as a cancer promoter. 

d)  Eating and/or taking turmeric with black pepper most days of every week makes getting Alzheimer’s disease less likely.  Doing this set of things also may help reverse Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. 

(Curcumin is thought to be the active ingredient in turmeric that has these effects.)

Doing this boosts your immune system, sharply lowers chronic inflammation, and reduces your level of LDL the more potentially harmful cholesterol.

No surprise then that doing this also is a strong preventive for all cancers.

In fact, in a talk I heard him give, Dr Jack Farquhar of Stanford said research has also found taking turmeric down regulates the same gene, P53, that exercise does with the same anticancer effect.

To sum up if you follow these health protective lifestyle practices, you become much less likely to get any cancer, you become even less likely to get prostate cancer, and you become even less likely to get prostate cancer that can harm you.

The combination effect is dramatic in my opinion.

It was nice to have all these new things listed in the Newsmax article to add to what I already knew.  Now you know them too.

The really nice thing was that except for taking propolis I have already been doing them all for some time for other health benefits!  

Be sexier, less fat, and prevent prostate cancer....

Today's Post:  Thursday, 6-14-2012

There are a number of ways to do each one separately.

A.  First, here’s two ways to do each one -- all from that one method alone!

1.  Regular vigorous exercise on most days of every week causes or helps cause all 3 effects.  (You get the best results from doing both some strength training and some interval cardio each week.)

Such exercise causes your body to release growth hormone and testosterone. And, it slows aging and increases blood circulation.  It also lowers your stress levels and increases your ability to withstand stress. It lowers your risk of most cancers, particularly if you eat fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants and take antioxidant supplements too.)  People who do such exercise even early on develop better self-esteem.  They begin to be and stay more proactive and optimistic.  They feel sexier, they feel better, and they tend to look better and become nicer to be around.  That’s a great combination.

If you eat right, stop eating fattening foods, and do such exercise and add some sustainable calorie restriction AND do such exercise you can lose excess fat and keep it off.  Studies show people who do each of these lose enough fat they feel sexier.  Not only that, this combination is what people do who lose fat they keep off.  There are multiple ways that regular vigorous exercise is essential for doing this.  It isn’t sufficient if you fail to eat right; but it IS a key component that makes fat loss go faster, get better health results, and be sustainable enough you keep the fat off.

And, there are now studies showing that doing regular vigorous exercise helps prevent cancer directly.  (Such exercise slows aging which helps keep your immune system strong. And it causes your body to express genes that directly turn cancers off or slow them down.)

2.  From the vitamin D Council email newsletter recently I got this:

“Prostate cancer is the most common cause of death from cancer among men over the age of 75. And, prostate cancer has been one of the most researched topics in vitamin D! Researchers were initially interested in the two when they observed that sun exposure decreases the risk of prostate cancer.

But since then, research has come along much further. Just this past year, a team of doctors discovered that 4,000 IU/day helped men with low-risk prostate cancer, lowering their Gleason score and number of “positive cores.”

….Finally, vitamin D boosts testosterone levels! In a randomized controlled trial, 3,300 IU/day of vitamin D increased testosterone levels by 30-40%. In men, testosterone is important for reproduction tissues like the testis and prostate, and it's also important for key masculine features like increased muscle, bone mass, and the growth of body hair.”

So, that means that if you get regular vigorous exercise, eat antioxidant foods and take antioxidant supplements, AND take 3,000 to 5,000 iu of vitamin D3, your testosterone will be higher AND your risk of prostate cancer will be significantly less. 

You get all 3 effects.  Your libido will be higher.  More of you will be lean weight as strong bones and strong muscles. And, any weight loss you do will be mostly to all fat and the fat you take off will likely stay off.  And, you get two kinds of cancer and prostate cancer protection from both the exercise and the vitamin D3.

B.  Other ways to do these three things:

1.  Some other ways to boost testosterone include taking a supplement called tribulus.

It also helps if your level of “free” or bioavailable testosterone is high.  It seems that eating raw cruciferous vegetables prevents pollutants that mimic estrogen from lowering your free testosterone. So your effective testosterone goes up.  But separate studies show that eating raw cruciferous vegetables prevents cancer.  And eating raw cauliflower or broccoli florets each week or several times a week cuts your risk of the aggressive form of prostate cancer in HALF!

In addition, eating such vegetables helps you feel full, get the anticancer effect, get several other kinds of nutrition including the antioxidant vitamin C.  And, it does all this with close to zero calories.  And that means that eating such vegetables makes fat loss easier and easier to sustain so the fat stays off!

2.  Stopping as close to all intake of both regular and diet soft drinks and refined grain foods and high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners and oils high in omega 6 and all oils that have been hydrogenated is big key to fat loss. Cutting back excessive sugar intake also helps.   You become LESS hungry.  You waste far fewer of the calories you take in, so you can eat MORE of the foods that protect your health and keep you well and still lose fat and keep it off.

Instead, eat a version you like of the DASH II diet or the Mediterranean diet with some extra nonstarchy vegetables and health OK protein foods.

The regular vigorous exercise and the increased testosterone increase muscle mass which burns at least 3 times the calories that the same weight of fat burns.  AND a recent study found that extra testosterone also removed belly fat!

3.  Besides these things from the regular vigorous exercise to the optimum intake of vitamin D3 to the raw cruciferous vegetables, there are several other ways to prevent cancer and most kinds of cancer.

Avoid tobacco smoke and tobacco products you put in your mouth!  Thirty per cent or more of ALL cancers are caused by smoke and/or tobacco products you put in your mouth.  That’s a huge chunk right off the top.

Smoke from a hot flame has several kinds of cancer creating compounds and most people today use lighters which have this effect.  Many of those compounds are also in cooler smoke. But recently news came out that tobacco also contains a radioactive element, polonium, so if you breathe tobacco smoke or put tobacco in your mouth or nose, that gets into your blood stream which goes everywhere in your body.  This can cause cancer anywhere in your body and too often it does. 

Avoid the tobacco smoke and tobacco products and you avoid all that!

Another key way to prevent cancers that has been proven to work is to either eat foods with curry spice that contains turmeric and black pepper or take curcumin from turmeric supplements along with a bit of black pepper once a day.  (I do both.)

The neat thing if you do this is you get four bonus health effects!  Your LDL cholesterol goes down.  Your level of chronic inflammation goes down.  So your heart health protection is better. And it also prevents Alzheimer’s disease! 

In summary, it IS quite doable to be sexier, less fat, and much less likely to get prostate cancer or any other cancer.

Now you know some of the methods that do this.

Exercise helps prevent cancer & helps people recover from cancer treatment....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-2-2012

Research on those two subjects came out this week.

1. The one on preventing prostate cancer with exercise was good to know since in my family there is a family history of it.

I found it very nice to know that the exercise I’ve already been getting has given me the extra benefit of adding to the many things I’m doing to prevent cancer, prostate cancer, and aggressive prostate cancer.

But the information on HOW they discovered it works means that exercise also likely helps prevent ALL cancers! That’s huge. It’s front page news important!

2. People who get chemo or radiation treatment for cancer quite often feel impaired, less mentally sharp, and have a reduced quality of life. (That’s in addition to the stress of worrying about the cancer!)

The second study found that exercise can and did reverse a good bit of all that!

That too is huge. It’s front page news important!

1. The first study was in this story: “Science Shows How Exercise Might Help in Prostate Cancer By Steven Reinberg TUESDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News)

Apparently the research was done by a team led by June Chan, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and urology at the University of California, San Francisco.

They found that vigorous exercise caused changes to the expression of 180 genes.

(In case you haven’t yet heard, it seems we don’t inherit genes that have only one setting. We mostly inherit genes that either have several settings or can be switched on or off, “expressed” or not “expressed.”)

Apparently the exercisers switched ON genes known to suppress tumor growth. And they switched ON genes that repair DNA.

The researchers were careful and said exercise could help prevent or delay progression of the disease.

Clearly exercise did cause the desirable things to happen! In a given person that might or might not be enough just like putting water on a fire.

The men who got the good effects did a total of at least three hours a week of exercise or activity than is or often is vigorous. The men in the study did running, swimming, and played tennis but that much vigorous exercise every week was the key.

The researchers found direct evidence that exercise likely also helps prevent breast cancer in women.

That’s because two of the genes more expressed in the men who exercised are two of the best known to suppress breast cancer, BRCA1 & BRCA2.

The men who exercised had increased expression of genes involved in DNA repair. That means that small cancers might get fixed before they get larger.

And they also expressed genes that tended to turn off or stop or slow the growth of cancers.

To me that means that if you want to not get cancer or have it be slow growing enough you have a shot at surviving it, exercise averaging about half an hour a day can be a huge help.

Note that if you don’t now exercise, the sooner you begin and the sooner you build up to the 3 hours a week – as long as you don’t rush it and overdo – the sooner you begin, the sooner you get this protection!

2. What if you get cancer and then get it treated with chemo or radiation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your recovery and quality of life and mental ability went well or at least better than it now often does?

Apparently doing both cardio and strength training each week even if you just begin exercising after the treatment does exactly that!

The second study was in this story: “WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Exercise can improve the health, energy and well-being of cancer patients after they've completed their main cancer treatment, a new review finds.”

Women just treated for breast cancer who then went on an exercise program -- "....showed improvements in” things that exercise normally does such as better blood sugar control & getting less fat & their legs got stronger

But the front page news is that they also got better in vitally important ways to recover from the treatment. They had less fatigue and depression, and their quality of life improved.

Patients with other types of cancer who exercised got similar improvements. They got stronger as measured by hand-grip strength, and they became more fit.

But the key thing is that they too improved with less depression and better quality of life.

Also breast cancer patients found that aerobic exercise AND doing some kind of strength training was much more effective.

Breast cancer patients who did both got better results “on physical fitness, emotional fitness, overall well-being and fears about breast cancer….” They got better results than the women who did only cardio.

(Doing some strength training too was a huge help in other words.)

Other research on exercise and its benefits also show that doing some cardio AND some strength training each week provides better results than just doing cardio. So that part might have been expected. The results were the same.

There was some variation in the results. Younger people tended to do better for example. The researchers speculated that might have been because the younger patients were able to do more exercise.

Similarly, I suspect that people who were doing such exercise before their treatment and resumed after the treatment or began doing closer to their prior routine would also do better. (They too would be able to do more exercise after the treatments.)

The bottom line is that that doing regular and vigorous exercise doing both cardio and strength training each week gives you two huge benefits.

It makes getting cancer or bad cancer less likely AND it can help your recovery go MUCH better if you do wind up getting chemo or radiation treatment for cancer.

Action items to prevent heart disease, diabetes, & cancer....

Today's Post: Thursday, 9-15-2011

The current UN meeting on the worldwide crisis in disease and increased health care costs caused by preventable, non-communicable diseases has already released the information that 90% of the diseases and health care costs in the United States are caused by these diseases

This is a timely reminder to consider doing the things yourself that will help you escape these diseases and health care costs!

Consider these.

1. Sugar, refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and, surprisingly, artificial sweeteners as well, each tend to cause blood sugar surges, lower your protective HDL and increase your harmful triglycerides. These effects tend to make you fat and cause heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Cut your use of sugar in half. Eliminate any food or drink that contains refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or artificial sweeteners.

Drink water, tea, coffee, or vegetable juice instead. Eat only 100 % whole grains or eat nonstarchy vegetables or beans instead of refined grains.

Extra benefit: If you have been eating and drinking a lot of these things, this can give you effortless fat loss. The extra fat will leave you; and you’ll NOT be hungrier.

2. The health benefits of the DASH II diet and the Mediterranean diet are very high. They help prevent all these diseases from Alzheimer’s disease to heart disease and high blood pressure. The combination of these two diets is likely the best diet to eat to stay healthy.

The two key things that seem to have the most health benefit are to eat lots nonstarchy vegetables and use only extra virgin olive oil or olive oil.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

a) Add one nonstarchy vegetable one time each day. Add one serving to your lunch or dinner. (Adding more than one a day each week can be faster than your body can adjust to it. So don’t add more than two a day the first week.)

Raw broccoli florets or cauliflower florets help prevent aggressive cancers. Tomato slices are also good for you and taste good. They too are nonstarchy. And there are dozens more nonstarchy vegetables you can try.

Nonstarchy vegetables have truly awesome health benefits and almost zero calories. So they combat diseases and help people avoid fat gain without extra hunger at the same time!

b) Get some mild tasting olive oil or extra virgin olive oil. Use that instead of all other oils or margarine. Use it instead of butter where you can. Where you can’t substitute olive oil for butter, use half as much butter.

(Be sure to never eat anything that contains hydrogenated oils or trans fats as they are proven heart attack starters.)

Using only olive oil increases your HDL, lowers your LDL, and lowers your level of chronic inflammation. Each of those effects protects your heart.

3. Exercise prevents disease, grows new brain cells, and slows aging. And, a surprisingly small amount gives you 40% of the health benefits of an ideal exercise program.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

Try doing some kind of strength training at home for just a few minutes first thing two mornings each week. Take one day off in between. This can range from doing 3 pushups from your knees and 5 half squats each time to 15 or 20 minutes using dumbbells for several exercises each time.

And, three or more days each week take a 15 to 20 minute walk or two 10 minute walks. Walk normally for most of it but trying a few bursts of walking really fast each time.

But get started with something you can do this week!

Once you can do just that much and keep doing it each week, you get 40 % of the health benefits of an ideal program. Of course, once you do that, you can add more if you have time.

4. Avoid tobacco smoke.

Yes, it produces 30 % of all cancers and 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancers. To be fair some smokers don’t get cancer.

NEWSFLASH: Tobacco smoke is horribly worse for you than that. And no one exposed to it escapes harm! (Unfortunately few smokers have any clue about the larger dangers from smoking.)

EVERY single exposure to tobacco smoke begins to deposit the plaque in your arteries that causes high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and erectile dysfunction. It also causes you have the lung power and breathing capacity of a MUCH older person. This is true even for teens and brand new smokers!

There’s more too!

Exposure to tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have otherwise escaped them.

And second hand smoke harms the people who are exposed to it in all the same ways, including babies and small children.

So consider doing this or at least trying it out for just a week.

If you smoke, contact the American Cancer Society or the American Lung Association and use their help to make a strong, focused, and determined effort to quit. Try the over the counter nicotine products if the nicotine craving gets too bad for you to handle. (Knowing the information above will make it easier for you than it is for most people trying to quit.)

If you smoke and decide not to quit, at least for the next week, make a very strong effort to never smoke in public or around your friends and family. See if you can protect the people around you from second hand smoke even if you keep smoking.

Also, if you are a doctor, for the next week, ask every patient if they smoke. For every one that does, hand them a copy of this information and PRESCRIBE in writing that they quit. Studies show this gets results. Most people respect doctors and often do as they are directed by their doctors.

5. There are supplements that help prevent these diseases as well.

Supplements are not always effective; but those that are can be more effective for prevention than drugs when several are taken in combination. Supplements usually have NO side effects. Even better, the ones with health benefits often protect several parts of your health at the same time!

Here’s an example.

Vitamin D3 has recently been found to help prevent many cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, autoimmune diseases, and to build your bones better than taking calcium.

They found that’s true IF you take 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day. (This helps replace the over 10,000 iu a day people used to get from being out in the sun all day.)

Supplements are food concentrates or pure and consistent versions of folk remedies used safely for hundreds of years or are substances natural to the human body.

Thousands of Americans are preventing many of the most expensive diseases to treat by taking supplements.

Heart attacks, cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease can take over $50,000 each to treat.

Estimating that 30 % of the population takes supplements and at least a third of those or 10% are successfully preventing these diseases, if these supplements were suddenly unavailable nationwide, our health care costs would go up at least 10%.

For example, in 2009, New York City was estimated to have a population of 8,391,881. So it has about 8,400,000 now. If we estimate half of those are adults, that’s 4,200,000 adults. This means that if 10 % of these people who are preventing those diseases with supplements, New York has 420,000 people who are NOT getting these diseases.

The added health care costs each year that would be incurred in New York if everyone were no longer able to get these supplements would run to billions of dollars.

Incredibly, that will happen soon unless it is stopped.

The FDA has just proposed re-classifying almost all supplements as drugs and removing them from the market completely. Only the handful that drug companies successfully get to pass the tests that drugs pass would ever be available again. That would be as much as ten years from when they were removed and they would cost over 10 times as much as now.

Even worse, a simple registration process with the fees for random testing from each supplement company would allow the FDA to find and remove the small number of companies making supplements for weight loss, muscle building, or sexual restoration that contain dangerous drugs not listed on the label.

So consider doing this sometime you schedule now for some time this week.

Write both your US representative and Senator to demand of the FDA that they remove their proposal and use the kind of simple registration process instead that would help the FDA more quickly remove the real problems.

This will save the United States from billions of dollars of new health care costs each year that supplements are now preventing.