Saturday, October 5, 2013

BREAST CANCER RESEARCH RIGHT NOW! 14 The Best From 2013…So Far!

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…

Every month, I’ll be highlighting breast cancer research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/breast-cancer-2013-breakthroughs-research_n_3996306.html

Even though 2013 isn’t over – though the car makers started advertising for the 2014s in March – we’ve got here in the HuffPost, a quick overview of the breakthroughs the fight against breast cancer has experienced over the past 10 months.

Positive reading for ANYONE who wants a shot of hope.

I don’t want to downplay this whiff of positive news – I want to point out that while lots of work is being done on treatment, especially of the deadliest forms of breast cancer, we’re still not-so-great on the prevention.

Certainly earlier, safer, and more accurate mammograms are a strong step in that direction. But only ONE of the ten deals with diet and one deals with exercise (based on research done here in my home state, no less!) I’ve touched on exercise here: http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/06/putting-it-all-together-exercise-isnt.html and from March 13 to May 26 in 2012 I did a series on exercise and breast cancer – but not on diet.

Maybe the reason I haven’t gone into diet too much is because there’s SO MUCH HYPE. Maybe I stay away from diet because there’s not enough there that is really, truly QUANTIFIABLE. In other words, where are the numbers? When you tell me that drinking the juice of the acai berry (the source of most of those “This one WEIRD FACT/DRINK/FOOD…” advertising with the shrinking waistline and growing muscles you always see on the side of your research page) will do whatever, I need to see tests that support that.

Another thing you see with the diet approach to cancer prevention is railing against “artificial sweeteners” and food additives.

While I’m absolutely certain that things that we eat and breathe and drink can kill us, you rarely see anywhere near this data that nicotine, tar, chlorine, and every one of the atoms that make up EVERYTHING WE COME INTO CONTACT WITH occurs...uh...in nature. Otherwise we wouldn’t come into contact with it.

Nutrasweet, sodium cyclamate, acetaminophen, even DDT is made up of atoms that occur in nature. Humans lack the skill of manipulating the universe deftly enough to make atoms from nothing – that power is reserved for Mother Nature or God. The things that receive the most abuse as being “man-made” flatters only Humanity. More correctly, the compounds above are assembled by Humans – and not even assembled in their entirety from loose matter.

The one slammed most often, Nutrasweet, has the chemical formula C14H18N2O5  (please note that all of these atoms are found in nature and are the major components of the class of molecules we call carbohydrates and proteins) and is assembled from amino acids (for the geeks out there, the amino acids are L-phenylalanine and L-aspartate. The “L” stands for “levorotated”. Nothing more sinister than the way the molecule is built…

At any rate, the upshot is that I’m going to do a series of blogs now that deal with breast cancer prevention as it intersects the world of what we eat. My suspicion is that instead of blaming chemicals we firmly believe are made by Humans and ipso facto, they are EVIL AND GIVE US CANCER, we might examine the OVEReating paradigm and how Humans were created/evolved to eat certain kinds of things and we now overeat the kinds of things we evolved/were created to eat – and then look at what kind of impact those things have on not only Human life, but on breast cancer prevention.

So…enough for now. See you later!

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