Anti-Cancer Diets

Special Anti-cancer diets

• There are many special diets promoted as having an anti-cancer effect
• Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to find much evidence that they really help
• Some of them are quite difficult to follow: unpalatable, time-consuming, expensive

It is certainly plausible that some foods may contain chemicals that can cause cancer (carcinogens) and eating too much of these could increase the risk of developing cancer – particularly in the stomach and digestive tract.  There is even some evidence in studies that seems to support this.  This is why there is general advice to limit the amount of processed meat and meat that has been cooked at high temperature. 

However, this is not the same thing as saying that making these changes will help if you already have a cancer.

There are many special diets that people have claimed can cause an improvement, even cure, of people who have advanced cancer.  These include: 

• the rainbow diet, 
• the alkaline diet, 
• the Gerson diet, 
• the berry diet 
• and many others.  

It is claimed that these diets may flush out toxins, change the chemistry of body fluids, or reduce harmful chemicals such as free radicals.

The problem with these proposed rationales is that there is a complex pathway between what we eat and what happens in the tissues of our body.  Our digestive system is highly developed to take food sources of all sorts and break them down to the components our metabolism needs, and our physiology is highly evolved to keep the composition of body fluids very constant irrespective of what we eat.

This is not to say that our diet has no effect on our health, only that it is often very difficult to understand or predict the effect that a change in diet will have.  The only way we can tell if something like this really has a beneficial effect on health is a properly conducted clinical trial.