Cancer - Is There Hope? - 005

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalized, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Today's topic is cancer. Is there hope even if it's stage four cancer? Stay stay tuned as we discuss powerful foods that can help you fight back. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of three ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good health. SPEAKER B With me in the studio today is health psychologist Jenifer Skues and Dr. John Clark. Welcome, Jenifer. Welcome John. Really lovely to have you on the program. And this is a very sensitive subject. It's just this disease of cancer is one that I think it strikes fear into us possibly more than any other. And so this topic we're really, really looking forward to what you have to say because we need to know how to fight back when this thing comes. So John, would you like to just talk to us a little bit about that? SPEAKER C Yes. Bob, a friend of mine was having trouble with his bowels. They weren't working right. He was like, having symptoms that were a problem and we were sure that he was going to be in trouble. He went to the hospital, got some tests done, and lo and behold, he had colon cancer. Well, he didn't know what he should do. And the hospital ran him through the usual ropes of chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. And then they sent him home and said, okay, you're fixed. But in four months things weren't going right again. He went back to the hospital and the surgeon looked at him and said, well, you probably have some blockages because chemotherapy makes strictures in your colon and we're going to have to go back in, so let's take you back to surgery. Took him back to surgery, opened him up and he was totally full of cancer. They closed him up, said, there's nothing more we can do, we'll just send you home. And then the surgeon said a funny thing. He says, well, if I was you, I'd probably at this point find somebody that would do something natural for you. Well, Bob was a bit taken back. Well, what do you mean? What are you saying? Well, I'd find somebody that might do know, take a natural approach to this. He said, well, where would I go to find? He says, I don't know, but just look around, you'll probably find something. And so he did. He sort of went on a life mission to find somebody that would take a natural approach, nutritional approach. And he found somebody. And so he went to this place. They gave him all fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, and seeds. They put him on some cleansing programs. They gave him some herbs, his cancer went away. SPEAKER B Can we make that herbs? We're in Australia now, John. That's fine. I'm just joking. SPEAKER C In America, herb is the name of a guy. SPEAKER B We have them too. SPEAKER C And so I gave him some herbs and his cancer went away. And so he went back home. He thought, well, how can I keep this to myself? He added five more bedrooms onto his house and started bringing people in. And he'd teach them how to fix food. They'd all go to the kitchen. He had a big kitchen with a big counter space and a place for everybody to prepare their fruits and vegetables. He taught them how to do herbs. He started his own herb distribution company, basically, and he had them doing cleanses. And so he shared what he had learned. SPEAKER B That's incredible. He'd basically been sent home to die. SPEAKER C Absolutely. SPEAKER B Because they said, there's nothing that we can do. And yet he was able to turn that around. And you would you'd feel like telling other people and helping other people when you'd just come back basically from the brink of the grave, wouldn't you? SPEAKER C Yeah. SPEAKER B And what a lovely thing that he did to do that and just not keep it all to himself. SPEAKER A Very sad that many people do die at that point, because they don't believe there's anything else that can be done. And we're just showing here that it's never too late. And I think that's important for people never to give up and to look beyond what may be more conventional treatments, which can help some. And if it doesn't, then there is a and this is a good example of that. SPEAKER C And I might just say, prior to coming to Australia, I was working at a health facility where we took in cancer patients. The large majority of our patients were cancer, and we would see them turn around. A lot of them had the same story, totally given up on by the general system or stage. I remember one gentleman, he called me up, he said, the hospital said, you're going to go home and die. He went to another natural place. They said, there's nothing we can do. You're going to go home and die. He said, but the Lord has showed me that this cancer is not unto death. He says, Can I come to your facility? I said, Well, I can't tell you if you're going to die or not. I don't know how they can tell you that. But I can tell you we'll do our best for you physically, mentally and spiritually and put you in the best position to present yourself to God for healing. And so he came, he had prostate cancer that had grown up through the bladder and was going into his intestine. SPEAKER A Wow, that's huge. SPEAKER C When he came, he couldn't get out of bed, hardly. We thought, okay, he's just going to lay in bed and die. But he started in on the program, lots of interesting therapies going on. And by the end of the 18 day program, he was walking a mile and a half. He was feeling a lot better. And three months later, some of our therapists went up to where he went to church and found him in church and talked with him and he was supposed to die. SPEAKER B That's really encouraging. I remember I was driving along the road one day and in front of me was a bus. And on the back of the bus they have signs and different things that you read on the back of the bus and it said, cancer is a word, not a sentence. And I thought that was interesting. In other words, not a death sentence, so to speak. And I thought that was really good. And there are things that can be done. You can't be sure that every person might not have left it a little bit too long. But certainly there are many, many stories of people who can actually recover. And so tell us about the foods that can help to fight back from cancer. What are the foods that are those powerful foods we promised we would talk about? SPEAKER C You know, when you come down with a disease, many people think that I was the unlucky one. I was just sitting here and it landed on me. And in reality, we've been doing things that have set us up for this. And one of the biggest problems with cancer is that it is often an infectious disease, a virus, bacteria, some other thing that came in and actually gave you the disease. And modern medicine has sort of sold us on the idea of the Germ theory, which says that I was me and I was like everybody else. And along came this really bad bug and look at me now. I'm a victim. Well, it's better to look at it a little different. And that is like this. It's like looking at the bugs as vultures. And do vultures eat live animals? No. They come up and clean up what's already dying. And you made yourself susceptible to whatever disease by being a target, by being the weak one, by not being healthy, by not having a good immune system. So you want to eat foods that maintain a strong immune system. Every one of us has cancer cells. When they collect and get to where they reach a certain number, the doctor says, look, there's a pile of them. It's a tumor. You have cancer. But if your immune system is working well, you'll be shuffling those growing bad cells off to the waste basket and you won't get cancer. That happens if you're eating a diet that is nutritionally dense, especially with fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds. And so for cancer, we think of things that are high in antioxidants blueberries, red, beans, all kinds of different green leafy vegetables, especially some of your root vegetables like beets, raw beets are great cabbage. You think of all the family of the cabbage foods good at fighting cancer, you look at all the different type of sprouts, high in antioxidants, high in nutrition. SPEAKER B Actually I was really surprised you mentioned the red beans. I was very surprised to notice that they are high on the list of antioxidant foods. They usually come in a dried form and I've only ever, until I read that recently actually, I've only ever thought of antioxidants being in fresh fruit and vegetables, not the dried form, but they're very high. The legumes are very, very high and that little red bean, the azuki bean is very high. So that's just an interesting thing to know, especially because it's a really good meat alternative and I mean, I'd put it the other way around actually. Meat's an alternative to what we really should be eating. So yeah, very interesting. SPEAKER A Jenny, what's your just listening to you John. One of the big things that comes up is the mindset of that person and their attitude and what they believe as well as contribute. You pair that with the diet, it's like a double whammy. And whenever anyone goes and gets a diagnosis of cancer, what is their first reaction is? We usually want to fear terror and they're going to die. So they immediately giving the brain is telling the body it's going to die. And we mentioned before that every cell of the body is impacted by every thought you have. So if we want to live, we have to start living like we're going to live even when we have an illness of some sort. SPEAKER B Sure. SPEAKER A And this is where the beliefs come into it. And you mentioned a few things about people belief, oh this is terrible, look at me, I'm not going to survive and what am I going to do? Because that's the way we've been primed with cancer. Not everyone dies from cancer. SPEAKER B No. Yeah. SPEAKER A And we're hearing here that if someone can go, well look here's this man in stage four who didn't die, I can do this. It gives people hope. SPEAKER B That's right. Stories like and I'm not being pessimistic at all, but even if they didn't fully survive, it would give them some extra good years. So it's a tricky one to talk about, I guess, John, cancer, isn't it? You can't make promises like you said when that man came to your clinic, you said, well you didn't know, but you would give him his best chance. And that's what we need to do. We all need to give ourselves the best chance that we can at a good quality of life. SPEAKER A There are a lot of lifestyle factors that impact cancer and certainly stress is a huge component. And one of the things now, which is a more recent area of research is on what they call epigenetics. And that means that we can be predisposed to an illness. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A And an illness can include things like addictions because there is a genetic capacity for the brain to be more addicted than not addicted. And they're saying now that it doesn't mean you'll get it if you've got the gene. It's triggered by health and lifestyle, diet, health and lifestyle and stress. Stress is a huge component of that. But sadly, people are not listening to that. And I know women who've gone and had a breast removed because their whole family or the women in the family have had cancer. SPEAKER B We read about that all the time. And that's very in fact, there was an actress who recently had both breasts done in the front page of the paper. And so people think, oh, now I can do that too. SPEAKER A It's a common instead of going, well, hang on, if I watch my stress levels and live the health principles, I won't get it because that's what happens. If you reduce your stress, watch your diet density, dense nutrients, then the body will fight it off, it will cure itself. SPEAKER B And it's interesting going back to, I think it was around about 2005, the US Surgeon General, where you're from, he said that our health status is determined. 70% of it is determined by our lifestyle. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER B What we eat and drink, where we smoke and exercise and how we love. Interesting might come back to that. That was what he said and I thought that was interesting. So that 70% is more than all other factors put together. He allocated 10% to genetics, 10% to medical care, and 10% to environmental factors. So that's very supportive of what you're really saying. Here what both of you are saying. And I think that's an amazing authority. So 70% of our whole health status is determined by our choices. And what we do about stress is. SPEAKER A A great factor in bringing the immune system down. And people who are stressed, a lot of the time, their immune function is very poor, hence they get colds, flu viruses, lots of things happening. So that means they're more predisposed to that gene pool activating because stress weakens the whole system. SPEAKER B And that's why we brought you on the program, Jenny, because you're talking about how what we think affects us so powerfully. Every cell of the body, you actually said in another program, and of course, John, you're talking about the physical things that we can do, the exercise and the water and the good food choices. And there's more, of course. And that was just interesting in what the US Surgeon General said back then about how we love. And I was actually really surprised to hear that coming from him. I don't know why I should be. I mean, I understand it really well. I just didn't expect it to come from him. And it's just an amazing thing because all it comes back attitudes and having that and relationships. Relationships are huge because people need people. And we know that, we all know that. SPEAKER A But if the heart's healthy and the brain has a capacity to love, when we action that, we're working a healthy connection between the heart and the brain, which is very powerful, but relationships are huge. Hits the heart, doesn't it? SPEAKER B Well, that's right. SPEAKER A That's where the heart comes into it and love comes into it. SPEAKER B That's right. SPEAKER C And this whole stress issue, when I was the medical director at the cancer program, I realized that all these cancer patients were just on edge. They were like, very stressed. A lot of them would probably be considered Type A personalities. SPEAKER A Yes. SPEAKER C Whereas you get somebody that's obese or has diabetes and they're like, oh yeah, I'd like to come to your program and I'd like to have fun there. The cancer patients are like, and are we going to be drinking carrot juice? And do we have this kind of herb? And should we look, it's like you guys are stressed out. You're stressing me out. So we immediately instituted a stress recovery program. We gave them an hour a day on stress management and had them one on one with our stress counselor. SPEAKER A Well, I have someone I know who is more the type A personality. She's a high achiever, had family, children, and her stress levels were huge. And she was diagnosed with cancer on the eye. And she was told that if they couldn't treat it effectively, they could have to remove the eye. And to actually remove it was going to send her blind and it would eventually do both eyes. It was a left eye initially, and because it was its early stages, she said no. The other story had, I want to try and thought this. And so she went off and she learned to relax. She cut her workload back. She started to deal with her temperament. She changed her diet. She had a reasonable diet, but she went for foods like you were talking about. One of them, she remember telling me raspberries. So she got raspberries and had those a lot. What was it, black currants or the other types of berries in that that are so powerful. So she did a whole makeover, if you want to put it that way, where she changed her lifestyle radically and it never progressed. It disappeared and she's never had it since. This would probably 20 years ago. SPEAKER B That's just absolutely fantastic. Now, we've talked about the things that these people did and I'm just thinking there are probably people tuning in who are thinking, that's a big ask. SPEAKER A I'm not sure I could do that. SPEAKER B What would you say, John, to people who are feeling like that's a huge especially when they're quite sick? What would you suggest? What would you say to them? SPEAKER C You want to take it a step at a time. If it's being a challenge for you, one place to start is drinking more water. You'd be surprised how many people are dehydrated. Therefore they're much more concentrated and they need to get rid of toxins. And so you drink more water. And so I tell people, drink a liter of water when you get up in the morning, drink a liter of water between breakfast and lunch and drink a liter of water a couple of hours after lunch. And this alone is a big help. SPEAKER B Now, that wouldn't leave much room for the other beverages that people usually like to have. So that could be a good thing because it would displace some of those things. SPEAKER C That's right. And then as far as diet goes, if you just take and look at what you're currently eating, hopefully you're eating some fresh fruits and vegetables. Just start increasing those proportions. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C Instead of one apple, two, or just make it a larger part of your meal. SPEAKER B So take a journey. And that's really good because it's not all or nothing. And everything that they do in the right direction is going to help them and hopefully they can get some good social support. Support is a really big thing. And being loved, often people with cancer. SPEAKER A Do get good social support because all their friends and that rally round will help them. SPEAKER B Yeah, but there's other kinds of support too, Jenny. I think you mentioned it in another program, like professional support. SPEAKER A Absolutely. And I do, I work with people who've had that diagnosis or have had it and recovering, and they're still struggling to get themselves around it. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A And certainly I think what we're talking about before that overwhelm of looking, I can't do this. And people psychologically can cope with changing one thing, not 20 things at once. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A So that's the sort of approach I take. Okay, well, how can you start to streamline your lifestyle and start to improve and help your immune system and your brain function? And water is one of them, because without enough water, the brain can shrink if it's dehydrated and it makes it very cloudy and it can't focus. So often people come to me and they're actually dehydrated and they're really struggling in when I'm talking to them and I'll get them a big drink of water. The difference is quite marked. SPEAKER B How fast can that happen? A drink of water? SPEAKER A Pretty quickly. SPEAKER B All right. SPEAKER A Once you put stuff in your mouth, it just translates through everything. Drink of water. SPEAKER B Yes. That's really good. I just think, too, that it's probably a time more particularly when people are facing a cris of any sort and that would be more likely to health cris. Yes, they are more likely to change. But also, I think it's a time when people tap into spirituality and they can do it in two ways. It might be that they turn to God for help and they draw strength from that, or they might blame him for their illness and turn against Him. And we see this happening in all kinds of situations where it will drive people one way or the other. And I would just really encourage you to draw strength because God would love to do that for you. And rather than be angry, which is going to make things worse. SPEAKER A Well, my friend, she did a bit more of a spiritual focus as well. SPEAKER B Sorry? SPEAKER A My friend did a bit more of a spiritual focus as well. Like I said, she did the whole package also exercise, so she embraced all the things we're talking about. SPEAKER B Yes. And when you've got them all going for you, mental, physical, spiritual, social, which is all of who we are, that's our package. SPEAKER A Total package. SPEAKER B Yes. When we have it all going for you, it's a synergistic effect. It is. It's more than the sum of the parts. And we need everything going for us. Even if we're not really as sick as that, we still need to have them all going for us. Why not? SPEAKER A Absolutely. SPEAKER B Why not? Why would we just coast along and. SPEAKER C You'Re sort of talking here about people really getting fearful when they get the diagnosis and this is sort of played up, but a lot of times, by the time they can actually find a lump or a bump or a tumor, it's been there a long time. It isn't like it popped up yesterday and you've been hit. No. And they push you to make a decision really fast. That's stressful in and of itself. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C So just sort of step back and take it easy and don't make fast decisions. And you don't need surgery tomorrow or chemo the next day, you need to sort of sit back and look at your alternatives and think, now, how am I going to approach this? And what could be wrong with my lifestyle that I need to make changes in? SPEAKER A That's why they come and see me. That's what I help them with. SPEAKER B Yeah. That's a wonderful combination. SPEAKER A It is. SPEAKER B Of the psychology and the health advice. SPEAKER A It needs to be married, it needs to be combined. They do the full total health. SPEAKER B That's right. And what a wonderful thing that you do there. So, yeah, really good. SPEAKER C And we might think a little bit about this, where the cancer came from. A lot of these folks we've talked about here were using lots of animal products. One interesting study that really struck me was in California, they looked at milk, they looked at what viruses were in milk and they looked at breast cancer and looked at what viruses were in breast cancer. 80% of those with breast cancer had a virus found in milk. And amazing, you're thinking, oh, it can't be. Well, does it make any sense at all that if I am drinking a product from a cow's breast, that I might get a breast cancer or a breast disease? This is no brain thought of it like that. SPEAKER A There is evidence around studies on animals that we eat with cancers and growths. It can contaminate, it can cross over, certainly, yeah. There's a lot of good research now that shows that, but you don't always see it in the papers. It's not going to be the frontline news, but that's the reality. SPEAKER C And a lot of these animals going to market are diseased. SPEAKER A Yeah. And very stressed. SPEAKER C Very stressed. And a lot of them know they're going to die. And this puts high hormones into them. SPEAKER A We eat stress hormones, meat. SPEAKER C And then there's the whole thing of the hormones. They feed animals to make them grow. They've discovered they can grow 20% more beef on the same amount of feed if they give them hormones, those hormones come straight through to you, and you can gain 20% more weight on the same amount of beef. But you can also grow cancer. And this is a big issue, because a lot of these cancers almost don't grow in the absence of hormones such as breast cancer, prostate cancer and so forth. And so when you look at that, you have to realize that modern cattle are not what they were 200 years ago. They're run on a very strict hormone program, lots of different chemicals given to them, and they don't get exercise, and they don't always get water, and they don't always get good food. SPEAKER B No. SPEAKER C And we could go into what they feed them, but that's a whole scary thing. SPEAKER A If we don't look at that in this program, we'll have everyone out there stressed. SPEAKER B No. I remember once as a fundraising thing for our youth group at the church, we decided we would bag up some manure and sell it. The kids were doing that, and we were told to go in on a certain day, on a certain Sunday, because that's when jokes would be eight weeks old. But then two weeks before that, they said, you're going to have to do it this weekend because there's been disease in the sheds and you'll have to come and get it. So we went there. Well, they'd all gone to market. All these sick fowls had got chickens, had gone to market. So we did this job. It was dreadful, I've got to tell you. It was dreadful because the smell was terrible. It was in an enclosed building, huge enclosed building. One of the children vomited, and we were wearing masks that didn't help, just from the smell, and that's the only air they breathed from the time they were chicks till they went to market, and they were walking in their own newer all that time. SPEAKER A This is why we should eat fresh foods that grown on trees and on the ground and plants. Doesn't make it more palatable. SPEAKER B And then when we'd finished, I said to the gentleman in charge, I said, now, do you want us to hose this out or do something? Oh, no, he said, what are they going to do? He said, we had disease, so we've got to treat it for that. I said, oh, what was the disease? He said, salmonella. And I was really shocked, and I think it must have shown. And he said, oh, don't worry, it's not one that humans get. But they would have died if they hadn't gone to get their heads chopped off right then they would have died before they got to market. So it's a big concern. You're talking about healthy animals we don't know. And I told my parents that don't eat any frozen chucks for quite a while because of what had happened. And then I talked to a friend of mine. He said, happens all the time. He used to work with them. SPEAKER C Have you ever heard of somebody getting a virus from a carrot? SPEAKER B No, actually I haven't. SPEAKER A Good news, you don't. SPEAKER B So that's really a big issue. So there's a lot of factors there as far as getting the antioxidants from the fresh fruit and vegetables, and also then there's the viruses and the hormones and the stress, a lot of these things. And the support. SPEAKER A We need a healthy immune system. That means we have to eat healthy, think healthy, look after the body, do all the things that keep it good working. SPEAKER B Thank you. That's all for our program today. If you'd like a fact sheet of the program or watch our programs on demand, just visit our website, 3abnaustralia.org.au, and click the watch button. And John and Jenifer are happy to answer your questions personally. Just email them at [email protected] We'll see you next time on Healthy Living.