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Natural Cancer Treatment: Is fat consumption the problem or is it lack of exercise?

By Harriet Denz Penhey

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 01Dec2009 Word count: 634 Viewed: 73 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

For many years, and even continuing now, there has been an understanding that fat in food is bad and contributes to cancer. And with the upsurge in obesity and obesity related illness there are still many doctors, nurses, nutritionists and dieticians who condemn the eating of fatty foods. However is fat the villain it has been made out to be?

A couple of weeks ago I read a research paper in a health and nutrition journal, all full of big academic words but the gist of it was that it had been known for decades that fat was not a contributor to cancer and heart disease. There were a range of articles in the journal along the same vein and I did not see any research providing contradictory evidence. It was as though the professionals had a new consensus view.

However that evening a "leading doctor" strutted in front of the television cameras pronouncing his horror on the intake of fat and how it was making people fat and causing cancer and heart disease. It was the hyped up lead news item that night.

It was with some interest that I found a just published study in the American Journal of Epidemiology (2009;170:1250-1256) that once again showed that animal fat intake was associated with increased cancer death. BUT when they looked at the effect of physical activity on breast cancer survival they found two important points.

Firstly, physical activity considerably reduced the risk of dying of breast cancer - the most active had less than 20% of the risk of dying than the least active. This is in line with what other studies have shown, albeit a somewhat more positive impact on physical activity.

The second point was that those who ate more animal fats tended to be less active. The researchers were able to show that exercise was what they call a confounder for animal fat intake. This means that although it LOOKED as though the higher deaths might be due to increased fat intake, it is really due to the fact that they did less exercise. When they "controlled" for exercise, then animal fat intake wasn't a problem.

Does this mean that we can eat all the meat fat that we like? There is evidence that meat fat is not the problem. However think about the bigger picture. I like to go back to first principles and look at meat as nature used to provide us before big agribusiness took over.

Animals used to be raised free range and pasture fed. I have no problems with animals which continue to be fed like that. However I do have a problem with lot fed, grain fed, antibiotic and hormone reared animals.

I remember back in the 1980s when we had a plant nursery and used to sell a large number of tomato plants to farmers to raise in their home gardens. Many were very proud of their organically grown tomatoes.

Then a couple of years after a "new generation" drench was used to kill parasites in the animals the farmers would come in with plants that looked as if they had been dosed with weed-killer. On questioning we would find that the farmers had grown their tomatoes solely in gardens fertilized with animal manure and had used manure from animals dosed with this new drench. The long term effects of the drench were killing the tomato plants.

Ever since then I have been aware of the long term effects of what has routinely been fed into our intensively fed animals. As a result, as a personal preference, I make sure that the vast majority of the meat we eat is from organically grown, pasture fed animals. And I do really enjoy eating the fat along with the meat and my large plate of veges!

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