AhYap’s Blog

A carcinogen is something that can cause cancer with high chances. Scientists have discover many carcinogens since then. But the most popular carcinogen is known as aflatoxin (AF) which is often found in peanut butter (yummy!). When you feed rats with AF, they will develop liver cancer very fast (and effective).

Before I begin, please be open minded and ready to investigate. This is very important while reading all my writings because everything I write will be controversial and unconventional. People familiar with my blog know this (and thanks for coming back for more!). But new visitors are usually too influenced by standard academics. Their “contaminated” brain will reject anything that doesn’t match what they already known. This is a pity because the one who loses is you, not me.

In my cancer is not a disease post, I mention that we should use statistics to serve us, not to screw us. Where if 1 out of 10 people is healed from cancer, we should learn what that 1 people is doing and learn from him.

And in the post don’t let modern medicine screw you, I challenge a lot about why “scietific approach” can lead to many wrong assumptions, observations and theories. I even say that in the end, all theories all meant to be wrong! In this post, we can demonstrate just that, how “scientific approach” will always prove themselves to be wrong again and again.

Let’s get back to our story today.

While the worst peanut butter might contains over 300 times the acceptable level of aflatoxin (AF), this post is not asking you not to eat peanut butter. This post will develop a very long story from AF to peanut butter, to protein, to soy beans, to North Antartica… It will be like a movie, getting you deeper and deeper. I hope it will be an eye opening one.

We live in a complicated world and it is when we try to simplify things that we make a lot of mistakes.

AF is a “proven” carcinogen because when scientist feed the rats (poor rats) with it, almost all of them get liver cancer. There is really no dispute on it because no matter if it is a Chinese rat, a Malay rate or an Indian rat, you feed it with carcinogen, it will get liver cancer. It comes with a very high probability in statistical terms.

Colin Campbell is an expert in protein (a “PHD”). He wrote a controversial book known as “The China Study” (which has nothing to do with my Chinese post by the way). It is a book of discovery from his research for a few decades. And most of the story today, are from that book.

Dr Campbell was sent to Philippines to help solve a problem many years ago. Many Philippines kids died before the age of 5 from liver cancer. At that time, the statistics shows that the countries with the less protein intake have the highest occurrences of liver cancer. So they believe Phillipines kids were poor and thus lack of nutrition (protein in this case). So they sent Dr Campbell (the protein expert) to solve the problem.

But funny things happened. After increasing the protein intake (mostly milk) which was thought to be the solution, instead of seeing a reduction of liver cancer, more kids were getting it! (wtf!!!) This is of course very shocking and disappointing. Isn’t that science and statistic were saying “protein is the solution”?

And later, a doctor who worked there before Dr Campbell came told him that, he noticed most of the kids who got liver cancer are not the “poor” kids but the “rich” kids! The kids from rich families who can afford to eat better than the poor (got money to eat more “nutrients”, i.e. meat, milk and proteins).

Dr Campbell is those researcher who can get a lot of money to do research. His “China Study” is named so because he has the power and money to run his research on hundreds of thousands of the Chinese in China, tracking all sort of patterns and statistics.

At that time, a research report came from India and caught Dr Campbell’s attention. A research that people like Rak999 (an unfriendly commenter in my blog) will definitely say is “statistically impossible” and “I know for an undisputed fact that you’re wrong”. Unfortunately, there are just too many Rak999 in this world.

The research said something like the more protein you eat, the higher chance you will develop cancer. With their own supporting research and experiment of course. This type of announcement will probably be laughed by anyone because protein are highly worshiped at that time (almost the same today). 

But Dr Campbell didn’t want to merely ignore it. He is open minded and ready to investigate. As I said, he always got a lot of money to do a lot of research in a very large scale.

He tried to duplicate what the Indians did and see if he could get the same results. He divided rats into 2 groups. He fed both group lots of AF (aflatoxin, the carcinogen) which based on all previous experiments will guarantee the rat to get liver cancer. The only difference to both group is the protein consumption. The first group took the “normal” consumption of 20% protein, while the second group took just 5% protein. (There will always be control groups in these experiments that I will not write about for simplicity sake, test groups are rats that are not fed with AF but just proteins to make sure the experiment results are “more reliable”)

[I highlighted the text “normal” because as in my blog, I have repeated again and again that a lot of things that we think are normal are far from normal! BTW, a “normal” 20% consumption of protein a day for human is around 7 pieces of nuggets, just for you to benchmark]

The results? The rats that took 20% protein, like expected, 100% (repeat 100%) developed liver cancer. The other group? 100% (repeat 100%) DIDN’T develop any cancer! Read this paragraph again. Something that is “statistically impossible” and “I know for an undisputed fact that you’re wrong”. To prove AF does not cause cancer is “statistically impossible” before this and it is an “undisputed fact that you are wrong” if you say protein cause cancer!

So, can we conclude that protein causes cancer and by reducing it, we can avoid cancer? Scientists love breakthrough discoveries. But most of the time their breakthrough discoveries is another breakthrough mistake. We live in a complicated world and it is when we try to simplify things that we make a lot of mistakes.

At first AF was blamed to be the cause of cancer. But later they find out even rats that took a lot of AF can avoid cancer by reducing protein consumption to 5%. And please remember the statistical probability is 100% which is very significant.

Luckily, unlike other researcher, Dr Campbell didn’t stop there, claim victory, announce his breakthrough discovery and take all the fame (or maybe Nobel prize). He did a lot more experiments to dig deeper.

Instead of giving the rats either a 20% or 5% protein, he adjusted them time to time. That means group A will start with 20% of protein for 3 weeks, 5% for 3 weeks and repeat. Group B will start with 5% of protein for 3 weeks, 20% for 3 weeks and repeat.

Wuhahahaha. Know what happened? It turns out that we found a way to TURN ON and TURN OFF the cancer tumor growth at will! They discover that when the rats were taking 20% protein, the cancer tumor grew very fast and when the rats were taking 5% protein, the tumor actually stop growing!

It is like a “magic” button. You press it, the cancer grow. Press it again, the cancer stop growing!

Now we can make a further conclusion that while AF is proven to cause cancer, protein will affect it’s growth rate. AF is like the seed of cancer, and protein is like the fertilizer/water. We can eat a lot of AF (the cancer seed) but still won’t get cancer if we didn’t provide it with enough fertilizer (protein).

Getting something? Can we conclude now? Nope, far from that.

The question comes to, is protein to be blamed? Are all proteins equal? What protein was they using in these experiments? They are using MILK protein! A protein known as casein extracted from cow’s milk! Hmmm, tasty milk, tasty yogurt, tasty cheese, provide you with “good” proteins to make you “strong” and “healthy”.

More experiments was done to see if all protein are equal. They fed the rats plant based proteins (such as soy proteins) and the result?

Plant based proteins have no effect whatever towards cancer, no matter how much you take it!

So we now know that it is animal protein (meat and milk) that is the problem! That means protein is not that evil. It is still very important to our dietary but the source of protein (animal or plant)  is the key!

We are taught in school that we should eat animal proteins because they contain all the essential amino acids. We are told that plant based proteins are “not good” because they don’t contain all the essential amino acids.

Amino acids are the simplest form of protein (after being broken down) and essential means our body can’t make it on our own and has to rely on our diet (food) to get them.

Correct observation, but wrong conclusion and solution. While it is true that meats and milks contain all the essential amino acids while plants do not, that doesn’t mean plants protein are not good and we should eat more meat.

While plant A, B and C might contain only 50% of the essential acids EACH, eating ALL A, B and C will give you ALL the essential amino acids your body needs! And hey, there are significant more type of plants in this world than meats!!! Meats that we eat most of the time are either chicken, pork, beef and fish. There are plenty of vegetables and fruits that you don’t even know their names.

That means for someone who didn’t eat chicken and drink milk (and other animal proteins), he can get all the proteins he need by eating, say, just soy bean + brown rice + carrot (example only). While each of them lack certain essential amino acids, overall they cover each other and provide all the essential amino acids that you need.

Dr Campbell goes on his research. The whole book will link animal proteins towards many other “modern” diseases including high blood pressure, heart attack, diabetes, etc. I am not going there now, I will continue with another part of the story I want to tell.

Michael Pollan (not a health expert but a journalist!) wrote a book called “In Defense of Food”. This is a great book that gives us a lot of new perspectives on looking at our “food” problem that we think are “normal”.

[This is the first time I have to put book names here for references because many people thought that I made things up myself. I do read a lot dude, more than 10 books on health topic alone from food to running to chi-gong and 300+ others since last 7 years. The figure is not for showing off. It is to give you some confidence that I am not really just talking cock! There is really something for you!]

The more perspectives your have, the more ways you can look at the same thing. While Mr Campbell is ingenious, still he can miss a lot of things. For the third time, I want to say, “We live in a complicated world and it is when we try to simplify things that we make a lot of mistakes.”

Repetition is the mother of skill dude. This blog is about repeating all the unconventional stuff to you again and again so it becomes conventional to you.

Is the answer and solution so simple as “animal protein”? While it is true that it is a BIG advantage to stay away from animal protein (which I do strongly encourage myself), what if there are more that we don’t know yet? What if there are some “black swans”?

[Black swan means if you have seen 1,000 white swans doesn’t mean you can conclude that all swans are white. All it takes is just a black swan and your theory/conclusion will be wrong]

There are just too many “black swans” as we will see. And this might be a good news for those who want to eat MEAT!

If animal proteins are evil, why cancer only become so common in the last 30 years? People 100 years ago might not even heard of cancer. [clue: modernization]

And how come the Eskimos, who eat almost 100% animals meat from sea (you can’t plant vegetables on ice dude!) have very low rate of cancer?

Or looking at it from the other way, why do so many vegetarians got cancer?! Why housewives who never smoke, never drink, eat nutrition supplements and even eat only vegetables can have lung cancer and breast cancer?

Because for the forth time-

We live in a complicated world and it is when we try to simplify things that we make a lot of mistakes.

Nothing is a mere simple cause and effect. Everything involve thousands of causes and thousands of effects cross linking with each other. We have 100 trillion cells in our body, we have multiple organs working together with millions of chemical reaction happening in our body each second… and we are trying to figure all this out with our overrated mind…

While we are far from knowing the real truth, we will look more about the black swans that I have just mentioned. We will see why this Eskimos are not cursed by animal proteins, why the housewives who live a “healthy” lifestyle could get cancer, how you can eat meat but not getting cancer (or how you can eat vegetables and die of cancer!).

We will bring more causes and effects to the surface (although is still be scratching the surface) but I believe it is sufficient for us to become lowest 10% of people who will get cancer in the future. Stay tuned as I will give you the knowledge that I have summarized from my own “study” (stolen and concluded from many books actually).

Akan Datang! Before 2012!

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