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Hey Vickie
I wholeheartedly agree with your decisions and with your general outlook on diet! I could have written the things you said myself so I certainly won’t be rough with you…
ha ha.
I also agree with you that we should respect other people’s points of view.
No point in embarking on crusades and impale (ok, a bit of a gory metaphor but it goes with the crusade scenario) whoever doesn’t think along our lines,right?
What’s the point of that, I ask? We are all trying to make sense of what happened to us and we all have to cope with some pretty horrendous treatments and with the fear of what might happen to us in the future. Do we need to be unfriendly to each other? I don’t think so.
So I’m glad you raised your head above the parapet and wrote. Your opinion is as valid as anybody else’s on this thread.
It’s a shame that you even think you might be shot down in flames…lol
Take care and a big hug to you (and ALL the other ladies too!)!
Lulu XX
Vickie, your comments correspond with the Breast Cancer Care young womans event talk held on nutrition, given by a qualified nutritionist who herself had cancer. X
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Vickie - welcome to the thread, Mel that was a sweet comment x
I know lots of people think I’m some sort of food nazi, but the reason is that my cancer is active, so I feel I need to go quite a lot further with my diet in trying to keep the cancer under control - I can’t afford to wait for definitive proof, so am happy to pursue promising avenues, as long as they can’t do any harm. I know many secondary ladies that are much more rigid in their approach, and tend to go the full vegan route. I completely understand that many people will have a much more relaxed view, particularly primary ladies with a good prognosis, and they can no doubt afford to do so.
Regarding the green tea research - thanks for posting it welcome - it does contradict many previous studies, but there may be a perfectly logical reason for that. There is no doubt that the polyphenols in green tea have shown an ability to inhibit human cancer cell lines in test tube studies, and in laboratory animals - including human breast cancers, although the effects have been more pronounced for bladder and prostate cancers.
But, the dosage does seem to be very important, and green tea is not an homogeneous product. The variation in polyphenol content can be as high as 5,000% (yes, five thousand percent!) between the best and worst, depending on the type of leaf, the quality, the area it’s grown in, the processing, and how it’s prepared for drinking. So a cup of poor quality tea brewed for a short time can have as few as 9mg of polyphenols per cup, but a cup of high quality tea brewed for 10 minutes could have as many as 540mg. Prof Beliveau recommends drinking 6 cups a day of the highest quality stuff to have any therapeutic effect - so that would be about 3,000mg per day - that would be 15,000% more than someone having a couple cups of low grade tea! So this makes any analysis of green tea consumption in large population studies very problematic, because it is very hard to know exactly what they are drinking.
The other reason I think a large population study of Japanese tea drinking should be taken with a little caution, is that the entire Japanese diet is considered the healthiest in the world for preventing many cancers, specifically breast cancer. So isolating small differences in the consumption of one product among many that may protect against cancer, may not give any meaningful results.
Just my 2p worth.
finty x
Hi Finty
interesting thoughts! I totally understand your wanting to explore every possible avenues considering you have secondary cancer. And what you post is always very informative and well researched. So thank you!
Re: green tea. How do you go about finding out which is good quality and which isn’t? Is it the price?
Didn’t realize the huge difference in polyphenol content. I can see now that the Tetley green tea with lemon which OH bought is not going to cut the mustard somehow!
If you or anyone else happens to know where to buy the high quality stuff I’d appreciate it.
I personally hate the taste but I have read so many good things about it that I have started drinking it (suspended during chemo, mind. I am having redbush tea instead). I am viewing it as some kind of medicine…
At worse it won’t do anything but IF it’s true it’s really good for you, like many cancer specialists say, why not drink it?
Lulu XX
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Mel - if you’re after organic green tea then Jing Teas do a good range with varying prices: jingtea.com/
I ordered from them recently for the first time and it arrived very quickly.
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Lulu, Mel - According to the Prof the types with the highest polyphenol content are in this order:
Sencha-uchiyama
Gyokuru #1
Sencha #1
Sencha #2
Gyokuru #2
Ordinary Gyokuru and Matcha are good too.
These are all Japanese. I believe Sainsbury’s do a Sencha, but most supermarket teas are Chinese, and have lower content. Try and get Japanese if you can.
I buy mine from the Japan Centre in London. They have a limited mail order range, but I have dealt by phone and they have the two on the top of the list that they will send them out. Also, this woman with an interesting story to tell (beware it is the Daily Mail!)sells sencha also:
Personally I don’t like the supermarket teas - I found them very bitter, particularly as I was being a good girl following the instructions and brewing them for 10 minutes. The ones I get from the Japan centre are very delicate, and much, much nicer. They are expensive but you only need a tiny amount of leaves for each cup.
Hope that’s helpful. Mel, I vaguely remember being told that asparagus is good for fatty liver - will have a poke around and get back to you on that.
finty x
Thanks Finty! Much appreciated. Maybe that’s why I didn’t like the taste. I was drinking sub standard, supermarket rubbish!
Might invest in some proper stuff.
Lulu X
Thank you for your comments everyone, I am really glad I posted now. Finty, I enjoy your posts as they are usually full of detail and well reasoned, and I do not think of you as a food Nazi! I hate green tea , it makes me gag, but like lulu I only bought the twinings from thr supermarket ones! Will try again with the japenese stuff. Are you sire there isn’t just a flavour free once a day no gagging type tablet I can try instead though…!!
Mel, I agree with finty, your comment was lovely. I really hope this thread stays on track so that I, and other readers, feel comfy posting.
Vickie
Tea Pigs do the most incredible teas, including an organic matcha tea.
They come in beautiful ‘tea temples’ (bags), and are as lovely to make as to drink.
The lemongrass, which is very high in anti-oxidants and great for digestion, is wonderful and refreshing and the chamomile (which I have never liked before) is sweet and floral. The peppermint packs a punch too.
I’ve not actually tried their matcha tea, but their mao feng green tea is very delicate and quite palatable. They seem to be quite an ethical company.
Hi Vicki,
Its lovely to see you and some other ladies posting on this thread, please never be afraid of posting on any thread , everyone has a valid view whatever they may be, and everyone has the right to express them, so a big welcome to you and the other ladies .
I think your friends have given you very good advice about your diet and also think it is the sensible approach, its always good to hear it from people who work in the feild of cancer so that must be reasurring for you.
Hi xwelcomex ,
Im not at all surprised about the Green Tea , ive always thought of green tea as another myth personaly, i know these so called “Cancer-fighting foods” proclaim all these benefits , but in reality all foods are Superfoods, they each have a part to play in keeping our bodies functioning and healthy in order to help fight desease, but… i guess its a good marketing tool anyway.
To me its very much like these “I Can Cure Cancer Books” what twaddle ,it realy annoys me that these authors pray on the many vulnerable people out there , im sure all these people writing these books are rubbing their hands all the way to the bank.
Take Care
Linda x
Just read this thread through from the beginning. There is nothing like a diet thread to get everyone heated is there?
Finty- can you tell me why Penny Brohn recommend organic butter? I have been veggie for years, but am now trying to cut down on dairy. I had switched to an olive oil spread instead, thinking this would be better but I’d far rather scoff butter.
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Mel - do keep going with the Servan Schreiber book - it’s not remotely a kooky cancer cure scam.
Hi Dibskelly - I’m not really sure about PB and the butter. I know they are very anti vegetable margarines, as everyone seems to be these days, but I wasn’t sure whether it was just that butter is better than those, or they were recommending it in its own right. Maybe someone else who has been can help here. They also recommend nut butters - particularly almond.
Vickie - thanks x
welcome - I don’t know if it is just me, but I always have to press submit twice with my comments, otherwise they disappear - may be this is happening to you too?
Mel - the tea is expensive, but if you buy loose tea it does last a long time, much better value than the bags. I was doing a little reading about fatty liver - plus it came up on Fat Families (my guilty pleasure!) last night. It does seem that there’s a lot you can do to help with diet - mostly related to reducing high GI foods. One thing to think about is if you have much High Fructose Corn Syrup in your diet. You won’t see it on food labels, but if you have a sweet tooth it will be the sugar in most sweet drinks and biscuits, cakes etc - almost all mass market sweet products - plus quite a few savoury ones too. It’s nasty stuff - the body has great difficulty using the sugar in this format and the liver struggles to metabolise it - it finishes up as fat, including in the liver. If you have the time - watch a video on YouTube called Sugar - the bitter truth. It explains the whole issue - but you’ll need to FF through the sciencey bit in the middle!
Welcome, your point about research is well made. Another point about trying to analyse a single food in a large diet study is that there is never any effective control group. Even if you take two groups, and one group eliminates one food type, they will replace it with something else, so you need to know what the effect of that replacement food is. Gary Taubes in The Diet Delusion identifies this as one of the reasons the dietary fat/heart disease studies in the 60’s and 70’s got such disastrously conflicting results. When they asked a large cohort to reduce animal fat in their diet - they did, but they had to replace all those calories with something else, generally another type of fat. I suspect this is why vegetarians sometimes don’t do much better than meat eaters in health studies - many will stop eating meat and just replace it with dairy.
finty x
Well…I have done further research into green tea (the “right” high quality one) and tried to locate other possible suppliers who won’t break the bank.
I have found two interesting websites which sell Sencha Japanese green tea, amongst other teas:
The first one is:
tea4life.co.uk/#
If you click on the Tea research link it takes you to some published articles about green tea from various magazines and papers as well as more high brows research papers.Interesting read.
The second one is:
clearspring.co.uk/index.php
They don’t just sell organic green tea here but a whole range of other organic food. You can’t buy directly from them but from a list of stockists. I used this excellent website, which I didn’t know before to purchase my very first Japanese Sencha loose green tea (£7.95 for 125 gr. Not bad pricing!)
goodnessdirect.co.uk/cgi-local/frameset/script/home.html
As they sell loads of other organic, ecofriendly products at reasonable prices on this website I ended up spending a little fortune (fairtrade honey, nuts, etc.)
Still, all good stuff!
Have a good day
Lulu X