A rude, wrong cancer doctor

Time to resume posting on this blog. The last time I posted was in August 2007. I had been busy and also doing other things.

I must thank Dr Ang Peng Tiam, who is described on one website as “a medical oncologist who is regarded as one of the best in his field in Singapore and in the region” for giving me the, er, “incentive” to start blogging again.

The background is this: On Wednesday, June 4, Dr Ang wrote a column in Mind Your Body, in which he advised:

“Don’t listen to old wives’ tales. Cancer patients often think they cannot eat dairy products, meat or sugar because these will make the cancer grow faster. Some start taking only organic foods or become vegetarian. I tell them a balanced diet is especially important when they are undergoing chemotherapy.”

I sent a letter to STForum. It was quite strongly worded, so I wasn’t surprised that my letter was not published.

Here it is:

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Dr Ang Peng Tiam is rude, wrong, unscientific and grossly irresponsible when he describes as “old wives tales” the beliefs that cancer patients should best avoid sugar, meat and milk products, adopt a vegetarian (or near vegetarian) diet and eat mostly organic foods. (It takes two to fight cancer, Mind Your Body, June 4)

He is rude to the entire community of natural health practitioners and a section of the medical profession that subscribe to such beliefs, by referring to them as “old wives”. Such name calling has no place in any discussion on any subject.

He is also wrong to say that such beliefs are old. The idea that diet is linked with cancer (and other illnesses) became popular only recently, arising from scientific research.

Nancy Appelton PhD, author of Lick the Sugar Habit, lists 76 harmful effects of excessive sugar consumption, giving scientific references mostly from the 1980s onwards. Apart from being directly associated with various types of cancer, sugar weakens immune function – and this allows cancer cells to spread.

Dr Colin T Campbell led The China Health Study – the biggest, long-term nutritional study ever undertaken. Dr Campbell grew up on a dairy farm, drinking a gallon of milk a day and believing that milk was wholesome and necessary. Today, he is a leading voice that warns against the great harm of milk.

The US-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has more than 100,000 members, including thousands of medical professionals, led by Dr Neal Barnard. It recommends a pure vegetarian diet and its website, www.pcrm.org is packed with scientific references about the harm of meat, milk and dairy.

Against all these, there is a great body of scientific literature about phytonutrients – plant nutrients – helping the body prevent and fight degenerative diseases, including cancer. And the few studies on organic foods generally show them to contain more nutrition, particularly phytonutrients.

Dr Ang dismissed all this science and more. Instead, he highlighted one isolated case of a young commando who survived toxic chemotherapy while adopting a high-calorie, high-protein diet that included milk shakes. Medical science calls such examples “anecdotal evidence” and rejects them.

By dismissing science as “old wives tales” and focussing on a single anecdotal evidence, Dr Ang is being unscientific in his approach. This makes him grossly irresponsible as a doctor and a man of science.

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The kampong chicken factory

What do you understand by “kapong chicken”?

If, like me, you believe it refers to chickens that roam about freely in kampongs (villages) – that is, the local equivalent of free-range, more or less organic, chicken –as opposed to those kept in cages in factory farms, well, you will be in for a disappointment and a shock.

According to more than one kampong chicken seller at the wet markets whom I have spoken to, there are at least two types of kampong chicken – the “real” type and the “fake” type.

The real type costs about $8.50 to $9 per kg and is a much bigger bird, so you will have to end up paying maybe $15 or more for a chicken. At the Ang Mo Kio Ave 4 market that I sometimes go to, this is called “mountain chicken”.

The one that generally sells for $5.50 per bird, in wet markets and supermarkets, is the fake type. These chickens are reared in cages in factory farms, where up to tens of thousands of chickens are confined in a covered shed. They do not get exercise or sunlight. Presumably, they are also regularly given antibiotics, because chickens raised under such conditions cannot be allowed to get sick. If one does, the sickness will quickly spread to the rest of the factory farm and tens of thousands of chickens will be destroyed.

So why are these “fake” kampong chickens called kampong chickens?

“They are the same species as kampong chicken,” the chicken seller at the market explained.

And so we have another case of misleading food labelling / food description that our health authorities seem to allow.

 

 

Cardboard or corn flakes?

I am back… It has been two months since I last posted. Times flies. I had been busy and so quickly got out of the habit. Hope to be a bit more regular again.

 A friend was asking about corn flakes and cereals, as he remembered hearing something that they are not all that great for health.

Well, I remembered reading about it and it did not take me long to find the article. Here’s an excerpt:

Researchers at Ann Arbor University were given 18 laboratory rats. They were divided into three groups: one group received corn flakes and water; a second group was given the cardboard box that the corn flakes came in and water; the control group received rat chow and water.

The rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. But the rats receiving the corn flakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The last corn flake rat died the day the first box rat died.)

But before death, the corn flake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. The startling conclusion of this study is that there was more nourishment in the box than there was in the corn flakes.

Read full report at the Weston Price Foundation, by clicking here.

So if you are hungry and offered a choice of card board or corn flakes, you know which to choose.

O! The organic price difference

A short while back, I wrote about Naturally Marketplace and mentioned that they sell O Organic coffee, at $24+. I was at Carrefour just now and I saw the same brand of organic coffee selling for only $15.80!

Now that’s a huge price difference. It is one reason why Carrefour is my favourite supermarket. They have good quality stuffs, mostly at very reasonable prices.

Here’s another reason… I found out today that Carrefour at Plaza Singapura — which I prefer to the outlet at Suntec City which I find to be too huge and out of the way — has reduced the price of its house brand organic dark chocolate.

That used to sell at $3.20 at Plaza Singapura and $2.85 at Suntec. Now it’s $2.85 at Plaza Singapura. Even if it now costs less at Suntec, I am not complaining.

$2.85 for a 100 gram bar of organic dark chocolate, with 74 percent cocoa, is a steal! Even Cadbury’s non-organic and not-so-dark chocolate costs nearly as much ($4+ for 200 grams).

Go give yourself a treat.

 

 

(Relatively) healthy, trans-fat free margarine!

Last weekend’s forum on trans fat, as it turned out, was a lot more enlightening than I originally realised. I now say it was revolutionary. And I am not being sarcastic here. I am serious. Because it has completely transformed my view of margarine.

Well, not the entire forum, but just one small remark that came out of it.

If you recall, I had reported that, according to Mr Wong Mong Hong from the Singapore Food Manufacturers’ Association, there are no hydrogenation plants in Singapore and Malaysia and he said that local margarines / vegetable shortenings are mostly made by a process called fractionation.

It took me a while to find out what this is. Originally, I remembered the word as “factorisation” and, when I did a Google search, all I found was mathematics! And saltwetfish made the same mistake too

Later, when I got the word correct, I found an article in Wikipedia and it was not very re-assuring. It said:

Fractionation is a separation process in which a certain quantity of a mixture (solid, liquid, solute or suspension) is divided up in a large number of smaller quantities (fractions)… Mixtures of liquids and gases are separated by fractional distillation by difference in boiling point.

I was thinking… What? They boil the oil? What sort of crazy high temperatures do they use? Surely that would make the oil super rancid — and far more harmful than trans fats!

How wrong I was! It is actually the exact opposite. They chill the oil!

When I searched further, I was led to an excellent website called Hydrogenated News and there, I found an interview with Edgar Hernandez, consultant with the American Palm Oil Council, and there, he explains what it is all about:

Fractionation is basically a process by which you can separate the oil into two main fractions – one solid, one liquid. It’s a physical process; there are no chemicals involved in that.

Basically, what they do is chill the oil, so when the temperature goes down, the solid fraction starts to crystallize. Then, you remove that solid fraction by filtration, so that’s why you come out with the fractions – one solid, one liquid.

There are no trans; you won’t get any trans fat unless you do hydrogenation. So, the benefit of those fractions is that you can formulate them in specific ratios and final quality to get the functional properties that you’ll need for different applications – for cooking or for cake or bread. There are different specifications for each, so you obtain those specifications by blending those fractions with the liquid or to come out with the final product.

Reading this was like Eureka! A new enlightenment.

It finally answers a lot of questions that I – and, I am sure, others who had been following the trans fats issue – always had.

Questions like why…

• Some brands of margarine claim zero or very negligible amounts of trans fats?

• Some brands of margarine don’t mention partially hydrogenated oils in their ingredients list? (I’ve since discovered, they list “palm oil fraction”!)

• Some brands of bread, biscuits, cookies, etc claim to have zero trans fat even though the ingredients’ lists say they contain vegetable shortening?

I had also heard it mentioned that there are “trans fat free” shortening, but simply assumed that they, in fact, contained small amounts of trans fats – ie, less than 0.5 grams per serving as allowed under US trans fat labelling laws.

Worse, I suspected that they contained interesterified fats, made from fully hydrogenated oils, which appear to be even more harmful than trans fats.

Finally, I reaslised how mistaken and ignorant I had been all along.

I hereby repent. (This is an excuse for me to explain that the original meaning of “repent”, from the Greek word “metanoia” is to change one’s way of thinking, not to beat the heart in regret!”)

And so, I have to stop declaring that margarines are all deadly poisons. Some of them still are, depending how they are manufactured – by hydrogenation or fractionation.

I won’t say they are absolutely healthy either, because they still have some of the other problems associated with margarine – possibly made with poor quality, rancid oils; containing far too much omega-6 relative to omega 3, and so on.

Plus, they are artificially coloured and flavoured. I had read, I forgot where, that food laws do not allow margarine to be artificially coloured, meaning they must use natural colouring. But it seems those laws don’t apply here. The label on most margarines I saw said “artificial colouring”.

So I will not start eating margarine. They still taste awful anyway.

And butter still has lots more goodness, especially if it is organic butter from grass-fed cows. More on that later. For now, you might want to refer to my website article about butter vs margarine.

Even if you disregard the parts about margarine being partially hydrogenated and containing trans fats, butter is still better