jmg@houxk.UUCP (10/13/83)
For those persons who require statistical data on the value of various dietary practices I'd like to call your attention to two studies I've heard of which are probably common knowledge to many people since they've been mentioned on tv and in the press. The first study was done by the U.S. Government to assess the health of men who were prisoners in North Vietnamese or Viet Cong prison camps during the war. The study concluded that former prisoners were presently in better health generally than others with similar backgrounds in the service who were not captured and held prisoner. The report attributed this better state of health to the diet the prisoners were given, a diet which can be shown to closely approximate the macrobiotic diet. Another study looked at the high rate of cancer in America as compared to European nations and Far Eastern nations. This study determined that when Japanese or Irish (two populations with low rates of cancer and heart disease) people come to the U.S. their incidence of cancer and heart disease rises to the rate for other Americans. Again the results of this study were attributed to the change in diet experienced when coming to the U.S. Furthermore, macrobiotics people point to a U.S. Government publication entitled "Dietary Goals for the United States" as vindication of their dietary system. This publication recommends changes in the American diet which would bring it into much closer agreement with the macrobiotic diet. Finally, lets look at the phenomenon of "spontaneous remission". This phrase is actually a euphamism (spelling?) for an unknown cure. What the medical experts are really saying is that they don't know why a particular cancer case was cured. This phrase is also misleading because it implys that a person was cured for no reason at all, that his cure had no cause. One of the very basic underlying principles of science in that there is a continuous and pervasive cause-effect relationship to every event in our universe. Therefore there cannot be any event without a cause. This can be compared to the doctrine of "spontaneous generation" of bacteria which was the dominant medical explanation for the appearance of bacteria and stated that bacteria grew spontaneously from inanimate matter in the atmosphere. This doctrine was finally destroyed by the discoveries of Louis Pasteur who was a chemist, not a physician. Anyone who implies that a cure has no cause is either being dishonest or unscientific at best. I believe that a detailed statistical study of cases of "spontaneous remission" would result in the discovery of some common threads which would help to determine cause of the curing of these people. I hope that this information has quenched the flames of some uninformed people (those who condemn any new theory without trying to learn anything about it) who think that a macrobiotic diet is "dangerous". What could be dangerous to someone under a death sentence from cancer? And I've never heard of macrobiotic people wanting to cut organs out of people. Isn't that much more dangerous and debilitating than a beneficial (according to U.S. Government publications and studies) change in diet?
dyer@wivax.UUCP (Stephen Dyer) (10/14/83)
houxk!jmg apparently likes to selectively read our responses to fit his prejudices. No one has said that "spontaneous" cancer remissions are due to magic--rather, we state only what we CAN state as scientists: that we are not yet aware of the mechanisms involved in the cure. This is a far more conservative position than attributing it without firm evidence to an arbitrary environmental influence like a macrobiotic diet. I know nothing of macrobiotic diets other than from the popular lore of the past decade, and what houxk!jmg recently posted. My comment still holds--the diet he posted doesn't look particularly unsound (save for dairy products and calcium) and I would be quite willing to believe reports that state that a population on such a diet is healthier than one high in animal fats, sugar and low in fibre. I have heard, though, that the macrobiotic diet is actually a series of diets, each one containing successively less animal protein, with rice alone as the final diet. I cannot believe that this is healthy, given what we already know about human nutrition. But, I am disinterested--show me a well-run study that refutes my preconceptions, and I will entertain a change of opinion. Nevertheless, this is irrelevant to the problem at hand--the treatment of cancer. houxk!jmg states that a macrobiotic diet is "harmless" compared to the "wanton removal of organs". Let me emphasize, that if houxk!jmg is recommending that cancer patients follow his diet IN PLACE OF traditional medical therapies, then one wonders what his definition of "harmlessness" is. /Steve Dyer decvax!wivax!dyer decvax!genrad!wjh12!bbncca!sdyer