Ralph Moss, Ph.D. has been investigating cancer treatments since 1977. Dr. Julian Whitaker said he is “probably the most knowledgeable writer in the world on alternative therapies for cancer.” He is the author of ten books including The Cancer Industry, the award-winning PBS documentary film The Cancer War and a monthly newsletter.

Common Ground What did you mean when you wrote recently that cancer is a disease of civilization?

Ralph Moss Civilization goes back many thousands of years. There always were a small minority of people who got cancer in ancient times, up until fairly modern times. But those were very rare instances and they always occasioned a great deal of wonder and amazement and dismay.

The references to cancer in literature are consistently few until we entered the modern era. There's an increasing drum beat of attention given to cancer starting with the 19th century and really accelerating in the beginning of the 20th century.

If you look at a typical textbook from the 1920s you'll find the statement that lung cancer is an extremely rare condition. Lung cancer was almost non-existent until recent times. Breast cancer isn't even mentioned, and many of the other kinds of cancer that fill the rooms and wards of cancer centres around the world today were virtually unknown.

C.G. If two hundred years ago cancer was rare and now it's an epidemic, what has happened in the interim to cause this change?

R.M. There are different theories. One, for instance, is that environmental pollution is responsible. I think it plays a role, but to me the most intimate environmental factor is food.

When cancer began its rise a number of things were happening. In about 1800 white bread became widely available in many parts of Europe and America. Then in about 1880 there were big advances in terms of the mechanical processing of grains so that white bread became the rule, rather than a luxury.

In about 1815 the consumption of sugar started to rise. If you look at the graphs of sugar consumption from 1815 to the late 20th century it's really like a rocket going up.

I was just reading James Joyce's The Dubliners and they talk about locking up the sugar in the sugar safe at the end of the meal. This was common practice a hundred years ago. Sugar was such a rare commodity that you would lock it up so the servants wouldn't steal it.

Today, five pounds of sugar is somewhere between a dollar or two at the retail level. This is unprecedented in the history of the world. Unlimited sugar has become the cheap thrills of the masses.

If you live the way I do, which is to try to keep my consumption of refined carbohydrates almost to zero, you quickly become aware there's sugar and sweeteners in almost everything now.

C.G. I read recently that the average American consumes almost half a cup of sugar a day.

R.M. It's up to 150 per pounds per person per year of sugar. If you imagine a family of four going out and buying their yearly intake of sugar at one shot, they’d have to load twelve 50 lb. sacks in the back of the SUV to equal what they're consuming in a year.

C.G. What is it about sugar and white flour that has a harmful effect?

R.M. The carbohydrates in sugar have been completely separated from any other modifying factor. The protein and especially the bulk of the beet or the cane, the fibre, has been completely removed. In other words it's purified white chemical.

When it hits your body, you're putting a tremendous strain on the pancreas not only to digest the carbohydrates, but the sugar goes into the blood stream in the form of glucose. Fructose and sucrose are also converted into glucose.

The body has a very finely balanced mechanism of sugar metabolism because that's our source of energy, so you have to produce an equivalent amount of insulin from the pancreas in order to ferry that sugar to the organs in order to fuel them. If you have too much sugar it's going to be stored in the form of fat.

So, every day you're putting this enormous demand on the pancreas to produce more and more insulin. In time a lot of people develop two possible conditions: one is insulin resistance, where the cells just don't want to accept the insulin any more, and the other is hyperinsulinemia where you have too much insulin and you get high blood sugar.

The end step of this process is Type II diabetes, which seems to be caused just by the wearing out of the pancreas by the constant demands on it to produce insulin.

This creates a breeding ground for disease. The body can't do anything with that sugar except turn it into fat. So, the person becomes overweight, possibly obese, which leads to a sedentary lifestyle because they're too exhausted from having to carry around all the extra weight.

So, you've got a complex of things going on: the failure to metabolize the sugar properly, the excess of insulin, the refusal of the cells to accept the insulin, the obesity and the sedentary behaviour that follows from that. It appears that complex of behaviours sets the stage for a number of different diseases.

Type II Diabetes used to be called Adult Onset Diabetes, but in the last thirty years it's becoming quite common among youngsters and even among children. So they've dropped the name Adult Onset Diabetes and now they just call it Type II.

C.G. You mentioned there are other foods to avoid besides sugar and white flour. What about potatoes?

R.M. If you eat the whole potato with the skin it's less glycemic, but even so they're high in sugar. Juices also have to be watched out for. Most of what's called juice is just flavoured, coloured water with high-fructose corn syrup.

Even natural juices have to be consumed with great caution, because the actual food content of them hits the body like pure sugar. Honey may have some redeeming features, but in terms of carbohydrate metabolism it’s also like pure sugar. There are many places on the internet where you can look at the glycemic index of foods and see how it compares to sugar.

In general one is well advised to stay away from foods that are very high in the glycemic index. Instead of drinking fruit juice it would be much better to have the whole fruit, because not only do you get more benefit in terms of anti-oxidants, but you're also getting the fibre that is associated with that and the fibre will slow the metabolism of the sugar and aid in digestion.

C.G. The diet you're describing sounds like Dr. Atkin's Diet Revolution.

R.M. We're in the midst of a reconsideration of Atkin's work. I'm good friends with him, but until fairly recently I wasn't entirely convinced of the correctness of his basic concept. However, I think more and more evidence is pointing in that direction.

An article just came out this morning, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It says: "Diets high in starchy foods, such as potatoes, rice and white bread, may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer in women who are overweight and sedentary according to a new study." Even though it affected only sedentary women, the authors of this article say they see no reason why the findings wouldn't apply equally to men.

They say that "excess insulin can promote the development of pancreatic cancer." This is a terribly aggressive form of cancer. The senior author, Charles Fuchs, at Dana Farber, says, "Our findings add to the growing body of evidence that suggests that insulin may have a role in the development of pancreatic cancer."

There was quite an increase in terms of the incidence of pancreatic cancer and those who had the highest intake of foods with a high glycemic load. I think it was "53 percent more likely to develop pancreatic cancer than those with a low load." And women who had consumed large amounts of fructose or fruit sugar had a 57 percent greater risk. Other kinds of cancer also may be related to the intake of these foods.

One can criticize certain aspects of Atkin's program. He allows bacon, other highly processed products and artificial ingredients. There are also questions about the quality of the meat people get nowadays, raised under artificial conditions that are in no way equivalent to the meat our ancestors ate.

Initially Atkins was criticized for de-emphasizing vegetables in his diet. There are a lot of vegetables that are low on the glycemic index and one could eat them quite easily.

C.G. We've been talking about cancer prevention, but what about the cancer treatment industry? How good a job are they doing?

R.M. I think they're doing a very poor job. The US war on cancer began more than 30 years ago, in December of '71, and the death rates for the major kinds of cancer are about where they were when we started. Sure, you can see some changes. Five year survival rates may have gone up in some cases, but we're also diagnosing a lot of cancers that are of a lower malignancy than were seen in the past because of the improved ability to find small tumours or tumours. that would never grow to become a menace to the person.

This is true in prostate cancer and some very early forms of breast cancer. Now you can manipulate figures in various ways to make it appear that improvement has been made, but those were made by including people who have much, much lower grades of malignancy than were seen in the past. This is a well-known statistical fluke which is exploited to fool naive people into thinking we've made great progress. We have not.

Nursing care is a lot better, and the treatment people get psychologically is much better, but the effectiveness of radiation and chemotherapy is highly overstated and hasn't really had much of an impact at all.

C.G. Who is profiting from the cancer industry?

R.M. In the United States we have at least a trillion dollar cost of health care, with100 billion dollars going to cancer. So cancer supports an enormous army of people at all levels. My feeling is that the most concentrated area of profit-making is the pharmaceutical industry and Wall St. People sell the stocks, evaluate, trade, promote and own them. This is Big Pharma, the 20 or 30 pharmaceutical companies that basically have a monopoly on providing therapeutic substances.

When I wrote Cancer Industry originally in 1980, I thought it was big. That was nothing compared to what it is now. I think two years ago it was 14 billion dollars a year on cancer drugs.

C.G. You've written a book called A Real Choice. Do we have a real choice if people don't even know what the choices are? The people who control and edit the information control the choices.

R.M. Absolutely, and information is the key. This is why I run an information company, trying to provide cancer patients with the most up-to-date and a wider circle of choices than they're going to get from any conventional source.

People should explore their options because there is information available. If you're gong to survive these plagues you have to think outside the box, not be naive and think somebody is going to give you something for nothing and that all these people are out to help you and so forth. They're not. They're out to help themselves, and nowadays you have to be very careful and aggressive in how you demand information.

C.G. Are you hopeful for the future?

R.M. Yes. If you're not hopeful you give up, and I'm not ready to do that. I think there's a lot of promise in alternative medicine, but it will take more money to prove the treatments are effective. So, it's a struggle all over the world to get governments to change direction, but that's my hope and why I keep fighting.

For more information visit Dr. Moss’ websites, www.ralphmoss.com and www.cancerdecisions.com or call 1-800-980-1234.