Special Diets We recognize now that diet may play a very significant role in causing certain cancers, particularly cancers of the breast, ovary, endometrium of the uterus , colon and rectum, and prostate. However, once cancer is established, the nutritional requirements of the cancer cells are similar to those of normal body cells. Therefore, altering the diet would not be expected to produce a "cure" of the cancer, and there is no evidence that changes in diet can slow or reverse the growth of a cancer. Think of this as analogous to a fire. The fire may be started by careless use of matches, but once it's burning, taking away the matches will not make the fire go out.
"Miraculous Cures"? The anecdotal reports that appear in magazines and tabloids rarely give the full story of the patient. Despite the absence of many facts, careful reading of the story may lead to one of the following conclusions:
• Cancer was diagnosed falsely with iridology or some other fraudulent technique. Anything and everything will
"cure" such "patients" because they never actually had cancer. For example, only a minority of breast lumps
are cancer. Benign lumps in the breast frequently disappear on their own. The misinformed woman who
develops breast lumps and adopts one of these forms of therapy and has the lumps go away may interpret the
sequence of events to mean that their "cancer" has been cured. The diagnosis of cancer can be made only by
examining tissue under the microscope ( see How Cancer is Diagnosed ).
