Doctor's studies links dairy to cancer risk

By Jan A. Igoe

The last thing you want to wear into Dr. Robert Bibb's dermatology office is a dark tan and a milk mustache.

"A tan is the body's response to damage," said Bibb, who suspected that ultraviolet A rays were more than innocent bystanders to sun damage years before it became popular knowledge. Now, dairy products and their link to hormonally sensitive cancers is on his radar. While dermatologists routinely advise patients to get their vitamin D from dietary sources instead of sunlight, Bibb doesn't want them getting it from yogurt and cheese.

He's working on a book titled "Death by Dairy" to warn consumers about a possible dietary danger.

From 1928 to 1948, milk was exposed to ultraviolet light to form vitamin D, Bibb said. During that time, no active hormones were present in milk. Then the industry started adding vitamin D powder, a cost-saving alternative, but soon after, breast and prostate cancer rates began a steep rise.

"My working hypothesis is that ultraviolet light incidentally inactivated the homones and proteins in dairy - and we proved this at Clemson [University]. There's an association between dairy [consumption] and hormonally sensitive cancers. I looked, but I can't find any other factors that fit epidemiologically [for the rise in cancer]."

Non-dairy consuming countries, such as China and Japan, have lower rates of prostate and breast cancer, Bibb said.

"It's a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. It's not just us. Man is the only mammal that doesn't wean its babies off milk."

That's not Bibb's only concern. When cows are treated with genetically engineered growth hormone to boost milk production, they produce more insulin-like growth factor, which stimulates cell growth. Bibb's theorizes that dairy-rich diets may render children less resistant to cancer.

"A gene can be turned on or turned off," said Bibb, "Suppose your consumption of dairy turned off some of the switches, but you didn't get cancer. You pass your gene on to your daughter or son and they have some of those turned-off switches ... this is all theory, but I believe it explains the phenomenon [of prostate and breast cancer occuring in younger people]."

Although dairy products' link to certain cancers have been suspected for at least 30 years, many health groups vouch for their safety. But other scientists, such as Dr. Ganmaa Davaasambuu, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, are independently questioning dairy's relationship to cancer.

"A groundswell is building on this thing," said Bibb, who filed for a patent for a dairy process that would neutralize harmful proteins and hormones. The whole exercise could be a waste of time if the dairy industry doesn't respond, or it could become the biggest thing since pasteurization.

"I'm not out to destroy the dairy industry," Bibb said. "I'm going to save them."

He ran his ideas past Dr. Daniel Nixon, a Charleston internist and cancer researcher, known for his work at Hollings Cancer Center at the Medical University of South Carolina.

"We've already proved that lower-fat diets help. That may tie into Bibb's milk theory. It's a testable hypothesis to see if he's right," Nixon said. "This is the way scientists work most of time. That's why I appreciate Dr. Bibb - because he's willing to have his ideas tested in the lab."

Bibb first met Nixon at one of his lectures on the chemopreventive properties of ellagic acid in raspberries.

"That was about 10 years ago. [He] also heard me at a lecture talking about the different chemicals in plants with cancer-fighting properties. There are about 1,000 of them," Nixon said. "One of the things I put into my lectures is that 80 percent of cancers are preventable - skin, prostate, breast, colon, the common ones - through diet and nutrition."

Bibb already takes all his acne patients off dairy because those foods aggravate the condition. As a vegan, he avoids milk products in his own diet. And it makes him nuts when celebrities - especially those who have had cancer - show up in "Got Milk?" ads.

Breast cancer survivor Sheryl Crow was interviewed in a cancer magazine where she also endorsed milk in an ad, so Bibb wrote the singer and the magazine about misleading the public.

"She didn't respond," he said.

Unless he can make his case on "Oprah," Bibb's afraid public opinion will remain in the hands of the Dairy Council because most people don't read scholarly research studies in their spare time.

"People say to me, 'Bob, you can't change an industry,'" Bibb said. "But 'Silent Spring' by Rachel Carson made people realize that the pesticide DDT was concentrating its way up the food chain."

When that prompted Congress to investigate, under mounting public pressure, production stopped, he said.

"If I do this [book] well and explain in layman's terms ... Even if you don't care about you, what about your grandkids?"

Contact JAN A. IGOE at jigoe@thesunnews.com or 626-0366.

SHARE:

Email This

Latest Health
- No Excuses: The Reality Cure of Thomas Szasz
- Big Pharma’s Lifetime Dependents
- Stem cells reverse blindness caused by burns
- US snuffs out 'light' cigarettes
- Monsanto’s 475-ton seed donation challenged by Haitian peasants
- Ten-year worldwide study links mobile phone use to cancer
- Millions drink toxic water in the USA, but it's EPA-approved!
- High Fructose Corn Syrup Linked to Liver Scarring

Comments

Add Comment

Page 1 of 1

friendstacy

Posted: Jul 25 2007, 8:59 AM

Link

it's not just dairy, but dairy is chock-full of bovine and artificial estrogens. Our environment is chock-full of estrogenic toxins. Our drinking water, contaminated with agricultural run-off, contains dioxin, the single most toxic chemical known to man, which is also estrogenic and linked to all sorts of reproductive and auto-immune disorders. If the immune system is not functioning properly, the risk of cancer goes sky high.

"It's a Western Hemisphere phenomenon. It's not just us. Man is the only mammal that doesn't wean its babies off milk."
oh yes we do, we wean them at about three to six months of age on average, then give them milk made for baby cows instead. Other mammals nurse until their immune systems are mature, which happens about the same time the permanent teeth come in. Breastfeeding not only protects the baby against cancers, but mom as well, but you won't see that in any breast cancer awareness advertisement. And the longer the baby is breastfed, the lower the risk of cancer.

yes, dairy is harmful. it wasn't made for humans in the first place, it was made for baby cows. since it is just slightly toxic to most people, we become addicted to it, unaware of the harm it is doing to our immune systems, and in turn, raising our risk of cancer.

Add Comment

Name

Comment

* No HTML

Verification *

Please Enter the Verification Code Seen Below

PLEASE NOTE

Please read our About Page, our Disclaimer, and our Comments Policy.

Please note: InformationLiberation is neither liberal or conservative. When one takes the time to research the "liberal elite," whom the conservatives oppose, and the "conservative elite," whom the liberals oppose, one finds both "elite" are one and the same. "Liberal" or "Conservative" is not a substantive choice, it is only the carefully crafted illusion of a choice, for both parties come together when they are instructed to.

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson."
A letter written by FDR to Colonel House, November 21st, 1933

"Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure."
Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK, in the July 26th, 1936 issue of The New York Times.

If you care to know who runs the world you live in, view these films. If you care not then I leave you with this quote to ponder:

"There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution."
Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961 Audio - Transcript

FAIR USE NOTICE

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.

About Us - Disclaimer
"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill