Note: before anyone pooh-poohs this article for being in a blog mostly about weather and climate, note the description on the masthead. Note also that I have recently experienced cancer in my family as I’m sure many readers have at some time, therefore it is relevant to me, and may be helpful to others, and that’s all that matters. – Anthony
Guest post by David Archibald
Before starting out in climate science in 2006, my main hobby was cancer research. To that end, I had co-invented a cancer drug with two professors from Purdue University, Professor Jim Morre and his wife Professor Dorothy Morre. I went on to lodge a patent on a benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) drug myself. I still operate in that space. Early in that journey, I was given the draft manuscript of a book on how isoflavones from soy and other legumes modulate the human female hormone system.
That was in 1998. The manuscript had been written by Dr Graham Kelly who had founded a company to commercialise isoflavone supplementation in men and women. Dr Kelly’s journey in cancer research started in the 1980s when a friend with bowel cancer asked him to look into the science of it. Dr Kelly was intrigued by the epidemiological differences in cancer rates between populations. For example, Japanese who migrate to the US go to the US breast cancer rate in a generation. The US breast cancer rate is five times the Japanese breast cancer rate. The difference in cancer rate is not genetic, it is obviously dietary. So what is the difference in diet that is causing the difference in cancer incidence? A big difference is isoflavone consumption. Amongst the Japanese, it is an average of 40 mg per day. The US average is 3 mg per day.
In Western countries, breast cancer and prostate cancer have the same incidence. In women, 11% get diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. In men, 11% get diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime and 5% die of it. There are very big epidemiological differences in prostate cancer rates. As the following graph shows, the Vietnamese prostate cancer rate is one fortieth of the Western prostate cancer rate:
Defeating the scourge of a lot of common cancers is as simple as changing your diet. It is a bit like Vitamin C. If you don’t get any Vitamin C in your diet, you die of scurvy within three years. Pigs and dogs make their own Vitamin C, and presumably some precursor ape to humans had the ability to make it. Humans must have lost the ability for an evolutionary advantage. There are probably a large number of other plant molecules which we evolved to rely upon in our diet. We might not die in the near term if we don’t get them in our diet, but we suffer an increased incidence of degenerative diseases if we don’t. With respect to the dietary components that might cause the low Vietnamese prostate cancer rate, the national dish of Vietnam is called pho. It is a bowl of noodles and meat with three side dishes – bean sprouts, chillis and mint. The anticancer effect would be the result of synergistic blocking of the tNOX molecule on the external membrane of cancer cells by sulforaphane from the bean sprouts with capsaicin from the chilli peppers, stopping the overproduction of anti-apoptotic proteins and allowing the death receptors to trigger the apoptotic cascade of the caspases.
Back to Dr Kelly’s book, “Hormones with Harmony”. It is 70,000 words and goes into highly readable detail on how the daughter metabolites of isoflavones become human hormones in the body. They then become very useful in evening out the peaks and troughs of the body’s estrogenic hormones: estradiol, estrone and estriol. The book goes into detail on how the plant-derived hormones are beneficial in pms, mastalgia, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, menopausal symptoms, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, cataracts, senile dementia and breast cancer. Without being overly technical, it does not talk down to its readers. Earlier this year, I undertook to get it published and it is now available on Kindle for $5 per copy. I do recommend it.
Further to the subject of prostate cancer, there are a number of plant molecules that have an effect on it and BPH. All cancers have tNOX molecules on their external membranes. tNOX is the tumour variant of cNOX, or normal constituent NOX. No plant molecules bind to cNOX but a number bind to tNOX. tNOX has two binding sites. If both are bound to simultaneously, the effect is synergistic. For example, the combination of sulforaphane with capsaicin has twenty times the effect of sulforaphane alone. Another example of synergism is curcumin from turmeric with piperine from black pepper.
David Archibald
December 2012
@ur momisugly michaeljmcfadden
The Git delights in teasing the ecoloons with the following observation. There is a demonstrated link between stress level and incidence of cancer. By frightening people about potential carcinogenic properties of agricultural chemicals ecoloons are definitely increasing the cancer rate in the general population, directly contradicting their purported desire to reduce cancer rates. When I was on the Aerial Spraying Implementation Group, we had the Menzies Institute conduct a literature search on agricultural chemicals and cancer. All they came up with was a potential link between non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and agricutural workers who applied glyphosate (Roundup) more than 20 times (IIRC) per annum. Apparently this cancer is rare, so the result may not have been statistically significant. Given that all the research into the negative effects of glyphosate appear to arise from the surfactant used with glyphosate it would seem sensible to discover a safer surfactant than to ban the use of glyphosate.
Thank you David Archibald,
I have read this fine work in one day!
You helped me to discover I can access Kindle material on my pc without using a wirless Kindle since this troglodyte is still tethered by a land line!
WUWT SHOULD HAVE MORE RESPECT!!!
My late friend Bert Farquhar owned 30,000 ha of pastoral land in NE Tasmania. Mike Temple-Smith from the Department of Primary Industry assisted Bert to introduce earthworms into the paddocks at Wyambi/Rushy Lagoon increasing the fertility of the soil by 25%. Following his acquisition of the property for a record (in Australia) 10.1 million dollars, Bert also built a 128 km long irrigation scheme that ultimately doubled the stock carrying capacity. According to Zeke & Rick, the stock carrying capacity should have halved. A brief summary of Bert’s life here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/legends/stories/13_2.htm
While the pine plantations Bert established get a brief mention, the Forestry Commission were also planting pinus radiata back in the day. Bert’s thrived and the Commission’s pines failed to. Bert would take a walnut-sized lump of soil from under a mature thriving pine and put it into the planting hole with every pine seedling. According to Forestry, this was “muck and mystery” and “unscientific” so for a decade the Forestry Commission wasted much taxpayers’ money planting out trees to die of starvation regardless of the amount of fertiliser applied at planting.
These days we know that what Bert was doing was inoculating the soil with a mycorrhizum, a beneficial soil organism that plays a vital role in organic production systems. Mycorrhizae trade phosphorus from the soil for carbohydrates from the plant’s roots.
Pompous Git:
I did bring up the most deadly pathogen, rust, and neither have you responded to how your existing system will protect against 300 varieties of constantly interbreeding, migrating wind born varieties of this deadly killer. Likewise, as can be seen by the potato famines, one single plant infected with blight is sufficient to infect thousands of local plants, as well as plants at very great distances. These are both very genetically diverse and have claimed many lives.
The organic approach is fine for small areas of voluntary participants, but as a national policy would lay our country open to previously vanquished smut, scab, rust, blast, blight, bunt, wilt, mildew and the rest. We know that malaria was at one time nearly eradicated, claiming at its lowest point 50,000 deaths in the world. Malaria now takes the lives of millions per year. It is in the letting down of our guard, through woeful ignorance of our past sufferings, history, and enemies, that the destruction is brought back.
I have no arguments against organic farmers, just as I have no bones with any one who is able to meet their own electrical requirements with solar power. However, neither of these technologies are ready, and may never be. The reasons for reversing, removing, and replacing our present systems is not settled science, either. Therefore, I am not conflating anything, but arguing against national implementation of local-only, organic, water restriction, and other Sustainable Agricultural policies supported by the UN.
Organic farming has its place and niche market, like renewables or dietary cures for cancer. Once again, I am not arguing against your research or successes. Why would I do that? I am certain that individual farmers can be responsible and not become breeders of blight. But the government has proven to be totally irresponsible on many occasions, such as its unwillingness to spray bark or Aisian Longhorn beetles, allowing them to wipe out whole forests here in the US under its management. Then, – it blames the fires on global warming!
It just isn’t ready, and it is most importantly, not necessary to remake our energy or our agricultural sectors.
Zeke said @ur momisugly December 16, 2012 at 2:23 pm
Actually, I did respond to your remark regarding rust & other wheat pathogens.
Now I can claim no special expertise in wheat growing; I am reporting what was said by wheat growers at a major agricultural conference. I can also report that not very long after this, the breakfast cereal manufacturer Uncle Tobys began manufacturing its big seller Vita Brits made with 100% organically grown wheat. Hitherto, most of these wheat growers had sold their produce to the AWB where it became indistinguishable from the conventional wheat it inevitably became mixed with. You claim that you never eat organic produce and despite my asking how you determine the provenance of the food you presumably eat, have not indicated how you can tell.
You say you are not arguing against my research or successes, but you claim that organic production reduces yields by 50% and increases prices by 100% without providing a single shred of evidence to that effect. You are merely parroting what the manufacturers of agvet chemicals assert. I also gave the anecdote when I discovered that the PRO for AVCA admitted to me that the anti-organic diatribes he engaged in when we both were writing for the local rural newspaper were entirely bogus and made up. He merely wrote what he was being paid to write.
Your remarks about late blight in potatoes seem to indicate that you believe an organic potato farmer would just sit and watch his crop die from it. Just how stupid do you think we are? Like their conventional counterparts organic producers control blight with copper-based sprays, the more modern ones being preferable to Bordeaux since far less copper is applied to the crop and copper is toxic to earthworms. In thirty years I have had late blight on only one occasion, the year I commenced market gardening when it rained for 28 days in the first month of spring. Since I’m not the idiot you think I am, I grabbed some copper oxychloride that all apple growers, organic and conventional, apply to their trees each spring and put it on the spuds. That crop of spuds yielded close to 10 pounds per square foot, a far from trivial yield and one I have only rarely bettered.
You also state that it’s OK for small scale growers to be organic which would seem to imply that you disapprove of farmers like my late friend Bert Farquhar. Wyambi/Rushy Lagoon carried 8,000 cattle and 50,000 sheep, more than double the numbers when run by the previous owners British Tobacco and the Cascade Brewery. How do you reconcile this with your claim that organic reduces yields by 50%? Incidentally, not all of Wyambi/Rushy Lagoon was managed organically. The very sandy coastal strip was extremely phosphorus deficient so Bert applied super-phosphate there. He was the largest single purchaser of super-phosphate in Tasmania when he did that.
Finally, you are bitching about the UN and the US government. Really, I couldn’t give a rat’s left testicle unless they get in my face and try to tell me what to do and how to do it. I have far too few years left in me to waste my time on lunatic fantasists. You refer to the government being irresponsible and I can only agree.
@ur momisugly Zeke & Rick
In the absence of any sort of support from you for your increased crop yields from herbicide use, I’ve been noodling around and discovered the following:
Avoiding crop damage from residual herbicides
http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/agriculture/farming-management/chemical-use/agricultural-chemical-use/chemical-residues/ag1258-managing-chemical-residues-in-crops-and-produce/ag0924-avoiding-crop-damage-from-residual-herbicides
It seems you can be quite restricted as to the type of crop you can plant following “selective” herbicides. It seems that the earlier herbicide trial I criticised has another flaw. There’s no indication of the effect of those herbicides on the yield of the following crop.
Also, glyphosate appears to be worse than I thought:
http://fluidfertilizer.com/pastart/pdf/S10-A4.pdf
So it seems you’re OK with glyphosate if you don’t use phosphatic fertiliser. Hilarious. Even funnier is that the very famous ecoloony/communist garden presenter on the ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, Peter Cundall, was a big promoter of Roundup on the show until he retired on the basis that since it didn’t kill earthworms it must be OK.
I think I’ll take a pass on those kinds of yield “increases”…
You can read more about DrHuber’s science here
Rick said @ur momisugly December 17, 2012 at 11:37 pm
Thanks for that. Mind you, I’m a little unsurprised that a fertiliser salesman is making exaggerated claims. I will nevertheless remain very judicious in my use of glyphosate. I’m experimenting with acetic acid as a desiccant herbicide this year. If I were certified organic I would not be allowed to apply the small amount of glyphosate I use, nor the acetic acid. I would however be allowed to use “natural” vinegar 🙂
I note that Ms Bodnar is a promoter of GMO crops, another area where exaggerated claims seem to be the order of the day. Here in Tasmania the pressure to introduce them was resisted by the Department of Primary Industry who initially imposed a moratorium on their use. Eventually, a licence was granted for a limited canola trial. The truck carrying the GMO canola seed “accidentally” spilled some on the roadside while travelling to the trial location, a fact not discovered until the seed germinated, potentially affecting nearby canola crops.
Tasmanian canola growers obtain a healthy premium from our GMO-free status and demand for GMO-free crops appears to be increasing.
Many years ago, the agvet industry were heavily promoting hormone growth promotants (HGPs) for beef production. In local trials, the weight gains were trivial and certainly not sufficient to cover the cost of the HGP and administering the drug. These days, Tasmania’s beef growers receive a worthwhile premium as a consequence of our HGP-free status.
While you talk about laws contemplated by the UN decreasing yields by 50%, we are currently battling to preserve the remnants of our apple industry and our aquaculture industry. Our feds signed up to international free-trade agreements that they are insisting mean we have to allow the importation of apples from New Zealand and salmon from the US & Canada. The NZ apple growers have a disease called fire blight, a bacterial disease they control with the antibiotic tetracycline. Understandably, our apple growers would rather not subject themselves and their workers to exposure to a broad-spectrum antibiotic, or lose access to markets that do not want to buy apples so treated. There have been two attempts to introduce fireblight into Tasmania in the past, both fortunately nipped in the bud before the disease became entrenched. Our salmon industry remains free of a number of diseases that exist in salmon stock overseas and want their stock to remain so.
As I said earlier in this thread, farming like any other business is all about having an excess of income over costs. Any strategy to ensure this has to take into account what markets demand.