Dr. Francisco Contreras: The Art & Science of Undermining Cancer (Part 1)

John Farrell: Could you please tell me a little bit about The Art and Science of Undermining Cancer?

Dr. Francisco Contreras: The purpose of this book is to provide information, especially to cancer patients, but to the public in general, about what cancer is and how you can survive it and in fact reverse it. The image right now that people get in their minds when they hear the word “cancer” is a death sentence and it doesn’t have to be.

I believe strongly that information can inspire people to seek better ways of treatment. The book talks about all kinds of treatment: conventional and non-conventional and the combination that can happen with both of them, depending on the stage and the type of cancer that a patient may have. It also talks a lot about prevention and what a cancer patient can do on his or her own to help themselves in combination with whatever therapy an oncologist is giving them to have better outcomes. That’s an overview of what the book is.

JF: What led you to writing the book? Was there a moment that happened in your life personally that got you thinking about writing a book on undermining cancer?

Francisco: I’ve been trying to educate people about cancer for many years. One of the things that inspired me was the fact that Christians are more prone to sickness overall and cancer than non-Christians. I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that we are overlooking completely all the healthy principles that the Bible offers to us.

There are a lot of biblical principles in my book that can help obviously Christians and the rest of the population, as well, because I’m strongly convinced that cancer is a multifactorial disease, but the factors that influence the most is our lifestyle. The incidence of cancer in developed countries is much higher than in under-developed countries. What we choose to eat and what we choose to consume play a major role in the development of cancer, and just making people aware of this again can inspire them to make the necessary changes to fight cancer or to avoid it altogether.

What Can I Do to Fight Cancer?

JF: What is the most important piece of advice that readers can glean from the book?

Francisco: The purpose of the book is to let people know that if we would consume food the way God put it on this earth, the incidence of cancer would drop dramatically. The more processed foods we consume the higher the incidence of cancer is going to be.

Also, the types of foods that we eat. We do not eat according to our design. If you take into account that we have 32 teeth and only four are canine, that would tell us that only about 10-11 percent of the foods of our caloric intake should come from animals. And yet we eat meat as if all of our teeth were canine and a foot long.

I just want to make people aware that we should be consuming a lot more vegetables and fruits than meats or dairy products because we were not designed to eat so much. We were definitely designed to eat meat. That’s why we have canine teeth, but we eat a lot more animal protein than what our body needs to function correctly.

Not only do we need to stay away from processed foods, but we need to consume a lot more vegetables and fruits than meats. There are hundreds of published studies in the medical literature that show that if anybody increases their intake of fruits and vegetables by five portions a day that they would reduce the incidence of cancer by 50 percent.

There are simple principles that can make a tremendous difference in the life of a person. If you already have cancer, if you make those changes the outcome can be a lot better regardless of the therapy that you’re taking.

JF: What are the top cancer-fighting foods?

Francisco: Green leafy vegetables would be probably at the top of the list. There’s a number of other foods, but just green vegetables. If you eat a lot of spinach. Lettuce has very little nutritional value, but there’s many others like broccoli, which is a very strong anti-tumor agent that you can consume. Some legumes, even though they have a high incidence of carbohydrates, are also very good.

JF: Why is The Art and Science of Undermining Cancer a book that needs to be read by all today?

Francisco: Because it has many principles of prevention that can lead you to have a much longer, better life without suffering cancer. But it also gives information about the state-of-the-art treatments that are available both on the conventional and on the alternative. When you have more information, you can make much more intelligent decisions as to how to treat yourself if you have cancer. And a lot of people just don’t know that they have other options on top of chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery. That is why I feel that it’s a very important book for people to read.

Can We Win the War Against the Cancer?

JF: Obviously you’re familiar with the war on cancer, and it’s been 50 years since president Nixon declared war on cancer. Is this a war that can be won?

Francisco: With the philosophy that we have now it can’t because the fact is that every year more people die of cancer than the year before. We’re not winning the war on cancer. But the reason for that again is that the whole focus of treating cancer right now is on the tumor. And whatever you develop to destroy a tumor, if a tumor responds and reduces in size or disappears, it is considered a good report even if the patient dies.

For us, the most important thing is the patient, not the tumor. Instead of fighting cancer what we do at the Oasis of Hope hospital is provide resources for the patient to be able to fight their own cancer. The resources are not only physical that it’s treatment-wise or nutrition or diet, but also spiritual and emotional resources because the status of our immune system is what determines whether we’re going to survive or not.

Cancer patients have a low immune system. That’s why they develop cancer. Then if they’re receiving chemo and radiation, their immune system is even more devastated and that’s why the results are so poor.

For us, providing resources to improve the quality and quantity of the immune system is paramount. And the most potent immune-stimulating agents are for free: laughter, spiritual fortitude, meditation, music. Just being happy makes a tremendous difference in how your immune system works. For instance, there’s a study that shows that for every minute of anger your immune system is going to be depleted significantly for a period of six hours. And for every minute of laughter your immune system is going to be enhanced significantly for a period of 24 hours. So, our attitude makes a tremendous difference in how our immune system is going to respond.

If people don’t have spiritual fortitude in this complicated world in which we live, our immune systems are not going to be up to par. We believe that that is the biggest difference in why at the Oasis we have much better results against cancer than in any other oncological center in the world.

JF: What is the total care approach to treating cancer?

Francisco: We’re not just going to be taking care of the physical entity of the patient, but we’re going to be very involved in providing our patients with emotional and spiritual support. We have a full-time staff in psychology. We have a psychologist on staff, but we also have a full-time pastor on staff at the hospital. That is what we call the total care approach. We provide the patients with the best medical elements available to them, and we also provide them with spiritual and emotional support.

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Order your copy of The Art & Science of Undermining Cancer: Strategies to Slow, Control, Reverse by Dr. Francisco Contreras