The Standard American Diet: Your Number One Risk Factor

The Standard American Diet: Your Number One Risk Factor (for breast cancer survivors)

The standard American diet (SAD), sometimes also referred to as the Western
dietary pattern, consists of a high intake of red meat, sugar, trans fats, high-fructose
corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and refined grains. This dietary pattern also
includes a low intake of colorful, whole-food fruits and vegetables.

The High Cost of Cheap Food

The health of the majority of Americans is getting worse as you read this. In the
Time magazine article “Getting Real about the High Price of Cheap Food,” Bryan
Walsh (2009) writes, “Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and
consume food, they face a future of…higher health costs.” Why? Food experts, such
as Michael Pollan, warn us that the quality of our food supply has been on a slow
decline for many decades; that is, our food has become more toxic and less
nutritious. In fact, much of what we eat is not actually food at all but what we like to
call “UFOs,” or “unidentified food objects.” Just look at the label on a typical
packaged food from a supermarket shelf. Try to pronounce most of the ingredients,
and you’ll see exactly what we mean. It’s no surprise that we’re witnessing an
unprecedented rise in obesity, blood-sugar imbalances, autoimmune diseases, and
cancer in our population (ACS 2010b).

The crux of the matter is this: fast food and packaged foods, as documented by
Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation (2001) and Carol Simontacchi in Crazy Makers
(2000), are made from the least-expensive ingredients possible and loaded with
chemicals, damaged fats, artificial ingredients, and flavor enhancers. Fast foods are
stimulating but they are not nourishing. Many experts, including researchers from
the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) (2007), believe that for the
twelve most common cancers, about 35 percent of cases in the United States are
preventable through maintaining a healthy diet and healthy weight, and being
physically active. So eating a diet aimed at risk reduction is probably the most
important step you can take to lower your chances of dancing with this most
unpleasant disease.

Sick animals make for unhealthy food.
While consuming malnourished, pesticideladen
plants can lead people to appear sickly and malnourished, those same
substandard crops, combined with excessive amounts of hormones and antibiotics,
lead to sickness in animals. Factory-farmed animals are fed a steady diet of
genetically modified (GM) corn and soy, with the intent of making the cattle gain
weight quickly. What’s more, a typical fast-food or school-lunch burger is not made
from a single piece of beef, but from “meat” from a variety of sources, such as
trimmings and scraps of fatty wastes that are left on the slaughterhouse floor after
the animals have been butchered.

The same basic practices are also applied to raising chicken and fish. Simple
common sense tells us that feeding GM soy and corn pellets to algae-loving salmon,
or sawdust, hormones, antibiotics, and cardboard to insect-loving chickens, will
produce sickly, malnourished animals, whose meat then contains the drugs,
pesticides, and other toxins the animal consumed. Indeed you are what the animal on
your dinner plate ate.

Got rBST?
Studies over the past decade have pointed clearly to the fact that
consuming cattle that were fed artificial growth hormones has led to increased rates
of breast cancer, early puberty, and obesity in the United States (Bohlooly-Y et al.
2005). Monsanto first began selling recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH),
also known as rBST (recombinant bovine somatotropin), in 1994. The hormone,
designed to force cows to produce more milk, has been banned in Europe, Canada,
Japan, Australia, and New Zealand due to safety concerns. Nevertheless, in the
United States, Monsanto has insisted that its genetically modified growth hormone is
safe. Many experts say otherwise. A key area of concern is the startling rise in
human blood levels of a growth hormone known as insulin-like growth factor (IGF-
1). As Dr. Samuel Epstein (1996), noted toxicologist, explains, consumption of
animals that were fed growth hormones leads to excessive levels of IGF-1, a close
relative of insulin, in humans.

Researcher Susan Hankinson first sounded the alarm on IGF-1 in 1998, when
she and her colleagues reported that among seventy-six premenopausal women,
those with IGF-1 blood concentrations in the highest third had almost three times
higher risk of breast cancer than those with levels in the lowest third. And among
premenopausal women younger than age fifty, the risk of breast cancer for those
with the highest levels of IGF-1 was approximately seven times higher than for
women with the lowest levels. “The up-to-sevenfold increase suggests that the
relation between IGF-1 and risk of breast cancer may be greater than that of other
established breast cancer risk factors, with the exception of a strong family history
of breast cancer or a high-density mammographic profile,” warned Hankinson and
her colleagues.

Given the research, we consider it prudent to strictly moderate your intake of
commercial animal products to help keep this risk factor under control. Since the
USDA does not require labeling of milk containing rBST as of this writing, it is
safe to assume that if your milk is not labeled organic or doesn’t clearly state the
absence of rBST, the cows that produced it were indeed treated with the hormone.
The good news is that you can avoid this risk by choosing milk that is labeled
“organic” or “rBST free.”