Telos Journal Edition Four November 2013 | Page 10

Wordcount.org ranks cancer as the 2,397th most used published word, ranking one slot behind democracy and one slot before count. An amazing rate of Facebook posts explicitly relate to cancer. Good food campaigners are spreading the message that was succinctly presented by Max Gerson to the 79 th Congress in 1946. Even though Gerson was institutionally ignored, his dietary therapy proved effective and slowly spread. Now his practice, the neo-traditional medicine that harks back to Hippocratic times, has gathered steam everywhere, and web campaigners promote his messages like after-party hippies with bellbottoms full of erstwhile dance moves. Nevertheless, their posts are vital to a population that stood in the darkness of a ‘diseasemanagement system’ for decades. People are consciously taking charge of their own health, most likely because their fears have become familial realities, and chemotherapy and gene detection can lie expensively out of reach. For those without health insurance and progressively considering alternatives, there’s a spread of potent fruits, herbs, vegetables, and roots that are empirically proven to kill or prevent malignancy. Soursop, tomatoes, turmeric, green tea, broccoli, cauliflower, avocado, carrots, flax, red wine, kale, mushrooms, rosemary, green tea, tapioca—basically anything that doesn’t sport a commercial or host a list of unpronounceable ingredients—are frequently considered anti-cancerous substances by scores of respected professionals. And coupled with a healthy belief system and sustainable environments, these nutritionists, doctors, and their campaigners are right about such natural cancer preventers. Still, some dedicated practitioners split the fence, waiting for ‘evidential’ data: a 95% rate of statistical proof. But if they confirm that weight-gaining foods and excessive meat are apparent causes and that plantdominated diets are truly cancer preventive, as many do, then unnatural foods and eating habits are the actual ingestive reasons for cancer—because salt, fat, sugar, and Big Mac’s are uncommonly found in nature. The problem in defining what ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are for those