Introducing FemRatio^TMand MaleRatio^TM

An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Jonathan Wright on . . .
Defeating Out-of-Control Cell Growth

'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'To talk of many things: Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax - Of cabbages - and kings . . .' - Lewis Carroll

Jonathan V. Wright, M.D., is well known to readers of Life Enhancement by virtue of his knowledge and enthusiasm for subjects dear to our hearts. Dr. Wright is widely acclaimed as one of the leading alternative and life extension physicians practicing in the United States today. In his role as medical director of the Tahoma Clinic in Kent, Washington, he has treated thousands of patients using innovative, natural therapies, including nutrient supplements, botanicals, natural hormones, and glandular extracts.

Among his most recent books are the bestsellers "Natural Hormone Replacement" and "Maximize Your Vitality and Potency for Men Over 40". Dr. Wright has also written monthly columns for Prevention and Let's Live magazines. Since 1982 he, along with Dr. Alan Gaby, has taught health care practitioners at his annual four-day intensive seminar, entitled "Nutritional Therapy in Medical Practice."

Despite his innovative and outstanding accomplishments in natural medicine, Dr. Wright was made infamous to those outside the natural medicine field by the FDA, which in 1992 raided his clinic at gunpoint and arrested his B vitamins! Not surprisingly, one of his favorite sayings is, "Let's outlive the FDA!" In this exclusive interview with Life Enhancement's publisher, Will Block, he discusses important natural phytonutrients for health maintenance and well-being that have recently been shown to impart dramatic health benefits. One of these nutrients, extracted from the Brassica (mustard) family, in an as-yet unpublished study, has even reversed, in women, the kind of out-of-control-growth - cancer - that we must avoid or defeat if we are to land safely in the future.

LE: Recently, I read an interview with a famous proponent of life extension, quite an educated person - the best colleges, the best medical schools, and so forth - who wrote a successful book on the subject. As editor of a major anti-aging publication, this "longevist" talks about the incredibly rosy future, yet goes on to say that there is little to no value in nutrient supplements, and nobody should bother with anything but genes. All I could think was: (1) nonsense, and (2) even if genetics does turn out to be the best way to extend ourselves into the future, what should we do until the time when that discipline begins to bear fruit?

It seems to me that we ought to be more immediately concerned with keeping ourselves going and staving off free-radical damage and degenerative diseases that affect our brains, our hearts, and the rest of our organs. We ought to be especially on guard against cancer. The late Russian gerontologist Vladimir Dilman described his idea of cancer as a developmental noose into which we all could step without the right kind of intervention.

Surprisingly, there is the general impression that the war against cancer is being won. But especially with regard to prostate and breast cancer, that certainly isn't true. Is there any hope on this front?

DR. WRIGHT: Yes, there is. Since 1982, I've been working with hormone therapy, and I was one of the first physicians to use DHEA in clinical practice and to describe such use to natural medicine doctors. I've also been working with replacement natural hormones such as the triple estrogen formulation estrone, estradiol, and estriol, as well as natural testosterone, progesterone, etc. Now, although those things all do a lot of good, there's always the nagging question about whether even natural hormone replacement therapy, especially as it is conventionally practiced, can increase or decrease the risk of cancer.

With DHEA, however, the situation seems fairly clear. From all the studies - some on humans but most on animals - it appears that DHEA prevents a significant proportion of cancers and is not itself a cancer inducer. However, things are not nearly as clear with the natural human estrogens (excluding, of course, such nonhuman estrogens as Premarin^® and all the synthetics) or with natural human testosterone, which I now commonly refer to as "bio-identical" hormones.

LE: By bio-identical, do you mean molecules that are exactly the same as those found naturally in the human body?

DR. WRIGHT: Exactly. I have observed since the early 1980s that practically none of my female patients who have taken the natural hormone replacement have turned up with cancer; and the same goes for my male patients who have taken natural testosterone. Now I did say "practically none," not "none," but the cancer rates appear to have been lower than I would have expected if these folks had been taking Premarin or methyltestosterone or one of those other non-bio-identicals. But who's to say whether the rates are higher or lower than if they weren't taking any hormone replacement at all? In that case, of course, other diseases might have come on.

There's always the nagging question about whether even natural hormone replacement therapy, especially as it is conventionally practiced, can increase or decrease the risk of cancer.

Since the mid-1980s there's been a growing body of literature about the metabolites of steroid hormones, specifically the metabolites of estrogens, inquiring whether some might be putting us more at risk for cancer and others might be putting us less at risk.

One of the early theories was that of Professor Henry Lemon, an oncologist at the University of Nebraska, who suggested in the 1970s that estriol might provide protection against cancer. Supporting his theory is the observation that, in the low-cancer regions of Asia, estriol levels are higher than in the high-cancer regions. Also, women of Asian ethnic origin living in Hawaii, where they are not only midway between Asia and North America, but on a midway between Asian and American-type diets, were found to have somewhat lower levels of estriol, and higher rates of cancer, than Asian women on entirely Asian diets. And women of the same ethnic origin living in North America and having adopted the typical American diet have the lowest levels of estriol, and their breast cancer rate is higher still. There seems to be a clear inverse relationship between breast cancer rates and estriol levels.

Beyond these epidemiologic observations, experimental animals with higher estriol levels seem to be better protected against cancer. But, oddly enough, despite those observations, and despite Dr. Lemon's observation that after surgery for breast cancer, the women with the highest proportion of estriol survived the longest, many academic researchers do not agree.

In the 1980s and 90s, work has centered largely around more minor metabolites of estrogens, specifically the metabolites 2-hydroxyestrone and 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone. Dr. H. Leon Bradlow, of Rockefeller University, a leader in this field, has called the 2-hydroxyestrone metabolite "good" estrogen, and I believe there is justification in calling the 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone metabolite "bad" estrogen.

The 16-alpha version is "bad" because it tends to damage DNA and cause abnormal cellular proliferation. And in a variety of animal models, it is definitely associated with a higher risk of cancer and with the progression of that cancer. In these same animal models, if the proportion of 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone can be made to go down and that of 2-hydroxyestrone to go up, the risk of cancer, and therefore its actual incidence, is reduced. Remarkably, there are natural means for altering this ratio in a positive direction, as much animal work has shown (see "Cabbages, Broccoli, et al., Versus Cancer" in the February 2000 issue of my newsletter, Nutrition & Healing).

As I have reported in a subsequent issue (see "Preventing and Curing Cancer of the Cervix" in the May issue), a recent breakthrough study by Maria Bell, M.D., and associates has gotten everyone thinking. The findings are to be published in Gynecologic Oncology within the next few months. In their study, Dr. Bell and associates treated a particular condition called cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) - also known as cancer in the epithelium of the cervix - in the intermediate stages of its development (stages 2 and 3) with a substance extracted from the so-called Brassica (mustard-family) vegetables, which include cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, rutabaga, and turnip. When this substance, which occurs naturally in these so-called cruciferous vegetables, was administered during the course of only 12 weeks, between 40 and 50% of these stage-2 and stage-3 CIN cancers literally disappeared.

LE: It must have caused quite a stir when Dr. Bell first presented her findings to an audience at the National Society for Gynecologic Oncologists in San Francisco last fall.

DR. WRIGHT: Well, it certainly did at her presentation that I attended at the meeting of the American College of Advancement in Medicine in the spring of this year.

There are natural means for altering the good-to-bad estrogen ratio in a positive direction, as much animal work has shown.

Dr. Bell's idea that the Brassica substance - a compound called I3C (we'll discuss it in detail later) - might work came from research involving the human papilloma virus. This virus causes a rare respiratory disease known as laryngeal papillomatosis or laryngeal papilloma, in which papillomas (noncancerous little bumps) grow on the surface of the larynx. A group at a hospital on Long Island had treated a number of people with this disease and had them take I3C. In a significant proportion of these people, the papillomas disappeared. The papillomas, by the way, interfere with the patient's voice. If you're Julie Andrews, you go off and have your larynx stripped, and then you sue your surgeon for malpractice because you can't sing like you used to. But it's possible that if Julie Andrews had taken I3C, her condition would have cleared up. It's even plausible that if she had just eaten a lot of Old George Bush's favorite vegetable, namely, . . .

LE: Broccoli.

DR. WRIGHT: . . . broccoli, the condition would have cleared up and she would have been OK. So, based on the success of I3C in treating laryngeal papilloma, Dr. Bell thought to see what happens at the other end of the body, and the result was that I3C worked in 40-50% of the cases, presumably by favorably altering the ratio of estrogen metabolites I mentioned earlier.

Yet Dr. Bell and her associates were met with skepticism because "everyone in gynecologic oncology" knows that there are very few estrogen receptors on the cell surfaces of the cervical intraepithelial neoplasm (the tumor). If that's true, how then could a change in the ratio of two minor estrogen metabolites possibly influence the cancer? We don’t have a proven theory, but what we do have is the observation that it did. And even though Dr. Bell's double-blind, placebo-controlled study is only one study, there is enough supporting evidence from animal and human work to say that it's very likely to be replicated.

Dr. Bell did every test she could think of both to prove the cancer was there in the first place and then to prove that it later disappeared. I have to emphasize that her success was not 100%. But making 40-50% of cancers disappear in as little as 12 weeks, with nothing more than a substance found naturally in some vegetables, is quite a remarkable breakthrough.

This got me and others to thinking of another study, reported by scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute in Seattle.¹ In that study, men who ate three servings of Brassica vegetables (containing I3C) per week had a 41% lessened risk of getting prostate cancer. So Dr. Bell is reporting that 40-50% of CIN cancers can be made to disappear, and the Hutchinson group reports that about the same proportion of prostate cancer can be prevented. Even though it's only speculation, it's at least a well-founded speculation that the mechanism may be the same in both cases.

In the case of CIN, Dr. Bell attributed some of the benefits to increases in the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio brought about by ingesting the I3C: more of the good estrogen and less of the bad estrogen. It is important to note that she conducted a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study, the so-called "gold standard." Women in the control group, receiving placebo, had no positive changes in the status of their cancers; in fact, their cancers all progressed (worsened). And in that same group, the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio got worse (it decreased) instead of better.

LE: Could any of this analysis apply to cancers of the prostate?



DR. WRIGHT: Yes. The long-held theory of prostate cancer, that testosterone is bad stuff, and even worse when it's converted to dihydrotestosterone, is gradually falling into disfavor. A more prevalent current opinion is that prostate cancer has more to do with estrogen than with dihydrotestosterone. It appears that many men, as they get older, convert too much testosterone to estrogen and that this excessive estrogen is the cause of prostate enlargement or prostate cancer. However, while the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio has been extensively examined in the study of breast cancer and CIN, it has not been examined at all for male cancers.

For men, we're just beginning to recognize that the overproduction of estrogen may be a large part of the problem. (We should remember, by the way, that in both sexes, testosterone metabolizes to estrogen. In women, of course, the great majority of the testosterone is converted, whereas in men, it's the opposite: most of the testosterone in a healthy man stays as testosterone, and only a little bit becomes estrogen.) The reasons for an excess of estrogen in some men may be genetic or are perhaps environmental - we've all heard about those environmental "estrogen-mimicking molecules."

LE: There's an impression that, with age, estrogen diminishes in women and perhaps increases in men. Some claim that estrogen ends up dominating men as well as women. Is this not the case?

DR. WRIGHT: While the majority of men do not end up with greater levels of estrogen and declining testosterone (estrogen dominance), certainly a significant minority do - as I've seen in practice - and they are definitely at greater risk for prostate problems. There is excellent research showing that too much estrogen and less-than-optimal testosterone put such men at risk for cardiovascular disease. It makes the blood more likely to clot and increases the risk of atherosclerosis. So this suggests the very basic idea that men ought to be men, and women ought to be women. Men ought to keep the great majority of their testosterone, with a small amount of estrogen, and vice versa for women.

In addition to the Brassica vegetables' metabolic modifier I3C, which affects the "good/bad" estrogen ratio, there are substances that can induce the formation in women of more estriol, which, according to early theories, is a good estrogen. While that is now in doubt, at least we know it's not a bad estrogen. Other substances can also produce more estriol, and yet others have been shown to greatly inhibit the undesirable testosterone-to-estrogen conversion in men.

It appears that there is enough scientific evidence at this time to hypothesize that if we combine some of these natural substances, we can have a favorable effect on our risk for cancer. Fortunately, the hypothesis can be tested. There is currently a urine test available for the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio. It is very accurate, by the way. In the not-too-distant future, tests will also be available for serum and blood.

Recently a man appeared in my office with very early prostate cancer. His urologist had found that his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level was a little high, and, sure enough, a biopsy found a few cancerous cells. We decided to check not only his testosterone-to-estrogen ratio, but also his 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone (good/bad estrogen) ratio. Both of them were bad, so we had him take I3C. His estrogen ratio was much improved, and his testosterone-to-estrogen ratio improved also.

LE: That's remarkable.

There is enough scientific evidence to hypothesize that if we combine some of these natural substances, we can have a favorable effect on our risk for cancer.

DR. WRIGHT: Yet in no way did I tell him, nor did he think, that this was going to be a total cure for his cancer, and he is doing many other things to deal with it. But we both believe that it will improve his risk, and the chances are very good that it will at least retard the cancer's progress. Excessive 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone drives abnormal cellular proliferation, so having less of it means less abnormality.

In another case, a woman came in and said, "My mom and my aunt both had breast cancer, but I prefer not to have it - what should I do?" She was premenopausal, and for such women, a low DHEA level increases the risk. We ran a blood test for DHEA, and sure enough, she was low. So we told her, "Please take some DHEA, because there is solid scientific evidence that if your DHEA is low, you’re at higher risk for cancer."

The same finding, however, does not apply to postmenopausal women. Nobody has yet conducted a placebo-controlled, double-blind study on postmenopausal women who have low DHEA and a family history of breast cancer to see whether the risk can be reduced. That's the kind of evidence that science requires, but it takes many years to conduct such a study.

In any case, however, how much harm is there in bringing a premenopausal woman's DHEA levels up to normal? Virtually none. We can reasonably hypothesize, although we can't prove, that if that is done, the woman's risk of breast cancer will at least be reduced to the norm.

In one more example, another woman came in with a similar history of breast cancer in her family, except that she was more perimenopausal than premenopausal. Thus, we didn't rely on DHEA measurement, but we did measure her 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio. Sure enough, we found low 2-hydroxyestrone - the good estrogen, per Dr. Bradlow - and high 16-alpha-hydroxyestrone. So we had her not only eat the right veggies, but also take metabolic modifiers from those veggies, and her estrogen ratio improved.

To repeat, we haven't yet seen scientific proof that I3C will reduce a woman's risk of breast cancer, but there is definitely reason to believe that it will. Since the risk from eating more Brassica vegetables and supplementing with the concentrated substance is about nil, it is certainly worth doing. By the time we have scientific proof, years down the road, it may be too late for some women.

LE: Especially given the alternatives.

DR. WRIGHT: Right. Now let's discuss the various metabolic modifiers found in those Brassica vegetables.

LE: In your February issue of Nutrition and Healing, there is a remarkable metabolism chart. It shows clearly how these substances interact and gives a better idea of what they do (see Figure 1). Why don't we start with I3C, the substance that Dr. Bell used in her study.




Figure 1. Eating Brassica vegetables tends to promote the desired ratio of the two hydroxyestrones shown in this diagram: high in 2, low in 16-alpha. Men who ate three servings of these vegetables (containing I3C) per week had a 41% lessened risk for prostate cancer. (Adapted from Nutrition & Healing; reprinted by permission.)

DR. WRIGHT: I3C is indole-3-carbinol, one of the key factors in altering the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio. From Dr. Bell's study, it is now beyond doubt that additional quantities of I3C, whether taken in capsule form or obtained directly from vegetables, will improve this ratio. That applies to both sexes, by the way.

Currently, the scientific literature does not say much about men in this regard, although there's no doubt that it works for women. So how can I be so sure about men? Because I've seen it work in actual tests in a number of men, and I don't think there's much room for doubt. I3C may also do many other things, but this is the principal effect that's under research.

Another metabolic modifier that alters the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio is a substance called 3,3'-diindolylmethane (DIM). DIM is a naturally occurring dimer, or coupled pair, of I3C molecules. Like I3C, DIM occurs naturally in broccoli, cabbage, etc., and it's rather innocuous. Dr. Bell has told us that her next study, which will again be double-blind and placebo-controlled, will focus on DIM rather than I3C, because it's been observed that DIM is considerably more potent in changing the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio, so studying it certainly makes sense. It also might be beneficial to use the two - DIM and I3C - together, perhaps resulting in an even better estrogen ratio.

LE: Some studies do indicate improved activity when both DIM and I3C are present, suggesting that they are not redundant.

DR. WRIGHT: Now, there is yet a third substance - in fact, it's said to be the most common of the indoles found in the Brassica vegetables - about which there has not been as much research, and that is ascorbigen, which you earlier called to my attention, "Dr." Block. The name calls to mind ascorbic acid (vitamin C), and indeed, when ascorbigen breaks down, it generates ascorbic acid as well as I3C. But that's not the point here. The idea is to use ascorbigen as a source of I3C, which improves the 2/16-alpha-hydroxyestrone ratio. Research does appear to show that if we combine ascorbigen with I3C (which is, of course, the situation in nature), their effect will be synergistic. Both are what are known as "mixed-function oxidases," which help to render carcinogens harmless before they cross the barrier to the lungs or bloodstream. Together, I3C and ascorbigen have been observed to produce up to an 80-fold increase in intestinal mixed-function oxidase activity.² Ascorbigen is also known to operate as an immunomodulator, or immune-system enhancer.³

LE: It's interesting to note also that ascorbigen has been used in topical skin lotions, with presumably great benefit. It is thought that much of its advantage is that it can be extremely antiproliferative, thus preventing abnormal skin growth.

To repeat, we haven't yet seen scientific proof that I3C will reduce a woman's risk of breast cancer, but there is definitely reason to believe that it will.

DR. WRIGHT: Right. So now we have three substances found in the same vegetables - indole-3-carbinol, 3,3'-diindolylmethane, and ascorbigen - all of which have been found to modify the good/bad estrogen ratio, and for women, that's what we want to do to lower the risk of cancer. For men, it's not quite as clear, but in my opinion, a man's prostate is just at much at risk from the good/bad estrogen ratio as it is from excess estrogen. I want to emphasize, though, that that's my opinion, not a proven scientific fact.

As we discussed earlier, the literature shows that too much estrogen is definitely a problem for a man's prostate, but the significance of the good/bad estrogen ratio has not yet been proved. In other words, we have more information about the quantitative effects of estrogen than about the qualitative effects of the different kinds of estrogen. I believe the latter will be forthcoming, though, and I've had at least a couple of male patients with early prostate cancer who, sure enough, had bad estrogen ratios. So I think those three substances will apply to cancer prevention for men as well as women. After that, however, the things we might want to do to reduce the risk of cancer in the two sexes diverge somewhat.

LE: What about men?

DR. WRIGHT: Well, we've talked about the testosterone-to-estrogen conversion problem. The steroid precursor DHEA (which is itself a steroid) can also be metabolized to estrogen through a couple of intermediary metabolites, and one enzyme, aromatase, appears to be the key to this process. Certain substances have been found to inhibit aromatase; this drastically reduces estrogen production from testosterone as well as from DHEA, resulting in a rise in testosterone and DHEA levels.

There actually is a drug out there, called Arimidex^®, that was designed specifically for inhibiting aromatase activity. It does that, but with undesirable side effects. Fortunately, there are natural aromatase inhibitors that do not have a long list of side effects. The one that appears to be the most potent, and is also bioavailable, is a flavonoid called chrysin. (For the automobile fans out there, this is not an extract of old Chryslers.) It is a natural substance that comes from the passionflower - whose name, incidentally, is a reference to the Passion of Christ and has nothing to do with sex.

Another flavonoid, naringenin, found in oranges and tangerines, also inhibits aromatase, but it's not quite as effective as chrysin, so the latter is better known and more widely available. Aromatase inhibitors would be counterproductive for women, of course, but not for men. I've had a number of male patients whose tests showed too little testosterone and too much estrogen, but after taking chrysin for as little as one month, the proper ratio was restored. Chances are very good that those men, who are mostly in their 50s and above, will need to take chrysin for the rest of their lives in order to maintain a proper balance.

LE: Well, we have to eat food for the rest of our lives. Why complain? I've heard of people who had difficulty taking DHEA because of benign prostatic hypertrophy but who took chrysin and were then able to take the DHEA.

DR. WRIGHT: That really fits, because in some men, DHEA will metabolize to estrogen excessively, and chrysin inhibits that process, thus removing the stress it imposes on the prostate gland. Also on the male list is lycopene, a carotenoid that gives tomatoes their color. I'm sure we were all entertained by the newspapers and wire services saying that science had finally found a health benefit for pizza. This came from one of the many studies showing that men who ate a lot of processed tomato products had a lower risk of prostate cancer than men who didn't eat many processed tomato products, including - what do you know - pizza.

Three substances found in the same vegetables - indole-3-carbinol, 3,3'-diindolylmethane, and ascorbigen - have been found to positively modify the good/bad estrogen ratio.

In a meta-analysis (a critical review) of over 100 studies, it was found that a large majority of them did indeed indicate an association between processed tomato products (and very likely lycopene) and a reduced risk of prostate cancer. More recently, a study was done by a urologic surgeon - creating a bit of a sensation - who had a number of patients who were to have their prostate glands removed because of proven prostate cancer. For 30 days before the operation, half of these men took lycopene, and the other half did not. Then their prostate glands were removed - which was too bad, really. A postoperative study of the tissue specimens showed that, whereas the prostate cancers in those men who had not received lycopene had progressed, the cancers in those who had received lycopene had actually shown a regression.

We can reasonably conclude that eating a lot of processed tomato products (the equivalent of 20 lbs of fresh tomatoes per week) or taking about 30 mg of lycopene per day is likely to have a favorable effect in preventing prostate cancer, and, if you already have it, in retarding its rate of progression. But, of course, primary prevention is best, not therapy after the fact.

LE: Some of the studies showed that cooked tomatoes were more cancer-preventive than fresh tomatoes, and when the tomatoes were combined with cheese, a la pizza, they had even more potency. That makes sense because lycopene is fat-soluble, so it's more easily absorbed by the gut when taken with fatty foods. We recommend only lycopene that has been made readily absorbable through a lipidation process, such as that from Hoffman-La Roche.

DR. WRIGHT: So chrysin and lycopene appear to be particularly relevant for cutting the risk of male cancer (which is to say, prevention), and possibly for treatment as well.

LE: Are there other items that can be used by both men and women?


DR. WRIGHT: There are three I'd like to talk about. The first is DHEA, mentioned earlier, which appears to be very strongly supported by the scientific literature for preventing premenopausal - and I want to emphasize premenopausal - breast cancer. There is enough literature from both experimental animal studies and from basic human biochemistry to say that DHEA is a risk reducer for all types of cancer. But here we're talking specifically about sex-hormone-related cancers.

The second item is selenium, which has been shown, epidemiologically, to be associated with lower levels of prostate cancer, along with lung and colon cancer. Even though we don't know its mechanism of action, it does appear to reduce the risk. In one study, 200 mcg of selenium per day lowered the risk of prostate cancer by about one-third.⁴

The third item is one that I like to recommend, although there is very little literature on it, and that's simply a very small amount of iodine. It turns out that the prostate gland is the male body's second-greatest repository for iodine - after the thyroid gland, of course. In women, the second greatest accumulation of iodine is in the ovaries.

It has been my clinical observation, not published in the scientific literature, that when women have low estriol and more estrone and estradiol - remember Dr. Lemon's theory that low estriol levels represent a cancer risk - added iodine helps to raise the levels of estriol and concomitantly lower the levels of estrone and estradiol (which are more procarcinogenic). I don't know how it works, but I've seen it work enough times since I first observed it in the 1970s that I know it's true.

LE: What about items specifically for women?

DR. WRIGHT: I've just mentioned iodine and why it's more likely to be useful for women than for men. Beyond that, selenium has been found to inhibit virally induced mammary tumors in female mice.⁵ Presumably this also applies to women, because it turns out that in 40-50% of breast cancers, when the tumor is removed and examined carefully, there are unmistakable traces of mouse mammary-tumor-virus DNA - in other words, DNA from the virus that gets into mice and gives them breast cancer.

LE: While the connection is strictly hypothetical, the low breast cancer rates in Japan have been associated with the consumption of seaweed, which has high concentrations of both iodine and selenium.


Vitex agnus-castus, the chaste tree.

DR. WRIGHT: Another item of value to women is the botanical Vitex agnus-castus (the chaste tree, native to the Mediterranean region), used traditionally to relieve PMS-associated symptoms such as breast tenderness, mood swings, cramps, depression, anxiety, tension, headaches, water retention, and weight gain associated with the menstrual cycle. The female hormonal imbalances associated with PMS are estimated to affect about 30-40% of menstruating women.

Work done principally in Germany appears to show that Vitex modulates progesterone levels by increasing luteinizing hormone and decreasing follicle-stimulating hormone in the pituitary gland. Thus it helps regulate the balance between progesterone and estrogen, namely, a little more progesterone and not so much estrogen dominance.

Insufficient progesterone is thought to increase the risk for breast and other sex-hormone-related cancers. So if we can boost women's progesterone production, theoretically we should be able to cut that risk. Now actually, that theory does not just involve too little progesterone; it also involves excessive androgens (male sex hormones) in those women. The theory is called ovarian dysfunction: the ovaries are making too much androgen and not enough progesterone. So Vitex, by inducing more progesterone or a more favorable progesterone/estrogen ratio, should help to reduce that risk, although again it isn't scientifically proven.


By now I think we’ve gone through many of the items that should either certainly or very probably reduce the risk of sex-hormone-related cancers for women and for men.

LE: There are those who say, "I don't have any cancer in my family; why should I worry about this kind of thing? Why should I be interested in preventive measures for something I'll probably never get?"

DR. WRIGHT: A recent book entitled Hormone Deception by our friend Dr. Lindsay Berkson reports on the ever-increasing accumulation of synthetic molecules in the environment - some from pesticides, some from plastics, some from many other sources - that mimic the effects of bad estrogens. Many of these synthetic compounds are even more harmful than our own bad estrogens. So even if we don't have cancer in our family, with this ever-increasing environmental burden of estrogen-mimicking molecules, we need to do everything we can to cut our risk. If we could eventually get those things cleansed from the environment, then maybe I would be more sympathetic to the "never had any, never will" argument.

LE: Isn't it also true that autopsies have shown that virtually all men are in the process of developing prostate cancer?

Vitex agnus-castus helps relieve PMS-associated symptoms such as breast tenderness, mood swings, cramps, depression, anxiety, tension, headaches, water retention, and weight gain associated with the menstrual cycle.

DR. WRIGHT: Autopsies have shown that. But what did autopsies show a century or two ago? We don't know. And it seems that getting prostate cancer is one of those things we have all come to think of as being normal.

LE: Well, some of us don't.

DR. WRIGHT: We really have no good data on this. All we can say is that it's true for our generation (or one might say our degeneration). We do not know if this was true 100 years ago, 200 years ago, or 300 years ago. In any case, most folks who are going to be reading these words are very interested in living as long and as healthily as they can.

LE: Exactly.

DR. WRIGHT: So if it is true that all autopsies in our generation of men are showing some trace of prostate cancer, and if we go and prolong our life by 10 or 20 years, well, then, we're all going to die of prostate cancer.

LE: Let's not.

DR. WRIGHT: What we'd like to do, of course, is reduce our risk as much as possible.

It is true that all autopsies in our generation of men are showing some trace of prostate cancer.

LE: Right. And what about women? I spoke from a male perspective before.

DR. WRIGHT: Well, my professors at the University of Michigan told me that as little as four to five generations ago, the risk of breast cancer (to take one example) was 1 in 30. At the time I was a student, it had gone up to 1 in 10 and was headed toward 1 in 9. Well, it got there and is now headed toward 1 in 8. This is why I mention that the autopsy data in our generation may apply only to our generation.

LE: With odds like that, you can't play against the house, unless you can change something in your favor. That's where supplementation enters: to improve the odds.

DR. WRIGHT: Right. Everyone in this field is in favor of eating the right foods first and then using supplements for insurance. What we've talked about today says that we should be making sure to eat those Brassica vegetables: cabbage, broccoli, bok choy, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, rutabaga, and turnip. We should also probably eat more processed tomato products and more iodine-containing foods. Finally, we might consider eating more garlic and onions, as those are two of the principal selenium-containing foods.

A word of caution: Brassica vegetables in excess can cause goiter - an enlarged thyroid - so it's probably best to monitor that possibility if we become big fans of these vegetables and eat them every day. But chances are that three or four servings a week won't do this.

Whether we establish good eating habits or not, we should take out an insurance policy of using supplements intelligently, especially for those of us who have cancers in our family. I think that's important insurance.

LE: Yes. Especially if we want to be vital and live a long time.

References

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