In this article, Mike Anderson shares about cancer, diet, and global warming. Mike Anderson is a medical researcher, author of The Rave Diet, and filmmaker/producer of “Eating” and “Healing Cancer from the Inside Out.”

Kevin: So Mike. If all this doesn’t work, what is?

Miguel: Food. I put some studies in the movie… the Office of Technology Assessment funded the Gerson Therapy. It is better than conventional treatments. This was at different stages of melanoma. It simply outperforms conventional treatments. They don’t like these studies. They don’t want to finance them. It is very hard.

Macrobiotics went to the NIH, National Institutes of Health and they tried to get funding because they presented six terminal cases, cancer cases, where the cancers were totally reverted. They were all biopsied and they were all confirmed and everything. Now don’t you think people should be interested in this? What should finance more studies? No, they can’t get any money for more funds for any of them.

You know allopathic medicine doesn’t do that, their track record is to shut down any nutritional approach because they are so threatened by it. Even this was around the turn of the century, 2001 or so. It’s on the website, the Sushi Institute. Anyway, they are totally threatened because it works. It is more effective. Instead of destroying the body, you are trying to rebuild it.

I specifically included Macrobiotics because they have a long history, 100 years of history. In fact, the founder of Macrobiotics reversed cancer. But they have a long history of reversing cancer. So I look at Macrobiotics and that’s almost 100% cooked. Then I look at raw, and that’s 100% raw, uncooked. And I think the bottom line here is that the common ground is that they’re all plant-based, 100% plant-based. They are all organic. Organic is very, very important because organic foods are much richer in micronutrients, the families of antioxidants. Those are the ones that are going to fight cancer effectively. It’s an organic whole food diet and that’s it. Whether raw or cooked is partly a personal preference, in terms of case and such.

Kevin: You knew this movie was going to cause some waves. So one, how did you prepare for that? Two, what kind of feedback have you gotten from people who weren’t happy?

Miguel: I really didn’t prepare much for it. What I did was try to make it as believable as possible and close the loop on all the arguments. To make it as tight as possible. I’ll tell you a story. I don’t know if Brian Clement wants me to tell this or not, he was interviewed in the movie, but he and his wife watched it for seven hours, seven hours looking for a way out. They were mainly looking for some angle that the conventional doctors could use to attack me and they couldn’t find it. So my approach was to make it as tight as possible and as believable as possible. As a result of that, I haven’t received many negative comments except that people don’t want to talk to me.

I was on KPFK, it’s a local non-profit station here in Los Angeles. I was there and they were very receptive as was the audience. I mean, people are hungry for this novelty. But bringing it out is very, very difficult.

People will say, “Oh my gosh. You should be on the major news shows,” and things like that. And I say, “Well, have you looked at the sponsors of those news shows? They’ll never have me.” You know, you have meat and dairy and drugs and I’m preaching against all of that. So, it’s hard to get him out, but word of mouth is extraordinarily strong; is pushing all of this. And thanks to programs like yours and others, more and more people are jumping on the bandwagon.

I was at the Raw Spirit Festival in Sedona this weekend and a lady and her husband came out specifically to see me. They flew in from Tampa. And it was because they saw “Healing Cancer” a month ago. Her father started with colon cancer, it spread to his liver, now it’s in his lungs. He has had a round of chemotherapy; he couldn’t take it anymore. So they were looking for something. They put him on a diet and within a month all of his cancer markers had dropped dramatically. They were just excited about the whole thing. They wanted to fly and thank me for that.

The strange thing is that most people have in their minds that cancer is this dreaded disease that kills people. Well, you know, cardiovascular disease kills more than twice as many people as have cancer, that’s a pretty scary disease. But people have in mind that cancer is scarier, but it is not. It can be controlled through food. People have this idea that, well, gosh, cancer is a dangerous disease that needs strong medicine. You need something that will make people lose their hair and make them throw up all day for days and until they get sick. That is strong medicine. You need just the opposite. You need something that will build the body. People, if they get off this toxic diet that they’re on and go on a good diet, they’re going to see miraculous things happen. Not just with the cancer, but the whole body will be healing.

Kevin: Let’s talk a little bit about the Rave diet. There are many people who are on this call who don’t know what that is. So, let’s give a little background on that and…

Miguel: IT’S OKAY. I wrote the book mainly because people were asking me for something to go with the “Eating” DVD. Because after watching the “Eating” DVD, they will say, “Okay, I’m ready to change my diet, but what should I do?” And although I list, at the end of the movie, all kinds of books, and on the website even more, they wanted something from me. So, I put it together primarily as a very short, very easy read, very short, if you will, guide on how to switch to this diet.

I also have a transition diet, because sometimes it’s hard for people to follow the full Rave diet. So I have an easier transition diet for them to evolve into. One man, for example, was too much for him because he had been eating processed foods his entire life and had horrible gas from all the fiber. So I tell people, “Calm down. You can go slow,” you know, unless you have some terrible disease that you’re struggling with. But what it means, Rave is an acronym, it means no refined foods. The A is no animal foods, the V, which gets me in trouble with most people all the time, means no vegetable oils; the E stands for no exceptions and exercise. There are a number of sub-rules within that. It’s not just that acronym alone. For example, eat at least half of your food uncooked. Also lists ingredients, has a full explanation of how to read ingredient lists, etc. But it is very well done.

Kevin: Not oil. Let’s talk about it.

Miguel: IT’S OKAY. I understood this mostly, I started if you look at Ornish, Essylstyn, Furman, a lot of doctors who actually reversed heart disease and have studies to prove it; all specifically exclude vegetable oils. There are clinical studies, it breaks the arteries. Essylstyn says it’s as good for your arteries as roast beef. If he looks at the nutrient scales, the key to a good diet is getting as many nutrients per calorie as you can. If you look at vegetable oils, they have the lowest nutritional value of any food on the planet. It’s all fat, very little nutrient values ​​per calorie.

It is a refined food, above; the molecules in vegetable oils are unstable. They produce free radicals. It is a promoter of some types of cancer, particularly skin cancers, and so on. So, I’m just saying there are substitutes for that. If you’re cooking and want to brown potatoes or something, use applesauce or apple juice or vegetable broth or something. You have to cook it slower, but it browns just as well. So that’s the scheme of vegetable oils. At first, I tell people with this, “Hey, if you put yourself in this, you can reverse your heart disease.” I am not going to go against all the doctors who have successfully proven through trials that heart disease can be reversed. They all exclude vegetable oils.

Kevin: Yes, I think it makes sense to follow the research of the people you mentioned, like Furman and Essylstyn and these guys, instead of recreating the wheel in theory.

Miguel: Well well. I have to continue; these guys are my heroes. I can’t challenge them and I want to, if someone comes up with a study on reversing heart disease that specifically includes vegetable oils, then I’ll review it a second time, as will they. But so far that has not happened.

Kevin: Who do you think you learned the most from?

Miguel: God, I don’t know. That is hard. They’re all essentially saying the same thing in different ways and doing their thing. At the beginning, there was John Robbins, the emotional, environmental aspect, in particular. He was huge. McDougall, was also huge. He was giving all this health boost. Then of course Fuhrman and Ornish and a few others, Esselston. I would probably say McDougall and, at first, McDougall and John Robbins.

Kevin: Excellent. You mentioned global warming, again, and I think we should probably talk about that because it was an additional part of the movie, “Eating.” What are some of the implications of the way we eat, in relation to global warming and the environment?

Miguel: It’s methane, that’s the most important thing that’s been overlooked. I’m not an expert on that, but what I did was summarize what the experts have said. It’s hard for people to visualize this, but there are hundreds of millions of cows and other animals that emit methane, both from their mouths and from their butts. It goes into the atmosphere and methane is a powerful heat trap, much more powerful than carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide will stay in the atmosphere much longer, but methane actually traps heat. Studies have shown that methane has, in fact, caused nearly half of global warming to date. The number one source of methane is the animals we raise and eventually eat. So the nice thing about methane is that it only stays in the atmosphere for eight years. If people reduced their consumption of animal products, they could recycle them very quickly. There could be a more immediate impact on global warming, on cooling. That’s not going to happen, but, let’s say, everyone in the world cut 1/3 of their meat consumption and cut back on livestock accordingly. That could have a big impact on global warming, and very soon. While the carbon dioxide that stays in the atmosphere for so long. It’s not going to have such an immediate impact and that’s what we need, an immediate impact, because we’re right there, as they call the tipping point.