Jerry Knox said:
> I taught oncology for a while in grad school. It is very very well
> established that a vegan diet reduces the incidence of cancer. I believe
> the raw living foods diet also reduces this by a factor of several fold.

Kirt Nieft replied:
> The curiosity is that most tribal cultures don't develop
> cancer and the are neither all-raw nor vegan. It's not as
> simple as you may like it to be on the cancer front.

One of the biggest fallacies in vegan advocacy is equating all
omnivore
diets with the "standard American diet" (SAD) or the SWD (standard
Western
diet). Clinical/epidemiological research typically utilizes SAD/SWD
omnivores for the control group. Well-known to Paleolithic diet
researchers
as well, but generally unknown or at least unappreciated (as yet) to
the
rest of the research community is that the composition of wild game is
far
different from that of domesticated meats. (Much leaner in general;
also
much lower in saturated fat; higher in PUFAs and omega-3 fats; and
this is
reflected in the character of hunter-gatherer diets.) The composition
of
modern meats are an aberration compared to the previous lengthy
history of
that previously available to our species.

As Kirt mentions, cancer was quite rare among H/G groups who were
studied
that followed their traditional lifestyles. While a vegan diet may be
superior in some respects to the SAD/SWD, to extrapolate from the
results
of typical epidemiological/clinical data to all omnivore diets is
invalid.
For more on these points, see the following links on the Beyond Veg
site:

http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-8c.shtml

(Which Omnivore Diet? The "Omnivorism = Western Diet" Fallacy)

and

http://www.beyondveg.com/billings-t/comp-anat/comp-anat-8b.shtml

(Hunter-Gatherers: Examples of Healthy Omnivores)

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>
Beyond Veg site editor
http://www.beyondveg.com/