Quotes from David Servan-Schreiber

The best proof of a link between changes in lifestyle and the arrested development of cancer cells is that the more diligently these men had absorbed Dr. Ornish's advice and applied it to their daily lives, the more active their blood was against the cancer cells!

I felt like I was only just beginning to make a useful contribution. In persuing my education and my career, I had made many sacrifices, invested a lot in the future. And suddenly I was facing the possibility that there would be no future at all.

These recent findings support the notion that "cancer genes" may not be so harmful if not triggered by our unhealthy lifestyle

have found harmony in this simple quartet: detoxification of carcinogenic substances, an anticancer diet, adequate physical activity, and a search for emotional peace.

In a long-range study of 91,000 nurses over twelve years, the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard showed that the risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women is twice as high in those who eat red meat more than once a day as in those who consume it less than three times a week .97 The risk of breast cancer could therefore be halved simply by reducing consumption of red meat.

same conclusion for colon cancer: The risk was twice as high for people who ate large quantities of meat as for those who consumed fewer than 20 grams (an ounce) a day. (With regular consumption of fish—rich in omega-3s—the risk went down by 50 percent.)98

It is also clear that typical vegetables contain one hundredth the amount of contaminants found in meat and that organic milk is less contaminated than conventional milk.102,103

We don't need to have cancer to start to really take our life seriously and to perceive its beauty.

Statistics are information, not condemnation.

Seventeen years ago, I discovered from my own brain-scanning experiment that I had brain cancer. From the waiting room on the tenth floor of the oncology building, I remember looking down at people in the street—distant and oblivious, going about their everyday life. I had been cast out of that life, separated from its goal-oriented busyness and from its promises of joy, by the prospect of a probable early death.

If we are incapable of controlling our existence, life loses its meaning, too.

and it has confirmed the importance of paying attention to how our emotions may affect the course of cancer.

If there is one single, clear, and emphatic message I'd like to send with this revised edition, it is that we must pay close attention to the mind-body connection, especially the negative impact of prolonged feelings of helplessness and despair.

When left unattended, these feelings—not the stresses of life themselves—contribute to the inflammatory processes that can help cancer grow.

In his documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore quotes a well-known twentieth-century American journalist, Upton Sinclair: "It's difficult to get someone to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

New research has confirmed the importance of vitamin D3 in preventing cancer, particularly in countries where the lack of sunshine means that the skin cannot synthesize enough of this vitamin during the winter.

I have integrated the information from these studies into the various chapters of this new edition. For example, one study published in the journal Nature in 2007 concluded that cancer can be understood as a breakdown in the balance between cancer cells that have always been "dormant" in the body and the natural defenses that normally keep them at bay (see chapter 4).

A fifty-year-old salesman who does not have cancer told me how much his life has changed since he started drinking green tea, adding turmeric to his food every day (with black pepper!), and managing his stress with cardiac coherence.

Cancer lies dormant in all of us. Like all living organisms, our bodies are making defective cells all the time. That's how tumors are born. But our bodies are also equipped with a number of mechanisms that detect and keep such cells in check.

Taken as a whole, the mass of scientific data reveals an essential role for our natural defenses in the battle against cancer.

This is what I learned: If we all have a potential cancer lying dormant in us, each of us also has a body designed to fight the process of tumor development. It is up to each of us to use our body's natural defenses.

We all live with myths that undermine our capacity to fight cancer. For example, many of us are convinced that cancer is primarily linked to our genetic makeup, rather than our lifestyle. When we look at the research, however, we can see that the contrary is true.

Throughout the process, the scanner emits a loud clanging sound, like that of a metal staff striking the floor repeatedly. It corresponds to the movements of the electronic magnet that quickly turns on and off to induce variations in the magnetic field in the brain.

This study shows that lifestyle is fundamentally involved in vulnerability to cancer.