Mongolia and cancer

Health Talk

I’m passing on some interesting information – food for thought – that I received by email this month.

At the last health talk I covered some traditional diets of our healthy ancestors and how they had an extremely rare incidence of cancer as compared to our modern diet. These cultures are now gone.

There still exists today a country whose diet is significantly different than our modern diet.

It is Mongolia. They have retained a lot of their traditional diet, but not all of it.

The Independent Republic of Mongolia is a living laboratory for the study of cancer incidence and mortality.

Mongolians basically subsist on red meat and dairy, including meat from cows, horses, camels, yaks, sheep, goats and sometimes game. Their national drink, airag (also known as kumis, similar to kefir), is fermented mare’s milk.

If foods of animal origin were intrinsically harmful to humans, then one would expect Mongolians to get eight-to-10 times as much cancer as the industrially advanced countries.

Instead, Mongolia’s age-adjusted breast cancer incidence rate is 8.0 per 100,000. Contrast this to the Japanese rate of 42.7, the European rate of 66.6 and the North American rate of 76.7 per 100,000.

In other words, America’s rate is more than eight times that of Mongolia.

Breast cancer mortality follows a similar trend.

The Mongolian BC death rate is 3.4 per 100,000, while the Japanese rate is 9.2, the European is 16.9, and the North American is 14.8 per 100,000. Thus the BC death rate in Europe or America is about four times that of Mongolia, according to a 2012 study.

“Mongolia’s low breast cancer incidence is of particular interest because of their unusual diet … compared with other Asian countries,” wrote Dr. Rebecca Troisi and her NIH and her NIH colleagues.

I could go on, and it is one of very many examples that shows that what we’ve come to accept as fact about nutrition and health is completely wrong.

This is the purpose of the health talks I do to shed some light on the subject of health.

Evron Helland, DC, For The Time