Beating Bladder Cancer Naturally

Even with the best modern treatment, over 50% of bladder cancers return within 5 years. With timely intervention, people are able to beat bladder cancer over and over again, but nutritional interventions can extend remission and prolong healthy life.

Fighting bladder cancer with nutrition doesn't require strange foods, difficult diets, or expensive supplements.

And the basics of eating right to achieve remission from bladder cancer couldn't be simpler:

• Drink at least 5 cups (1.2 liters) of water every day. You don't have to drink so much water that you begin to slosh to reduce the burden of toxic chemicals that initiate and perpetuate bladder cancer. A mere 5 cups of water, in one study, was enough to make a measurable difference, and drinking more than 5 cups of water daily, in and of itself, offers no additional benefits. The important thing is not to become so dehydrated that chemicals from the environment stay in constant contact with the lining of the bladder. Flushing the chemicals away reduces the burden on bladder cell DNA.
• Keep your urine as alkaline as possible. Alkaline urine causes heavy metals and toxic residues from agricultural chemicals to precipitate into crystals that flow out of the body with the flow of urine. Acidic urine keeps heavy metals and agricultural chemicals in solution so they can be absorbed back into the body. To alkalize your urine, eat more green leafy vegetables and fruit, and less red meat, cheese, and smoked fish. The objective isn't to alkalize your bloodstream--your kidneys take care of that automatically--but to keep the amount of acidifying urine your kidneys release from the breakdown or excess protein to a minimum. Some protein in your diet is necessary. Lots of protein just causes the excess to be turned into acidic urea and sugar.
• Eating some meat, cheese, and fish is still an option even if you have had bladder cancer. It is excess protein that is the problem.
• Eat cabbage family vegetables such as cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, turnip greens, kohlrabi, mizuna, and watercress. Particularly when they are prepared by steaming, they provide cancer-fighting isothiocyanates. These cabbage family plant compounds combine with the antioxidants N-acetylcysteine and glutathione to form compounds that go quickly to the bladder, where they protect DNA from damage by toxic chemicals and inflammation released by dying cells. Because these vegetables also contain goitrogens that can interfere with the thyroid gland's absorption of iodine when they are eaten raw, it is best to eat them cooked.
• Sauerkraut contains isothiocyanates that fight caner, but it also contains sulfur compounds that fight bladder infections, especially those caused by Listeria bacteria.

See Also: Bladder Cancer Treatment: Conventional and Alternative Medicine

• If you are not currently a smoker, eating red, yellow, and orange vegetables that contain beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, lycopene, lutein, and cryptoxanthin provides your body with the basic building blocks that it can use to make the antioxidants it needs to keep bladder cells healthy. If you smoke, however, eating excesses of these vegetables paradoxically may increase DNA damage, due to an interaction of the antioxidants in the vegetables and certain chemicals from cigarette smoke.

• Essiac tea is an herbal remedy that has been promoted as a complementary treatment for cancer, including bladder cancer. It is typically made from a blend of herbs, including burdock root, sheep sorrel, slippery elm bark, and Indian rhubarb root. Proponents of Essiac tea claim that it has various health benefits, including potential anti-cancer properties.

Aged Garlic Extract, The Premier Supplement For Bladder Cancer

If you could only afford the time and effort to take one nutritional supplement for sustaining remission from bladder cancer--this supplement is not particularly expensive--it should be aged garlic extract. Urologist David L. Lamm of University of Texas at San Antonio and his colleague Dr. Dale Riggs of West Virginia University report that they get better results from giving their patients aged garlic extract than they do from chemotherapy.

Lamm and Riggs note that in laboratory experiments, aged garlic extract:

• Stimulates the production of a kind of white blood cell known as a macrophage to destroy both bacteria that cause bladder infections and pre-cancerous cells deactivated by their own protective mechanisms.
• Stimulates the production of new white blood cells in general.
• Reduces swelling of tumors caused  by invasion of white blood cells.
• Increases the activity of natural killer cells against bladder cancer.
• Increases the production of tumor-necrosis factor alpha and interleukin-2 to destroy bladder cancer cells once they have been identified by the immune system.

Aged garlic extract stimulates the immune system to do the work of fighting bladder cancer, and stimulates it in ways that get better results than chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin (Adriamycin) while preserving the ability of the immune system to control infections that occur elsewhere in the body.

The garlic phytochemicals allylmethylsulfide, diallysulfide, diallylsulfide, and ajoene reduce the activity of enzymes in the liver that transform benzopyrenes, dimethylbenzenes, and nitrosamines into their cancer-causing forms. In other words, they counteract the cancer-causing effects of cleaning solvents, gasoline (petrol), cigarette smoke, and charcoal-grilled food.

All of these great benefits, however, are concentrated in age garlic, not the fresh garlic you would use in cooking. Aging the garlic concentrates the useful chemicals so they are more effective in stimulating the immune system and deactivating harmful enzymes in the liver. You could get the same benefits from fresh garlic if you ate 10 cloves of garlic a day, chewing each clove to release all the cancer-fighting chemicals, but you will have fewer problems with bad breath and indigestion if you use the aged garlic extract in a convenient coated tablet.

What to Avoid?

Not every nutritional supplement is helpful if you have a history of bladder cancer. In particular, you need to avoid taking supplements that cause methylation of bladder cell DNA, a process that activates the process of carcinogenesis. That means you should avoid s-adenosylemethione (sam-E), and the chemicals the body uses to make sam-E, which are folic acid, vitamin B6, and vitamin B12.

See Also: Interstitial Cystitis And Bladder Pain: Diagnosis And Treatment

If you take B vitamins at all, take them as part of a daily multivitamin that contains no more than the recommended daily intake (RDI). Calcium supplements also may increase the risk of bladder cancer.

Some studies suggest that a high intake of red meat, particularly processed meats like bacon and sausages, may be associated with a higher risk of bladder cancer. Consider reducing your consumption of red and processed meats. Minimize the consumption of highly processed and packaged foods, which often contain additives, preservatives, and unhealthy fats. These can contribute to overall inflammation and may not support your immune system.

You will never know, of course, if something you added to your diet prevented your bladder cancer from coming back. But the nutritional interventions that doctors believe will help in bladder cancer don't have side effects and aren't a burden on your budget. They are certainly worth the effort and the minimal expense.