 Just a few days of walking and eating whole healthy plant foods and our IGF-1 levels drop low enough to reverse cancer cell growth. What if we stick with it? Going to some predicate spa and getting healthy for two weeks is one thing, but what about long term? Does your IGF-1 start to creep back up to standard American diet levels again? No. Here's after 11 days and it just gets better. Planting plant-based diets for 14 years have half the IGF-1 in their bodies and more than twice the amount of IGF-1 binding protein than those on the standard American diet. We know decreasing animal product consumption decreases our IGF-1 levels, but how low do you gotta go? How plant-based does our diet need to get? Well, let's look at IGF-1 levels in meat-eaters versus vegetarians versus vegans. The aim of this study was to determine whether a plant-based diet is associated with a lower circulating level of IGF-1 compared with a meat-eating or lactoval vegetarian diet, and this is what they found. Only the vegans had significantly lower levels, and the same relationship found with IGF-1 binding capacity. Only the vegans were significantly more able to bind up excess IGF-1 in their bloodstreams. This was a study on women. What about vegan men? They found the same thing. So even though vegan men tend to have significantly higher testosterone levels than both vegetarians and meat-eaters, which can be a risk factor for prostate cancer, the reason plant-based diets appear to reverse the progression of prostate cancer may be due to how low their IGF-1 levels drop. So more testosterone, but less cancer. The bottom line is that male or female just eating vegetarian did not seem to cut it. It looks like to get a significant drop in cancer-promoting growth hormone levels. One apparently has to eliminate animal products altogether. The good news is that given what we know about IGF-1s, we could predict that a low-fat vegan diet may be profoundly protective with respect to, for example, risk for post-menopausal breast cancer.