 The vast majority of cancer research is devoted to finding cures rather than finding new ways to prevent disease, and the results of these skewed priorities are plain to see. 2021 is the 50th anniversary of Nixon's declaration of war on cancer, and the death tolls from the most common forms of cancer in the United States have continued unabated. We've been looking at the very nature of cancer in the wrong way. This cancer doesn't begin when a lump is first detected. All the common cancers, like lung, colorectal, breast, and prostate, which counts for the majority of deaths, have a long latency period, often 20 years or more. So it's not like you were healthy and then one day you got cancer. You haven't been healthy. You've had cancer growing in you for decades. Indeed, there's a bizarre misperception that people are healthy until they have actual symptoms of invasive cancer. But the barn in which hay is smoldering before it bursts into flames is not a safe place. So what does this professor of pharmacology recommend? Drugs, of course, chemo-prevention, putting people on drugs to prevent cancer. Hey, the pharmaceutical industry spends huge amounts of money to promote chemo-prevention of heart disease and strokes with statins and blood thinners. So why shouldn't people take drugs every day for the rest of their lives to protect against cancer? There has to be a better way. What about using diet and nutrition to prevent and treat cancer? Okay, but what kind of cancer? There are more than 200 types of cancer. Ah, but they all share the same hallmarks. In a series of papers cited more than 40,000 times in the biomedical literature, 10 hallmarks of cancer have been identified. Increased sensitivity to growth factors, evading your body's tumor suppressors, dodging your immune system, being able to grow forever, tumor-promoting inflammation, the ability to invade and spread, and hook up its own blood supply, the accumulation of DNA mutations, disarming the self-destruct mechanisms in place, and hijacking the cell's metabolism. And yes, of course there are classes of drugs to try to counter each one. Chemotherapy agents designed to target each piece of the cancer puzzle. Now ideally there would be drugs able to target multiple hallmarks at the same time, but that's not how drugs tend to work. And this is one of the major reasons why in the context of cancer research, there are so many proponents of investigating plant foods as they can deliver a cocktail of bioactive compounds— bioactive compounds that make target most, if not all, of the hallmarks of cancer. Here's a sampling of compounds found in fruits and vegetables, such as berries, greens, and broccoli, shown to be able to target each of the 10 hallmarks of cancer, at least in a Petri dish. Moreover, they fit the characteristics of an ideal chemo-preventive agent. I mean, if you were to design the perfect candidate, you'd want them to be selected for cancerous or pre-cancerous cells while leaving normal cells alone, be side-effect-free, target most types of cancer, be able to be consumed as part of a daily diet, be conveniently available almost everywhere, and be relatively inexpensive to boot. And plants have all these. So no wonder those eating more plant-based and have lower cancer rates. However, it should be understood that we're not talking about taking supplements, containing extracts of purified phytochemicals, but rather eating whole-plant foods themselves, more of a food-system-based approach to targeting the hallmarks of cancer. Foods contain many thousands of substances that lead to vast numbers of possible interactions, yet much of nutritional science has long been directed towards the impact of single dietary components. Yes, this kind of reductionist approach can reveal the role of individual nutrients or foods in the development of disease, but let's think about what the optimal research strategy would be to study the effects of bioactive natural plant compounds on disease prevention. Instead of using isolated phytochemicals in the management of cancer, how about using whole foods? Because sometimes the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, a concept known as food synergy. Check out this study. The simultaneous inhibition of a series of cancer stages in breast cancer cells using a phytochemical supercoctail. Two breast cancer cell lines were treated with six different plant compounds individually, and then all together at the level you might find your bloodstream after eating foods like broccoli, grapes, soybeans, and turmeric. And while the compounds were ineffective individually in combination, they significantly suppressed breast cancer cell proliferation by more than 80 percent. Inhibited cancer cell migration and invasion stopped the cancer cells in their tracts and eventually killed them all off. The plant compounds did all of this without having any deleterious effects on the normal non-cancer cells used as control. No wonder the foundation of cancer prevention based on an update of the most extensive report on dying cancer ever published is not pills, but plans. Cut down on alcohol, soda, meat, and processed junk, and center your diet around whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans.