 Remember the Pritikin experiment? You put people on a plant-based diet in exercise, and as little as 12 days, you can turn their bloodstream into a cancer cell fighting machine. Here's the before picture, a layer of breast cancer cells is laid down in a petri dish, and then blood from women eating the standard American diet is dripped on them. And as you can see, even people eating crappy diets have some ability to break down cancer. But after just 12 days eating healthy, blood was drawn from those same women, and it was dripped on another carpet of breast cancer cells, and this is what you're left with. Their bodies cleaned up. You can also look at it another way. This is what's called a eternal deoxynucleotidal transferase, DUTP, Nick End Labeling, or tunnel imaging, which measures DNA fragmentation, cell death. Dying cells show up as white spots. So again, this is the before, what the blood of your average woman can do to breast cancer cells. It can kill a few. But then, after 12 days of healthy plant-based living, their blood can do this. This is that programmed cancer cell death. After eating healthy, their own bodies were able to reprogram the cancer cells, forcing them into early retirement. It's like you're an entirely different person inside. How does a simple dietary change make one's bloodstream so inhospitable of cancer in just a matter of days? That was the next question they set out to answer, and they finally did, in 2011. Here we sought to determine the underlying mechanisms for this antarcancer effect. What they came up with was IGF-1. If you measure the blood levels of insulin-like growth factor 1, before and after 11 days on a plant-based diet with exercise, IGF-1 levels significantly drop, and IGF-1 binding protein levels significantly rise. That's one way our body tries to protect itself from cancer, from excessive growth, by releasing a binding protein into the bloodstream to tie up IGF-1. It's like our body's emergency break. Yeah, sure, in as little as 11 days a healthy diet can reprogram our body to slow down IGF-1 production, but you still have all that, you know, IGF-1 circulating your bloodstream from the bacon and eggs you had the week before. So your liver releases this snatch squad of binding proteins to take it out of circulation, pronto. Exercise alone can drop IGF-1 levels, but you need that plant-based diet to get those kind of snatch squad levels. And so with that combination, 20% less IGF-1 and 50% more IGF-1 binding protein, no wonder there's such a dramatic cancer cell die-off after just a few days. So did they solve the riddle? Did they figure out how a plant-based diet shuts down cancer growth? Well, the definitive study wasn't published until recently. Same as last time, before and after a few weeks of a plant-based diet, cancer cell growth drops and programmed cell death, cancer cell death, shoots up. But then, here's the kicker. Remember how IGF-1 levels dropped? Well, what if you added back to the cancer the exact same level of, you know, amount of IGF-1 banished from your body because of the healthy diet? What if you added that back in with the cancer? It erases the diet and exercise effect. It's like you never started eating healthy at all. Now, if cancer growth just came back down to here, you'd be like, okay, IGF-1 was part of it, but the fact that it eliminates the effects of the lifestyle changes suggests that it was the mechanism all along. Walking and eating a plant-based diet for just a few days, lowers circulating IGF-1 levels, which then can reverse cancer growth.