Video Transcript: Should Protein Be Part of Your Anti-Cancer Diet?
Ty Bollinger: What does your diet look like?
Dr. Ben Johnson: My diet that I want my patients eating looks green, very green. Vegetables, lots of vegetables, all kinds of vegetables in all forms, but key to that is the fresher the better. So, cutting to you the less time the better. If you have your own garden, that’s awesome. And then secondly is organic, because you don’t want those pesticides and chemicals and artificial fertilizers and things working against you.
Ty Bollinger: Okay.
Dr. Ben Johnson: So fresh, raw, organic are the keys, vegetables and then nuts and fruits. And I do allow my patients to eat small portions of meat. I want it to be organic, free range, or wild caught, harvested.
Ty Bollinger: Okay. So the way that the animals are raised affects the meat.
Dr. Ben Johnson: You know we have all these studies showing that two eggs a week causes increase in prostate cancer and red meat causes colon cancer in all of these studies. But you don’t see anybody comparing organic free range eggs against pen fed, chickens.
Ty Bollinger: Right.
Dr. Ben Johnson: You don’t see the free-range meat. Again, so I would love to see those studies done. Of course, no drug company is going to fund those. And no independent farmer has the money to do that. I don’t think the meat, the eggs, the things are the problem. I think it’s what we do to them. We put a chicken or a cow in a pen or a hog. And we feed them genetically modified corn.
That’s not their diet. I mean they’re out there eating grass, including the chickens, and crickets. So they’re out there eating things that we, when we raise them commercially, that’s not what we’re feeding them. So now they have concentrated, genetically modified corn and other chemicals in their body. And then we eat that and concentrate it in ours.
Ty Bollinger: Wow!
Dr. Ben Johnson: I’m not a vegetarian. I have no problem with vegetarians as long as they get adequate amounts of protein, which is sometimes difficult to do unless they’re educated as to how to get those. And there are certain amino acids you just don’t find in vegetables at all. But we have nice supplements these days.
So you go to a supplement store and get those. So I don’t have a problem with a patient being a vegetarian. But I certainly don’t have a problem with them being omnivarian because we need protein; especially our immune systems need protein. I just want it to be healthy protein.