The most highly-regarded cancer institutions have been the biggest obstacles to reducing cancer rates in the USA. A whole book has been written about it in 2011 called National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society: Criminal Indifference to Cancer Prevention and Conflicts of Interest (but don’t try saying it all in one breath). Having been named “the world’s wealthiest non-profit”, The ACS has invested over $5 billion into research since 1946 – but never into studies on diet or prevention, of course. What they mainly advocate is lots and lots of testing – even where testing has not been shown to reduce all-cause mortality or even mortality from the cancer that is being tested for. In 2009, The US preventative services taskforce found that the risks of annual mammograms outweighed the benefits in women under 50 so they moved to recommending bi-annual screenings instead. But the ACS continued recommending yearly tests. A huge sum of money is spent on cancer screening for patients that don’t really need screening because it brings huge sums of money in to private hospitals. I could write a whole chapter on it. In fact, I have! It’s all going to be in my forthcoming book Big Pharma – None Dare Call It Quackery.
The ACS then ignores all evidence of cancer-risk reduction by limiting exposure to carcinogens in air, water, consumer products, radiation, BPAs and plastic contaminants, and the workplace. Not only are their guidelines on diet woefully inadequate, but, in fact, they accept huge sums of money from junk food manufacturers. These include Wendy’s International, McDonalds’s, Unilever/Best Foods, and Coca-Cola. It’s no wonder the ACS does not take a hard stance on anything related to diet. They also accept funds from petrochemical companies (DuPont; BP, Pennzoil), industrial waste companies (BFI Waste Systems), biotech companies (Amgen, Genentech), cosmetic companies (Christian Dior, Avon, Revlon, Elizabeth Arden, Estee Lauder), auto companies (Nissan, General Motors), wireless technology companies (AT&T, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, General Electric), and lets not forget Big Pharma (AstraZenceca, Bristol Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis). These conflicts of interest were documented by extensively T. Colin Campbell, in his book Whole (2014).
In spite of this long-standing track record of flagrant conflicts of interest, as reported in the December 8, 2009 New York Times, the ACS responded that it “holds itself to the highest standards of transparency and public accountability.” Hah! And I’m next in line to be pope.
If the ACS were serious about cancer, they would focus most of their advocacy on lowering cancer rates. They’d identify the biggest risk factors and target those first with public health campaigns. Campbell writes that their approach is actually: “No different from the PR department of AstraZenica or Amgen.” AstraZenica, for example, fund Breast-cancer Awareness campaigns, which is unsurprising, given they manufacture lots of breast cancer drugs. “When AstraZeneca makes a statement that tamoxifen is safe and effective treatment for breast cancer the public know that it’s self-interested advertising, but when the ACS makes the same claim, it is accepted as truth.” Unsurprisingly, the ACS also blacklists anyone advocating natural remedies and sometimes just advocating dietary protocols.
They are all on one side – and it isn’t yours!
