Summary of Can we eat to starve Cancer ted talk. By William Li.



The original TedTalk link is here

Medical revolution : Angiogenesis


The angiogenesis is a physiological process in which our body creates new blood vessel from previously older blood vessels. Not only it helps the body for growth, development and wound healing, it is also a fundamental step from making begign tumorous cancer to malignant cancer. This article explains how anti-angiogenic therapy can applied in the most natural and effective way by changing what we eat.
Our body has more than 60000 miles of blood vessels. This is equivalent to 19 billions of capillaries in our body. They can also be the vessel of life or death, depending if they let organs function well or not. For example, here are some fo the functions that the blood vessels do:
Liver : Form channels to detoxifiy the blood.
Lung : They line air set for gas exchange.
Muscle: Cork screws in muscle can contract.
Nerve: They are there together to keep the nerves alive.

We get those blood vessel when in the womb. As adult blood vessels do not typically grow. Except for uterus (for women) or after an injury.
The body can release proteins, call "angiogense factor".
When body don't need them anymore, it prunes them back (through naturally occuring inhibitors)
For number of diseases, the body can't build back to the given set point.
- Wounds that don't heal
- Legs without circulation
Up to 70 other majors diseases.
One thing that is very imprtant is that they all share abnormal angiogenesis as their common denominator. Therefore there is a great hope with anti-angioese therapy.
One of the these disease is cancer, which is an all too common disease. Most cancer grow up to by 0.5mm (not bigger than ballpoint). They are commonly found in most adults. They did a study where they saw that most people have cancer (especially at 70 years old) without disease. But these cancers can't grow larger since they don't have blood supply. Therefore, blocking angiogenesis to reach cancer cells makes sure it doesn't grow. But if angiogenesis happens, cancer might grow exponentially. Once the vessels invade the cancer, it provides nutrients to grow larger. It is also this type of cancer (fed with angiogenese) that is usually diagnosed at a later stage, since the small cancer are a lot more difficult to diagnose.

Anti-angiogenic therapy

Antiangiogenic therapy consists of trying to stop feeding cancer tumor with blood vessels. We can use drugs (some are FDA approved).
These was a few studies done on dogs and we were able to sucessfully extend the life of the dog by 6x by only doing anti-angiogenesis .
When looking at the causes of cancer, we notice that about 30-35% comes from our diet. Instead of thinking of what can we remove from our diet, the team tried to think about what can we add to make it anti-angiogenic. It happens that there is a lots of food with naturally occurring angiogenesis. Here is a short list:

- Red wine : inhibit (60%).
- Strawberries
- Soybeans
- Drinking tea

The experiment was done with 3 types of tea to measure the anti-angiogenic property. The most interesting outcome was that by mixing different types of teas, the result was that this mixed tea had higher potential anti-angiogenic. So it seems that synergy of different food can create more anti-angiogenic mixtures.
Another thing noted by the team is that dietary factors can sometime be better or equal to most known drugs for antiangiogenesis.
They thought about building a food rating system to reduce antiangiogenesis.
There was one study with men that lasted for 20 years. In this study men who ate cooked tomates 2-3 times a week would see a reduction in the risk of developing prostate cancer. Similarly those who ate tomato sauce regurlarly were able to reduce the cancer angiogenesis.
Another application of angiogenesis is the fight agains obesity. Fat is highly angiogenesis depend. Experiments suggests also that we can we eliminate fat by doing antiangiogenesis.

You can use yumget to help you track what you eat and make sure you have as much angiogenic food as possible.
You can learn more about angiogenesis on wikipedia : Wikipedia definition