A couple of weeks back, an article shared on social media discussed the unsettling and surprising rise of colon cancer diagnoses in younger adults. The article suggested that experts were totally flummoxed as to why 20 and 30-year-olds were now coming down with colon cancer, some even dying from it.
There have been plenty of plant-based and vegan influencers leaping at the chance to claim that this is due to animal products. After all, ask the average person on the street what’s causing colon cancer and they’ll likely say it’s red meat. If they’re a little more informed, they might say processed meat like hotdogs, bacon, and bologna.
I don’t claim to have the answer to this issue, but I have a couple of guesses. First, the growing trend of people, especially young people, avoiding dairy products in favor of fake plant milks like oat milk, almond milk, and soy milk, is almost certainly going to increase the risk of colon cancer. For one simple reason: colorectal cancer does not develop without calcium deficiency. Animal study after animal study shows that inducing colon cancer in rodents doesn’t work unless their diet is also deficient in calcium. With a high calcium diet, the threshold for cancer initiation, for colorectal cancer initiation, is much higher. Many researchers find that they need to strip the diet of calcium before inducing colon cancer.
Another prerequisite for colon cancer appears to be high intake of polyunsaturated fats in the form of linoleic acid, the kind found in seed oils. Once again, in animal studies that try to induce colon cancer, it becomes very difficult to do so if the base fatty acids in the diet are monounsaturated or saturated. For instance, there’s one study where the diets of the two rodent groups were identical, save for the fat source: one of them was safflower oil, which is highly polyunsaturated, and the other was coconut oil, which is highly saturated. Colon cancer “took” much better in the sunflower oil group. Another study had similar results comparing colon cancer progression in rats fed either high-PUFA seed oil or high-MUFA olive oil with or without adequate calcium.
The ultimate conclusion of that last study? "Diets high in calcium, or in oxidation-resistant fats, may prevent the possible cancer-promoting effect of red meat."
Think about society right now. Think about the way young people are being told to eat, whether it’s by their doctors or the latest Netflix vegan documentary. It’s all plant-based. It’s all about swapping out milk and cheese for oat milk and cashew cheese. It’s all about replacing butter with plant-based butter substitutes. It’s all about eating salads drenched in seed oil salad dressing. It’s calcium deficient and high in seed oils—the two exact factors that are implicated in colon cancer. And they’re certainly not getting calcium by eating bone-in sardines, taking shots of blackstrap molasses, or having collard greens cooked in bone broth and vinegar.
People don’t consider these factors because they’re hidden. For so much of human history, adequate levels of calcium and adequately low levels of polyunsaturated seed oils were assumed. There was no other way because the industrial food system hadn’t been invented. Hell, it wasn’t physically possible for people to eat PUFAs and salad dressings and fake milk. And the funny thing about this one is, you can’t make the claim that the rise in cancer is simply because people are living longer. The rise in cancer that we’re talking about is in young people, 20 to 30-year-olds. All throughout history, people lived well past 20 and 30. So that’s nothing new, and they certainly weren’t getting colon cancer in medieval Europe.
Unfortunately, I have no faith that the medical or health authorities are going to pursue this line of research. They're far too entrenched in the current narrative. What is it going to take to change that?
This is honestly why I created the Primal Blueprint in the first place. I wanted to create a comprehensive lifestyle that addressed these hidden issues that normal people would probably never even consider. These fringe, alternative health topics like seed oils and fake dairy versus real dairy. Because that's never changed; 500 years ago, nobody thought about seed oils or polyunsaturated fat or calcium. They just ate, and they were lucky enough to live in the context of a food system that was congruent with their physiology. We can't overhaul the industrial food system in this country or health education, but we can find the chink in the armor and expose it and exploit it—one person at a time. Let me know what you think about all of this on Instagram.
