Dr. David Servan-Schreiber's Book "Anticancer" Will Change Your Life

Dr. David Servan-Schreiber is a clinical professor of psychiatry and cofounder of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote the New York Times bestseller Anticancer: A New Way of Life, which has been translated into 30 languages. He has been living with brain cancer for the last 17 years.

At the age of 31, while running experiments on brain scanning, one of Servan-Schreiber's subjects had not shown up. He thus volunteered to go into the MRI machine himself, and as he lay there, heard his colleague in the control room tell him something looked wrong.

"They walked into the room, pulled me out, and said, 'There's a tumor in your brain,'" he recalled. "It was pretty hard at the time. As a physician and scientist, you kind of feel it can't happen to you, you're protected by law."

He underwent conventional treatments — surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation — but relapsed anyway. He then turned to scientific literature to learn how to help his body fight cancer more effectively, together with standard medicine.

"There were tons of things in the scientific literature — not in the esoteric literature, not in astrology, not in Chinese medicine," he said. "Things like how to eat differently to strengthen you body's capacity to fight cancer cells, and to stop putting things in your body that feed cancer, and to do physical activity every day."

One main thing to stop ingesting, he said, is sugar, which Americans now consume at exorbitant levels, and which cancer cells need in order to grow. Servan-Schreiber also pointed out that a lack of certain nutrients often leads to cancer. For example, cancer cell-inhibiting Omega-3 fatty acids are no longer found in meat and in animal byproducts, since cows and hens are fed corn and soy instead of grass and grains.

In Anticancer: A New Way of Life Servan-Schreiber lists foods to eat and those to avoid. He strongly recommends getting enough Vitamin D, low levels of which are responsible for more cancers than smoking, he said.

"If your Vitamin D level is too low, your risk of cancer is double or triple what it would be if you had regular exposure to the sun, or adequate levels of Vitamin D through supplements," he said, and chalked Imus's own prostate cancer up to dangerously low (at the time) Vitamin D levels.

He called the lack of Vitamin D screening among doctors "one of the most scandalous things about today's modern medicine," and said that Vitamin D, which can be obtained freely from the sun, is not profitable to doctors, and therefore the main reason most don't check it.

Controlling stress is also important; while it does not necessarily cause cancer, a lack of stress enables the body to better fight off cancer cell growth. Servan-Schreiber also warned about the dangers of cell phones (which, incidentally, can cause a lot of stress).

"We don't know they're a definite danger, but there are signs that they may well be the next cigarette," he said, citing recent studies that showed, over ten years, a doubling in the risk of brain tumors in people who used cell phones just a few hours a week. He advocated for cell phone companies to design phones that reduce radiation levels. "The company that will do that will be the most successful one, because it will show that it cares about its customers."

As for Imus, he's proof that Servan-Schreiber's diet and exercise plan to battle cancer works. So is Servan-Schreiber himself.

"I'm much healthier now than before I ever had cancer," he said. "And I feel better."

-Julie Kanfer