OK, so I’m looking at this website, which happens to be where we are going to eat tonight.
They make the claim:
“Bison are the only mammals that don’t get cancer.”
Is this true? I hit google for some help and found other sites that make this claim – however most of them also sell Bison and list other “facts” like this one:
"When plains Indians’ main diet was bison, they never had cancer, heart disease or diabetes. " Which also sounds suspect. This site says (keep in mind they also are players in the bison trade):
“Grass-fed bison are higher in essential fatty acids with a good ratio of Omega-3s to Omega-6s and contain much more CLA. Grass-fed meats are one of the richest sources of CLA. Studies have shown that CLA slows the progress of some types of cancer and heart disease. CLA may reduce body fat and increase lean muscle mass. CLA may prevent or delay the onset of diabetes. Studies were done at the University of Bristol, Cornell, Penn State, and the University of Utah. Bison carry a cancer-preventative enzyme and researchers are now investigating the positive effects that Bison meat has on cancer prevention.”
which at least sounds like it may have something to it.
Any help? Thanks in advance.
Well, here’s a nice article from a veterinary journal talking about a bison with a case of squamous carcinoma, so I guess that sort of disproves that. http://www.afip.org/acvp/Vet_Pathol/TOC37-4.htm
Shh dear, don’t cause a fuss. I’ll have your bison. I love it. I’m having bison, bison, bison, bison, bison, bison, bison, baked beans, bison, bison, bison, and bison.
Qadgop. In reading that journal article a bit farther, one finds that
Can a case be made that the lesion might not have appeared if there was no branding?
There’s truly little Google info out there to refute the restaurant claim, although I’d love to see the journal articles upon which the bison supporters base their claims.
regardless, omega 3 to omega 6 ratio is something people should be focusing on much more in their diets. current public’s understanding of nutrition is lagging the science by about 20 years…
a typical diet has omega3 to to omega6 ratio of about 1/20. an ideal ratio is 1/1.
the source of the problem is corn and similar man-grown crops. corn oil is almost exclusively omega6 and animals fed with these crops have similarly elevated omega6 in their meat, and basically all livestock is that way now.
your body’s cell membranes incorporate omega3 and omega6 in the same ratio as they come in your diet. so you ARE what you eat, and what you eat is crap.
to get to the healthy omega3 ballance you need to supplement with Flax Seed Oil ( best omega3 source there is, but tastes like shit ) and basically eliminate corn and vegetable oil from your diet.
Olive oil is OK because while it is not a real source of omega3 it doesn’t pack much omega6 either.
fish that isn’t farmed is a good source of omega3. fish that is farmed is useless. likewise all meat is not at all the same depending on whether it is grass fed or grain fed. grass fed is what you want but you will not find it anywhere, and even if you do its still probably not grass fed in reality.
It can’t be true that the bison is the only animal that doesn’t get cancer. The shark-cartilage salesman told me it’s the shark that is the only animal that doesn’t get cancer. He wouldn’t lie about something that important, would he?
I’ve heard it about sharks before, from a born-again Christian. He also told me that sharks were “evolutionally perfect”, in that they couldn’t be improved any more. (He doesn’t believe in evolution, of course, so the fact that he believes this is illuminating, to say the least) Funny how much pseudoscience I’ve heard from those guys. It’s like a Christian hobby.
