Oncologist: Aspirin and routine may save your life

Oncologist and author of “The End of Illness,” Dr. David Agus, says you’re better off not taking a fistful of vitamins every day. (AP Photo)

Dr. David Agus is turning a lot of heads with his new book, “The End of Illness.”
The oncologist says we can fight cancer and heart disease simply
by taking an aspirin a day, regulating our schedule, and not taking
vitamins.

Omega-3, vitamin D, multi-vitamin, and calcium may be just some of the
pills you’re shoving down your throat every day and they may be just
some of the vitamins doing you harm.

Agus, Professor of Medicine and Engineering at the University of
Southern California, tells 97.3 KIRO FM’s “Ross and Burbank Show” you get enough vitamins in
the food you eat. Taking large quantities of pills will cause problems.

“The government first looked at all studies that were more than 500
people and randomized with multi-vitamins. There were 63 of them done
over the last 20 years. None of them showed a benefit with heart
disease and cancer,” says Agus. “Men who took vitamin E every day,
which is the same amount as in a multi-vitamin, for three years have a
17 percent higher rate of prostate cancer. And it lasts three or four years
after stopping.”

Agus says he’s not the first one to look at the negative side effects of
taking vitamins, it’s all been published in medical journals in the last 15
years.

“People choose to ignore it.”

So what should you do if you know you’re not as healthy as you could be
without help from vitamins? Agus recommends getting on a regular
schedule, eating fresh food, getting an annual flu shot, and taking
aspirin.

“The data on aspirin is somewhat profound.”

We’ve known for at least 30 years that aspirin can delay heart attacks
and stroke, but Agus says there’s relatively new data that says “if you
take an aspirin a day for five years, your rate of colon cancer death is
down almost 60 percent.”

“If you take it for 20 years, death due to prostate cancer down 10
percent, lung cancer 30 percent, esophageal 60 percent.”

Aspirin is a remarkable drug at blocking inflammation, according to
Agus, and inflammation is the root of heart disease and cancer.

Of course, a baby aspirin every day is not for everybody and Agus says
if you’re considering adding it to your routine, you should discuss it with
your doctor first because there are side effects.

Blocking inflammation is the same reason Agus suggests a regular flu
shot.

He says two weeks of an inflammatory storm, the flu, can harm us in
ways that increase our lifetime risk of obesity, cancer, and heart disease.

While you’re able to survive body aches and fever when you’re in tip-top
breeding condition, Agus says it’s the decades past your prime you
should be considering.

If not taking vitamins and getting a yearly flu shot seem too easy to
believe, Agus’ most important piece of advice might be more difficult to
adopt. He wants you to regulate your schedule.

“If you eat on a schedule and get up and go to sleep on a regular
schedule, you’re going to have significant improvement in performance.”

If you eat lunch at noon one day and at 2:00 p.m. the next, stress
hormones start to increase in those two hours, your metabolism drops
and you can’t think or exercise as well. Agus says picking up an apple
one day isn’t a good idea, but eating one every day at 3:00 p.m. is
excellent.

He says sleeping in on the weekends or taking a nap is also harmful
because your body will crave that extra sleep on Monday and Tuesday.

Those are life changers, but Agus has a few simple tips to consider:
Don’t wear high heels all day because they cause pain and inflammation.
You can exercise all you want, but sitting all day will negate the benefits.
Walk around as much as possible. Eat fresh and local; if you can’t, buy
flash frozen food.

His ideas may seem a little obvious, but Agus says he’s tired of telling
people the cancer is going to win. His book is meant to arm people with
the facts before they go to the doctor’s office. He’d prefer you walk in
with pages of data so that you’re not prescribed something based on
how you feel or what your blood pressure was on that one specific day.

“We have to get to a culture of prevention. Doctors, myself included, are
incentivized to treat and that’s what we do. We have to be incentivized to
prevent.”

Agus says we haven’t written ‘old age’ on a death certificate since the
1950’s.

“I want people to die of old age.”