While survival rates from some cancer have improved, that is not significantly true for oral cancer. No more people survive it today than did 40 years ago despite the improvements in radiation, chemo, and surgical techniques, this is primarily because it is 66% of the time found as a late stage disease. When it begins to be found at stage 1 and 2 more frequently, you will see the survival rates go up. Cancer this year replaced heart disease as the number one killer of Americans.

And I was never suggesting a fat free diet. Some fats, hopefully mono saturated, are necessary for normal body functions, as Mark has said. I said that diet only composed of empty calories mostly derived from sugars and fats isn't going to give you the building blocks to heal rapidly and well. You could eat 3000 calories a day of Haggen Das and still have malnutrition. If this isn't self evident to everyone, I guess we need to put up a basic nutrition page to give everyone a clear basic understanding of how the body fuels itself and what each type of nutrient brings to the party. And while I usually agree with Mark I am living proof that you can live off of basically nothing but Ensure for over a year on a PEG tube. I don't think we currently have any posters that are completely PEG based, but there are lots of them out there, and they live 100% off of can liquid diet drinks. Realizing that yes-even calories from any source are important parts of those cans, they do fill them up with sugars to make them calorie dense for the volume. But not to the exclusion of the other building blocks of nutrition. In the next 4 months we will be adding new nutrition pages to the main web site written by nutritionist/scientists from Abbot Labs. This issue needs to be stated clearly by someone with better credentials than me. This will certainly be helpful for the minority of people that actually get off these message boards and read the main body of the web site.........