Cancer Lifestyle

Dr. Peter Holst worked until 1984 as a general practitioner in The Hague area, the Netherlands. As a starting general practitioner in 1970 he saw a young girl with a severe case of pneumonia. After treatment with antibiotics she recovered. Because she kept a  budgie in a cage in her bedroom, he assumed “the presence of a caged bird at home could be responsible for more serious disease”. In his practice was also a 17 year old boy with an osteosarcoma, where he died from. As a hobby he kept and bred about 100 tropical birds in a basement room. After consulting an epidemiologist he started a ten-year practice-survey. The results were published in the Netherlands Journal of Medicine (Holst 1984). After this he began a case-control study of all newly diagnosed lung cancer patients in all hospitals of The Hague with the aid of their own lung specialists. The results of these studies were published in the British Medical Journal (Holst, Kromhout & Brand 1988). Bird keeping and particularly bird breeding were proven to be a risk of lung cancer. Also lower vitamin C intake was found to be a risk factor.                                                                                                  
With the Dutch Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO Delft) he then carried out dust measurements in homes of bird keepers, and from 1987 he defended the thesis that a connection can be established with the keeping (especially raising) of tropical birds and/or pigeons and lung cancer patients in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom. In this cases lung cancer is a cell infection of the lung stem cells. With the breeding and keeping of songbirds, tropical birds and pigeons indoors, microbes of all kind are easily dispersed. You can imagine that repeated colds, throat infections, coughing and flu in bird keeping households cause, in the long run, more serious lung disease and even lung cancer.

In the past fifty years, our diet has become increasingly unnatural. More meat products from animals, solely bred for consumption, and more refined sugar products cause more chronic diseases.