March is national colorectal month

March is the U.S. National Colorectal Month - designed to bring awareness to, and hopefully, get people tested, for cancer in the colon and the rectum. Such cancer is the 3rd most common cancer in the U.S., with over 130,000 new diagnoses in 2000 (more recently, up to 150,000). (This pattern holds for the western, European 1st world countries.)
Yet earlier this week I saw a news segment on, I think, Nicaragua in Central America about a volunteer group (Doctors Without Borders) testing, and removing if found, cervical cancer in women in remote rural areas with very little access to health care. Why this particular cancer, one might think? Well, cervical cancer is the most common form of cancer in this area and is also easily treated when small. Yet in the U. S., cervical cancer is way down the list as the 9th most common form of cancer.
So what is the difference between the two populations? One lives in a highly industrial society, eating lots of processed foods; the other lives much as their forebears did hundreds of years ago, subsisting on a beans and corn diet. So their diet is the difference between the two incidences of cancer, and the fact that colorectal cancer seems not to be important in Nicaragua.
Two North of England doctors, beginning in the late 1960's and continuing into the 1980's ran a series of experiments feeding a seaweed often added to food as an extender or emulsifier, carrageenan, to various lab animals such as rabbits. One such experiment I have before me:"Hyperplastic Mucosal Changes in the Rabbit Colon Produced by Degraded Carrageenin". Hyperplastic means that the cells and tissues have changed shape - the first requirement to ulcerative colitis and then cancer. A photo of a dissected rabbit's colon - the owner of which had been fed carrageenan for only three months - shows lots of ulcers (think of them as raw sores) on a thickened tissue base, which denotes inflammation and edema. Small abcesses are within the tissue (mucosa); Polypoidal formations, looking like small bubbled-up blobs of tissue, have formed in some of the animal's colons, and these are what doctors are looking for if you go in for a colorectal exam, because these are the most obvious and first signs of cancer.
Carrageenan is known to do this so regularly that pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers use this as a "model for human ulcerative colitis" when testing new drugs against ulcerative colitis, etc. Isn't it equally likely that carrageenan also causes ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer in humans also, yet carrageenan has been given GRAS status by the FDA meaning Generally Regarded As Safe. And one can go to any site or read any publication about ulcerative colitis, etc., and there is no mention of carrageenan: Sites say that there is no known cause of ulcerative colitis, and so over one hundred thousand will develop cancer in this area and, what is it? half will die.