You can reduce your risk of cancer by reevaluating what you eat. That, according to an article in the Montreal Gazette, is the central theme in the best-selling book Foods that Fight Cancer.
Written by biochemist Richard Beliveau with fellow scientist Denis Gingras, the book makes the case that more fruits and vegetables in your diet, especially those with antioxidants, can help reduce the occurrence of cancer.
Quoted in the Montreal Gazette, Beliveau says:
“People think cancer is all due to heredity, stress and pollution. Those are factors, but not as significant as smoking, diet and obesity, along with a lack of exercise,” he says. “Not smoking, eating well and maintaining a reasonable body weight is 65 per cent of the battle. If you don’t drink much, you don’t have a risky sex life and you exercise, you bring that to 85 per cent.”
The article also offers the following summary from the book:
- Reduce Trans fatty acids of prepared foods. Why? They double the risk of breast cancer.
- Salt, sugar, red meat, processed and estrogen supplements are believed to increase the risk as well.
- The healthy foods include: anthocyanins in wild blueberries, isoflavones in soybeans, curcuminoids in turmeric, lignans in flax, polyphenols in rich dark chocolate, and sulforaphane in cabbage. (The only difficult one for me on the list is cabbage.)
- Up the amount of Vitamin D to 1,000 mg a day. It ”increases protection against cancer by 50 per cent.”
