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Cancer Prevention
by author Neil McKinney, ND

You can make dietary and lifestyle choices which will reduce your chances of being the one out of three Canadians who will get cancer in their lifetime.

While you cannot avoid every genetic risk, environmental insult, and the aging process, you may be able to delay or even avoid the diseases which kill two of every three Canadian adults. Bad things do sometimes happen to good people with good habits, but the choices that can help you avoid cancer - adding protective factors, reducing risky behaviours, and seeking early detection - may also help you avoid cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, and other chronic degenerative conditions.

Vegetables are Vital

Protection comes in many agreeable packages; delicious foods provide us with proven cancer fighters. Increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables you eat to over five servings daily adds protective ingredients such as antioxidants and bioflavonoids, resveratrol, limonene, lycopene, and polyphenols to your diet. A cancer-preventive diet includes two to three servings of fruit, four to six servings of vegetables, and more than seven servings of other plant foods such as whole-cereal grains, beans, peas, roots, and tubers daily. All the colours of the rainbow should be represented in the variety of foods you eat, but especially good cancer-fighting foods include blueberries, grapes, cherries, apples, tomatoes, celery, yams, squash, onions, and garlic.

Green vegetables and green drinks such as barley grass juice and wheat grass juice are sources of that “magical” capturer of all sun energy on this planet, chlorophyll. This green substance inhibits the leading trigger of skin cancers, lipid peroxidization. Green vegetables are also powerful detoxifiers of the blood. Plant fats such as sterols and sterolins, found in all fruits and vegetables, are being studied as immune modulators that may benefit cancer patients.

Folic acid (also known as folate), found in green leafy vegetables, is a significant regulator of cell development. The long-running Nurse’s Health Study showed folate to work well as a protective factor against colorectal cancer. Both folate and vitamin B₁₂ put methyl groups into DNA to silence overactive genes. A multivitamin with B-complex vitamins such as folate or a greens powder supplement should be included in a cancer-prevention diet, especially if you eat under five servings of vegetables daily.

The cabbage family of vegetables gives us indole-3-carbinol, which reduces the activity of potentially harmful hormones such as estrogen. Excess estrogen exposure is the primary cause of breast cancer, and sex hormones are also thought to contribute to prostate, colorectal, and other common cancers.

Cancer Fighters in Your Diet

Seeds and plants contain lignins, which friendly bacteria in our gut turn into weak phytoestrogens. These bind to estrogen receptors on cells and block the signal to grow. A good example of a seed with cancer-fighting lignins is flaxseed, which is antiestrogenic enough to be thought to play a role in preventing and treating hormone-dependent cancers. Its lignins also increase the liver’s output of sex-hormone binding proteins, which further inactivate excess hormones.

Psyllium husks are converted by bacteria in the colon to short-chain fatty acids such as butyrates, which regulate the abnormal DNA in cancer cells. Flaxseed, hemp, nuts, seeds, seafood, fish, and fish oils are excellent sources of omega-3 fats, which reduce arachidonic acid and prostaglandin PGE2, associated with inflammation. Inflammation gives rise to a host of growth stimulators which can accelerate cancer.

Vitamin and Mineral Supplements

Calcium and vitamin D are being studied for their role in reducing risk of colorectal cancer. The best form of calcium is calcium-D-glucarate, which some researchers believe may be the most bioavailable. It is found in citrus fruit, cruciferous vegetables (cabbage family again), and apples. It inhibits beta-glucoronidase, an enzyme involved in metastasis in hormone-dependent cancers.

Neil McKinney, ND, author of Naturally There’s Hope: A Handbook for the Naturopathic Care of Cancer Patients (Trafford Publishing, 2003), is a professor of naturopathic oncology practising in Victoria, BC.

Source: alive #270, April 2005