Continued research shows that one of the most effective and significant fights against disease starts with your diet. Nutritional science offers some of the greatest hope in fighting breast cancer to date, and following this research is one way women can take a proactive role in protecting themselves from breast cancer.
One of the easiest, and least expensive ways to reduce your risk of cancer is by incorporating the following foods into your diet.
Produce:
Eating a diet rich in brightly colored produce can help protect you against breast cancer. The National Cancer Institute found that women who ate lots of carotenoid-rich fruits and vegetables had a lower risk of developing certain types of breast cancer. Carotenoids contain compounds that help regulate cell growth, defense, and repair. When shopping, fill your cart with a variety of colored produce like carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, and dark leafy greens.
Good Fats:
Omega-3 fatty acids are a good source of lignans -- compounds that may have a weak estrogen effect. When a weak estrogen-like substance takes the place of your body’s natural strong estrogen in a breast cell’s estrogen receptor, then the weak substance can act as a relative anti-estrogen. By acting in this way, lignans might help work against breast cancer that depends on estrogen for its growth.
Getting your Omega-3's is easy! The following are the top 10 omega rich foods-- flax seeds, walnuts, sardines, salmon, beef, soybeans, tofu, shrimp, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower.
Green Tea:
Tea, especially green tea, is packed with polyphenols, an antioxidant with enormous health benefits including anti- breast cancer properties. Skip out on the bottled teas though, stick to brewing your own.
Pomegranates:
Pomegranates are a rich source of antioxidants and include six chemicals known to suppress aromatase, a substance in the body that helps produce estrogen. About 70 percent of breast cancers need estrogen to grow, so pomegranates are a prime breast-cancer-blocking super food. Additionally scientists have detected two substances in the fruit with potential to fight both colon cancer and diabetes.
Blueberries:
City of Hope researchers found that blueberries could play a part in undoing a tough-to-treat type of breast cancer. One study indicates that blueberries may help halt the growth and spread of triple-negative breast cancer. This form of the disease is particularly aggressive and resistant to therapy. In City of Hope labs, blueberry juice held back the migration of cancer cells, while blueberry extract shrank tumors, stopped cancer cells from multiplying and even triggered their destruction.
Eggs:
Choline, an essential nutrient abundant in eggs, is associated with a 24 percent reduced risk of breast cancer, according to a U.S. study involving more than 3,000 women. This essential nutrient, found in the yolk, is necessary to ensure proper cell functioning.
Other sources of choline include fish, poultry, beef, broccoli, and wheat germ.
Save the tatas! Your fight against cancer starts in the kitchen.
