Overview: Nutrition and Cancer Prevention

Why Is Diet So Important When It Comes to Cancer Risk?

In 337 BC, the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, stated, "Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food." When it comes to which foods offer the best "medicine", nothing beats plant foods. The most important cancer-fighting plant foods are vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes (beans). The health benefits of regularly including plant foods in the diet are nothing short of miraculous. Based on the latest health research, there is no doubt that plant foods can reduce the risk of many of the diseases that plague us. This is especially true for cancer.

Some Facts To Consider

Did you know that most health experts believe that about one-third of all cancers are caused by poor diet? Many nutrition experts believe as much as 50-60% of cancers are due to poor diet! Another one-third of cancers are caused by tobacco (cigarettes, chewing tobacco, and pipes). Every year, about 1.3 to 1.4 million people are diagnosed with cancer. Think about that for a moment. That means that if everyone ate well and stopped using tobacco, about 1 million of these cancers never would occur. That's how much power we all have over our own health!

Does That Mean People "Cause" Their Own Cancer?

The answer to this question is absolutely not! When we say that diet may cause 30 to 60% of all cancers, these are general numbers, for large groups of people. This does not mean that for any one person, including you, that we can say with certainty that what you did or didn't eat was directly related to your cancer risk. Cancer is such a complicated disease. We can never know for sure what may have caused cancer to occur in any one person. But these numbers still are useful. They help us to realize that you do have power over your health. And by making smart nutrition choices, we all can "stack the deck" in our favor, so to speak.

Eating well is not a guarantee that you won't get cancer, but it sure will put the odds in your favor! There are no downsides to eating healthfully. And fortunately, the diet that best reduces cancer risk also helps fight heart disease, diabetes, stroke, hypertension, Alzheimer's disease, and most of the other diseases that plague our modern society. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making smart nutrition choices.

Plant Food Power

For best cancer-fighting nutrition, we are not talking about the same old “5-A-Day” advice you may have heard. Instead, the real health benefits come from creating your whole eating plan around vegetables, fruit, whole grains and legumes. A healthy diet plan combined with regular exercise, a healthy body weight, alcohol used only in moderation or not at all, and avoiding tobacco use (including smoking and chewing) are the steps needed to lower cancer risk. These are the fundamentals of cancer prevention.

Plant foods contain nutrients called phytochemicals. Phyto means plant, so phytochemicals are just plant chemicals. There are thousands of these health-promoting, naturally occurring substances in plants. This includes vitamins, minerals, and many other phytochemicals that are important for cancer prevention. Only plants, including vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, contain these healthy phytochemicals. And research shows that the more plants, and therefore the more phytochemicals you eat, the lower your risk of cancer and other diseases.

Put This Knowledge Into Action!

Beyond eating plenty of plant foods, you want to focus on variety for optimal cancer prevention benefits. The last time you ate a piece of fruit, what was it? Chances are, it was an apple or a banana. These foods are healthy, but they are not enough! If you just stick with foods that are familiar to you, you'll miss out on the maximum cancer fighting benefit these foods have to offer. When was the last time you ate kiwi or dark red berries such as strawberries, blueberries, or dark cherries? How about mangos and guavas? Do you eat boysenberries? What about blackberries?

Now think about vegetables. Not counting potatoes, peas, and corn, what vegetables do you regularly eat? Do you eat fresh spinach and broccoli every week? What about the green leafy foods, such as kale, collard greens, mustard greens, dandelion greens, and bok choy? Do you eat the "cabbage" type foods including purple and green cabbage, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts? Do you include asparagus and squash? If not, you should!

Remember, there thousands of cancer fighting phytochemicals in plants. For best benefit, more of these foods and more variety of these foods is your ticket!

Am I Eating Enough Variety of Plant Foods?

Below is a list of fruits and vegetable  This list is not "all-inclusive". There are plenty of other plant foods out there for you to try. But, you can use the list to get started on expanding your diet.

Put a check mark next to the foods you eat on a regular basis (weekly to monthly). You should have check marks by at least half of the fruits and half of the vegetables on these lists. This is about 20 fruits & 20 vegetables, or 40 total foods. If you don't have that many check marks, start adding these foods to your diet today.

Food Check List

Fruit                                                    Vegetables