Breasts: An Owner’s Manual: Every Woman’s Guide to Reducing Cancer Risk, Making Treatment Choices and Optimising Outcomes. Kristi Funk

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PART 2

       REDUCING CANCER RISK

CHAPTER 3

       Eat This

      “Hey honey, can you run over to aisle five and grab a jar of flavonoids? You’ll see it next to all the polyphenols . . .” Though your ability to track down such cancer-kicking, life-giving antioxidants isn’t this obvious, I am about to make your life easier by showing you where to find the best food-based nutrients to support your breasts and body. I think you’ll love that they’re not found in obscure, disgusting, or pricey foods. They’re yummy, affordable, and located in every grocery store around the world.

      When eating food, as opposed to supplements, we don’t consume individual nutrients, like swallowing a spoonful of one essential amino acid. We eat meals and snacks with combinations of ingredients inside a variety of foods. Therefore, an obvious difficulty arises when trying to arrive at a definitive, “Yes, consuming 5 milligrams of this decreases breast cancer risk by 50 percent.” Nonetheless, trends do emerge when one examines the body of literature related to this topic, so let’s be trendy, shall we?

      THE MIGHTY PHYTOCHEMICAL (A.K.A. PHYTONUTRIENT)

      The key to using food to protect yourself from breast cancer is to understand that food holds the power to alter the following factors inside of you: estrogen levels, growth factors, new blood vessel formation (angiogenesis), inflammation, and immune system function.

      Each of these factors affects what we call a tumor’s microenvironment—the fluids and cells that bathe, support, and fuel potential cancers . . . or seek and destroy them. You choose. When your microenvironment cries out, “Pro-cancer!” cancer cells can form and multiply. I want you to regularly ingest foods that make your breast microenvironment unpleasant to tumors by shouting out, “Anticancer!” The ones that do so the loudest come naturally packed with phytochemicals. Phytochemicals are plant-derived molecules (phyto means “plant” in Greek) known to possess profound anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties that directly target the very processes that cancer cells use to develop a tumor.

      Imagine a normal cell happily humming along when, unexpectedly, in a matter of days, what was normal becomes mutated by factors like the sun’s UV rays, cigarette smoke, or carcinogenic foods. This mutated cell transforms into a cancer seed. Whether or not that seed takes root and blooms into a full-blown cancer capable of destroying your life depends on the microenvironment—the soil in which cancer seeds either flourish or fail. In 1974, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a study that showed that breast cancers implanted into female rats shed tumor cells into the bloodstream at dizzying rates. From one cubic centimeter of breast cancer—the size of a peanut M&M or sugar cube—cancers will shed 3.2 million malignant cells into the bloodstream every twenty-four hours.¹ Kind of makes you catch your breath, doesn’t it? How, then, doesn’t every cancer story have a fatal ending? The majority of these cells are rapidly cleared from the blood by a functional immune system, and if breast cells do arrive in a foreign land like the liver, they usually stop dividing and perish—unless they find that soil conducive to growth.

      How do we engineer soil that stops cancer seeds from sprouting? In the most comprehensive study of human nutrition ever conducted in the history of science, the China Study, the authors observed that nutrition is infinitely more important in controlling cancer growth (the soil) than the dose of the initiating carcinogen (the seed maker).² In other words, healthy cells can wear nutritional armor that protects against mutations when they get exposed to bad things, so they don’t become seeds. Furthermore, even if some cells mutate into malignant seeds, by maintaining an anticancer microenvironment, seeds wither away. But in a pro-cancer body, that mutated cell multiplies and divides over and over again, as weeks turn to years, becoming decades of growth without the body’s ability to control these cells the way it controls normal aging cells. Eventually, that little zombie creates its own blood supply to bring itself even more of the nutrients it needs to now rapidly progress into a cancerous mass that you suddenly feel in your breast, making you gasp and say, “What? That was not there yesterday.”

      Let me introduce you to some of the powerful plant compounds that block carcinogenic action—like sulforaphane and indole-3-carbinol (broccoli, kale), genistein (soy), diallyl sulphide (garlic), and ellagic acid (berries, walnuts)—and can save your life. Plants preceded humans on this earth, and they developed some awesome weaponry to protect themselves against adversaries like the sun’s UV rays, microorganisms, and insects.³ So we are going to pay serious attention to them, just as scientists have for many years. Plants behave like little pharmacies, auto-dispensing molecules that kill off bacteria, viruses, and fungi before these attackers kill them. Let me ask you this: If you were to eat plants, would their protective powers extend to you as a human? Of course they would! Folk medicine isn’t folklore. The medicinal gifts of the Amazonian jungle provide the basis for countless medications sold by pharmaceutical companies.⁴

      A number of natural chemicals known to actively block the birth and growth of cancer cells (carcinogenesis) have been isolated from fruits and vegetables. When cancer seeds do form, these same phytochemicals enable or disable the soil’s microenvironment everywhere in your body—in the breast, yes, but also in the liver and lung and bone and brain—in all the places where breast cancer likes to travel. Phytonutrients include curcumin (turmeric), epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG, in green tea), resveratrol (grapes, wine), omega-3 fatty acids (flaxseeds, avocado), procyanidins (berries), genistein (soy), lycopene (tomatoes), anthocyanidins (apples), and limonene (oranges). Research reveals that phytochemicals exude serious anticarcinogenesis powers by⁵

       • providing antioxidant activity and scavenging free radicals, which stop harmful things we consume and encounter (i.e., carcinogens) from becoming cancer cells in our bodies

       • preventing DNA damage

       • repairing broken DNA

       • destroying harmful cells in our body

       • tempering the growth rate of cancer cells

       • inhibiting new blood supply to tumor cells (anti-angiogenesis)

       • stimulating the immune system

       • regulating hormone metabolism

       • reducing inflammation

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