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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      THE ACCLAIMED ANTIOXIDANT

      The most famous phytochemicals behave as antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, and lycopene. But what are antioxidants, and what do they do? Don’t worry, this won’t become a biochemistry lesson, but you need to understand the battlefield we call oxidative stress. Free radicals are bad oxygen molecules, acting like a dog without a bone. Because they need an electron to make themselves stable and happy, they steal it from any cell next to them, and this now makes the adjacent cell unhappy, so it steals from its neighbor, and so on and so on. What-oh-what can stop all the oxidative madness? Antioxidants can halt this cascade of free radical formation and ravaging cell damage. A kind-hearted, life-giving molecule, the antioxidant says to the oxidant, “Hey dog, take my electron. I’m super stable even without that bone. You need it, and I don’t.”

      Free radicals are actually necessary to some degree in that they help us breathe (useful, I would say); they combat infection and can actually kill the cancer cells they help cause (ironic, but also useful); and they start the inflammatory response to injury so that your body can repair itself (that’s nice).⁶ But if more “bad” hangs around than there is “good” to stop it, then oxidative stress results, and when this imbalance persists day after day, year after year, your body’s cells and DNA get too beat up. Sickness results. Basically, whichever organs these free radicals injure the most frequently determines what diseases you’ll get. If it’s your blood vessels, hello heart disease. If it’s your muscles, you’re chronically fatigued or have fibromyalgia. If it’s your brain, I forgot what happens—oh wait, dementia and Alzheimer’s. If it’s your gut, bowels get irritable. If there’s excessive free radical damage in your breast tissue, well . . . Eliminate oxidative stress, and you just might live forever.

      The role of antioxidants in tempering oxidative stress only scratches the surface of the anticancer abilities of phytonutrients, as evidenced by antioxidant activity being just the first of our ten bullet points above. If you really want to defeat cancer, then eat like you mean it.

      I have something to share that will transform your eating forever. Every meal creates damaging free radicals in an effort to digest food; that is, oxidative stress rules what’s called the postprandial—after a meal—state. In fact, harmful oxidation is so high with the standard American diet (a.k.a. SAD) that most people go to bed every night with fewer antioxidants than when they woke up. How can you reverse this? Well, a study gave people a standard breakfast and measured their oxidized LDL cholesterol levels hourly.⁷ Cholesterol tracked up and up, and by noon, the participants were in a hyperoxidized state, ready to chow down their next SAD meal. What happened when people ate the same meals with one change: they added a cup of strawberries? All it took was one cup of antioxidant-packed strawberries with that same breakfast, and oxidative stress levels returned to baseline by noon! I hope your eyes just widened and nearly popped out of your head. Imagine if the meal weren’t pancakes and bacon, or steak and eggs plus that strawberry cup, but rather, steel cut oatmeal plus berries? Wow—then you would be building up health instead of staying neutral. The take home point: eat antioxidants with every meal (not just a cup of blueberries in the morning, and you’re done for the day). Every meal creates an oxidation battle—fight back with antioxidant-rich plant-based foods every time you lift fork to mouth.

      The Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) comes up often as a healthy way to eat, and not surprisingly, it makes phytonutrients a priority, emphasizing fruits, vegetables, whole grains, olive oil, fish, and red wine in moderation. The MedDiet theoretically creates a microenvironment that cancers should consider hostile . . . so what happens when you put it to the test? Recently, nineteen studies unanimously showed strong benefits of the MedDiet to reduce the risk of total mortality from all the illnesses we fear: heart attacks, strokes, cognitive decline, and cancer.⁸ Could the MedDiet be the reason why breast cancer rates have been lower in Mediterranean countries (such as Spain, Italy, Greece) than in the United States, and northern and central European countries (such as Scotland, England, Denmark)?⁹ In a multicenter study from Spain, adherence to a MedDiet decreased the occurrence of all breast tumor subtypes, but most notably, the aggressive triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC) dropped by 68 percent.¹⁰ A Dutch study of over 62,000 women tracked for twenty years showed a 40 percent drop in TNBC on the MedDiet.¹¹ Finally, a ten-country European study followed a whopping 330,000 women for eleven years and found 20 percent less TNBC with a MedDiet.¹² Well, I’d say the MedDiet passed the longevity test with flying (antioxidant-rich) colors.

      THE PERFECT PLATE

      So what does a plate loaded with antioxidants and other cancer-fighting nutrients look like? The ideal meal is largely plant-based with an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, whole grains, legumes, occasional fish or lean meats (or not, as we later discuss), with a cup of green tea—and sometimes wine—on the side.

      Your plate at any given meal should be 70 percent full of fresh fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens (kale, spinach, collards), and 30 percent packed with whole grains and protein (legumes and soy). Don’t fear starchy veggies like sweet potatoes and butternut squash; go for a deep-colored rainbow of foods, since the color contains the phytonutrients (chlorophyll makes a mean green; carotenoids create yellow and orange; flavonoids equal blue, red, and cream). For example, red jasmine rice extract reduced the migration and invasion of human breast cancer cells in a petri dish; the same thing happened with bran extract from brown rice dripped onto breast cancer cells. But white rice extract did nothing; what’s more, black rice extract fed to mice with human breast cancer grafts (I know, science can be cruel) clearly suppressed tumor growth and angiogenesis.¹³ So be colorful. And FYI, sprouting, soaking, and fermenting whole grains forms a more digestible carbohydrate.

      A typical meal for me follows the 70/30 rule. I’ll eat a huge salad with a thick, delicious whole grain base across half the bottom and legumes on the other. I pile kale, arugula, and broccoli sprouts atop this layer, and then I vary what gets thrown on next among about five to ten different foods that suit my mood: raw broccoli (always), cherry tomatoes, artichoke hearts, sweet yellow peppers, fresh blueberries, avocado, a heap of hummus, and pumpkin seeds. My dressing involves a blend of apple cider vinegar, crushed garlic, ground pepper, and herbs. But honestly, if this concept is new to you, and you need a little Thousand Island or creamy ranch to enjoy it, go ahead. I’m so psyched that your plate has all those antioxidants, you won this meal’s oxidative stress battle already.

       MY IDEAL MEAL, DECODED . . .

      We all know our fruits and vegetables, and we even have a number of go-to faves, but when I got started eating a whole food, plant-based diet and wanted to find hearty replacements for my butter, eggs, and salmon fillet, I ran into quite a few delicious discoveries. So may I introduce to you . . .

       • Healthy fats: Avocados, nuts (walnuts, pecans, pistachios, cashews, macadamia, almonds), seeds (ground flax, chia, sunflower, sesame), nut and seed butters (almond, cashew, sunflower), olives, tofu, edamame, at least 70 percent cacao dark chocolate, extra virgin olive oil, organic expeller-pressed canola oil.

       • 100 percent whole grains: Whole wheat and whole grain bread and pasta, brown/wild/black/red rice, whole oats, quinoa, freekeh, farro, popcorn, whole rye, whole barley, buckwheat, whole wheat couscous, bulgur, amaranth, sorghum, teff.

       • Legumes: Beans (kidney, garbanzo, lima, fava, mung, black, soy), peas (green, snow, snap, split, black-eyed), special nuts (peanuts, soy nuts), and lentils (brown, green, red, black, yellow).

      RELATIVE WHAAA?

      Before we chase a rainbow of healthy foods, we need a stat course in statistics. СКАЧАТЬ