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

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

       • supplying antibacterial and antiviral effects

      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