How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease

by Michael Greger

strawberries,28 pomegranates,29 and plain white mushrooms30 may also suppress the potentially cancer-promoting enzyme.

because blind women can’t see sunlight, their pineal glands never stop secreting melatonin into their bloodstreams. Sure enough, the researchers found that blind women may have just half the odds of breast cancer as sighted women.34 Conversely, women who interrupt their melatonin production by working night shifts appear to be at increased risk for breast cancer.35

Minimizing melatonin disruption may therefore mean putting curtains on your windows, eating more vegetables, and lowering the curtain on eating too much meat.

Physical activity is considered a promising preventive measure against breast cancer43 not only because it helps with weight control but because exercise tends to lower circulating estrogen levels.

Five hours a week of vigorous aerobic exercise

can lower estrogen and progesterone exposure by about 20 percent.

walking an hour a day or more is associated with significantly lower breast cancer risk.50

heterocyclic amines (HCAs), described by the National Cancer Institute as “chemicals formed when muscle meat, including beef, pork, fish, and poultry, is cooked using high-temperature methods.”

roasting, pan frying, grilling, and baking. Eating boiled meat is probably the safest.

not only may eating healthier to prevent cancer help to prevent heart disease but eating to prevent heart disease may also help to prevent cancer.

Cholesterol

may play a role in the development and progression of...

eating more broccoli and flaxseeds.

five or more servings of fruits and veggies per day along with walking for thirty minutes six days a week

soluble fiber may be protective.

The reason high fiber intake is associated with less breast cancer may be because of more beans—or less bologna.

a 14 percent lower risk of breast cancer for every twenty grams of fiber intake per day.90

Breast cancer risk may not significantly fall until at least twenty-five grams of fiber a day is reached.

the whole-food, plant-based diets used therapeutically to reverse chronic disease contain upward of sixty grams of fiber.

Compared with people who average less than one apple a day, daily apple eaters had 24 percent lower odds of breast cancer, as well as significantly lower risks for ovarian cancer, laryngeal cancer, and colorectal cancer.

something in the peels of organic apples (presumably present in conventional ones as well) that appears to reactivate a tumor-suppressor gene called maspin (an acronym for mammary serine protease

inhibitor).

Breast cancer cells find a way to turn off this gene, but apple peels appear to be...

cruciferous vegetables like broccoli boost the activity of detoxifying enzymes in your liver.

that if you feed people broccoli and brussels sprouts, they clear caffeine more quickly—meaning that if you eat a lot of cruciferous vegetables, you’d have to drink more coffee to get the

same buzz because your liver (the body’s purifier) has beco...

the subjects’ liver function remained enhanced even weeks later.

you would have to eat at least a quarter-cup of broccoli sprouts a day.

flaxseeds have around one hundred times more lignans than other foods.117 What are lignans? Lignans are phytoestrogens that can dampen the effects of the body’s own estrogen. This is why flaxseeds are considered a first-line medical therapy for menstrual breast pain.118

eating about a daily tablespoonful of ground flaxseeds can extend a woman’s menstrual cycle by about a day.119 This means she’ll have fewer periods over the course of a lifetime and, therefore, presumably less estrogen exposure and reduced breast cancer risk.

women with frequent urinary tract infections may be at a higher risk of breast cancer: Every course of antibiotics you take can kill bacteria indiscriminately,

sprinkling a few spoonfuls of ground flaxseeds on your oatmeal or whatever you’re eating throughout the day may reduce the risk of breast cancer.

women who eat flaxseeds may also see a rise in the levels of endostatin in their breasts.128 (Endostatin is a protein produced by your body to help starve tumors of their blood supply.)

Compared with the women who ate the placebo muffins, women consuming the muffins with flaxseed, on average, witnessed their tumor-cell proliferation decrease, cancer-cell death rates increase, and their c-erB2 scores go down. C-erB2 is a marker of cancer aggressiveness;

Soybeans naturally contain another class of phytoestrogens called isoflavones.

Phytoestrogens dock into the same receptors as your own estrogen but have a weaker effect, so they can act to block the effects of your more powerful animal estrogen. There are two types of estrogen

receptors in the body, alpha and beta. Your own estrogen prefers alpha receptors, while plant estrogens (phytoestrogens) have an affinity for the beta receptors.

Ideally, you’d like what’s called a “selective estrogen receptor modulator” in your body that would have proestrogenic effects in some tissues and antiestrogenic effects in others. Well, that’s what soy phytoestrogens appear to be.132

One way soy may decrease cancer risk and improve survival is by helping to reactivate BRCA genes.140 BRCA1 and BRCA2 are so-called caretaker genes, cancer-suppressing genes responsible for DNA repair.

Soy may also help women with variations of other breast cancer susceptibility genes known as MDM2 and CYP1B1.

Women at increased genetic risk of breast cancer may therefore especially benefit from high soy intake.145

Asian women are up to five times less likely to develop breast cancer than North American women.146 Why? One possibility is their intake of green tea, a common staple in many Asian diets.

Green tea has been associated with about a 30 percent reduction in breast cancer risk.147 Another strong possibility is a relatively high intake of soy, which, if consumed consistently during childhood, may cut the risk of breast cancer later in life by half. If

women consume soy primarily as an adult, though, their risk reduction may only be...

Eating mushrooms and sipping at least half a tea bag’s worth of green tea each day was associated with nearly 90 percent lower breast cancer odds.150

Happier people, it seems, are less likely to get sick.

common foods from leafy

green vegetables to your basic garden-variety tomato may positively affect your brain chemistry and help ward off depression. In fact, even simply smelling a common spice may improve your emotional state. But avoiding the blues is not just about eating your greens. There are also components in certain foods that may increase the risk of depression, such as arachidonic acid, an inflammation-promoting compound found mostly in chicken and eggs in the diet that is blamed for potentially impairing mood by inflaming the brain.

eating less meat isn’t just good for us physically; it’s good for us emotionally too.

Those