Anti-Cancer Recipes: Have a Berry Merry Tea Party!

Now that the holidays are behind us, let’s get back to celebrating life with some simple, health-promoting anti-cancer recipes.  Instead of wine and canapés, treat yourself to a Berry Merry Tea Party—a handful of goji berries along with a cup of the finest tea.  Here’s the black and white—and green and red—on your tea choices.     

For any of you with cancer, please read the last three questions first.

Anti-Cancer Recipes: How to Make Turmeric More Potent and Tasty

Here’s your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow: an anti-cancer recipe for a Turmeric Concoction.

Anti-Cancer Recipes: So Many Alternatives to Cow’s Milk

Now that you’re eliminating mammary secretions on your anti-cancer diet, how do you decide which alternative to buy?  It took a spreadsheet to figure out the answer.

Anti-Cancer Recipes: How to Handle Garlic

Itching to know the best ways of preserving garlic’s anti-cancer properties?

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Should you Cook Cabbage?

Most people will tell you to eat cabbage for its anti-cancer compounds, but they don’t explain that how you prepare it is key. If you want to get the anti-cancer benefits from cabbage, then heed this advice:

Anti-Cancer Recipes: No Sugar, Lots of Spice and other Zesty Thoughts

Although Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month wraps today, the disease remains– and will always be the beast that roused this anti-cancer blog.

In the words of McGill University’s Dr. Gerald Wiviott, we all need a trigger to help us get off our bums (Canadian for “butts”) and make changes:  Inspiration, Motivation, Provocation and Support.  

Anti-Cancer News: RIP Rice, even Brown Organic

The news this past week—that some rice and rice products are contaminated with arsenic—should spark a change in your anti-cancer eating habits.

Here’s the short version of the story:

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Here’s to a Berry Good Year!

Summer’s waning. It’s your last chance to gather these anti-cancer wonders and preserve their pleasures for those long, winter nights. Get out today, and buy a bushel or four along with a large cookie sheet that will fit in your freezer, then

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Pick Leeks

When it comes to anti-cancer properties, some vegies tower above the others. Put leeks on top of that list.

Anti-Cancer Breakfast Recipes: What Grain is Best for your Blood Sugar?

Hint: For an anti-cancer diet, one of these tops your choice of grains:

a/ steel cut oats       b/ oat flakes       c/ oat bran.     Which one?

    

Anti Cancer Recipes: How to Grill Surprisingly Great Sardines

Gills down, this anti-cancer recipe wins the tastiest meal of the summer—

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Can Flaxseed Stave off Prostate Cancer?

We know that flaxseed appears to be an anti-cancer food for women and it may just do wonders for our sex drive, but what about for our men: Does it fight prostate cancer, too?

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Can Flaxseed Stave off Breast Cancer?

Know anyone who has breast cancer? Doing your best to avoid it? Then consider this: Studies are showing that flaxseed can protect against breast cancer and prolong survival in women who have it.

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Can Eggs Cause Ovarian Cancer?

Should you include eggs in your anti-cancer diet? To be perfectly honest,

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Beware the Roasted Chicken

Yikes. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but you might want to reconsider Grandma’s precious recipe. Roasted chicken, it turns out, is more pro- than anti-cancerous. Here are two reasons why:

Anti-Cancer Strategies: Kick the 3 a Day Habit!

Make that 4-5-even 6 smaller meals a day instead.  And why is that?

Anti-Cancer Recipes: What’s for Drinking?

If you’ve been following the anti-cancer recipes in this blog, then you already have some ideas. Besides good old- fashioned water (not from a plastic bottle, especially if it’s been sitting around in heat), here are some healthy options:

Anti-Cancer Recipes: What’s for Breakfast?

Hey, guys. It might be a bit difficult at first to wrap your new anti-cancer brain around this one, but you’ll get used to it:

Anti-Cancer Recipe: Lemons, Limes, Limonene

D-limonene, to be precise. Put it in your anti-cancer vocabulary.  It’s a member of a very fragrant class of molecules that abound in citrus–terpenoids or terpenes. And they’ve been shown to inhibit cancer cell progression and induce cell death. 

How to Eat Out on an Anti-Cancer Diet

Sure, we’re trying to stick to an anti-cancer diet, but we still have to enjoy ourselves, right? And that means eating in restaurants every so often, indulging in some Kaeng Red (Red Thai curry, pictured here), but hold the chicken, lots of broccoli, please.

Anti-Cancer Recipe: Ricky’s Perfect Raw Veggie Juice

Ever notice how all the veggie juice recipes have you throwing in something sweet?  Apples? Beets? Loads of carrots? Well, toss that taste for sweet out of your lifestyle. On the contrary, we’re trying to ignore our addiction to sugars and carbs til it vanishes. Kaput.   

So how, then, do you make green juice tasty?

Anti-Cancer Recipe: Kale and Blueberry Salad

If you haven’t yet subscribed to Glowing Older, ® here’s a delicious anti-cancer recipe you’re likely missing:

Grapefruit and Estrogen: Pro or Anti-Cancer?

The few studies on grapefruit—and whether it has an anti-cancer benefits or promotes cancer—are definitely at odds.

It’s clear that grapefruit juice contains natural substances that can inhibit an enzyme system (called CYP3A4) responsible for metabolizing certain meds. The result: an increase of medication circulating in the blood, with potentially toxic side effects.

But can grapefruit also increase your estrogen?

Anti-Cancer Dietary Strategies: The Basics, Part 2

Epigallocatechin gallates (EGCGs) from green tea were one of the first dietary components identified as protective against angiogenesis, the process by which cancer cells develop blood vessels in order to grow and spread. Today researchers have found many more compounds that affect angiogenesis.

Exactly how do foods impact our ability to fight cancer? We started talking about that in Part I of The Basics. I owe you a better explanation.   

Anti-Cancer Dietary Strategies: The Basics, Part 1

We all have cancer cells dormant inside our bodies; the key is to keep them from growing and spreading.

Picture your lawn in the springtime—at the beginning, a few precocious dandelions, then an army of weeds invades your space. We slay them with herbicides, we patiently dig out their roots, yet they continue to multiply.  

But what if we changed the soil they grow in? What if we made that soil inhospitable to uncontrolled growth and spread?

Anti-Cancer Foods: Crucifer Cooking Tips, Take Two

What to do–and NOT to do– with this bounty of kale?

Cruciferous veggies may seem tough on the outside, but as we talked about in the first post on these anti-cancer wonders, they’re highly sensitive to boot. If you don’t handle them properly, their magic powers could literally evaporate.   

University of Warwick scientist Dr. Paul Thornalley explains: Crucifers contain compounds called glucosinolates that, when mixed with an enzyme (myrosinase), get converted to another compound (isothiocyanates )with high cancer prevention activity. Talk about a mouthful…  

Anti-Cancer Strategies: Countering Radiation

Dahl soup with mung beans

Taking CT scans or radiation treatments? Confused about what to eat in the wake of  Japan’s quake?

● For starters, try miso soup, prescribed by Japanese doctors for radiation poisoning after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Miso is made by fermenting barley, soybeans and/or brown rice with salt and a fungus loaded with enzymes and probiotics. According to Japanese researchers, it helps protect the body from absorbing radiation.

Anti-Cancer Recipes: Broccoli Puttanesca

A tasty dinner, in 20 minutes …

Forget the pasta. It’s loaded with carbs, which wreak havoc with your blood sugar–and you probably know by now that sugar metabolism has been linked to cancer growth.  Here, broccoli flowers stand in for pasta and give you cancer-fighting nutrients to boot.    

Anti-Cancer Foods: Turmeric’s Many Talents

Turmeric concoction with chickpeas

Turmeric, the yellow spice that gives curry its bright color and peppery flavor, has been revered in India and China for thousands of years for its wide range of medicinal properties. 

Its active ingredient, curcumin, is arguably nature’s most powerful anti-inflammatory and has shown great promise in many studies as an anti-cancer agent  —reducing tumor growth and metastases, helping stimulate cancer cells to commit suicide and enhancing the effectiveness of chemotherapy. 

Anti-Cancer Foods: Holy Crucifers The Key is How you Cook them

Broccoli and particularly its powerful baby sprouts are among the reigning monarchs in the crucifer family

Along with vegetables from the Allium family, cruciferous ones TOP the list of foods that fight cancer:  Broccoli sprouts and broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, collards, mustard greens, arugula, watercress, rutabaga and radishes.

The reason:

Anti-Cancer Foods: Garlic Breath and Onion Sense

Meet the Allium family:  garlic, onions, leeks, scallions, shallots and chives.

When it comes to cancer, they’re incendiary–packed with sulphur containing molecules that ward off disease. And no wonder they’re so powerful. They originated in central Asia north of Afghanistan—as pests go, a tough neck of the woods.

The ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Greeks all cherished Alliums for their medicinal value, and in the mid 1800s Louis Pasteur proved them right. He showed that garlic fights bacteria.

Anti-Cancer Strategies: Meet the Experts

Who are among the world’s top experts on nutrition and cancer?

With all the blather out there in the information universe, we all know that you’re only as good as your sources. As a journalist, I’ll tap into the world’s foremost experts on cancer and nutrition, digest their thoughts and then deliver their advice atop platters of inviting recipes. I’ll tell you where the experts differ in opinion—some say no alcohol; others tout red wine, for example (Don’t believe them)– and declare my philosophical bias at the outset: If you’re fighting cancer, follow the opinion that’s the least risky.

Anti-Cancer Foods: Eat your Avastin?

Avastin (also known as bevacizumab) is one of the most promising drugs for treating cancer. It works by binding to and neutralizing a protein that promotes angiogenesis, the process by which cancer cells create blood vessels and spread throughout the body.  But Avastin is expensive, hard to get and still in the trial stages for many types of cancer.

The good news is:  That protein our cells produce—VEGF, or vascular endothelial growth factor – can also be blocked by natural agents in common plants.