Cancer Prevention Food and Herbs

A Healthy Diet Including These Foods & Herbs May Reduce Cancer Risk

Sep 16, 2009 Genevieve Kiger

There is a huge variety of anti-cancer foods and herbs to choose from; fortunate, as variety may be the key to cancer prevention.

Unfortunately, there is not as much research as many people would like as to what foods and herbs might be effective anti-cancer treatments. One reason is that there just isn't much money in it — telling people what foods to eat can't be patented or sold, after all. The other problem exists within the studies themselves. How can they know if someone would develop cancer without their regimen? The best they can offer is that they were higher risk, but that can be hard to quantify. Still, there are many plants and herbs that have shown anti-cancer benefits of one sort or another.

Antioxidants for Cancer Prevention

One thing that has been shown in numerous studies is that antioxidants help clean up free radicals in the body, which can lead to pre-cancerous abnormalities.

This means that any foods high in antioxidants are good additions to the diet to help lower cancer risk. This can include fresh berries, beans, broccoli, artichokes, apples, plums, dates, pears, nuts, citrus fruits, potatoes, and many, many more.

Cancer Prevention Salad

James A. Duke, author of The Green Pharmacy (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1998), recommends a salad that contains "garlic, onions, red peppers, tomatoes, red clover flowers, chopped cooked beets, fresh calendula flowers, celery, fresh chicory flowers, chives, cucumbers, cumin, peanuts, pokesalad, purslane, and sage."

He continues, "I came up with a cancer prevention dressing to use with this salad. It includes flaxseed oil, evening primrose oil, garlic, rosemary, a dash of lemon juice, and that Latin American favorite, hot peppers."

Want to Help Prevent Cancer? Drink Tea

Looking for advice on foods and herbs that help prevent cancer, one recommendation crops up over and over. Tea, especially green and white tea, is revered as being at the top of most lists of cancer prevention. Green tea is packed with antioxidants, flavonoids and other anti-cancer compounds.

According to the National Geographic Desk Reference to Nature's Medicine, by Steven Foster and Rebecca L. Johnson (National Geographic Society, 2006), "Clinical studies indicate that regular tea drinking is safe and may contribute to the prevention of . . . several kinds of cancer including cancer of the mouth, breast, bladder, skin, stomach, pancreas, lungs, prostate, and esophagus," among many other potential problems.

Other Foods and Herbs That Lower Cancer Risk

For preventing cancer before it even begins, in what is known as the initiation stage, the Prescription for Herbal Healing, by Phyllis A. Balch (Avery, 2002), recommends "Foods rich in carotenoids, such as dark-green leafy vegetables an yellow and orange fruits and vegetables; foods rich in sulphoraphanes, such as broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts; and food and herbs rich in flavonoids such as berries, green tea, and grapes."

Also mentioned specifically in several sources are:

• Evening Primrose
• Peppermint - high antioxidant content
• Purslane - highly packed with an amazing amount of nutrients, many of them potent cancer fighters
• Garlic - contains antioxidants and sulfides
• Tomatoes - contains lycopene
• Cat's Claw - helps prevent the formation of tumors
• Shiitake, Maitake, Reishi
• Milk Thistle - protects and helps to recover damage to the liver, and has shown some activity against breast and prostate cancer cells
• Grapeseed and Pinebark Extracts - studies have shown they help inhibit abnormal cell growth
• Red Clover - studies show it helps control the spread of cancerous cells
• Turmeric - prevents angiogenesis (formation of new blood supply to tumors, required to grow over 2 cm in size) and may have other anti-cancer properties as well

The copyright of the article Cancer Prevention Food and Herbs in Natural Medicine is owned by Genevieve Kiger. Permission to republish Cancer Prevention Food and Herbs in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Green Tea Helps Lower Cancer Risk

Antioxidants Play Large Role in Cancer Prevention

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Sep 17, 2009 4:14 AM

Guest :

Drink your tea. Definitely. And to go with it a good food for cancer-prevention synergy is soy. Now, there's controversy about whether soy is good or bad. But there's little scientific doubt that soy combines well with tea to prevent cancer.

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