These are among the nutritional and lifestyle changes I follow and recommend in the fight against cancer.
Vegetables
Eat raw carrots. Harvard researchers have found young women who eat two or more servings of carotenoid-rich fruits and vegetables (oranges, broccoli, carrots, romaine lettuce and spinach) had a 17 percent lower risk of breast cancer.
Green Tea
Green tea consumption may reduce your breast cancer risk by up to 53 percent. Drink 2 to 4 cups a day—make a pot and drink it cold in the summer, too. A University of Southern California research team found green tea lowered breast cancer risk by up to 53 percent.
Fiber
High-fiber foods lower your risk by 42 percent.
Fish
Omega-3 oils from salmon (wild-caught only, please) reduce your risk by up to 94 percent. I tried to eat salmon once a week. And during the chemo when I was really anemic (low red-blood-cell count), I did eat some meat—grass-fed only—beef, liver and veal. My body was craving the iron, so listen to your body. I even drank “beef tea” when I felt really anemic (top sirloin steak extract).
Flaxseed
Flaxseed may reduce risk by 54 percent, according to recent studies—eat your lignans! If you don’t know about Chia seeds, get to know them fast. They are like flax on steroids (high in anti-oxidants, fiber, calcium). They are a whole food, and they make you very strong.
Fruit
A few apples a day may keep breast cancer at bay—eat them with skins. Pomegranates may reduce breast cancer risk by up to 87 percent, according to another recent study.
Broccoli and Cabbage
Broccoli actually kills cancer cells, according to some studies. I used two cookbooks that were life savers: Rebecca Katz’s The Cancer Fighting Kitchen and One Bite at a Time. The second one is for chemo patients. It has amazing tips and basically shows you what cancer-fighting quality every fruit and vegetable out there has. So you start realizing you need to eat a lot of kale and you find yourself buying a lot of cabbage because “Cancer hates cabbage.” I sometimes had coleslaw for breakfast—it got that crazy. But I had it easy. My friends banded together to have a personal chef, Christine Merkle, deliver healthy vegan food twice a week. I was extraordinarily lucky.
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