Cancer Disease Symptoms

There is much passing reference to the need to eat more vegetables in order to avoid cancer, but beyond the urging of some health promotion staff little seems to be written in the lay press in any detail at all. In addition to this, or perhaps because of the simplistic message that is out there, many doctors do not yet recognize the importance of diet in relation both to reducing the chances of the disease occurring but also in the care of patients who have already got cancer. They do not recognize that good nutrition is a natural cancer treatment.

Many doctors are wedded to the fast effects of antibiotics. They really, really want any and every drug to be as effective as antibiotics were when they were first used. And if foods cannot give that sort of effect with the majority of people then a goodly number of them will dismiss the impact of food as being "not really important".

However there are many drugs which are not very effective. For example chemotherapy increases survival overall at the 5-year stage by only just over 2%, with it being ineffective in many cancers, despite its ongoing use. With this in mind, any "natural" activity without negative side effects should be embraced with open arms.

There are many foods which have been shown in epidemiological studies to reduce the chances of getting cancer by 25%, 50%, 75% and sometimes even more when you compare high consuming groups with low consuming groups.

There are foods which seem to prevent cells from mutating into cancer cells. There are foods which encourage mutated cells to die off. There are foods which stop the cancer cells from growing, or reduce the speed of growth and foods which stop the cancer cells from moving around the body. In biomedical words foods can be antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, anti-mutagenic, encouraging apoptosis, cytotoxic, with antimetastatic effects. Of course not all fruit and vegetables have all these effects, but they have enough to be useful.

So which are the most important vegetables and fruits? I would urge you to go for variety and not get hung up on just one or two thinking that will be enough. Plants act synergistically. That is, they work better when you eat a number of them together.