How Foods Can Prevent Breast Cancer

There have been four standard ways of treating cancer: radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, and biological therapy. Now emerging is a new and far more important technique, chemo- prevention. Chemoprevention allows you to prevent a cancer from growing in the first place or to treat a preclinical cancer. Many of you are familiar with this idea from Pap smears that have come back abnormal but not cancerous. They may show "dysplasia" but not cancer. Early treatment prevents cancer. We know that a breast cancer could take as long as 33 years to develop. For much of that time it is unseen and undetectable by standard methods. As an example, in their forties, 40 per- cent of women have small cancers in their breast that escape detection, according to autopsy reports of women who died from other causes. Only when the tumor reaches one billion cells in size can a mammogram detect it; that's the smallest that a radiologist can see but it is simply enormous in terms of cancer growth. What this book is designed to do is change the biology of your breast so that you create a very unfavorable climate for a cancer to grow. Here's how. Cancer is often treated with a variety of chemical agents to target the cancer's life cycle in as many ways as possible. Because of our great daily familiarity with foods, we tend to discount their ability to work as medicines. But look at the proven ways in which foods can act to target cancer development. They can: * Disrupt hormonal pathways that cause cancer * Repair the genetic material DNA * Inactivate harmful chemicals * Inactivate enzymes that drive chemical reactions * Scavenge mutant cells * Lower oxidant levels with antioxidants * Inhibit tumor growth basically, the entire tool chest needed to stop a cancer before it starts. And fighting cancer requires a big tool chest. This chapter will show you how you can block the estrogen effect in a step-by-step fashion with the right kinds of foods. Remember that the key principle of cancer chemotherapy is to use several different agents to interrupt the cancer cell's growth with several critical choke holds. The same concept applies before a cell becomes cancerous, using multiple agents to block the amount of estrogen that flows through the blood-stream and attaches to estrogen receptors in the breast. You will find that many of these steps can be targeted with more than one nutritional strategy. Some of the same strategies such as high-fiber or low-fat diets affect more than one step because they have more than one anticancer action. You'll find each of these measures covered at length in a chapter of its own. There's a lot of science in this chapter. Don't be overwhelmed by it. In the end, it all comes down to blunting the estrogen effect and blocking the trigger that causes cancer. As you'll see in the last part of the book, the diet itself is pretty simple. I include the science because knowledge leads to tremendous empowerment and because it will allow you to change and adapt your diet as new discoveries are made. The more you know about what you are doing to your body, the more likely you are to succeed. Slow Down Estrogen Production