Eating To Starve Cancer

Eating to starve cancer? Wouldn’t that be great? And look at all the other anti-angiogenic substances in the pantry. Some might help. Along with the blog, I include Dr. Li’s often requested slide from the presentation on anti-angiogenic foods.  You’ll note a lot of foods we’ve have already been emphasizing:

• Blueberries
• Turmeric
• Raspberries
• Grapes
• Apples
• Kale and Bok Choy
• Cooked Tomatoes
• Red Wine

Dr. Li is the medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation:

http://www.angio.org/

According to Li, most cancers start as tiny clusters of malignant cells that remain dormant until they recruit new vessels to deliver oxygen and nutrients. Yet, after angiogenesis builds up steam, a cancer can expand like a wildfire—dividing 16,000 times in just two weeks.

Li also has a lot of other practical hints: dunking your tea bag to release more of the cancer- fighting nutrients, cooking tomatoes in olive oil to potentiate their advantages and chewing your greens well to release the nutrients. Li strongly endorses fermented soybean products such as miso (seven times the concentration of helpful compounds) and broccoli sprouts. He suggests trying to add one anti-angiogenic food to each meal.

I did find Dr. Li’s final talking point in the TED presentation particularly intriguing.

Here, he speaks of the importance of early intervention with diet before cancer takes hold. However, I wonder if this also might apply to myeloma patients in remission, nearly complete response or with smoldering myeloma.

Could anti-cancer foods (and limiting pro-angiogenic foods such as sugars and carbohydrates) make a bigger difference when the disease is not well established, or has been hammered down by a drug assault?

I think that would be in line with Dr. Li’s thinking. While, we don’t know his opinion, in a conversation in Atlantic Magazine, last March, Li was asked what was the big takeaway point he wanted everyone to hear relative to his work:

“Understanding that food is the chemotherapy we take three times per day is a game changer. We are learning that Mother Nature has imbued many foods–fruits, vegetables, herbs, seafoods, tea, coffee, even chocolate–with natural substances that can cut off the blood vessels that feed cancer and other diseases. Eating to starve cancer will pull the rug from under the cancer epidemic, and in a way that puts control in the hands of consumers, not doctors.”