My friend William Sears, MD, and his wife Martha Sears, RN, both cancer survivors, have recently released an excellent book on the best nutritional approaches for preventing and treating cancer. The book is titled: Help Heal Yourself from Cancer: Partner Smarter with Your Doctor, Personalize Your Treatment Plan, and Take Charge of Your Recovery. The Sears were kind enough to provide an excerpt from the book so that I can provide my readers with this valuable information.
Because they multiply so fast, cancer cells are ravenous eaters. Cancer can only spread if its cells have what they need to grow. Imagine a conference of cancer cells getting together to design the diet they like. After hearing from each cell what their favorite foods are, the biggest and baddest cancer cell concludes: “We don’t have to design a new diet to feed us, we’ve already got one—the standard American diet (SAD).” Cancer cells crave carbs. They love high blood sugar spikes. The SAD is high in carbs that spike blood sugar.
Cancer cells grow ands pread when the soil they’re in is fertile, or cancer-friendly. The SAD diet is like adding chemical fertilizers to a cancer garden. Eating a cancer-healing diet starts with leaving out what cancer craves, by eating smarter and lower carb.When Bill had his first cancer back in 1997, the conventional wisdom was low-fat and high-carb eating. Science has since revealed that fad was a big, fat, sweet lie. You don’t get fat by eating smart fats. You get fat by eating dumb carbs. And when you take the fat out of food, you have to fill your diet with more carbs to get enough calories.
Replacing healthy fats with unhealthy carbs gives you a double fault that fuels more cancer. Supporting the ISA lesson “Feed us well and we’ll fight better for you,” smart fats smarten the cancer-fighting NK cell’s cell membrane, which is mostly made of fat, by making it more selective and protective. Remember our mantra: “Every organ of the body is only ashealthy as its cells, and every cell is only as healthy as the membrane protecting it.” Could a low-fat, high cancer-feeding diet weaken cell membranes, and therefore NK cells? We believe so. You can remember a cancer-feeding carb by the four Fs: it’s fake, fast, fiberless, and factory-made.We have chosen the following foods because they have these conquer-cancer biochemical effects:
Remember Mom’s advice to “Put more color on your plate”? Dr. Mom was right. Our conquer-cancer plate is color-full. The nutrients, called antioxidants, that give foods their color are also the ones that fight cancer best. And the deeper the color, usually the richer the antioxidant content of the food.
Help Heal Yourself from Cancer: Partner Smarter with Your Doctor, Personalize Your Treatment Plan, and Take Charge of Your Recovery by William Sears, MD, and Martha Sears, RN (BenBella Books, Inc). Available at Amazon.com and other major book retailers.
Dr. Mark Stengler NMD, MS, is a bestselling author in private practice in Encinitas, California, at the Stengler Center for Integrative Medicine. His newsletter, Dr. Stengler’s Health Breakthroughs, is available at www.markstengler.com and his product line at www.drstengler.com
