33 Foods That Starve Cancer

Thursday, June 19, 2014 SPORK! 0 Comments

“The obvious thing is to think about what we could remove from our diet. But I took a completely opposite approach and began asking: What could we be adding to our diet that could boost the body’s defense system? In other words, can we eat to starve cancer?”- Dr. William Li

Cancer is the second most common form of death in the United States – claiming the lives of 1 in 4 people. While billions of dollars in high-tech research is conducted yearly, we just can’t seem to get ahead of the curve as more and more people are diagnosed with a number of types of cancers.

We often think about what we should be removing from our diet in an effort to prevent cancer, such as refined sugar and processed foods. While this is a good thing to do there may be something else we should be doing. What if we could actually add certain foods to our diet that would beat cancer at its own game?

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The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates said it best when he said, “Let your food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” He was referring quite simply to the innate powers that are locked deep within the cells of living foods – those foods that provide the maximum nutrition for us are also the very foods that can starve cancer.

What is angiogenesis?

Angiogenesis literally means the creation of new blood vessels – “angio” means blood vessels and “genesis” means creation. The human body contains over 60,000 miles of blood vessels, including 19 million capillaries.

Blood vessels can adapt to whatever environment they are exposed to and the body has the amazing ability to regulate how many blood vessels are present at any time.

Angiogenesis occurs during times of health and disease. Blood carries oxygen and nutrients to all parts of the body via blood vessels. When new tissue is developed, a blood supply is necessary for its growth and maintenance – angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels, must occur.

The body can fertilize vessels to grow and also has ways to prune them back when necessary. A healthy body has control over the on and off switch and can regulate angiogenesis as needed.

However, research is now showing that in a number of diseases the body fails to either grow enough blood vessels or is not able to prune vessels when needed. When there are too many blood vessels conditions like cancer, arthritis, blindness, endometriosis, obesity and Alzheimers disease are fueled. When there are too few vessels, wounds don’t heal and conditions such as stroke, coronary heart disease, hair loss, erectile dysfunction and peripheral arterial disease result.

In the case of cancer, tumors release growth factor proteins that beckon for blood vessels to grow into the tumor. This provides not only the oxygen and the nutrients that the cancer needs to grow, but also supplies an escape route whereby cancerous cells can exit the tumor and metastasize in other areas.

Worldwide there are over 70 major diseases that impact millions of humans on a large scale – these diseases may all look different on the outside but upon closer inspection, they all share unbalanced angiogenesis as their common denominator.

This finding is now allowing researchers to re-conceptualize disease prevention and treatment..

FACT: Cancer begins as a group of harmless cells

Imbalanced angiogenesis is a hallmark of all forms of cancer. First and foremost it is important to understand how cancer starts. All cancers begin as microscopic nests of cells that are, for all intensive purposes, harmless. They can only grow to the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen at most on their own because they don’t have their own blood supply – no nutrients or oxygen means no growth.

Autopsy studies from people who have died in car accidents show that forty percent of women between the ages of 40 and 50 have microscopic cancers in their breasts and fifty percent of men in their 50′s and 60′s have microscopic cancers in their prostate.