How diet affects cancer?
Diet affects cancer both
directly and indirectly. Nutrients directly impact the mechanisms by which
cancer cells grow and spread. They indirectly help control the cancer by
changing the surrounding biochemical conditions that either encourage or
discourage the progression of malignant disease. For example, diets high in fat
and refined carbohydrates make you more likely to become overweight, which in
turn increases your risk of greater risk of tumour recurrences. Obese men are
at significantly greater risk of developing more aggressive prostate cancer.
Diets high in fat tend to
cause more DNA damage. That allows malignant cells to accumulate ever more
mutations, which in turn make it more likely that they will escape the effects
of chemotherapy and radiation. Results: more aggressive cancer. In addition, a
diet high in fat can weaken your immune system while increasing inflammation,
angiogenesis and blood levels of tumor-promoting growth factors. This is likely
why people eating the standard American diet have a higher rate of cancer and a
worse prognosis than populations that adhere to low-fat, vegetable-rich diets
such as the traditional Japanese diet or the Mediterranean diet.
Compared with normal cells,
cancer cells have a sweet tooth: they consume between ten and fifty times more
glucose than surrounding healthy cells. In addition, the faster a tumor’s
proliferation, the more glucose it consumes. Experiments have shown that when
lab animals are injected with an aggressive cancer, they have much higher
survival rates if they have low or normal blood sugar than if they have high
blood sugar; glucose enables the cancers to grow with reckless abandon. These
and many similar findings suggest that controlling your blood sugar can make a
substantial difference in controlling the course of your cancer.
Most Americans are overfed
but undernourished. We consume too many calories, primarily in the form of fat,
sugar, and animal protein and too few vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals.
For the first time in human history, you can be overweigth but undernourished.
A recent survey by the U.S.Department of Agriculture, for instance, found that
70 percent of men and more than 80 percent of women consumed less than
two-thirds of the RDA for one or more nutrients. In particular, most of us are
not getting enough vitamin E, vitamin B6,, calcium, magnesium and
zinc. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising in a country where a president argued
that ketchup should be considered a vegetable and about one in four “vegetable”
servings are french fries.
There is a relationship
between cancer and what we consume, therefore it is a must for cancer patient
to change their eating habits to more healthy. For normal people, we do need to
take care about our diet as prevention is better than cure.
