Step 2: Cancer and your diet! Microwaves & Ultra Processed Foods!
Your body is a beautiful, complex, miracle of nature and it deserves to be nourished properly.
This series of short articles aims to give you a number of steps to follow to find the perfect anti-cancer diet. Of course the origin of cancer is multi-factorial and depends on a lot more than just diet alone, however there is so much you can do to start right here in your fight against Cancer and as an integrative metabolic oncology specialist nutritionist, I want to show you how.
Avoid processed food!
At face value this sounds like a no-brainer but we actually don’t always understand what processed food actually is.
An official definition is this: (It’s an ultra-processed description too)
Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). Group 1 [un- or minimally processed] foods are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. (Gibney, 2018)
Sounds yummy!
That sliced bread in a plastic bag you buy from the supermarket is an ultra processed food.
The dreaded ‘UPF’ (ultra processed food) label isn’t simply targeted at ready meals, doughnuts and cereal fruit loops. It’s anything that went through a process to become something you couldn’t make from a few basic ingredients in your own kitchen and as the quote above says ‘an alternative to freshly prepared food’.
Pasta is a processed food. The grains that went to make the flour, that makes the pasta (in the factory) were likely grown with glyphosate if you are in the US and were refined, treated, bleached and extruded into whatever shape you like. We are tricked into thinking that this IS a whole food, it’s not!
Plus if you read Step 1, you know that we aren’t evolved to eat wheat. Pasta is just like bread which is basically just sugar to the body. If you want to avoid cancer, these empty carbs shouldn’t be on your weekly shopping list.
These carbohydrates are broken down into sugar in the body and sugar is the primary driver of cancer, between 70-90% of cancers are sugar driven.
Sure you can make your own freshly prepared bread, but you won’t be throwing all the ingredients in there that make a commercial loaf sit on a shelf for days on end, not perishing and remaining stable… your home made loaf would be like a house brick by the time that commercial loaf was approaching its best before date and with good reason.
And while I don’t advocate eating grains, the reality is that wheat is a highly addictive (and pleasurable) food that many people don’t want to fully give up. Gluten contains morphine like substances and of course the carbs, becoming sugar gives us that sugar hit. So fine, we all get to choose our poison as grown ups, it’s better if we actually do that in an informed way, instead of eating this stuff actually believing it’s good for us when it’s making us sicker. If you are going to have it, consider making your own or getting the best quality you can!
You want to have foods in your cupboards that have a short shelf life. You want to have foods that will go off quickly as these foods are real. You may have to shop a little more frequently for the freshest foods is all, maybe that means a couple more walks to the supermarket for that days’ ingredients. You also get to move and carry the smaller bag of groceries back home. Your body wins all round. Fresh food and movement. Win Win!
Did you see the image of the McDonalds burger meal that looked exactly the same 4 years later…?
I’ve never forgotten that image. What processes does a food item have to go through to be able to be so ‘preserved’ that nothing changes over a few years. You don’t want to have to force your body to ‘deal with that’.
Not so happy any more….
Microwaves.
If you microwave your food, it becomes a junk food. You risk damaging any unstable fats in your food (see my latest blog post on Omega 3 to understand fats and how they are constructed). If the fats aren’t saturated then they aren’t stable and so not able to withstand processes like being irradiated/heated. These fats then become damaged and damaged fats cause damage to your own cell membranes.
There is some evidence to show that vitamins are damaged in the microwaving process too. B12 was shown to be instantly damaged when microwaved, being converted into a non usable kind. (Watanabe et al., 1998)
Microwaving in plastic causes the release of millions of microplastic particles into the food. These plastics can act as oestrogen mimickers, sitting in the docking port of your cells called receptors, pretending to be oestrogen, which can drive many kinds of cancer. You don’t want these plastics in your body. It’s really sad to see that the research cited below, refers to baby and toddler ingestion of these plastics from the drinks that parents are unknowingly microwaving to give to their kiddos.
Kids are heavily exposed to plastics just from the drinks they consume from plastic bottles every day, leaching microplastics into their water and juice or milk or sadly for most babies these days, their artificial milk. These kids have then got to live with ongoing hormonal disruptions, skin problems due to detoxification issues and of course increased risks of oestrogen driven cancer. (Kazi Albab Hussain et al., 2023)
Processed foods include ingredients that were made in a lab by food technologists! Your body didn’t evolve over hundreds of thousands of years to process this junk!
I can and will tell you over the coming articles, what you need to eat and how to construct a generally good diet for your body, however to get started let’s understand that good health is based on addressing two things.
Deficiencies - you need to get blood work done and book in with a nutritionist or registered naturopath for this. Usually you start with supplements to address nutritional deficiencies then your clean and natural diet takes over (and you keep checking regularly and temporarily correcting with supplements where necessary).
Toxicity - don’t put in the junk that needs you to detoxify it in the first place. Stay clean! Reduce the toxic load.
Next up: What are the pillars of a great diet?
Can you do a post on the rise of iron deficient anemia in connection to diet?
So glad that I found you!
Thank you for your post.
You mentioned getting blood work to test for deficiencies
What do you think of hair analysis to check for mineral deficiency and toxicity?