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Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Top 10 Anti-Cancer Vegetables

Photo by David Grunfeld


If you haven’t noticed, we are constantly bombarded with pleas from charities for cancer research money.
“Race for the Cure, Stand Up to Cancer, Buy Pink products, grow a Movember mustache….”
This is often accompanied by the message  that “we are running out of funding for cancer research”.  And of course this is a problem, because “without funding for more research, we will never find a cure”.
Cue the shots of bald women and children poisoned by chemo, accompanied by dramatic music. Then insert a high-profile celebrity to say, “The cure is just around the corner.
Together we can make cancer history. Please give today.”
Here’s the reality. The mega billion dollar pharmaceutical industry has plenty of money to fund research, they would just prefer that you fund it with your donations instead of theirs.
Real problem #1  They are running out of your money.
Real problem #2 They are only interested in medicines they can patent.
Real problem #3  Research on nutrition and natural therapies is ignored.
There are literally thousands of published peer-reviewed studies demonstrating that the 100,000+ phytonutrients in plants have the ability to prevent and reverse cancer.
But because the pharmaceutical industry can’t figure out how to extract these compounds, synthesize them, and patent them for profit, they are ignored.
Doctors can’t even use this published information or they risk losing their license.


But you can!

One of my favorite studies was published in Food Chemistry, January 2009 called,
“The antiproliferative and antioxidant activities of common vegetables: A comparative study”
The title is so boring I almost fell asleep typing it, but hold on, because the results are awesome.
Researchers studied the inhibitory (cancer-stopping) effects of 34 vegetable extracts
on 8 different tumor cell lines.
They basically just ran vegetables through a juicer and then dripped the extracted juice on different cancer cells to see what would happen. Here’s what they found…



The #1 most powerful anti-cancer food was Garlic.

Garlic stopped cancer growth COMPLETELY against these tumor cell lines:
Breast cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer,
childhood brain cancer, and stomach cancer.



Leeks were #1 against kidney cancer. Garlic was #2.

But not just garlic and leeks, almost all vegetables from the Allium and Cruciferous families completely stopped growth in the various cancers tested. Here they are:

  • Allium vegetables: Garlic, Leeks, Yellow and Green Onions
  • Cruciferous vegetables: Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, Cauliflower, Kale, Red cabbage and Curly Cabbage
  • Spinach and Beet Root also scored in the top ten against many of the cancers tested.
  • Honorable mentions: Asparagus, fiddlehead, green beans, radishes and rutabaga.
  • Poor Performers: Acorn Squash, Bok Choy, Boston Lettuce, Carrot, Endive, English Cucumber, Fennel Bulb, Jalapeño, Orange Sweet Pepper, Potato, Radicchio, Romaine lettuce, and Tomatoes.




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