Your Anti-Cancer Menu
By Michael Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D. Call it eating for a cause. You can plan your menu in a way that helps knock out the third leading cancer for both men and women: colorectal cancer. Here's how to tune up your meals:
Breakfast
Add sliced bananas. They're good sources of vitamin B-6. People who get the most of this vitamin reduce their risk of colorectal cancer by 20 percent to 30 percent. You need about 4 milligrams a day for this effect, and you get 0.5 mg from a banana. Other B-6 "bomb the colon cancer" sources are corn, eggs and spinach -- and your multivitamin.
Lunch
Toss broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage into your salad. As part of the Brassica family (that's a family of vegetables, not a singing group), these contain compounds called isothiocyanates. They turn on the GSTM1 gene that produces a protein that causes many colorectal cancer cells to commit suicide. Seems to work for breast and prostate cancers, too.
Snack
Crunch on an apple. The fiber in apples -- pectin -- increases levels of butyrate, a fatty acid that slows the production of a cancer-causing substance.
Dinner
Select the salmon. Men who eat fish and shrimp five times a week have a 40 percent lower risk of colorectal cancer. It's possible that fish keep you from eating red meat, a food that dramatically raises colon cancer risk. We recommend salmon: It's packed with vitamin D, a known colon-cancer protector (it has more than 500 IU in 3 ounces; a good start toward the 1,000 IU a day that adults under age 60 need and the 1,200 needed by people over 60).
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The YOU Docs, Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, are authors of "YOU: The Owner's Manual." Want more? See "The Dr. Oz Show" on TV (check local listings). To submit questions, go to www.RealAge.com. (c) 2009 Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D. Distributed by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
Read more about By Michael Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D. at ArcaMax.com.
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