Your mother always told you to “eat your vegetables” and its no surprise that she was right. Interestingly enough, the compounds in fruits and vegetables (called polyphenols) that give them their beautiful colours, flavours and taste are the same compounds that have incredible healing properties.

Foods with high levels of healing polyphenols include soybeans, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, green tea, fava beans, kale, grapes and the spice turmeric.

Sipping approximately three cups of green tea has been shown to reverse breast cancer in laboratory mice by suppressing the gene that triggers the disease. A daily cup of broccoli sprouts, which has sulforaphane as an active compound, has been shown to reduce the risk of developing many cancers.

The full review is published in the journal Clinical Epigenetics and research more about angiogenesis and epigenetics to discover more about the healing properties of polyphenols.

Photo from http://therawendeavor.com/?p=122 – Yummy Kale Salad recipe!

Recently (September 2010), Dr. Oz interviewed Dr. William Li about his antiangiogenic research. Angiogenesis is the term used to describe the body’s ability to create new blood vessels and capillaries to heal damage to the body. While this is important to maintain homeostasis, there is another time when angiogenesis occurs – and thats when cancer tumors send out angiogenic enzymes and new capillaries are formed to feed the tumor. Not good – because this allows cancer cells to grow and divide at a much faster rate.Dr. William Li has developed several antiangiogenic drug therapies to stop angiogenesis to cancer tumors, but while doing his research he discovered that there are several foods that inhibit angiogenesis.How You Can Eat (and Drink) to Defeat Cancer Eating to defeat cancer can be accomplished simply by adding a few anti-angiogenic foods to your meals each day. Our diet is all about making choices. Since we all eat every day, why not choose foods that can reduce your risk of disease? Listed below are some food facts, supported by scientific research, to help you get the most cancer fighting benefits from your diet. 

• Be picky. Red Delicious and Granny Smith apples have twice as many cancer fighters as Fuji or Golden Delicious apples. The San Marzano tomato contains more cancer fighters than any other variety. Wine grapes grown in cooler climates have more cancer fighters than grapes grown in warmer climates.
• Eat Your Sprouts. Broccoli sprouts can contain more cancer-fighting properties than regular broccoli.
• Dunk Your Teabag. Dunking a green tea bag up and down releases more cancer-fighting molecules than letting the bag just sit in the cup.
• Cook Your Tomatoes. Raw tomatoes are good, but cooking them in olive oil is better. Tomatoes contain the phytonutrient lycopene which, when combined with olive oil, has very strong antiangiogenic capabilities.
• Chew Your Greens. Chewing leafy greens helps to release enzymes that activate cancer-fighting molecules embedded deep in the leaves.
• Go Soy. Fermented soy, like the kind used in miso soup, and tempeh, contains four times more cancer fighters than regular soybeans.
• Choose one cancer fighting food for each meal. We eat at least 3 meals each day, that adds up to more than a thousand of cancer fighting food opportunites each year.
• Foods from the brassica family are antiangiogenic – brassicas include broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, bok choy, kale, Brussels sprouts, rapini.
• Berries, like raspberres and strawberries, contain ellagic acid in their seeds. Ellagic acid is both an antioxidant and antiangiogenic.
• Omega 3 EFAs – found in white fish like flounder and flax seed oil – are antiangiogenic.

There’s lots more of Dr. William Li’s research available at http://www.angio.org/.  Also, there’s another video of his lecture at TED that’s very interesting and informative.

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