Know These Foods That Fight Breast Cancer!

Interviewer: Your book deals with breast cancer. Do certain foods target or can your book or similar ones apply to different types of cancers?

Helayne Waldman: Well, there's a lot of foods in our book that are applicable to many, many, many cancers, but there's a few things that are very particularly applicable to breast cancer and I guess what I would focus on would be the cruciferous vegetables because the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage, Brussels sprouts, especially broccoli sprouts, contain vito-nutrients called glucosinolates and those glucosinolates help to detoxify estrogen in our system. They help convert what's a toxic form of estrogen into a much more benign and less toxic form of estrogen. So they are specific to helping us manage, what most of us experience as estrogen overload, which is a contributor to breast cancer. So we stress those a lot.

We also stress foods that are very friendly to the liver because the liver, again, is very involved in how you metabolize estrogen. So if your liver is working well, then your estrogen's going to be metabolized that much more efficiently.

And, then, finally, we stress, and this is good for every, not just cancer, but every health condition under the sun, is fermented foods, but they do have a particularly interesting and critical role in breast cancer because when the... if we colonize our guts with healthy bacteria and we eat what's called lignans, which are found in some nuts and flax seeds in particular, the bacteria and the lignans will combine to create compounds called intertidal and enterolactone and those are anti-cancer compounds and they also help target. They help us to, again, detoxify estrogens. So it is interesting how some of foods are just sort of good for everything, but we do have some that we really, really stress with breast cancer.