Reducing Disease Risk

So chard and greens in general are just wonderful for you.
I mean, I can't say enough about greens.
And I know Dr. Max, I always forgot the statistic.
But you were saying if people eat
one serving of leafy green vegetables a day,
it lowers their chance of heart disease by-- what is it?
30%.
By 30%.
One serving of this a day will lower
your chance of heart disease by 30%.
It's just boggling why people wouldn't be eating greens
all the time.
So I think sometimes people have this feeling-- I'm not sure
if this is on.
Uh-oh.

So let's talk a little about while we're heating up
our stove what other ingredients we have.
That's OK.
No worries.
I was like [INAUDIBLE].
So chard is anti-inflammatory.
It's one of the most powerful cancer-fighting vegetables
out there.
It's filled with beta-Carotene, fiber, vitamins A and C.
It's just a powerhouse.

But sometimes chard is one of those vegetables that
inhibits the absorption of calcium.
So you don't want to eat chard every single day, because it
might inhibit the absorption of calcium.
So what you can do is you can substitute this recipe
with kale.
What else can you eat with the chard
to help absorb the calcium?
Well, the chard has oxalate in it which can interfere--
Interfere with it.
--with some of the leaf greens.
Spinach, chard, and beet greens are not
great sources of calcium because of--
Oxalic acid, is that?
--oxalate.
Oxalate binds it up.
But other dark green vegetables are great sources
of calcium, kale, dark green lettuces, so yeah.
So it's good to--
Mix it up.
--mix it up.
How is the gazpacho?
Delicious.
Good.
Delicious.
So pretty easy, right?
I mean we're talking a lot.
It was just blended up.
And the key things of why this tastes good
is the olive oil to give it that fat, that mouth-feel, which
helps, again as Dr. Max said, to absorb
a lot of those nutrients.
I mean, there's no point in doing this wonderful beautiful
healthy vegetable dish, and then your body doesn't actually
get to utilize all this because it can't absorb it.
So it's the olive oil not vinegar.
Those are the two key things that made it so good.
That tomato juice that you used, is that sodium-free?
It is not.
So actually I was thinking about that
when I was-- I believe they have a sodium-free one.
So there is some sodium in there.
So you might want to just watch that.
Now, when you're cooking with whole foods
like we are today for the most part,
you don't necessarily have to watch that.
But when utilizing an ingredient like this,
it is important to keep that mind.
I know, I mean I could tell.
I mean, it tastes like plenty of salt.
It's seasoned, yes.
So and I knew you didn't put very much in there.
That's why I asked.
Yeah.
So it's got a little bit of its own sea salt together.
OK.
So we're going our pan nicely pre-heated.
So some of the ingredients that we're using today,
we're using maple syrup, which just gives us
a little bit of sweetness to that.
And that's high in zinc because we're using Grade B.
Now, Grade B we have at the co-op in bulk.
So if you're in the bulk section of the co-op,
you can buy as little or as much as you'd like.
And Grade B, even though it's less expensive than Grade A,
is higher in zinc.
And zinc has been shown to lower the risk of prostate cancer.
Because the more zinc you have, the higher chances
you have of combating that type of cancer.
So that's a great ingredient to use a sweetener.
Obviously, it is a sugar, so it's not the type of thing
where you can have as much maple syrup as you want all the time,
because then you might have other issues.
We're using citrus, orange zest.
Now, zest is the outer peel of the citrus fruits.
And zest in citrus fruits is anti-microbial
and it's also anti-inflammatory.
And oftentimes, people think it's
the fruit that's the most nutritious.
Well, in this case, it's the zest but also
the white pith which is that part that they always say,
don't go down to the pith because it's a little bit
bitter.
Well, you're going to see that in another recipe,
in our smoothie, we're going to use the pith from that lemon
to give us some of those extra nutrients, because that's where
the-- is it the monoterpenes that are in the pith?
I think the monoterpenes are in the peel.
In the zest.
And then, there are flavonoids, things
like hesperetin in the pith.
And then, of course, you get vitamin C
and everything else in the fruit.
Great.
So wonderful.
Use everything.
We're going to add in our olive oil to our pan.
And I'm doing two times the recipe.
So you'll see there's a little bit more olive oil then
you might use for your single recipe.
And we're going to go ahead and add
in our garlic and our red pepper flakes and our cranberries.

And sometimes, I just add the garlic in.
And just be watchful and mindful of it,
because garlic can burn pretty quickly.
The red pepper flakes are just going
to give us a little bit of heat.
And the reason why we're adding our cranberries in right
now is just to kind of soften them.
After we've zested the orange with our orange zester,
we're going to then use the fruit
and make fresh-squeeze orange juice.
And we add the juice to the pan.

So this a wonderful recipe for the holidays,
too, orange and cranberry to be a great Thanksgiving side dish.
This is a wonderful recipe because it
is beautiful both in the flavors and also in the colors.
If you're serving two people, I'd say one bunch of chard.
So this is the four bunches, [INAUDIBLE]?
Is that what this ends up being in here?
It's three.
Three?
OK.
They were big bunches.
And then, we're going to add in our chard.

And we add a little bit of salt.
And the salt helps to draw out the moisture of the greens,
and it helps to soften the vegetables
so that it cooks now.

And we're going to add in our zest as well.
How many of you use orange and citrus zest regularly?
OK.
So citrus zest is just a wonderful way
to get incredible depth of flavor,
adding really nutritious components into recipes.
Let me add the rest of the green chard.
So you can tear this up or you can chop it,
whatever you prefer.

And sometimes, it's easier to use two things or tongs
to toss the chard in.

And again, we're using garlic which
we talked about has many helpful properties.

[INAUDIBLE] issue of [INAUDIBLE] lettuce and water [INAUDIBLE]?

Well, the lettuce is a little bit moist.
But if you're putting it into the olive oil and orange juice
mixture, so it's already-- yeah.
Sometimes, if you're doing a hot pan, hot oil, and wet,
you might get some splatter.
But because we've already kind of given
that orange juice a little bit of time to reduce,
it's almost developed its own kind of sauce.
So you don't have as much splattering.

OK.
Let these vegetables, this chard, cook down a little bit
and soften.
So if you'll look at your recipe,
it says to have the chard salt zest and sauteed
until the chard begins to darken and intensify.
And the recipe has us-- we're moving the chard
and bringing the liquid to a boil.
And I've left that in there because that's
how it was written for this cookbook.
But sometimes I find depending on the day or the type of pan
you use, sometimes you don't have
a lot of liquid in the bottom left.
It sometimes cooks all down.
So sometimes that stuff is not necessary.
So if you have a lot of liquid in the bottom
and you're feeling like you want to remove
your greens, by all means do that.
If you don't, you want to leave it
in there, make it a little looser,
then you can do that as well.
I'm getting a very nice orange-scented facial
as we speak.
[LAUGHTER]
So it feels very, very healthy.
My skin will thank me.
And then, we're going to go and add in our maple syrup.
And then, oftentimes, you taste food
at the end to see if you need to add salt,
as opposed to just adding it.
We added some to let the chard reduce and kind of soften.
But sometimes at the end of the cooking process
is when it's a good idea to taste for seasoning.
So we'll go ahead and do that and see
if we need to add anymore.
And again here, you want to your preferences.
Restaurant food sometimes can be overly salted.

I think we're fine.
I don't think we need to add anymore salt.
So I have a little bit of liquid here
on the bottom of the pan, so I can show you
the step that you can remove the chard.
So basically we don't want to get it completely hooked down.
But you can see there's that liquid in there.
So it's up to you.
If you want to remove it, you can.
This will definitely give us a lot of nice flavor.
I guess this is where the slotted spoon comes in.
What do you want?
I don't know.

So as you see how much that cooked down.
Really cooked down quite a bit.
Is there a good kind of natural ingredient
that you can use to thicken that liquid?
You can certainly use something like arrowroot.
But you really don't need to, because reduction
is a thickening process that, well, the reduction basically
we're evaporating off the liquid and we're reducing it.
And you don't need to add any thickener when you're reducing,
because it will go ahead and concentrate.
So you're aware that I'm using a non-stick pan.
So this I had intended to get a little bit more liquid out
of this today than in the past.
Sometimes, I've had nothing left in there.
But this is a good technique to learn.
So for example, if you have any vegetables that you don't want
to keep cooking but you have a little bit of liquid
and you want to intensify the flavors.
Or if you're making a sauce, for example,
and it talks about reducing, and you're
like, what the heck is that.
Reducing, what do you mean?
Basically, you're just evaporating off
some of the liquid and concentrating the flavors
and reducing the volume.

The only thing about this particular recipe
is that the citrus juice sometimes
turns the vegetables a little bit.
The color doesn't stay bright and vibrant.
So one of the ways that you can do
that to keep your colors staying very vibrant
is to do what's called, "blanching,"
your green vegetables first and boiling
in salt and water for just about two minutes to set the color.
And then, the cooking process in the saute pan is much shorter.
And that tends to leave your vegetables a little bit more
vibrant.
So now we have this beautiful glaze.
So I took this a little bit far, but I just
wanted you guys to see what that looks like.
So you don't need to add anything to that.
Now, we have this lovely, yummy, syrupy loveliness
of vegetables.
You can see how thick that became.

And that looked very abundant before.
And now, look how-- but still such a beautiful side dish.

Thank you.
So that'll be our small vegetable course
before our next course.
So any questions on the chard recipe?
So you can do that with spinach.
You can do that with kale.

Kale is just one of the vegetables
that I just think people don't eat enough of.
And it's so good for you.
So we're going to sneak it into our smoothie
in the next recipe.
We're going to make another wonderful recipe that
also has some citrus.
And this is going to be our orange pistachio quinoa.
How many people have had quinoa before?
Has everyone had quinoa?
Is there anyone who has not had quinoa?
So quinoa is an ancient grain.
And we'll pass this around.
This is rock quinoa.
And what makes this grain so special?
Well, besides, having a very difficult name to pronounce
and people always getting embarrassed
when they can't find it if they've never bought it before,
quinoa is packed with protein.
So it makes for a wonderful choice,
as opposed to brown rice.
Note, there's some protein there, but not as much.
This is a perfect balance of carbohydrate and proteins.
So it's an excellent choice.
And quinoa contains all the essential amino acids
that we need.
So why would you choose brown rice
when you can choose quinoa?
And you can make it in the same amount
of time in a rice cooker.
So it's really a no-brainer.
Now, quinoa is interesting because like many whole grains,
there's a couple different things
that you can do to prepare.
You can soak your grains overnight.
And what that does is it kind of activates and makes them easier
to digest and it breaks down the phytic acid.
Right.
And we talk about that--

Quinoa is a wonderful grain.
We went ahead and cooked it 20 minutes in water,
so just like you would prepare white rice.
It's two to one, 20 minutes.
And then, we just kind of separated and laid it out
on cookie sheets.
So we didn't bake this.
I just want to make sure that everyone's with me here.
This wasn't a baked preparation.
And then, we're going to just kind of get it nice and fluffy
and separate.
And quinoa has a nutty flavor.
It kind of has these fun, little curly tails at the end.
I mean, tails might be not the best way of describing it.
But I can't really figure out another way to describe it.
It's a cute little whole grain that
has this very nutty texture.

So we're going to put our quinoa in a bowl.
And if you were making a warm salad,
or even again for Thanksgiving this would
be a wonderful dressing or stuffing substitute,
you could certainly just keep the quinoa warm in a pan
and do this whole recipe warm.

So other things that we have besides our quinoa,
some lovely aromatic vegetables and herbs.
So we have some green onions.
We have mint.
And mint is one of those things that's not just a garnish.
It's great for digestion.
It's very antimicrobial as well.
It has vitamin C and beta-Carotene.
And it helps in a myriad of different things.
It also takes part in the NF-k regulator,
which that's probably the most scientific
that we will get in this class.
And Dr. Max, do you want to talk a little bit about that.
I know we talked about spices that turn off a substance
called NF-kappa B in the cells.
And that gets activated as one of the major initiators
of the inflammatory cascade.
So [INAUDIBLE] spices turn that process off,
which is what we want.
We're trying to reduce the amount
of inflammatory chemicals that are used in cancer cells.
[INAUDIBLE]

And cinnamon is another one, and we're
going to be using that in our smoothie.
So mint, yes, I mean, I always would laugh at my mom,
because she will always eat her mint off of her plate.
It doesn't matter what.
And she'll ask other people at the table--
not strangers-- can I have your mint.
And I always thought, it's so funny that she does that.
But now, I think she's really onto something.
So we have our quinoa that's been cooked ahead,
and we're going to combine our quinoa
with our mint and our green onions.
And again, the mint we have just soaking in water.
You can see how brown the water became.
This is a little cook's trick if you want your mint
to not turn black, and you want to chop it ahead of time, just
like basil.
Basil will do the same thing.
You want to soak it in water.
So that is a nice, little trick.
So basil and mint turn black if you chop it up ahead of time.
You can add in our scallions.
And hopefully, you guys can all see up here on the monitor
if I put this in the right position.
And again, with our orange zest.
So you can use lemon zest, you can use orange zest.
Zest gives you that wonderful citrus flavor
without a lot of the acidity that vinegar
brings or lemon juice.
And then, we are going to add some of the juice
as well, some orange juice and lemon juice.
So some nice vitamin C here.
Olive oil, again that good, healthy olive oil.
And then, we have pistachios and raisins.
And pistachios like other nuts are very good for us.
And you could use almonds in this particular recipe,
you could use cashews, you could omit the nuts if you'd like.
But nuts are a really wonderful source of protein and fiber.
And what else are pistachios really good for?
The antioxidants, the vitamin E's, and the oils.
So really, really good for us.
We have some raisins here, which have some-- phenolic acid?
Is that what's in these?
And they do have some sugars, so you
do want to watch some of that.
You don't want to be eating tons and tons of raisins.
But it's been known on certain studies
to control some cancers in certain laboratory animals.
So we're going to add in some of the raisins.
You could use dried cranberries, dried cherries.
Any of those dark berries are higher in the anti-oxidants,
like the cherries and the cranberries,
and our toasted pistachios.
So this recipe for me has a lot of Mediterranean,
kind of Middle-Eastern flavors with the orange
and the mint and the pistachios.
You can make it sound really fancy
and say you're making Moroccan orange couscous.
So all of these recipes are full of lots of flavor
and are easy to eat, easy to digest,
and are the type of thing that you can have
and you can make in batches.
And this salad, the same thing, can
last four to five days in your refrigerator.
It won't freeze, but you can make a big batch
and you can just have it for lunch.
And paired with greens you just ate, this is a wonderful meal.
You have all of your extra protein and your vegetables
and your carbohydrates altogether.
What did you guys think of the greens?
They're delicious.
Great, great.
I know there wasn't a lot, so it definitely cooks down.
So we're going to taste this and see
if we need to add anymore olive oil or any sea salt.

I'm just going to add a pinch of sea salt.
I'll use this one today.

So when you're taking for salt, you
don't want food to taste salty.
You just want it to be flavorful and you
want that salt to bring out the natural flavors of the food
that you're cooking.

That tastes delicious.
Doesn't that look yummy?
Mm-hmm.

Yes, quinoa is just a hugely important grain to get to know,
because not only is it so quick to cook and it's so versatile.
You can do salads.
Virtually any recipe you see for rice,
whether it's a pilaf, fried rice, rice patties,
you could do with quinoa.
And it's just a wonderful ingredient,
because it's relatively inexpensive.
You can buy it in bulk.
So if you're not quite sure about this quinoa thing,
you can buy it in just a small amount.
It is very helpful in that it contains lignens which
our gut converts to enterolactone,
which a lot of scientists believe
mimics the estrogen in our bodies.
And so that can also help us with the cancer prevention.

Welcome to the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op.
I'm going to be your instructor today.
My name is Terese Esperas.
And I'm delighted to be instructing you guys today.
This is one of my favorite classes
that we get to do because it's very rewarding and very
inspirational.
Thank you for having me.
So Barbara is going to be assisting me today.
And Adriana Jones is our outreach coordinator,
who was possible for getting this all together.
So thank you, ladies.
So if you have any questions at all during the class,
please don't hesitate to have a conversation
and we'll keep it informal and I'd
love for people to share their experiences.
I love to refer to Dr. Max because she knows
so much more about many of the nutritional components
than I do, so it's always great to have her here.
I wish she was in all of my classes to refer to.
So thank you, guys.
So today, I wish that the weather was a little bit warmer
because then I would have the perfect soup to go into,
but obviously, it's summer in Sacramento
and tomatoes are abundant so we're
going to be making a wonderful chilled gazpacho to serve
to you.
So if you all turn to your recipes.
You have a recipe packet in front of you.
And Adriana will go over some of the other things
that you have in your folders.

But let's talk about all of these wonderful ingredients.
So what's the first thing that you're just
noticing when I'm bringing these ingredients out?
What do you see?
Fabulous color.
Exactly.
Fabulous color.
And that right away-- we eat with our eyes first.
So that not only is it the visual component,
but nature has an interesting way
of making some of the most beautiful fruits and vegetables
be some of the most healthy fruits and vegetables.
So all of these wonderful colors, these reds,
are really wonderful for us.
So We're going to talk a little bit about the ingredients
and what they are good for in terms of nutrition and support
during this time.
And also other things that you can do.
So let's look at the recipe first.
We have cucumbers, red bell peppers, tomatoes, some onion,
and garlic.
And both the garlic, as we know, is a very strong important part
in terms of the flavors, but also it
has wonderful components.
Antimicrobial a it's very good for information as well.
And same with onions, right?
But not as much as garlic maybe?
So very, very healthy ingredients here.
Very strong.
We also have some vinegars, a little olive oil,
which is a wonderful healthy fat.
And olive oil is something that we
like to use a lot in the Mediterranean diet,
as well as in a majority of recipes.
And olive oil is an oil-- if you're not
familiar with cooking, it's just an all-purpose, good, healthy
oil.
And Dr. Max, did you want to just touch on a few--
I think we talked about that last week.
A couple of the antioxidants-- oleocanthal,
[INAUDIBLE] blood sugar.
So a great all around oil.
And we talked about cooking it at low heat--
Lower heat.
--in order to use it for cooking.
Otherwise, it's great for salads.
So one of the things about gazpacho
is it's a Spanish cold soup recipe.
How many people have had it before?
It's a wonderful way to get a lot of fresh vegetables in you
and it's great because, especially right now
when you might have not as much energy and time.
Maybe it's not something that you just have tons of time
to be cooking or you're a caregiver
and you're wanting to cook for someone,
this is something that you can make a big batch of
and you can just have.
So that when you feel your energy dropping
or you need a little pick me up, it's hot,
you're just not necessarily feeling like eating a lot,
you can drink a little bit of this gazpacho
and it can be very fortifying.
So the vegetables are chopped up first.
And there's several different ways and recipes
that you can do gazpacho.
In many cases, you can blend it all up in a blender,
like a Vitamix, and it can be nice and pureed
and can be very smooth.
Or alternatively, you can use a processor
and you can process each vegetable separately.
So I'm going to leave that up to you.
We're going to do it the way the recipe is written
and hopefully, I'll be able to remember how to use this.
Me too.
There we go.
This one is a little different.
So we're just going to roughly chop each vegetable.

And this way, it gives us a little bit of texture.
But if you would rather just have everything pureed then
you absolutely can just put everything
in a Vitamix or a food processor and do it that.
way.
So this is a little bit of an extra step,
but the result is that it gives us a little bit more
of an interesting flavor and crunch.
It smells good.
It does smell good.
So this is one of the great recipes, I think,
that was probably just made for a Sacramento summer
just because so many people already
are growing these things in their gardens.
Peppers, tomatoes.
Cucumbers are very easy to grow as well.
So we're going to process our red bell peppers.

If peppers upset your stomach, you can use fewer peppers.
You can omit them.
Peppers do give us a nice flavor,
it gives a nice sweetness to it, but sometimes peppers
can-- I don't know what it is, Dr. Max,
about peppers that give people that upset stomach.
Do you know?
Is it the skin?
There are some of the chemicals in the nightshade family which
can be irritating for some people, especially [INAUDIBLE].

OK.
I always wondered about that.
So I'm going to put our tomatoes and our garlic
and our onion in together and process this.
Yeah, I wish that it was really, really hot,
but I'm actually glad it's not hot.
This soup is wonderful when it's really, really hot.
We're going to give this a little bit more of a pulse.
And after you look at your recipe,
after each vegetable is processed,
we're going to combine in a large bowl
and add the garlic, tomato juice.
Well, I would add the garlic a little bit
before because I find that it helps a little bit more
to get it worked in.
And then we're going to add some tomato juice.
And the tomato juice that we're using
is an organic tomato juice.
In we have our vinegar.
And the vinegar that we're using is this one.
I'll pass it around.
It's a nice agrodolce, which means sour sweet.
So it has a nice little wine flavor to it.
It's very nice.
You can use apple cider vinegar, Bragg's apple cider vinegar
would be just fine.
OK.
So then we're just going to put everything in this
and just mix it together just a few pulses.

And doing it separately ensures that you
don't have huge chunks.
And our vinegar.
Now sea salt.
How many people are familiar with sea salt?

OK.
So sea salt is one of the things that we
use in cooking here at the co-op,
but it's also a really good ingredient for you guys
to get familiar with because it's also an appetite
stimulant.
So there are some more minerals in sea salt
as opposed to table salt.
You could even see this is Real Salt.
It's another brand.
But sea salt actually has minerals where as many
of the iodized table salts-- the umbrella-- doesn't
have a lot of nutrition.
So sea salt is a wonderful thing to get used to cooking with.
And I'm going to add my sea salt and pepper.

How's kosher salt?
Kosher salt is a mined salt.
So it's a flaked mined salt.
It's not from the sea.
It can't be if it's kosher.
So it doesn't have the same benefits
as sea salt would have.
But still a lot of chefs like to use kosher salt
because it has a really nice flavor.

Oh, good.
I didn't overflow the food processor.
That's always good.
I was worried for a second there.

OK.
So that's the gazpacho.
Now the reason why if you put everything in a food processor
all together whole, you aren't going to get it fine enough.
And then if you want to retain a little bit of chunk,
it's going to be in very odd pieces.
So that's why it's better to do it individually.
The Vitamix, if you have Vitamixes at home--
how many of you do?
Anybody?
This side of the room does.
It's a wonderful tool to have.
It certainly is an investment, but it's one
that you'll have forever.
The Vitamix just absolutely makes things so easy.
It's such a lovely thing.
And we'll be using it for our smoothies.
Oh and I forgot to add the olive oil, which
is an important component.
But we'll just drizzle that in.
And just give it a little whisk.
So gazpacho is just a wonderful thing
to have during the summertime.
It's a great snack.
It's a wonderful lunch.

You can add some lovely toasted whole wheat bread, croutons.
I like to garnish it with some fresh herbs.
That's always good.
We'll give this a little bit of a taste
and we'll see if we need to just season it more.
Now with your seasoning-- that's good--
you always want to season to your own taste buds.
So if something to you tastes particular salty or you're
not a fan of using a lot of seasoning, then season
to your own adjustments.
If you have a medical reason for needing to cut back on salt,
then by all means, follow your doctor recommendations.
OK.
So we're making that oil [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah.
Yeah, maybe just give it a little zzt
so that it emulsifies a little bit.
OK.
So we're going to serve that gazpacho to you.

Any questions on that recipe?
Is there anything about tomatoes that you
want to talk about and maybe lycopene and [INAUDIBLE]?
So great source of vitamin C in that fresh recipe, lycopene
is one of the beta-carotenes, which
are really good for our immune system,
boost the immune system, which we want for fighting cancer.
The lycopene is [INAUDIBLE] most activated
when tomatoes are cooked.
So again, you get the benefits of fresh vitamin
C and the fiber and all that in this recipe.
If you want to boost your intake of those other beta-carotene
antioxidants, then you have to have
some cooked tomato products as well.
What about the tomato sauce that she put in there?
Yea, the tomato juice is cooked and then
there were raw tomatoes.

Hi, I'm Dr. Maxine Barish-Wreden,
and I'm Medical Director for the Sutter Center for Integrative
Holistic Health in Sacramento, California.
I'm going to talk with you a few minutes
about the importance of nutrition in cancer prevention.
Many cancers are on the rise now in the United States.
And many of these are felt to be due in part
to the rising rates of both diabetes and obesity
and overweight in the United States.
In fact, a recent report showed that even
prediabetes can increase the risk of cancer by about 15%.
And what's of concern about that is that about a third-- 30%--
of adult Americans now are felt to have prediabetes.
And many more adults have full-blown diabetes.
In addition, our children are developing
diabetes in alarming numbers now.
Why do these have an impact on cancer?
Well, for one thing, cancer cells love to feed on sugar.
So when we eat a diet that's high in sugar and refined
foods-- leading to an increase in our own blood sugar--
that may be the thing that really
helps to augment cancer cell growth.
Inflammation is something that also
seems to drive cancer cell growth.
And when we eat a diet high in processed foods
or when we gain weight, or if we are sedentary
and not exercising, if we aren't getting enough sleep,
if we're under a lot of stress, all of these things
tend to increase inflammation as well-- another risk factor
for increasing the rates of cancer.
But there's good news.
Americans are waking up to the importance of healthy nutrition
to help us stay well and to combat chronic illness when
it does occur, including cancer.
In 1988, Doctor Harold Foster at the University
of Victoria in British Columbia, looked at 200 cases of people
with advanced cancer who had spontaneous remission
of their cancer-- who completely healed from their cancer.
And he looked to see what happened to those people who
made such dramatic recoveries.
Well, close to 90% of them made significant changes
in their diet.
What did they do?
You probably know already.
They reduced their intake of sugar and processed foods
and they increased their intake of vegetables, fruits, legumes,
and other whole, unprocessed foods.
So why would these changes in our diet
help us to recover from cancer?
Well, we think there's a number of reasons.
Healthy fruits and vegetables are loaded, not only with
minerals and vitamins, which we all know about,
but they're also rich sources of what we call phytonutrients.
And these are chemicals in plants
that seem to have a suppressive impact on cancer.
They also seem to increase the activity of tumor suppressor
genes.
Vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains,
healthy unprocessed foods like that,
also provide us with lots of fiber.
And when we ingest a lot of fiber,
it helps to control our weight and our blood sugar.
Fiber also helps to reduce inflammation.
And it helps to support a healthy bacterial content
in the gut.
And what we're finding now in fascinating science
is that when the bacteria in our intestines are healthy,
they help to keep our immune cells healthy.
And this is probably one of the ways in which they
help to prevent and also treat cancer and other chronic
diseases.
On the other hand, when we eat foods
that are high in sugar and flours, foods that are highly
processed, these foods tend to not only increase our blood
sugar and inflammation, but they are also
usually devoid of these healthy phytonutrients.
So we're getting a double whammy when
we eat a lot of processed foods.
We're increasing the risk of diabetes and elevated blood
sugar.
We're increasing the risk of obesity.
And we're not providing our bodies
with those important phytonutrients that
are really critical in helping us
to fight cancer and other chronic diseases.
So, in summary, we can help to reduce our risk of prediabetes,
diabetes, inflammation, obesity and overweight
by eating a really healthy diet.
And those things, in turn, help us to fight cancer
and to recover from cancer.
It's never too late to make changes
in your diet to help to improve your health
and improve your chances for a full recovery.
We hope here at Sutter that by watching these videos,
you will be inspired to spend more time at farmers markets,
to shop and bring home healthy foods to your own kitchen,
and to cook those foods with your family and your friends.
And we know that this will play an important role
in helping you on your healing journey.
We wish you all the best here at Sutter.
To your health.