Eat Your Vegetables

If you are what you eat, then I want you all to be antioxidants. To paraphrase Ty Webb from Caddyshack, See the antioxidant...Be...the antioxidants...."

Two excellent bits of cancer- and diet-related pieces of news recently:

First, great news for you all from the American Journal of Clinal Nutrition.

In an article called "Dietary Flavanoid Intake and Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Risk," researchers concluded that "Higher total flavonoid intake was significantly associated with lower risk of NHL." Basically, they are seeing that eating foods that are high in certaint antioxidants might help prevent NHL, both agressive types and indolent (like follicular) types. The antioxidants mentioned are found in foods like onion and garlic; kale and broccoli; spinach and dark green lettuces; tomatos; apples; grapes and deep-colored berries; tea (especially green tea), red wine, and chocolate.

So that's good news for you. Less good for me, since it's about preventing NHL, but some of those foods are also thought to help slow down tumor growth (a recent study I read about seemed to show that steamed broccoli, more than other ways of preparing broccoli, brought out larger amounts of tumor-slowing compounds).

Yet another reason to eat well, just in case getting older wasn't reason enough. (And now you can feel less guilty about getting raspberries and dark chocolate in your next Dairy Queen Blizzard -- you're preventing cancer, after all.)


The other piece of news: researchers have found that just a few habits will greatly increase the quality of life of cancer survivors. Pretty simple: exercise for 30 minutes a day, five days a week; eat 5 servings of fruits and veggies a day; and stop smoking. That one is good news for me. OK, technically, I'm not a "survivor" in the way the term usually used (someone in remission), but I consider myself a survivor from the day I was diagnosed. And I'm doing all of those things now.


The common thread is the fruits and veggies. Get into the habit if you aren't already in it. Admit it -- you need more fiber in your diet anyway. I've taken to keeping a bowl of fruit on my desk at work and having an apple or orange instead of going downstairs to the coffee wagon for a bagel. Maybe not a cure-all. But it's good in so many ways.


The USDA is trying to keep a searchable list of Farmers Markets on its web site. Look for one. Visit often. Eat more produce, cut down on the gas used to deliver it, and support your local economy.

Amen.