What foods are you eating to reduce recurrence?

someone posted a link as I recall that eating something like a dozen lemons a day is a cure. but that didn't "work" either. I use a half a lemon in my daily fresh juice, seds skin & all. vitamin K I hear is rich in the skins of citrus. I can't remember if that helps with blood clotting or blood not clotting, but it does give a good taste. & citrus though tastes acidic turns to base in the body

you're correct: I misspoke. It's the white plith in citrus, the white bitter stuff that has it

Here is a list of vitamin K content of various foods: http://www.drgourmet.com/md/warfarincomprehensive.pdf

Actually it is the opposite, Abigail, vitamin K helps the blood coagulate, among other effects. If you are on medication for blood clots, you have to keep your vitamin K intake low and staple.

Grammy, I am not all that creative. At this point I have a decent rotation of things that we both like, that are healthy and easy to make, but it also means that we eat the same thing often. But if you stick to onion and garlic, olive oil, lemon and whatever veggies are in season or cheap or available frozen, it is not really so bad. Root veggies and squashes can be cubed and thrown in the oven with olive oil and garlic. Anything else can be sauteed with onion, garlic, some tomato if you like etc.

OBX, I should have mentioned the chocolate . I do not eat candy, cookies and cakes, but I have a square of 70% chocolate on most days. It is a health food. That is my story, and I am sticking to it

I see a few pages back that Gully mentions her onc recommends the Paleo diet.  I am currently trying to work my way towards that diet.  I have always eaten a lot of fruits and vegetables but was semi-vegetarian and also ate a lot of pasta, put sugar in my coffee, and ate a lot of dairy.  That way of eating did not prevent BC.  This past February, I changed my diet in an attempt to lose some weight.  Long story but I did lose 10 lbs by eliminating all dairy except a little cheese, all potatos and a lot of wheat, especially high gluten wheat.  However in April I discovered I had another 5mm mass.  So at that point I didn't know if my new diet was going to be good enough even though I was at a lower weight and seemed to be eating a lot of anti-cancer foods.   So I continued to explore. 

I saw a documentary called The Perfect Human Diet.  It talks about how humans ate the same diet for 2 m years and then 10,000 years ago grain was introduced and only recently processed foods.  Purely from an evolutionary standpoint, they don't believe this is enough time to have evolved to this diet.  This sparked me to read again a book I already have by Gary Taubes called "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and in that I was struck by the fact that primitive people did not have cancer until they came into contact with Europeans and their white flour and sugar. 

So this is the diet I am working my way towards.  For breakfast I usually have nuts and pumpkin seeds.  On the weekends I have eggs.  For lunch I usually have salad with meat and nuts.  For dinner I usually have grilled vegetables or stir fry and meat.  Not perfect yet because I still have a few crackers or a little bread now and then, and yes a little chocolate.  I still try to eat a lot of the anti-cancer foods you all have been mentioning, but the big difference is I've added meat and eggs and FAT back. It also convinced me to finally get the sugar out of my coffee.   

AlaskaAngel, I so relate to your post and I am not 60.  When I had my son at 35 I was unable to lose the 20 lbs I gained.  Literally 16 years later, I weighed exactly the same as two weeks after my son was born, and this was after 16 years of trying to diet EVERY day.  Not succeeding obviously, but trying.  One thing you might check out that worked for me is "The Plan" by Lynn Genet-Recitas.  I wasn't going to go into detail in my post but this is the diet I mentioned I tried starting in February and I lost 10 lbs!  I am currently trying to become more Paleo in hopes of stopping cancer, but for weight loss I was extremely sucessful with The Plan.  It essentially claims that some of the foods we have been told are healthy are not, and you end up devising a plan of foods that work for you by testing foods. 

just want to say thanks for keeping this thread going.....still learning new information. Got to check out The Plan diet. ...would love to lose 10 pounds. I am in week 3 of the Couch 2 5 K running app. I'm 61 and determined.....

Dulcigirl, both Hepburns are great role models, I think!

I didn't know it until reading your paleo link, but that is the diet I'm doing (except for eating salt) although I would have to eat a bit more meat/eggs to truly match it. The varieties of squash especially have helped. Until I did more of them I had thought of some of them as being more starchy than they actually are. And they are so available right now in the stores!

TwoHobbies, thanks for the info on Genet-Recitas -- I will check on that. BTW, when I first started having problems after treatment, with dieting, I made the effort to include visits with the cancer center dietitian in Seattle, but he too was clueless about the diff in metabolism reduction. He did a test measuring my breath with a device that provides your recommended caloric intake per day in order to lose weight. My results were 1440 calories per day, but to get it to actually work for weight loss, I would have to do 2 full hours per day 7 days a week of strenuous exercise (with more than that amount of exercise each day to make up for any sick days, or days spent in such things as travel status. I actually started hauling a jump rope with me everywhere and jumped rope in airports, etc. while waiting for planes to try to keep up, but it was a complete bust.) Add that to an hour's travel time round-trip to use a gym, plus the 1/2 of showering and dressing again afterward, and half the day is wiped out entirely.

YouTube is great for lectures and its free! 

Here's an interesting video by Gary Taubes on YouTube:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDneyrETR2o
And heres one of a Loren Cordain lecture (Paleo Diet Author)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dw1MuD9EP4

Momine... exactly!  I work with historical records every day and cannot find any historical justification that less people died from cancer than do today.  On any given page of the really old burial registers, I can see "tumour" or "cancer" as a cause of death.  Factor in the high infant mortality, high mortality rate caused by childbirth, and the high mortality rate caused by infection in the pre-antibiotic years and we'll never know if our current rate of cancer is an any way comparable to what it might have been if we were living under the same conditions of those in the - say - 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

Looking at it another way, first world countries have successfully reduced death rates from tuberculosis, cholera, malaria (which was, once, very common in North America), Scarlet Fever, diptheria, typhoid/typhus, diabetes, the list goes on.  Prior to modern food preservation methods, a great deal of people died from food poisoning.  Children were, once, susceptible to cholera infantum, or death due to drinking unpasturised- or spoiled milk, especially during the hot months.  Children also died (and quite frequently) from the fever and inflamation caused by teething.  Trying to compare our incidence of these diseases/illnesses with third world countries doesn't make sense because: 1) it is easily explained by better access to the necessary treatments and; 2) can't always be explained by different lifestyles.

So, to me, it doesn't make sense trying to make a comparison on disease incidence between ancient societies and today's society because there is just too many factors that could- and do skew the outcome.

My onc does the paleo diet himself. I do not think there are any magic bullets here to keep cancer at bay for sure. But as for my personal experience with the paleo diet. Pre paleo diet I had reflux, bloating, etc.. every time I ate and had trouble keeping that extra weight off. I am 5 3 and weighed about 132. Now, after going paleo for two months, I have no reflux or any other nasty gasto symptoms. I am down to 117 without even thinking about a "diet" I eat when hungry and exercise less than I did before adopting the paleo eating plan. I feel so much better, and my quality of life is better as a result! I love eating again! Dont miss the bread and pasta at all.

For those interested: Mark Sisson: The paleo diet and The primal blueprint are two books my onc suggested I read.

It you google the paleo eating plan, there is a PDF of all the paleo approved foods.

I'll try to answer that question of how do we know cavemen were healthy based on some of the points from the books I've read. They have studied mummies and cancer was extremely rare even in people that lived to old age. But even if we ignore whether ancient people had cancer, we do know from the last two hundred years that hunter gatherer cultures also had almost no cancer until they start eating a more modern diet. So I find it thought provoking.

And Selena the records of 17th and18th century are of peoples who did eat grains. The idea is hunter gatherer, more native peoples didn't have cancers and this comes from western doctors who came into contact with them.

Twohobbies, as far as I know, this hypothesis does not hold up under scientific scrutiny, although it is very popular as an idea.

Jessica, like I said at the start, I can easily see how this diet may be useful as a weight loss or weigh maintenance tool. My own diet is similar, except I do eat grains and legumes in moderation.

Bounce, yes, I do, but it is not paleo or gluten-free. I posted it somewhere recently, but now I can't find it. So here goes again.

I make the pie Greek-style, meaning that there is a bottom and a top crust and the filling is less than an inch "high." But this crust can also be used for quiche.

Crust (enough for 2 quiches or a large, 12-inch closed pie):

1 cup sparkling water

1/2 cup olive oil

pinch salt

whole-wheat flour, a little less than a pound.

Pour sparkling water and oil in a bowl, stir in ww flour and salt. Add enough flour that you can knead the dough. Knead it till smooth and even. Let the dough rest a half hour (you can make the filling meanwhile).

Filling:

2 lbs frozen spinach, thawed and as much water as possible squeezed out.

1 large onion, chopped fairly small.

Several cloves garlic, chopped, sliced or mashed.

Large handful cleaned and chopped dill, chervil, mint or parsley or a mix of any of those.

3-4 oz Greek yogurt

2 eggs

3-4 oz feta, chopped or crumbled (optional)

salt and pepper

Method:

Preheat oven to 375 F (175 C). Saute onion and garlic in olive oil till translucent. Add spinach and herbs. Cook 5 minutes, take off heat. Beat yogurt and eggs together, stir in feta, salt and pepper to taste. Mix yogurt mixture well with onion/spinach mixture. Oil a large tin with olive oil. Roll out half the dough and line the tin with it. Spread filling over dough. Roll out other half, cover filling, seal and fold in edges onto pie. Cut several steam holes in top, and brush with olive oil. Bake 45-60 minutes. The pie should be well browned and should have shrunk a bit from the sides when it is done. A few times during baking, roll up a sheet of kitchen paper and soak up the liquid bubbling up in the steam holes. Let the pie cool in the tin, on a rack, for 10-15 minutes. Then gently ease it out of the tin onto the rack to cool further. It makes 8-12 servings.

You can also make fillings from other veggies. Leeks are particularly good. For a large pie like this, use about 5 leeks, sliced, cleaned really well and cooked down with onion, garlic and herbs till most of the water has evaporated. Same deal with the yogurt/egg/feta mixture.

When I have fresh beets with the tops on, I wash the tops well, steam them, squeeze the water out, chop them and add them to the spinach for the spinach pie.