Food that Fights Breast Cancer, Part 2

What Do Red Wine and Peanut Butter Have in Common?

Hmm… red wine and peanut butter don’t even go together very well do they. But they both contain a compound called resveratrol that can help prevent breast cancer.

Dr. Eleanor Rogan, PhD, professor at the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center; and Chairwoman of the Department of Environmental, Agricultural, and Occupational Health studied the effects of resveratrol on the development of breast cancer.

Since breast cancer develops in stages, finding a substance that blocks one of the stages effectively stops the development of the cancer.

Estrogen can induce the development of cancer by interacting with the DNA of the cells causing alterations that form the beginning of the breast cancer cells.

That’s where the powerful antioxidant properties of resveratrol come into action. By inactivating the estrogen, resveratrol stops the development of breast cancer.

You’ve probably already heard about the benefits of resveratrol, that it’s found in red wine. And so now there’s a good excuse to drink red wine.

Resveratrol food

But why red wine? The resveratrol resides mainly in the skin of grapes. The skins are included in the process of fermenting red wine, but not white wine. So the resveratrol leaches into the wine from the grape skins during the fermentation process.

But, I don’t recommend drinking alcohol since it upsets body chemistry. Maybe we can eat food that contains resveratrol. Take a look at this chart showing the amount of resveratrol in other food.

Content in wines and grape juice

Content in selected foods

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol

Since there’s not a lot of resveratrol in any food some scientists recommend taking supplements. However, we’re mainly looking at food sources that fight breast cancer in this series of articles. Even the American Society says that eating five servings of fruits and vegetables per day helps prevent the development of all cancer. Resveratrol is just one anti-oxidant among a myriad of them in vegetables and fruit.

So keep including a variety of colors of vegetables in your meals. The various colors provide an array of different phytonutrients and anti-oxidants that build cells and protect against cancer and other degenerative diseases.

If you strive to be as healthy as possible, eat ten servings of vegetables per day to keep the telomeres on your DNA from shortening faster each time the DNA reproduces. That’s an anti-aging trick.

If you like to eat fruit too, keep it to two servings per day. Fruit contains great phytonutrients and anti-oxidants but it also contains fructose, a sugar that can cause havoc in the body if overeaten.