Food and health

I saw this article in the Herald online today (below). Recently I've been hearing and reading the same message from so many different sources. The theory fits nicely with a book I just finished reading called "The China Study" which is pretty fascinating if you can get your hands on a copy.

It summarises the results of the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease. Quick summary: “People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease … People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored,”

It also fits with this awesome talk I saw from Mark Bittman, a New York times food critic on "What's wrong with the way we eat". I highly recommend taking 18 minutes of your life to watch this, it's very entertaining and really interesting.

The simple message seems to be best summed up by Michael Pollan (author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma") as:
Eat food (real food, not edible foodlike substances)
Mainly plants
Not too much

The interesting thing is that none of these authors advocates vegetarianism or veganism.

Making food an ally against cancer

Just imagine two people each driving their car - one has had too much to drink and is chatting on her mobile phone, while the other, who's had no alcohol, drives safely, carefully observing all the rules. Which one is least likely to lose control of their car? The answer's obvious - the safe driver. It's a similar story with cancer prevention and lifestyle, say two Canadian scientists Richard Beliveau and Denis Gingras - just as driving safely won't make you accident-proof on the road, healthy habits won't make you cancer-proof either - but they'll go a long way to lowering your risk of harm.

One third of cancers are now linked to poor diet, usually meaning too few plant foods, say Beliveau and Gingras, the authors of Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer. Both are researchers with the University of Quebec at Montreal, where Beliveau holds the Chair in the Prevention and Treatment of Cancer (so let's assume he knows what he's talking about). In order to give our bodies a fighting chance against the disease, they say, we need to provide cancer with the least favourable conditions for it to thrive in our bodies - and that's where choosing the right food comes in.

There are two terrific things about this book - a collaboration between the two scientists and a team of Canadian chefs. One is that it delivers - in language you can understand - detailed nutrition science that explains the cancer process and how food can help disrupt it .

The other is that it has 160 pages of good, easy recipes to help you put the science into practice, using foods which science suggests are important sources of anti-cancer molecules - among them are seaweed, mushrooms, tomatoes, cruciferous vegetables, flaxseed, berries, citrus, soy, tomatoes, green tea - and dark chocolate. None of them are magic bullets, stress Gingras and Beliveau, who'd rather describe them as allies that can help bolster our defences against disease.