Statistics indicate that one in two people will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime. Today’s cancer rates are daunting and provide motivation toward a healthier lifestyle to reduce cancer risk. What can you do? Learn about important steps to empower yourself with health promoting strategies. These self-care approaches support your optimal vitality, making you feel the best that you can be.
1. Diet
Good nutrition supports your entire body and even positively influences your genes. The foods you eat affect your potential for cancer. Some foods promote cancer cell growth and others kill cancer cells. Learning the differences between what to eat and what not to eat is essential to reducing cancer risk.
Top foods to reduce cancer risk include vegetables, fruits, garlic and onions, herbs and spices such as turmeric, mushrooms, whole grains, oils, nuts, and seeds, as well as fish without heavy metals. As you improve your diet, you will feel better and better through the support of healthy, anti-cancer foods.
As you add nutritious tasty bites, make sure that you eliminate dietary choices associated with health problems. Foods to moderate and even avoid because they are associated with health problems such as cancer include trans fats, saturated fats, omega-6 fatty acids, sugars, and animal meats.
2. Sleep
Sleep is the body’s natural resting state. Everyone needs sleep to rejuvenate and function optimally. Sleep is critical to parasympathetic nervous system function for repairing and restoring health. Rest rejuvenates body, mind, and spirit.
Abnormal sleep disrupts the circadian rhythms that control the body’s biological clock, biorhythms, and melatonin production. These rhythms control metabolism and cellular functions within 24-hour activity patterns. Ongoing, abnormal sleep patterns are associated with health problems such as cancer.
What constitutes optimal sleep? Research suggests that healthy adults need between 7 and 8 hours of quality sleep nightly. Some people need even more sleep. Tune into what feels best for you and incorporate strategies to support your best sleep possible--reduce your light exposure in the evening for consistency with natural nighttime darkness, aim to transition into sleep without electronics and intense cognitive activity, go to bed when you naturally want to sleep and be consistent with your rhythms, and sleep in complete darkness to support melatonin production and your biorhythms.
3. Exercise
Movement can raise energy levels and provide many physical benefits, including reduced cancer risk. Studies indicate that exercise helps to prevent obesity that is a major cancer risk factor, provide health benefits against various chronic diseases associated with cancer, and produce many benefits for cancer patients. Specific physical benefits of exercise include improved health function, decreased body fat, increased bone density, enhanced metabolism and detoxification efficiency, lower stress, better mood, energy, strength, and more.
How much do you need to exercise? Consider moderate-intensity physical activities for at least 30 minutes on five or more days of the week or vigorous-intensity physical activities three or more days of the week for at least 20 minutes. Try adding eight to 10 strength-training exercises with repetitions twice weekly. Know that exercise is more than going to a gym. Incorporate practices that you thrive on such as dancing, yoga, hiking, and whatever other forms of movement that you love.
4. Low Levels of Inflammation
Studies show that chronic inflammation is associated with cancer. What does that mean and how does it work? The human body experiences both acute and chronic inflammation. Acute inflammation occurs to heal swelling, irritation, redness, and pain when you have an injury such as a cut or bruise. The damaged area attracts immune cells producing inflammatory chemicals to kill toxins and stimulate repair. More often than not, the inflammatory chemical production ceases when the tissue is restored.
But, sometimes the inflammatory response does not stop when the body has the perception of an ongoing threat. The continued inflammatory panic creates a hostile environment. A chronic state of inflammation causes a confused immune response. The result is an environment that initiates and fuels cancer.
Low inflammatory levels reduce cancer risk while high inflammatory levels increase cancer risk. Inflammatory offenders should be avoided such as smoking, alcohol, pollution, not enough sleep, unhealthy foods, too much weight, and stress. Many healthy foods and supplements also provide anti-inflammatory support.
5. Clean Environment
In 2010, the President’s Cancer Panel published a report called Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, emphasizing failed attention and regulations to environmental contaminants as well as massive neglect for addressing cancer prevention and cancer control through environmental causes of cancer. The report said, “The true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated. With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or understudied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread.”
What can you do to reduce environmental contaminants? With thousands of chemicals on the market today, many steps must be taken to eliminate exposures. Use clean products for personal care, household cleaning, water and air purification, as well as other everyday products.
Although cancer prevention is not a guarantee, incorporating these lifestyle strategies will support reducing your cancer risk. Remember, these self-care approaches will make you feel better too.
Jeannine Walston is co-founder and Executive Director of EmbodiWorks at www.embodiworks.org, a non-profit organization that provides integrative cancer care education and advocacy supporting whole person health and healing to reduce cancer risk, improve cancer related survival, and quality of life.