Go Green for Cancer

With a lot of eco-friendly, “Save the Earth” campaigns out there, grocery stores, retail outlets, and just about every other kind of place that sells something also sells trendy sacks to take home your goodies in—all in the effort to make the world “go green.” Aside from keeping the world free from plastic bags, this new practice isn’t helping your body become any healthier.  Instead of just spending your money on reusable bags, how about turning to something else green to fill up those bags and to help your health naturally—veggies. Green vegetables are making a comeback and aren’t afraid to strut their stuff across headlines recently touting their incredible effects.

Sure, there are a ton of faux cures out there and most of them include eating or drinking herbs, extracts, or any mixture of the two along with funky food combinations said to shrink tumors, prevent all sorts of infectious diseases, and stave off cancer comebacks. Don’t worry, eating more green vegetables like broccoli, beans, and brussels sprouts will not harm your body (unless you have specific dietary needs that prohibit intake of certain vitamins provided by these types of foods) like some of these fake cures can.

One of the biggest anti-cancer vegetables being paraded around these days is broccoli.  Broccoli, besides being one of my personal favorite vegetables, is gaining popularity because new reports have been saying broccoli sprouts contain a component called indole-3-carbinol, also found in other members of the broccoli family like bok choy, swiss chard, turnips, and kale, which have been accused of stopping or slowing down the cell life of certain cancers like breast, prostate, and other serious conditions like heart or lung diseases. Broccoli is part of a large group of cruciferous veggies that have all been shown as “superfoods” in recent years, especially against the occurrence or growth of cancer cells within the body.

With any health study, results hold the key to making progress. When alternative medicine is the study, results can become cloudy. There seems to be a misunderstanding with a lot of natural cures that they are as effective as pharmaceuticals and that they work as quickly, but since CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) is based on a whole-body approach using the mind and emotions to help control the body along with herbs and other organic treatments, time is essential to success.

Patients and their family members should remember that complementary medicines are used in conjunction with other, more conventional approaches and that broccoli is not the wonder cure that cancer patients are looking for…at least not by itself. The studies show multiple inconsistencies about cruciferous vegetables and which cancers they supposedly prevent. A lot more research needs to be done, but it seems unlikely that an actual cure would be found in a common family of vegetables.

Many different factors can help change the results of the studies because—believe it or not—broccoli is passed down in our genes, or at least our body’s reaction to it is. More specifically, research has shown that certain parts of the population inherit genes that make the chemicals in broccoli more susceptible to being absorbed by the human body than others. Every individual’s body breaks down separate chemicals from these vegetables in different ways depending on the rate of metabolism and each type of vegetable has its own set of chemicals which highlight it as a “cancer defender.”

Even though eating a bushel full of broccoli every day may keep you out of your doctor’s office, it alone may not keep you off of a chemotherapy list down the line. If you want to go natural and green to keep your body environmentally friendly, make sure any supplements or vitamins are doctor-approved and always know the risks. Using broccoli or its yummy cousins to hopefully stave off breeding cancer cells can become or continue to be part of your routine, but helpful annual cancer screens and checkups are also a good idea that should never be ignored.