Reducing your risk of cancer through what you eat (hopefully)

For various reasons,  I (M) sort-of adhere to a diet that is supposed to put me at lower risk for cancer. This somewhat changes what I cook for everyone else. For instance, they eat bacon when I don't and they probably eat more sugar than I do.

These guidelines come from no one source, but from the advice of two nutritionists and several doctors who have given me sometimes conflicting advice, from which I've had to pick and choose.  I share them with the disclaimer that neither these guidelines nor any product/lifestyle/supplement can absolutely guarantee that you won’t get cancer. I offer them realizing that they may prove to be no more than whistling in the dark, but I'd rather whistle than cower there, helpless.

• Strictest: Be a vegetarian and avoid all animal fats.

• Less strict (this is what I'm doing since I would find it hard to be vegetarian or vegan because of my range of food sensitivities and dairy allergies, and my need for high calorie intake in order to maintain weight): 

• Eat beef no more than once a week  (I’m wondering if this is true only of hormone-enriched, non-organic beef, but I haven’t found a source that justifies it)
• Don’t eat pork (I don’t follow this strictly, especially in the presence of N.C. BBQ, but I've pretty much quit eating bacon except on special occasion; I'm trying to learn to love turkey bacon as a substitute).
  
• Avoid smoked meats.

• Drink green tea, up to 4 cups a day
(You can decaf it naturally if you pour hot water just over the tea leaves, wait 20 seconds, pour off, then refill. In the winter, I pour my green tea into a thermos and then drink it warm all day. In the summer, I don’t mind it cold, or at room temperature.)

• Avoid fats.
(I avoid trans and hydrogenated fats, but taking the advice of a nutritionalist I knew a long time ago, I always use whole-milk dairy products. Her theory, which she backed up with research done in Germany, is that non-fat dairy products cause digestive problems, food sensitivities and other health problems. And I think whole milk products are healthier for growing children—it’s the fake fats and the high fructose corn syrup sweeteners that are worse for their health).

• Eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

• Avoid sugar. (I can't say how much is too much sugar and I'm probably still eating too much, but I've  cut out store-bought sweetened yogurt and cut most of my sweets/treat intake down to only super-dark chocolate. I'll address sugar in a separate, future post).  

• Avoid food additives, preservatives and dyes.

• Eat whole grain products. (I hate whole wheat pasta and I mostly eat white rice, so I'm not reaching 100 percent on this one.)

• Take some supplements to support health (but don’t go overboard). For women, some studies have shown that coenzyme Q10 helps prevent breast cancer; I take 200 mg/day. Other supplements can include coral calcium, mushroom derivatives, and flax seed oil or fish oil.

• This is my own suggestion: don’t take any diet or dietary guideline too seriously or think that any diet will kill you. I think it’s far healthier to enjoy a juicy hamburger than it is to chomp down a raw salad with a sense of bitter longing or defeat.

A 50/50 (organic/non-organic) compromise

I’d like to eat only organic food, but I don’t (as I've said in previous posts)--not only for cost reasons, but also for lack of accessibility and convenience.

Some organic foods are more expensive (see post about organic grapes) than I can justify for the health benefit--I’m not sure it’s all that healthy to buy a couple of pounds of organic grapes and then munch on them with clenched jaw, stressed over the hole they’ve put in the family budget.

And, if I insisted on only eating organic food in restaurants, I would have to travel to downtown D.C. and eat at Restaurant Nora (America’s First Certified Organic Restaurant) or some other such fancy-pants restaurant, meaning that our family of four could only go out to eat once or twice a year. (And PE probably wouldn’t eat anything anyway, unless they offered organic chicken nuggets). Or I wouldn’t be able to eat out at all when traveling to rural North Carolina, where I’m from.

If I only ate organic, I'm afraid I would be like I was after I returned home from my first semester in college--I was a militant vegetarian and a pain in the neck to all. I refused to eat most of my family’s Christmas dinner. I didn’t eat ham or turkey, I wouldn’t eat the rolls because they were made with bleached flour. I probably ate the cooked vegetables (not even knowing the difference between organic and non-organic produce since it wasn’t readily available in N.C. in the 1970s) and maybe one of the whole wheat carob brownies I was always making and carrying around with me then. I remember my grandmother’s hurt look at this or another family dinner, when I again lectured her about the danger of bleached flour and she said, “I thought all food was good.”

Just that one comment had a huge effect on me later in life. I have tried to approach grocery shopping and restaurant eating with that philosophy. In the grocery store, I may steer my way past corn-syrup-laden food (except for cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving…) but I will buy non-organic, canned pinto beans since the organic beans there often run a dollar more; I buy regular whole wheat sliced bread for school lunches when organic bread isn’t available; and I justify eating what I know is not going to be organic chicken or meat in a restaurant because I usually eat organic or free-range meat at home.

I call this approach the 50/50 compromise—what is, essentially, a half-a**ed approach to organic shopping/eating/living (but 50/50 is a nicer tag for our family readers). It allows me to eat almost anywhere (when we occasionally go to McDonald’s, I’ll guiltlessly eat salads or fish sandwiches there, not worrying where the vegetables or meat came from) and to buy groceries from almost any store. There are only a few items I rarely compromise on in the grocery store, like organic milk and free-range eggs. Out of the house, though, I’ve eaten frozen custard and IHOP pancakes, never giving it a thought about where the eggs and milk came from.

Fifty percent (or somewhere thereabouts) organic is better than no organic at all, I tell myself. Maybe only the super-rich and super-sheltered (or people who live on organic farms) can truly afford to be all-organic. The rest of us can do what we can, arriving at whatever ratio of organic/healthy food we can afford or muster, whether it’s 60/40 or 25/75 percent, etc. The 50/50 compromise has helped me think, within certain boundaries, that all food is good.

The dairy dilemma

For a long time, I kept dairy out of my diet. I had been allergic to dairy products as a baby, and I became sensitive to milk products again after a chronic illness as an adult, so I figured that all dairy was bad. I bought into the idea that milk is for baby cows. And, to a certain degree, I still believe that. I still can't eat cow's cheese (except Swiss, occasionally, for some unknown reason) and I have a hard time digesting nonfat milk products. But gosh darn it, I love whole milk yogurt and eat it almost every day.

Back in the day when I believed that milk was evil, I kept it out of my son's diet for the first couple of years after he was born. His milk intake was restricted to breast milk, supplemented with goat's milk after I went back to work (which I fortified with iron and calcium, since he didn't seem to tolerate any commercial formulas). When he hit preschool age, I sent a box of soy milk for him to drink during snack time, so he wouldn't be drinking the skim milk than the other kids drank.

All this was an effort on my part to keep him from developing an allergy to milk. The result, according to a broad allergy-panel blood test he took a few years ago, is that soy is one of the few things that he is allergic to but milk is no problem at all. That's good, since he now hates tofu and won't drink soy milk. So, maybe this effort paid off in a backwards kind of way.

By the time my daughter was born, my feelings about dairy products had swayed since my own dairy allergy was waning. Even as a baby she begged me to taste the maple-flavored yogurt I was eating. (Yogurt was one of the few things I could eat that wouldn't give her an allergic reaction when I nursed her--her worst reaction was to wheat). After a certain age, I let her have whole milk and she never showed any signs of a sensitivity. Now she begs for a glass of milk or a banana-milk smoothie at least once a day. She is very healthy, so I see no harm with this. In some ways, I have made my peace with milk.

My biggest concern with dairy products these days is with bovine growth hormone (rBGH or BGH). It seems unnatural to stimulate cows' udders to produce more milk than they would naturally produce. I won't be surprised if a link is found eventually between BGH and breast cancer in women who drank BGH as children--I don't see how it might not have some effect on developing breasts. Some people on the Internet are also worrying it could cause prostate cancer.

Even if that doesn't prove true, the other worry about BGH is that, according the Christiane Northrup and others, milk produced with it is allowed to have more white cells than non-rBGH milk, which is, in other words, pus. Yuk. Because cows given BGH have a higher incidence of udder infections, they're also more likely to be given antibiotics.

If you can't always buy organic milk, you can check which U.S. dairies are rBGH-free on the Organic Consumers Association rBGH info page.

If I had the money (and time to run around shopping only at health food stores), I would only buy organic cheese, ice cream, sour cream, cream cheese, etc. Right now, I will spend $6 on a gallon of organic milk at the grocery store (I can get it cheaper at Whole Foods usually), but not $6 on a small hunk of organic cheese. I console myself with the idea that I make my own yogurt from the organic milk I purchase, and that most of the non-organic dairy products I purchase are BGH-free. Maybe BGH-free is a meager consolation, at best, since it ignores the pesticides, other hormones and antibiotics in non-organic milk--as well as the probably inhumane warehousing of the animals forced to produce most commercial milk. But given that BGH-free is hard to even find sometimes, it's a meager consolation that is better than no consolation at all.

Finding Your Inner-Julia Child

[This essay originally appeared in a very small magazine, issue 23]*

More and more American men and women are discovering that there is an angry, hurt "inner-Julia Child" inside them, an "inner-Julia Child" which has been abused by a culture that cares more about calories, convenience and cholesterol than it does about (in Julia Child's words) "wonderfully good eating".

Your inner-Julia Child may have been wounded in any of the following ways:

• By adherence to the too long-lingering, low-fat, non-cholesterol dietary fad of the last decade.

• By your worrying more about what your food might do to your waistline than how it tastes; as a result of this, you have been far more likely to drink diet sodas all day than to let yourself have one satisfying glass of dark beer; to glop chemical goo on your potatoes rather than risk the extra but pleasurable calories of real sour cream; to forego the unique richness of butter for the plastic taste of margarine.

• By your inability to plan or shop ahead, causing you and your family to rely upon your microwave to quickly cook or, more likely, to thaw out your frozen dinner.

• By your so readily accepting the great cultural lie that a night at McDonald's offers a great evening of dining, or that pizza, hot dogs, and french fries constitute the extent of our national cuisine.

While you fill your belly, meal after meal, without truly savoring anything you chew, your inner-Julia Child is secretly yearning for gigot en chevreuil, filet mignon with madeira sauce, triple chocolate mousse. It is begging you to roast a succulent pig, to whip a cup of heavy cream and ladle it onto a bowl of sweet red strawberries that have been lovingly and lightly dredged with confectionary sugar.

There is no way to free your inner Julia Child but to cook, and then, to eat. But nothing prepared in a microwave, nothing labeled “low fat/low-calorie” will satisfy the yearnings of the inner-Julia Child. Your inner-Julia Child may be starving, which may be why you keep eating, growing fatter and fatter, all the while praising yourself for avoiding sugar/red meat/milk/cholesterol or complex carbohydrates. Deep down, you are achieving no real satisfaction or pleasure, no real nourishment.

There is no way out of such toxic habits but through our rich, twelve-course program in which we teach you to cook AND to eat. We don't call it self-help, but "Help Yourself!" Once you begin a pattern of eating truly delicious, satisfying and sometimes rich food, you may find yourself not needing second or third helpings. You will be sated on both a physical and spiritual level. There are many variations to the 12-Course menu to free the inner-Julia Child; the ingredients or the center of the menu is not as important as achieving the goals outlined in the examples below; the menu might include:

• COURSE (STEP) 1 - Pate (en croute) -- ("We acknowledge our fear of cholesterol")

• COURSE 2 - Lobster Bisque -- ("We believe that Julia Child and/or the power of French cuisine can restore our senses")

• COURSE 3 - Braised duck with chestnut stuffing -- ("We have made a brave and conscious decision to eat delicious and nutritious food, however long it takes to prepare and eat it")

• COURSE 4 - Asparagus with Butter and Egg -- ("Fearlessly, we continue to eat, even as we loosen our waistbands and belts")

• COURSE 5 - Dandelion, Spinach and Bacon Salad -- ("We realize that Course 5 is here for no other purpose than to give our palates a break") ... and on and on into:

• COURSE 11 - Chocolate soufflé -- ("We have sought through eating well and much to improve our contact with the gods"); and

• COURSE 12 - Fruit (in season) -- ("Having had our taste buds reawakened as the result of this meal, we will henceforth strive to eat only delicious food, in quantities and qualities that nourish and delight us, trying to use our microwave ovens no more than twice a week, for anything other than the thawing of food, the melting of butter, or reheating something we ourselves have lovingly prepared").

If you are on a budget and/or are a vegetarian, an alternative menu might include vegetables served as separate courses, each in its own, unique butter- or wine-based sauce, with fruit as the final course.

For more information on finding and pleasuring your own unique inner-Julia Child, contact us at: cookingforfour -AT- gmail.com. (The full course menu, along with individualized meal plan, is available for $99.95).

For those who can't afford a private consultation, please study Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes I and II.

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* Reprinted with permission (M wrote the essay and published the magazine).

We're reprinting this essay because, within certain boundaries, it represents our family's food philosophy. We eat to enjoy food--not to lose weight, avoid cholesterol, etc.--although, to be honest, we rarely cook French food anymore given that PE and TA probably won't eat it and it takes too long to cook.