HOW FOODS CAN PREVENT BREAST CANCER: CHEMOPREVENTION
There have been four standard ways of treating cancer: radiation, chemotherapy, surgery, and biological therapy. Now emerging is a new and far more important technique, chemo-prevention. Chemoprevention allows you to prevent a cancer from growing in the first place or to treat a preclinical cancer. Many of you are familiar with this idea from Pap smears that have come back abnormal but not cancerous. They may show "dysplasia" but not cancer. Early treatment prevents cancer. We know that a breast cancer could take as long as 33 years to develop. For much of that time it is unseen and undetectable by standard methods. As an example, in their forties, 40 percent of women have small cancers in their breast that escape detection, according to autopsy reports of women who died from other causes. Only when the tumor reaches one billion cells in size can a mammogram detect it; that's the smallest that a radiologist can see but it is simply enormous in terms of cancer growth. What this book is designed to do is change the biology of your breast so that you create a very unfavorable climate for a cancer to grow. Here's how.
Cancer is often treated with a variety of chemical agents to target the cancer's life cycle in as many ways as possible. Because of our great daily familiarity with foods, we tend to discount their ability to work as medicines. But look at the proven ways in which foods can act to target cancer development. They can:
disrupt hormonal pathways that cause cancer
repair the genetic material DNA
inactivate harmful chemicals
inactivate enzymes that drive chemical reactions
scavenge mutant cells
lower oxidant levels with antioxidants
inhibit tumor growth
basically the entire tool chest needed to stop a cancer before it starts. And fighting cancer requires a big tool chest.
This chapter will show you how you can block the estrogen effect in a step-by-step fashion with the right kinds of foods. Remember that the key principle of cancer chemotherapy is to use several different agents to interrupt the cancer cell's growth with several critical choke holds. The same concept applies before a cell becomes cancerous, using multiple agents to block the amount of estrogen that flows through the bloodstream and attaches to estrogen receptors in the breast.
You will find that many of these steps can be targeted with more than one nutritional strategy. Some of the same strategies such as high-fiber or low-fat diets affect more than one step because they have more than one anticancer action. You'll find each of these measures covered at length in a chapter of its own. There's a lot of science in this chapter. Don't be overwhelmed by it. In the end, it all comes down to blunting the estrogen effect and blocking the trigger that causes cancer. As you'll see in the last part of the book, the diet itself is pretty simple. I include the science because knowledge leads to tremendous empowerment and because it will allow you to change and adapt your diet as new discoveries are made. The more you know about what you are doing to your body, the more likely you are to succeed.
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Womens health
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ALEXANDER TECHNIQUE IN PREGNANCY AND CHILDBIRTH: MISUSE
Originally, when Alexander discovered that he was stiffening his neck and pulling his head back, and creating tension throughout his body, he thought that he was the only person to do this, but his investigations confirmed that this pattern of 'misuse' is common to the vast majority of people.
The effect of this misuse is that it interferes with the head/neck/back relationship, which means that a high degree of muscular tension is needed to maintain upright posture and for movement. This muscular tension is distributed unevenly through the body, with an excessive amount in some areas and too little tension in others, and there is a lack of interaction between the muscle groups. Obviously this brings about the very opposite of what we find with good use: being upright becomes an effort, there is a limited range of movement, the joints are stiff and breathing is impaired.
As with good use, misuse refers to our 'thinking'. It involves performing activities in a habitual and automatic way that is harmful to overall use and functioning. This could mean that we allow our emotional state to affect our musculature adversely, for example if we are worried about something we let tension build up in the neck muscles. Or it could be how we perform everyday activities. Observing people in action, we often see a great deal of effort being used, in parts of the body that are not directly involved in the activity. Check for yourself how tightly you hold your toothbrush while cleaning your teeth - or how tightly you are holding this book right now! You will probably find that, like most people, you are using an excessive amount of effort in holding what is a very light object, and in a task that actually requires a minimum of force.
People misuse themselves in different ways. Broadly speaking, a person may hold himself up with too much tension - the 'sergeant major' approach - or he may 'collapse', with over-relaxed muscles. In practice, of course, it is not as clear cut as this; both forms of misuse involve a combination of excess tension and over-laxity. For example, even in someone with collapsed posture, only some muscles are 'over-relaxed', and therefore others have to work all the harder in compensation, and are over-tense.
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Womens health
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