It is said that good diet & gardening can reduce your risk of developing lung cancer by 40 – 46%! In this article, we explain how to set up your diet so as to maximize the number of fruits and vegetables you consume in any given day.
The American Cancer Society suggests that you eat 5 servings of these foods every day. Here is a sample menu to incorporate to your diet each day without taking on extra expenses.
Incorporating servings of fruits & vegetables to your diet is a lot easier than you think, because you can consume them in very small quantities.
Eating 1 banana a day and having some extra broccoli together with that rice for lunch adds up to 2 servings of fruits & vegetables already. Eating tomatoes and peas together with your Kraft dinner makes it 4. You know what I’m saying??
Did you know that strawberries have a substance called quercetin in them that helps destroy human cancer cells? Quercetin is a phytonutrient that influences the body’s immune system to destroy cancer cells.
This process is known as “apoptosis” and is very important in order for the body to be able to eliminate damaged cancerous cells and replace them with new cells.
In a recent clinical trial study using 18 different compounds, Quercetin was found as the #1 destroyer of cancerous human cells because it dramatically reduces the lifespan of damaged cancerous cells that reside in the lungs.
It also expedites the replacement of these damaged cells with new fresh and healthy human cells.
Breakfast: For breakfast, doctors suggest having cereals such as Kraft Alpha Bits, Honeycomb, Shreddies cereal, Cheerios, etc.
On top of that, have a banana (medium to large size) as well as orange or mango juice. Make sure the juice you have is 100% fruit juice of about 4 ounces.
Post-Breakfast Snack
A few hours after breakfast, you might feel hungry again. It is usually best to add another fruit or vegetable as your post breakfast snack.
Have 4-5 small carrots or a small bown of applesauce. At this point, you would have consumed 3 servings of fruits and vegetables in your day. You had 2 at breakfast (the cereal and the mango/orance juice), and 1 here.
Lunch
If you are like me and work in the office the whole day, the best lunch to have is a wrapped pita bread loaded with tons of vegetables and/or a cup of vegetable soup.
Either of these will add 1 more healthy serving to your diet. If you want to total up your servings to 5 by lunch time, add a small green salad plate to your lunch.
Dinner
Apart from eating your regular dinner (pasta or meat, etc), it is smart to add heated peas or cauliflower on the side. Or you could have a small dish of potato with little butter, 1 slice of lemon and light sprinklings of cinnamon or brown sugar.
Dessert
During late night or just before you go to bed, have some dessert consisting of peaches, berries or fruits that contain low fat yoghurt.
dr. Khadijah