How Can I Protect My Family From Cancer?

How Can I Protect My Family From Cancer?

What would you do to avoid getting cancer, or what would you be willing to do to keep your spouse and your children from getting cancer? Do you believe that people just get cancer and there’s nothing they can do about it, or do you believe that at least some cancers are avoidable if you take certain precautions?

My wife was diagnosed with stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma almost 5 years ago. She was and is the healthiest person I know, so how in the world did a healthy, fit, 35 year old Registered Nurse and mother get diagnosed with a form of cancer that is usually found in people over 60?

We may never know the exact reason for her diagnosis, but the only possibilities we could come up with are chemicals. Chemicals used for cleaning, chemicals used in personal care products and chemicals used in the production of the food we eat!

This is why we stopped using chemical laden cleaners in our home & business, we use as many personal care products as possible that do not have chemicals in them and I produce all of our vegetables without using any chemical herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers.

Up until now I have only been providing fresh, chemical-free food for my family and a few friends. But because of so many people requesting this type of food, I have increased my production and I am offering CSA Shares for sale. I’ll have more information on our CSA and chemical-free cleaners later in this post.

Cancer

What if I was to tell you that only 5% of all cancer is hereditary? Do you know what that means? It means that only 5% of cancer will occur because of someone else in your family that had cancer. It means that up to 95% of cancer is avoidable!  After all these years of cancer research, almost all of the research time and money have gone to find ways to slow down or cure cancer, but very little has been done to find ways to avoid getting cancer. Why don’t we try to prevent cancer in the first place?

Most cancers are a result of our environment and lifestyle. So the theory is that 90% of cancer can be prevented if we change our environment and we change our lifestyle. Unfortunately changing these things are not easy and will require major changes in most of our lives, but wouldn’t it be worth a major change if you could prevent watching your child go through a cancer diagnosis and then chemotherapy and/or radiation treatments?

What medicine refers to as environmental and lifestyle factors include some familiar culprits: overweight, lack of exercise, poor diet, smoking, overuse of alcohol and overexposure to UV and other forms of radiation. Of all cancer-related deaths, it’s thought that 25-30 percent are due to tobacco; 30-35 percent are linked to diet; and about 15-20 percent are due to infections, many of them preventable.

Cancer Prevention

That the vast majority of cancers are not caused by genetic defects means that in most cases we have the power to modify or eliminate most of the factors that lead to it.

Most of the known risk factors for cancer have one thing in common: they create chronic (long-term) inflammation in the body. Inflammation is a normal part of your body’s immune system response to injury. Problems arise when that inflammation becomes chronic. When that happens, levels of many potent inflammatory chemicals go up.  All of these various chemicals have been linked to the development of cancerous tumors, and chronic inflammation precedes tumor growth in most types of cancer.

Solutions

Obesity, smoking, alcohol, infectious agents and carcinogens in food and in the environment have been shown to cause chronic inflammation in the body. The longer the inflammation continues, the greater the risk of cancer.

Maintain a healthy weight

There’s a clear link between obesity and cancer. It’s thought that, in the U.S., excess weight or obesity cause 14 percent of cancer deaths in men and 20 percent of cancer deaths in women. Obesity is linked to many cancers, including cancers of the colon, breast, endometrium (uterine lining), esophagus, and kidneys.

Clearly, it’s important to keep your weight at a healthy level to help prevent cancer. It’s important for other reasons as well. You can also prevent the many co-morbidities of obesity, including diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease and osteoarthritis.

Eat anti-cancer foods

It’s estimated that diet causes about one-third of all cancer cases, almost as many as tobacco. Because cancer is so strongly associated with chronic inflammation, eating foods that fight inflammation can have a chemoprotective effect.
Chief among cancer-protective foods are fruits and vegetables. They contain numerous cancer-preventing, anti-inflammatory chemicals, including:

• Carotenoids, especially lycopene, found in watermelon, guava, grapefruit, and tomatoes
• Resveratrol, found in grapes, peanuts, and berries
• Quercitin, found in red grapes, citrus fruits, tomatoes, broccoli, and leafy green vegetables as well as tea and wine
• Sulforane, found in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli

Cancer-fighting chemicals are found in teas and many spices, including:

• Green tea
• Turmeric
• Garlic
• Chilies
• Ginger
• Fenugreek
• Fennel
• Clove
• Cinnamon
• Rosemary

Whole grains contain potent antioxidants and are rich in fiber, which speeds the transit of food through the colon. Eating whole grains has been found to reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.

Ok, ok. That’s a lot of information and a lot of it can be confusing. To me, the bottom line is to eliminate as many chemicals in your environment and eat food that are not harmful to you. So here are some things our family has done to change our lifestyle.

Eliminate Chemicals

Chemicals are all around us. My family has removed all of the hazardous chemicals in our home. We only use all-natural cleaners. We threw out all of the chemical cleaners we had and replaced them with safe, natural cleaners…and they work!! We replaced our window cleaner, all purpose cleaner, floor cleaner, hand dish washing soap, dish washer detergent, laundry detergent, fabric softener, germicide, degreaser, and even our scrubbing deep cleaner!

Eat Safe Food

My main focus has been supplying my family with fresh, safe food. I have done hours and hours of research on how to grow food that is produced with absolutely NO CHEMICALS. For nearly five years, I have learned and experimented with different ways of natural gardening. The 20+ years prior to that, I gardened just like everyone else. I tilled, weeded, sprayed our garden with Round-Up to get rid of weeds before planting, I used chemical fertilizers to try to get healthier plants and I used chemicals to get rid of pesky insects.

Now I garden the most natural way I know. I used wood chips to cover the garden, I don’t need to till anymore, I use less water, I used beneficial insects like lady bugs to control the bad insects, I used earthworms to provide an all-natural fertilizer, and because of using the wood chips I don’t have hardly any weeds anymore.

CSA Program

Since I have been gardening this way, I have had many people ask me for my all-natural vegetables…so many people that I have decided to increase my garden so I can start supplying vegetables for not only my family, but other families as well. I have started a CSA Program and I am accepting applications! Click Here To Request An Application.

Education

I have also had a lot of people ask me how they can grow their vegetables the same way I grow my vegetables. I will be holding some local classes for people that are interested in growing their own natural garden AND I am also developing a some video classes for those people that are too far away to come to my local classes.

If you are interested in either a local class or a video class, please fill out the form below and submit your information so I can get you more information.

Comments or questions are welcome.