Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer?

In this TED video, the speaker William Li talks about "angiogenesis", which researches have claimed to have caused the growth cancer in a human body.

In short...

"Angiogenesis, the growth of new capillary blood vessels in the body, is an important natural process in the body used for healing and reproduction. The body controls angiogenesis by producing a precise balance of growth and inhibitory factors in healthy tissues." ~ The Angiogenesis Foundation

You can read more about works done in the field of angiogenesis at the following link:

http://www.angio.org/

Here are some important points taken from the video:

• Angiogenesis is important for the healing and reproduction of cells and tissues in the body.
• When angiogenesis gets out of balance in the body, it causes diseases such as heart disease, cancer, obesity, etc.
• Having insufficient angiogenesis means that normal healthy cells and tissues heal too slow or little compared to the on-going damage incurred.
• Having excessive angiogenesis means that abnormal unhealthy cells and tissues grow too fast or much that the body fails to dispose them.
• Cancer cells are just like normal cells in the body, which also require feeding from blood vessels in order to grow. With antiangiogenic theraphy, the feeding of cancer cells is cut off, thus stopping the growth (or ending the life) of cancer cells.
• Most of the time cancer is treated too late. A better way to fight cancer is to prevent angiogenesis by means of early intervention, effectively inhibiting the spread of cancer cells.
• Diet accounts for 30-35% of environmentally-caused cancers. Instead of just reducing the intake of food which increases the risk of cancer, we can also resort to increasing the intake of food which reduces the risk of cancer.
• There are many natural antiangiogenic foods which can be taken in our diet to prevent cancer, such as green tea, fruits, ginseng, spices, tuna, olive oil, dark chocolate, tomatoes, etc. Each food has different level of antiangionenic potency.

In my personal opinion, there are many similarities between the concepts of "antiangiogenesis" and "antioxidant". Both serve the purpose of inhibiting the growth of cancer cells in the body.

It is important to get ourselves educated more on these topics so that we can make a better choice of the nutrition that we take.