1. Plant foods, unprocessed [AICR guidelines; ACS guidelines; AICR = American Institute of Cancer Research; ACS = American Cancer Society].
2. High fiber foods; antioxidant rich foods; anti-inflammatory foods.
3. Phytates found in grains, beans, nuts & seeds.
4. All cruciferous veggies, especially broccoli, broccoli sprouts, kale & collards. List of cruciferous veggies is long and also includes cabbage, purple cabbage, cauliflower, gai lan, wasabi, radish, Brussels sprouts, …
5. All alliums, especially garlic. Other alliums are onion, sweet onion & leeks.
6. Dr Greger also mentions lemon, sweet potatoes, apple (with peels), pomegranate & tomato. Over time, this list will invariably grow as more research gets done. Generally speaking, all fruits & veggies are cancer protective.
7. Berries! Invariably rich in antioxidants. Especially amla (Indian gooseberries), cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, black raspberries. Many more berries are found in physical stores or online: fresh ($$$), frozen ($), dried ($), powdered ($).
8. Seeds: flax seeds, fenugreek, cumin. One study showed that among top 10 nuts & seeds in USA, the best ones are walnuts, pecans & peanuts.
9. Herbs & spices: Generally rich in antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and salicylic acid, all of which are cancer protective. In particular, the spice turmeric is special! Plus cumin.
10. Soy foods! In any form: soybeans, tofu, soy milk, edamame, tempeh.
11. Teas: many teas are antioxidant rich. Green tea is special!
12. Mushrooms! The plain old 'white button mushroom' is great! Other mushrooms will help us diversify.
13. Seaweed: Nori sheets, for example, or dulse or wakame.
14. Nutritional yeast.

Note:

1. For specific foods listed above, it would help to have a rough idea of: how much do we need to consume? do we need it daily? or does eating it once a week suffice? are there any special steps to remember for food preparation? anything we need to add to boost effectiveness? Are there folks who should NOT eat that food for some reason?
2. Five foods from Asian cultures that are magical (cancer protective): turmeric, soy, mushrooms, green tea & seaweed.
3. ! Important ! Sulforaphane from cruciferous and allicin from alliums are 2 special compounds that are cancer protective. But if we don't know how to prepare these veggies, we don't get any sulforaphane or allicin. What steps do we have to follow to ensure that we produce sulforaphane and allicin? Worth digging into and understanding.

In the remainder of this article, we go through thse guidelines in detail.

Plant foods protect us from cancer! How do we know? Well, a brief glance at AICR's 10 Recommendations from 2018 and New American Food Plate will convince us! Both are focused on plants in their unprocessed form!

What's AICR, by the way? AICR is American Institute of Cancer Research, a respected organization in USA. We may also glance at ACS Dietary Guidelines from 2020. ACS is American Cancer Society, another respected organization. ACS guidelines also focus on plant-foods in their unprocessed form.

Summary: On the whole, AICR's 10 Recommendations and New American Food Plate emphasize unprocessed plants! It's instructive to study the food plates they recommend.

Fiber & Colon / Colorectal Cancer: A direct and easy-to-understand connection between fiber and cancer emerges for colon / colorectal cancers. Colorectal cancer is a short-hand for colon cancer & rectal cancer. To grasp this connection, please browse through Fiber, especially these two articles: Dr Burkitt: The Fiber Man and Fiber & Cancer.

How prevalent is colon / colorectal cancer? Should we be worried about it? In 2018, these cancers were the 4th leading cause of cancer deaths in USA, after cancers of the lung, breast & prostate.

Are Fiber Rich and WFPB Synonymous? Almost. Let's see why. Turns out that animal foods (meat, fish, eggs, dairy) have zero fiber. None at all. Fiber is found only in plant foods. Now plant foods in their whole, natural form are abundant with fiber, but processed plant foods are often fiber deficient! Fiber deficiency in processed foods is so commonplace that rules of thumb like the 5:1 rule by Dr Greger have been devised to help processed food consumers make fiber-rich choices in supermarkets.

When it comes to fiber, it would help to remember this: Every time we consumed an animal product (meat, fish, eggs or dairy) to fill up our tummy, an opportunity to consume fiber was lost. The same holds for fiber-deficient processed plant foods! In fact, the same holds for sugar and oil too! Both of these are calorie rich but zero in fiber! In WFPB guidelines, we are encouraged to dial down our intake of all of these to zero: animal products (meat, fish, eggs, dairy), processed foods, sugar and oil.

In order to understand why fiber is so important for our overall health, it would help to spend some time studying Microbiome & WFPB; this is a somewhat technical subject but I encourage my friends to invest time and grasp what is being taught in Microbiome circles today — it's insightful and important. It's likely to change the way we think about our body and food, and drive home the point for a fiber-rich diet.

Fiber Rich Diet & Other Cancers: Actually, a high fiber diet will help us against all cancers! But what exactly is there in a high fiber diet that is responsible for cancer protection? Is it fiber itself? Or is it something else in a high fiber diet, e.g., antioxidants or phytochemicals or something else abundantly found in plants?

Cancer development is multi-stage — a complex subject. Also, cancer is a broad term for many diseases in different parts of our body. There are many pathways through which plant foods in their whole form protect us from cancer. And there are many pathways via which animal products and processed foods promote cancer. All of that knowledge has been summarized by organizations like AICR (American Institute of Cancer Research) and ACS (American Cancer Society) into 10 Recommendations from 2018, New American Food Plate and ACS Dietary Guidelines from 2020. For details, we may browse through AICR literature (they have free detailed PDFs online), or we may browse through Dr Greger's videos here: Dr Michael Greger: Cancer, Prostate Cancer & WFPB, Colon Cancer & WFPB and Breast Cancer & WFPB.

Discussion: Guidelines 1 and 2 are more or less equivalent. At a high level, 'Plants! Unprocessed!', 'High Fiber' and 'Whole Food Plant-Based' are almost synonymous. Practically speaking, we may pick any (or all) of these mantras and move forward. I have listed Guidelines 1 and 2 separately so that we have more than one way to remember what to do, and to help us understand why.

Foods rich in antioxidants are protective against cancer. Why? High level story, as explained by Antioxidants and Cancer Prevention (cancer.gov): Something called 'free radicals' wreck havoc inside our bodies. What exactly do they do? They induce something called 'oxidative stress', which may damage the DNA inside our cells, which leads to cancer. And what counters this oxidative stress? Antioxidants! Where are antioxidants found? In all foods but there is a very large variation in antioxidant content of foods. So we must consciously strive to consume antioxidant rich foods.

Interestingly, animal products are not only poor in fiber, they are poor in antioxidants too! See Antioxidants in Animal vs Plant Foods. When it comes to fiber, animal products actually have zero fiber! When it comes to antioxidants, they do have some antioxidant capacity. But it's important to understand that plant foods are far far richer in antioxidants! By how much? By multiplicative amounts! Moreover, the variation in antioxidant content in plants is very large. Some specific plant foods are extraordinarily rich in antioxidants! So with only a little bit of effort, if we are careful to choose at least one or two plant foods in every meal which is known to be extraordinarily rich in antioxidants, we could flood our bodies with antioxidants every time we eat food!

Do we really need antioxidant rich meals every time we eat? Yes! Are there occasions when we need more antioxidants than normal? Yes. To understand these dynamics and more, please browse through Antioxidant Dynamics In Our Body for fascinating insights.

Discussion: If we follow Guidelines 1 and 2, don't our food plates become antioxidant rich automatically? To my surprise, I learnt that there could be a HUGE difference in antioxidant capacity of two Whole Food Plant-Based plates. This point is brought out in this video: How To Reach Antioxidant "RDA" (3 mins, 2013). So it would be prudent to study this article: Antioxidant-Rich Foods, and to study the broad theme of Antioxidants so that we compose antioxidant-rich Whole Food Plant-Based food plates every time we eat.

High level story: Inflammation may bring down our immune system. A body with a weakened immune system is more susceptible to cancer!

What is inflammation? Acute inflammation is what we all intuitively connect with. We have all experienced it. Acute inflammation is defined as "a short term process in response to tissue injury, usually appearing within minutes or hours; characterized by five cardinal signs: pain, redness, immobility (loss of function), swelling and heat". Such an inflammation may be prolonged, lasting months and years, in which case we call it 'chronic inflammation'.

But chronic inflammation, especially 'low grade, systemic & chronic inflammation' may happen inside our bodies without us 'feeling' it. For example, our guts could be inflamed, leading to something called 'leaky gut syndrome'; our prostate may be inflamed; our lungs may be inflamed; our arterial walls may be inflamed; and so on. Often, we don't 'feel' the inflammation, so we may not realize that we are carrying inflammation inside our body day after day after day, year after year after year!

Avoid all chronic diseases! All modern chronic lifestyle diseases like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, and so on, are accompanied by low grade chronic inflammation. Which is why getting any of these chronic conditions means increased chances of cancer! So one strategy to avoid cancer is to diligently avoid getting any of these chronic conditions! In other words, we must strive to protect ourselves from obesity, from heart disease, from diabetes, from autoimmune conditions, and so on! In other words, for cancer protection, we must respect each and every part of our body like a temple and take care of it!

Maximize anti-inflammatory foods; minimize pro-inflammatory foods: Anti-inflammatory foods reduce inflammation; pro-inflammatory foods promote inflammation. They are opposites! So we must do both: we must consume an abundance of anti-inflammatory foods. At the same time, we must diligently remove foods known to cause us inflammation!

Which foods are known to be anti-inflammatory? Plant foods! WFPB docs explain that animal foods are pro-inflammatory. The reasons are multifarious. [Yet to write articles summarizing Dr Greger's videos that explain this point.]

Anti-inflammatory foods? Are some plant foods extraordinarily anti-inflammatory? Yes. It would be prudent to prepare a checklist of these specific plant foods and make sure that we consume them in our daily meals, at least once a day. Do we need such foods (which are extraordinarily anti-inflammatory) with every meal? Or is it okay to have them once a day? My intuition says that it's best to have them with every meal, but I need a reference to medical literature (or a Dr Greger video :-)) to be 100% sure.

Discussion: If we adopt Guidelines 1, 2, and 3, then don't our food plates automatically become high in anti-inflammatories? Yes, they do, as explained by Anti-Inflammatory Antioxidants. Still, remembering Guideline 4 is helpful because many of us have a mental checklist of 'anti-inflammatory foods' like turmeric & cloves in our minds; only a few of us remember lists of foods high in antioxidants.

The classes of plant foods and specific plant foods listed below were derived from Dr Greger's videos. In case I missed something, please write a comment or drop me an email. Thank you!

• Fruits & Veggies? Fruits & veggies are super-important components of a Whole Food Plant-Based system. Research into the impact of fruits & veggies on cancer is still ongoing. We don't have definitive lists of 'best fruits' and 'best veggies' yet. However, two classes of veggies have emerged as particularly helpful for cancer protection: the cruciferous family and the allium family. And one class of fruits has emerged as particularly helpful: Berries! In addition, a few specific fruits have emerged as winners in some studies.
  • Cruciferous veggies: Awesome for cancer protection due to a magical compound known as sulforaphane. But it's important to understand how to consume cruciferous veggies (raw vs cooked? how to cook?) so that we actually produce sulforaphane! See Cruciferous Veggies & Cancer, Broccoli Sprouts, Daily Cruciferous Intake: How To? and Cruciferous Veggies.

    In the cruciferous family, broccoli (the most powerful cruciferous), kale & collards (the two leafy greens that feature prominently in Dr Greger's videos; both are cruciferous too) are my favorites.

  • Allium family: Awesome for cancer protection! See Fruits, Vegetables & Cancer and The Allium Family. All of these are helpful: garlic, onions, sweet onions & leeks but garlic stands out.

    Just like we have to be careful with cruciferous veggies to actually produce sulforaphane, we have to be careful with garlic to actually produce allicin, the key compound that helps! So it will help to study the The Allium Family article.

  • Sweet potatoes: Dr Greger has a video on sweet potatoes and cancer. See Fruits, Vegetables & Cancer.
  • Lemon, apple (with peels), pomegranate, tomato: These fruits have emerged as winners when it comes to cancer protection in different studies. See Fruits, Vegetables & Cancer.
• Berries? "Berries are the best fruits", says Dr Greger.
  • Berries & Cancer is a collection of Dr Greger videos summarizing research into berries and cancer. I found some of these videos remarkable! In general, berries are rich in antioxidants, so all of them are helpful.
  • Amla (Indian gooseberries), cranberries, blueberries, strawberries, black raspberries: see Berries & Cancer. Intriguingly, one of the studies combined blueberries with cardamom powder and black pepper to boost its effectiveness!
• Nuts & seeds? Protective against cancer: see Phytates & Cancer. Are there specific nuts & seeds known to have special cancer fighting powers?
  • Flax seeds & fenugreek: see Nuts, Seeds & Cancer.
  • Cumin is less well known. I've listed it here because it has extraordinary amounts of salicylic acid, which is said to protect us against cancer — see Aspirin & Cancer.
  • Walnuts, pecans & peanuts: Among the top 10 nuts & seeds consumed in USA, walnuts, pecans & peanuts were found to be extra protective than others in a study. See Nuts, Seeds & Cancer. There may be other nuts & seeds in other parts of the world that are even more protective! If anybody knows, please share.
• Grains & Beans?
  • Grains & beans are protective against cancer: see Phytates & Cancer.
  • Soy foods: Asian cultures are said to have less cancer due to regular soy food consumption. See Soy & Cancer. But it would help to know: how to consume soy? In what form? How much? Is there an upper limit?
• Teas? Many teas are rich in antioxidants, which makes them protective against cancer. Do any teas stand out?
  • Green tea: Said to be a key reason why cancer rates are lower in Asian cultures. See Green Tea & Cancer. It would help to study: How much green tea to consume? How to prepare?
• Herbs & spices?
  • Turmeric: A magical root that helps us with so many illnesses, including cancer! See Turmeric & Cancer. It would help to study how to use turmeric: raw vs cooked? How long to cook? Are turmeric supplements (with curcumin) effective?
  • In general, many herbs & spices are rich in all of these: antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and salicylic acid, which are helpful for cancer protection. For the salicylic acid and cancer story, see Aspirin & Cancer. Just like flax seeds have extraordinary amounts of 'lignans' in them, cumin has extraordinary amounts of salicylic acid; I've listed cumin above under Nuts & Seeds.
• Other foods? Fungi and algae are also known to be highly cancer protective:
  • Mushrooms: See Mushrooms & Cancer.
  • Seaweed: See Seaweed & Cancer.
  • Nutritional yeast: See Nutritional Yeast & Cancer.

Cancer fighting foods from Asian cultures: Turmeric, Soy, Mushrooms, Green Tea and Seaweed.

Note: For various classes of foods and specific foods, it would help to know these: Do we need to consume that food with every meal? Or every day? Or is consuming once a week (or even once a month) sufficient? Are there upper limits on consumption of that food? Are there food combinations that increase effectiveness? Are there food preparation and food cooking techniques that boost effectiveness?

Thank you! :-)