Why the sunshine diet can reduce YOUR CANCER RISK

SMOkInG is the leading cause of cancer in the Uk, accounting for half of all cancer deaths. But did you know that being overweight or obese is the next most common cause?

And that carrying excess fat, particularly around the tummy, is directly linked to 13 different cancers, including post-menopausal breast cancer, colorectal and endometrial cancer.

not only are the risks of getting it higher if you are carrying too much weight, but the outcomes tend to be worse, too.

That’s because fat cells don’t just sit in the spare tyre around your middle doing nothing — they are highly active. Among other things, they make lots of extra hormones and growth factors, which travel through your blood and trigger cells in other parts of the body to divide rapidly, raising your cancer risk.

Fat around the belly also leads to increased inflammation throughout the body — a key driver not only of cancer but heart disease, depression and dementia.

The good news is that even quite modest weight loss may make a big difference.

In a recent study, researchers rs from the American Cancer Society tracked 180,885 women, who were 50 or older, for ten years. They found that at overetween overweight women who lost between 4.4 lb to 10 lb (2 kg to 4.5 kg) reduced educed their risk of breast cancer by y 13 per cent, compared with those se who stayed the same weight or who put on weight. And the more they ey lost, the better they did.

WOMEn who managed anaged to lose 20 lb (9 9kg) kg) or more reduced d their risk by 23 per er cent, even if they put some, but not ot all, of that weight back on.

One reason why the link between etween breast cancer and weight loss oss seems to be particularly strong is because weight loss quickly reduces levels of oestrogen, and we know that high levels of oestrogen help drive cancers of the breast and womb.

I firmly believe that one of best ways to get weight off — and to keep it off — is to start with a rapid pid weight-loss ss diet, as used in n my Fast 800 0 programme.

You may baulk at the idea of cutting down to 800 calories a day for a few weeks — it sounds really hard, but, trust me, it isn’t. The first few days are tough but, after that, it gets easier. And it’s especially easy with the simple food choices and delicious recipes you’ll find in the Fast 800 Easy. The re recipes have been created by my wife, Clare, wh— who is a GP — with years o of experience h helping her patients to tackle health problems through low-carb, l low- calorie diets — and food writer Justine Pattison. The recipes are not only easy to make, but many are based on inexpensive storecupboard essentials.

If you follow our Fast 800 programme, we suggest you start with rapid weight- loss phase (800 calories a day, for at least the first few weeks).

Once you have lost most of your excess inches — and in a study Clare did with Oxford University, the average weight loss was 20 lb (9.5 kg) in eight weeks — we suggest you switch to ‘intermittent fasting’, where you stick to 800 calories, but only for two days a week, before finally moving to a healthy Mediterranean-style diet.

INTERMITTENT FASTING AND CANCER

ThErE have been a number of studies showing that intermittent fasting (like the 5:2 diet) can help people lose weight, and there is tentative evidence it may also help reduce the risk of cancer. One of the ways it’s believed to do that is by improving your insulin sensitivity.

Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas that brings down your blood sugar levels. Every time you eat high-carbohydrate foods, particularly if they are sugary and easily digested (such as cakes and biscuits), your blood sugar levels soar and the body has to pump out insulin to bring them down.

But, after a while, it becomes a bit like shouting at the kids — the rest of your body stops listening and becomes ever more resistant to the effects of insulin. So the pancreas has to pump out more to produce an effect.

The problem is that as well as regulating your blood sugar levels, insulin also promotes rapid cell growth. And that, in turn, increases the chance of a mutation, where one of those cells turns cancerous.

So you really don’t want lots of insulin running round your body. And that’s where intermittent

fasting comes in, because there is good evidence that it improves your body’s sensitivity to insulin to a greater degree than standard weight loss.

In addition to its effect on insulin levels, intermittent fasting may also reduce other factors that promote cancer.

For example, in 2016, researchers at the Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre in Manchester, asked 23 women who were all overweight and who had an increased risk of breast cancer to cut their calories by 75 per cent on two consecutive days and follow a healthy Mediterranean diet for the remaining five days of the week.

After a month, not only had they lost 5 per cent of their body fat, but around half of the women showed biochemical changes in their breast tissue thought to be linked to reduced breast cancer risk.

This was a short-term study, involving a small number of women, but it is consistent with a lot of animal research.

There are now trials going on which are more rigorously testing whether intermittent fasting really can help to prevent cancer.

HEAD TO THE MED TO WARD OFF CANCER

CLARE and I are huge fans of the Mediterranean diet, one which is rich in fish, vegetables, nuts and olive oil. It is super healthy and tastes great, which is why it is the basis of almost all Clare’s recipes. It is also a well-tested, cancerpreventing diet.

That’s partly because the diet is rich in omega 3, a fat found in nuts and oily fish such as salmon, sardines and mackerel, and which has been shown to help slow down cancer development

The Mediterranean diet is also packed full of fruit and vegetables that are wellknown for their cancer-fighting properties. As well as fibre and antioxidants, there is a compound found in kale and broccoli, called indole-3- carbinol (I3C), which seems to be particularly effective at halting the growth of tumours,

I really like broccoli, so I was also delighted to see a study presented last year at the American Society of Clinical Oncology involving 155,000 people which found that regularly eating this humble green vegetable reduced the risk of developing cancer by about 5 per cent.

But for every study like this involving broccoli, there are many others involving different fruit and veg, so don’t focus on any one in isolation: it’s the mix that is key and the recipes in the Fast 800 easy provide just that — and will tempt your tastebuds at the same time!

For more information on how the Fast 800 works, go to thefast800.com.