Book #27: Anti Cancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber

I feel like my mom told me about reading this book, so when I saw it as an audiobook at the library, it seemed to ring a bell, so I picked it up. I was looking for something to listen to while I exercised, and this seemed like as good an option as any. Unfortunately, I don't think this was an ideal audiobook--it would have been much better to instead of to listen to. There were too many tables and discussions of which specific foods are healthier and blah blah blah that would have been much easier to read and skim as needed. I think I would have been much more interested (and I would have finished it in about 1/5 of the time!) if I had picked up a paper copy.

But anyway--Servan-Schreiber is a psychiatrist who has become interested in cancer after having it himself. He and his colleagues were using an scanning machine to do MRIs on people and study their brains, and he volunteered to let them do a scan of him, and they found out that he had a brain tumor. He had an operation, everything seemed to work, and then he relapsed, and he decided to do all the research he could to find out about how we can change our lifestyles to avoid cancer. There were many suggestions, and stories to back up their potential usefulness: eat anti-cancer foods (like green tea, dark chocolate--avoid a typical Western diet as much as possible), eat foods with Omega-3s to balance out the excess of Omega-6s, eat organic (avoid pesticides), clean up your home from environmental toxins, find calm and avoid stress, etc. I think these are really simple and useful suggestions that definitely could help someone motivated enough to follow them. If nothing else, even if they don't help prevent cancer in your body, these suggestions will most likely only make you feel better in general anyways. I'm not quite invested enough to sacrifice our decent-but-not-crazy eating habits and we can't afford organic right now anyways, so we're not going to be immediately adopting all of these suggestions, but I thought they were pretty interesting anyways. And now I think I'll feel good every time I make a smoothie with berries and flaxseed, because both of those are anti-cancer foods!