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5 Tips to Help Lower Your Breast Cancer Risk
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among American women. If the American Cancer Society estimates are accurate, nearly 200,000 women would have been diagnosed with breast cancer this year.
After lung cancer, breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death among women. And its threat is real because women have a one in eight chance of developing this disease during their lifetime.
The good news is that you can greatly reduce your breast cancer risk by taking control of your health.
Here are Dr. Joseph Mercola’s Top 5 Tips to Help Lower Your Breast Cancer Risk:
1. Get regular exercise and eat healthy to maintain an ideal body weight – Exercise for at least half an hour per day and eat according to your Nutritional Type to be as lean as possible without being underweight. Having a weight closer to the end of a healthy weight range will give you more protection against cancer. A healthy body mass index is above 18.5 but does not exceed 25.
2. Breastfeed exclusively for up to six months – Studies show that new mothers who breastfeed their babies reduce their risk of breast cancer.
3. Limit your alcohol intake.
4. Optimize your vitamin D levels – Getting safe sun exposure, using a safe tanning bed and taking vitamin D3 supplements will give you healthy vitamin D levels. Studies show that calcitrol, the active form of vitamin D, induces a tumor suppressing protein which inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells. In general, vitamin D helps protect against cancer by helping increase the self-destruction of mutated cells, reducing the spread and reproduction of cancer cells, causing cell differentiation and reducing the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones.
5. Avoid mammograms – Conventional doctors recommend that women ages 40 and up should have an annual mammogram to diagnose and screen for breast cancer. But Dr. Mercola warns that a mammogram may increase the risk of cancer because the radiation it emits is up to 1,000 times greater than that from a chest x-ray. Mammograms are also painful and compresses the breast, which may spur the faster growth of malignant cells.
Mercola has recently added a radiation-free, painless and non-invasive diagnostic tool called thermal imaging or thermography, to his clinic, the Natural Health Center. Thermography checks for vascular changes in the breasts by creating a digital map using an infrared, scanning-type camera to draw heat patterns that may detect some condition or abnormality.
Thermograms provide you with a greater opportunity of early detection of breast cancer than through self examination, doctor examination or mammography. Aside from detecting breast cancer, thermography screenings can also help check for conditions concerning your cardiovascular, digestive and muscular systems.
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Tags: breast cancer, exercise, Nutritional Typing, thermography, vitamin d
