About The Blog

As a surgeon who specializes in the treatment of breast cancer, I see patients affected by cancer every day, and I am amazed at their courage to move forward in the fight.  Their fortitude, as well as the fact that 1 in 8 women living in the US will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, inspires me to investigate, learn and share what we can all do to reduce our risk for cancer.

Cancer development is known as a “multi-hit process”, or one that requires the combined effects of multiple pro-cancer events to allow a cancer to evade our body’s defenses and establish a foothold.  As a result, fighting cancer also requires a multi-hit approach to most effectively prevent or even cure.

Studies show that we have small cancerous tumors in our bodies called microtumors. However, studies also show that lifestyle and nutrition have a direct effect on whether these tumors are halted or develop into a clinically significant cancer. The study of epigenetics shows that lifestyle and nutrition are the cornerstones to our health and together can even trump genetic risk. This is great news!

Many of my patients make lifestyle changes once they are diagnosed with cancer – the diagnosis is a wake-up call.  I encourage you to make the simple, totally doable changes toward a healthier lifestyle before receiving your own wake-up call.

Persistent themes that I have identified throughout my research are moderation, variety, and synergy – these are keys to optimal health.  For those who decide they want to take control of their health, moderation is often skipped, or ignored, or more accurately, leaped right over!  But the same enthusiasm that causes this rush to health, can cause us to focus excessively on known healthy practices.  For example, discovering that compounds in soy products can help fight cancer does not mean drinking a half gallon of soymilk and eating soybeans every day.  Even healthy practices have downsides unless they are coupled with moderation.  Practicing moderation has another benefit – when not consuming too much of a few things, we leave room for variety. 

Variety is another key in our nutritional armor against cancer.  Food really can be medicine, and different kinds and colors of food contain different “medicines”.  Offering your body the variety it needs helps lead to the last item – synergy.  

Synergy simply means the combined effects of two or more things (health choices or habits, in this case) are greater than expected.  It’s somewhat like 3+3+3=9 versus 3x3x3=27.  So, as you might imagine, synergy really matters, and it can offer huge benefit in cellular health.  However, synergy works both ways – for the better to maximize your health and for the worse to maximize disease and disease risk.  Changing just one lifestyle choice or habit is good.  Even great, depending on the habit.  But changing two or three or five or more bad habits to good habits offers synergy.  It’s a benefit for free!

But I am not here to bark out orders.  I want to help you learn the WHY behind the DO, because understanding the WHY helps us internalize the DO…to make it our own…to help us take responsibility for and control our health.

The bottom line is that EVERYTHING we do ultimately affects the regulation of our genes, and gene regulation (that is, turning on, turning off, turning up, or turning down the right genes) affects our health outcome, good or bad. Everything we do, every choice we make, is THAT powerful and becomes even more important as we age.

Importantly, my beliefs about lifestyle and its impact on health don’t just reside in scientific literature, it comes from personal experience. I have come to a place of better health at an older age through educating myself about optimal health to reduce my own risk of breast cancer.

My hope with this blog is to provide you with the tools and knowledge to do all you can to reduce your risk of developing breast cancer. Optimizing your lifestyle choices and minimizing environmental exposures offers you your best chance to never hear the words “You have cancer…”

Knowledge is power. Join me in the journey to discover best practices in prevention and optimization of your health, doing so with concrete, easy to implement tips and solutions.