Lifestyle Anti-Oxidants: Healthy Habits That Help Prevent Cancer

These days, the word “cancer” is often immediately followed by another word, “antioxidant”. What is an antioxidant? And how does an anti-oxidant help to prevent cancer?

An anti-oxidant is any compound which slows down or prevents oxidation, a chemical process that accelerates aging and makes it easier for disease processes to affect your health. Visualize a hole in the body of your car that has been created by rust. That is oxidation, and it’s not much different from the kind of oxidation that happens inside of our bodies. An anti-oxidant is, in a nutshell, a human rustproofing agent.

Nutritional anti-oxidants are the rage right now. From acai to zeaxanthin, you can buy an antioxidant for any letter of the alphabet, and for any disease you wish to prevent. Did you know, however, that some of your every day choices and habits can also be thought of as antioxidants? Here is a list of some of my favorite ones.

1. Adequate sleep. The most powerful antioxidant the body has is one it makes itself—melatonin. People who do not regularly get adequate sleep, whether because they do not prioritize it, the nature of their work interferes with it, or they simply can’t no matter how they try…do not expose themselves to enough melatonin to be able to capitalize on its anti-aging, cancer-fighting properties. The famous Nurses’ Health Study brought to light that women working night shifts were more prone to developing breast cancer than women working other shifts. The more research that is conducted, the more connections are being made, and it is clear, the more attention you pay to your sleep hygiene, the easier it is for your body to fight off many serious diseases.

2. Adequate nutrition. Before you start nitpicking individual nutrients and stocking up on expensive supplements, take a look at your overall diet. Are you eating enough food? Or are you chronically dieting? Do you skip breakfast and overload in the evening? Do you eat to cope with stress? Deficiencies and excesses of any kind only add other stresses to your body’s workload. The more extreme your food behavior, the less resources it has to allocate to really dangerous stressors like free radicals. Rather than waste your defenses on behaviors that you can change, leaving you defenseless against the ones you may not be able to see…consider adopting a more balanced approach to nutrition and eating.

3. Balanced exercise. Exercise in itself is actually an oxidative/aging activity. It’s what happens in between exercise sessions, in recovery, that benefits you. With regular exercise, your body learns to recognize stress and oxidation and handle it more efficiently than if you never broke a sweat. But…if your exercise is extreme, you don’t give yourself adequate rest and recovery time between workouts, and/or you don’t eat enough to fuel the workouts and the recovery process, exercise can become an unhealthy activity.

4. Managing stress. Women are not always the greatest delegators. They are often, in their families, the person with whom the buck stops. If you’re picking up pieces for your husband, your kids, your carpool group, your peer group at work, you’re likely so preoccupied at times with your “to do” list that you aren’t giving yourself a chance to listen to what your body needs—sleep, activity, nourishment. You’re likely tossing and turning at night about the things on your “to do” list that did not get finished. The bottom line is, you are going to be much better at taking care of the people in your life that you REALLY care about, if you take care of yourself first. And let some of the unnecessary people you’ve been caring about to drop off of that list. It’s ok to delegate, and it’s ok to say no. Really.

Now, back to those supplements. The supplements I work with the most, always seem to have their greatest effect in people who are already doing much to take care of themselves. They have a hard time working in environments that are out of balance. So if you want to use supplements, consider that without incorporating them into a total anti-oxidant LIFESTYLE, they’re not really going to be effective. They can enhance healthy choices, but they can’t replace them.

An anti-oxidant lifestyle is cheap, available to everyone, and it can drastically reduce your risk for many of today’s biggest health issues. It’s not as glamorous as a wrinkled berry hand-picked by silent Monks on an exotic mountainside, but it can be the difference that makes a difference.

Sleep. Eat. Move. Delegate. It really can be that simple!

Monika M. Woolsey, MS, RD, is a registered dietitian, an exercise physiologist, and the founder of the inCYST Institute for Hormone Health. The inCYST Institute is an educational resource for people with hormone-related problems and the professionals who treat them. Please visit her blog,www.incyst.com, or join her Facebook fan pages, inCYST Programs for Women with PCOS and/or Insomniacfest, to receive her health updates. You can contact Monika directly at monika@afterthediet.com.