Cancer-Protective Healthy Dinner Party

I found out recently that a friend of mine has a brain tumor. She's working on raising money for a biopsy. She is raising money through this store.

I decided to have a fundraiser in the form of a healthy food night dinner party. I've done healthy food nights before for free. I buy inexpensive food and prepare healthy, simple, yet tasty recipes to encourage people to eat this way as well. For this event, I made more food than usual, and asked for a suggested donation of $10. It was a small event, but I feel like it went well.

I made a kale, white bean, and tomato stew using canned organic tomato sauce, onions, garlic, cannelini beans, kale, carrots, seasoned with a little paprika, thyme, and garlic. The tomato sauce had some salt in it already.

I also made a black rice salad with a dijon dressing that included dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, fresh lemon juice, garlic, and water. This salad had japonica black rice (which was on sale) and also had chopped sun-dried tomatoes and crushed walnuts. It was meant to have greens added, but I ran out of time and there were plenty of greens in the other dishes.

The other salad I made was mostly raw: raw chopped collards and some spinach, chopped apples, with my favorite tahini curry dressing that contained curry powder, lemon juice, tahini, and water. I brought optional currants that people could add to the salad.

The dessert got a lot of praise. I wanted to make something with berries, since these are protective against cancer. I wanted to make something that was mostly whole foods and mostly raw. I got some dates from my local farmers market (the apples, kale, and lemons were from there too). I thawed some mixed organic berries and blended them up with a little bit of lemon juice and vanilla extract. I slightly melted some raw coconut butter (this stuff is probably not incredibly healthy in large quantities, but more ideal that coconut oil, and so rich and delicious) and mixed all this together. I sliced the dates along one side, removed the pit, and stuffed each date with a little of the coconut-berry filling. I had considered putting in some raw cacao nibs, but ran out of time to deal with that.

So over all, I had a variety of whole plant foods, many of which are protective against cancer, including the kale and collards (cruciferous veggies- in the cabbage family), garlic, onions, carotenoids in the carrots and tomatoes, turmeric in the curry powder, and the good stuff (antioxidants) in dark berries (and probably the black rice). Plus a healthy dose of fiber.  Oh, and walnuts have some omega 3 fatty acids.

Of course eating this one meal isn't going to prevent or reverse cancer.  Eating this way on a regular basis can help protect you against cancer.  Discussion reversing cancer would be tricky for anyone to discuss, even seemingly doctors.  But if you are fighting cancer, it makes sense to eat a whole foods plant-based diet.

Further reading:  Eat For Health - The Anti-Cancer Diet
 Foods for Cancer Prevention |  T. Colin Campbell Foundation

Here are some other links I've been sharing with friends and family dealing with cancer:

http://anticancerliving.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/tumor-shrinking-on-vegan-diet/

http://www.thechinastudy.com/PDFs/ChinaStudy_Excerpt.pdf

http://crazysexylife.com/category/diet-lifestyle/

http://www.healingdaily.com/conditions/Gerson-therapy.htm

video/audio: China Study: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfWSHaaPiE8

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/859

http://nutritionfacts.org/videos/1-anticancer-vegetable/