Several weeks ago, I read a newsletter I received from Dr. Ben Kim (drbenkim.com), a chiropractor and acupuncturist with an extremely helpful health-related blog.  The newsletter talked about how helpful the carotenoid nutrient is for lowering cancer risk.

Part of the newsletter read as follows (printed with permission):

“If you do a search through the National Library of Medicine
archives, you’ll quickly find a plethora of studies that
support the strong correlation between carotenoid intake and
lower incidence of all types of cancer.

Breast, colon, bone, uterus, prostate, brain – all of the
tissues in these areas are less prone to developing malignant
masses when carotenoid intake is consistently high.”

In other words, if you eat a lot of foods that contain decent carotenoid amounts, you lower your risk of cancer.  This is news that all of us need to heed.

What Are Carotenoids?

According to Wikipedia, carotenoids are essentially pigments found in a lot of fruits and vegetables.  The pigments are associated with various nutrients like beta-carotene and lycopene, and are usually present in yellow, orange and red fruits.

What Foods to Focus on for Carotenoids

The question to ask now is, what foods should I focus on to intake high amounts of carotenoid?  Well one of them should be obvious…

…carrots.  Carrot-enoids…get it? 🙂

Here are some others:

Sweet Potatoes

Bananas

Oranges

Tomatoes

Leafy Greens (cabbage, collards, spinach, kale, turnips, etc.)

See a trend?  Basically, to get a lot of carotenoids in, we have to focus on vegetables and fruits.  The really cool thing about this is that 1) all of these vegetables contain many, many more nutrients than carotenoid, and 2) a diet high in vegetables is associated not only with reduced disease instances, but also with a healthy weight.  Plant foods give you a ton of nutrients for just a few calories.

That is why it is so important to eat for your health first; the weight loss will take care of itself if you’re eating right.

Am I eating enough?

So how do you know if you’re eating enough carotenoids?  I don’t have a definite number of grams to recommend to you, but I think that a better focus is to just make sure you eat a lot of them…for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks.

• Add spinach or some other greens to your eggs in the morning
• Chop up some baby carrots to add in your spaghetti meat sauce
• Throw a sweet potato in the oven at 425 degrees for about an hour for dinner OR breakfast even
• Make green smoothies with greens and bananas
• Buy some of the cuties or halos…a delicious, easy snack

Don’t worry about definite amounts.  Base your diet on vegetables and fruits, and I’m sure you’ll be alright.

For the Record…

Sweet Potatoes are a favorite carotenoid source for my wife and I, and I thought I would also let you know that they are very, very easy to grow.  Check out this article I wrote some time ago that details how we grow ours.  Now is the time to start sprouting some sweet potatoes so that you’ll have slips to plant in May.

You can eat the leaves from the sweet potato vines, too (they are very similar to spinach), so that’s double carotenoid power from sweet potatoes alone!