What Role Does Nutrition Play in Skin Cancer?

Here are five key reasons today’s food contains fewer nutrients than the food of past generations:

1. Monoculture farming (the practice of growing a single crop on a very large scale) over crop rotation has depleted the soil of key nutrients.

2. The Agri-business companies harvest early before the produce has ripened and really assimilated all the nutrients from the soil.

3. Selecting limited food crops for ideal flavor but not variety and nutritional content.

4. More toxins in our food (pesticides, preservatives and even BPA).

5. Environmental chemicals in our air (pesticides, herbicides), skin care, hair products and toothpaste.

Adequate nutrition — including: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, phytonutrients and essential fats like omega 3s — is essential to the body’s detoxifying process. Increased toxin load in our environment and diet means more need for more nutrients. Lack of nutrition means lack of ability to detoxify. Our bodies simply cannot keep up.

When the body cannot keep up with the detox process, toxins bioaccumulate, leading to illness and disease, such as cancer. When we have less nutrition from our food, we have less capacity to detox. According to a study published in Scientific American, “Workers who apply certain pesticides to farm fields are twice as likely to contract melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer…The findings add to evidence suggesting that frequent use of pesticides could raise the risk of melanoma. Rates of the disease have tripled in the United States in the last 30 years, with sun exposure identified as the major cause.” These chemicals are used in the United States on a variety of crops, including nuts, vegetables and fruits.

So could it be that skin cancer is from toxin exposure and the sun is actually helpful. Vitamin D is cancer protective. So therefore, sun exposure without getting burned would be cancer protective.

When you eat food that is low in nutritional value and high in inflammatory Omega-6s and your body is forced to manage toxins we were not designed to detoxify, then your body becomes toxic, and full of free radicals. It becomes inflamed, and acidic which is the prime environment for cancer.

Betty Murray, CN, IFMCP, CHC is a Certified Nutritionist & Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner with the Institute for Functional Medicine, founder of the Dallas-based functional medicine clinic Living Well Dallas and Executive Director of the the Functional Medicine Association of North Texas. A master of the biochemistry of the body, Betty teaches her clients how to utilize nutrition for autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, MTHFR and weight loss.  You can find her book “Cleanse: Detox Your Body, Mind & Spirit” on Amazon here.

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