This detoxifying snack stops cancer in its tracks

If you want to prevent disease and attain optimum health, it’s vital to detoxify your body from the chemicals, heavy metals, pollutants, bacteria, viruses and radiation it faces on a daily basis.

But you don’t have to do anything crazy to detoxify — like go on a weeklong juice fast or only eat vegetables for a month.

The easiest way to detoxify is to pick out a few detoxifying foods that you enjoy and add them to your daily diet. And, based on the latest study from researchers in Germany, the first delicious, detoxifying food you should put on your grocery list is a bag of your favorite nuts.

Nuts and detoxification

Research has already shown that just a handful of nuts per day can prevent a long list of diseases. Nuts have even been shown to heal your gut and prevent colon cancer. But why are these scrumptious little morsels so good for your health?

Well, researchers from the University of Jena in Germany recently uncovered one of the many reasons behind their health benefits… they help detoxify your body.

After examining nuts on the molecular level, these researchers determined that nuts help your body detoxify reactive oxygen species.

As a quick refresher, reactive oxygen species are a type of free radicals that attack your DNA, damage and cause cell mutations and put you at risk for diseases like cancer. They’re created when your body is exposed to viruses, bacteria and environmental toxins like pollution, radiation and chemicals.

When researchers examined the effect of fermented nuts on human colon cells in a petri dish, they found that these nuts inhibited abnormal growth in these cells. In other words, they kept healthy cells from turning cancerous. They did this by impacting the genes responsible for cell growth and detoxification.

Go nuts for nuts now

The take home message from this and other research is… if you want to protect your body from disease, make nuts a part of your daily diet. In this particular study, researchers verified the detoxifying properties of five different types of nuts: macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds and pistachios. But there are a wide variety of healthy nuts to choose from.

You can also include other tasty and detoxifying foods in your diet. In fact, Easy Health Options contributor Dr. Brad Cutler has created a comprehensive list of detoxifying foods, herbs and spices you can use to create your next shopping list. You can also try foods that are high in the compound sulforaphane to detoxify your body and reduce your cancer risk. And don’t forget to reduce your toxin exposure by detoxifying your personal environment too.

Sources:

1. “The molecular mechanisms of the cancer-protective effect of nuts.” MedicalXpress. https://medicalxpress.com. Retrieved February 7, 2017.

2. Schlörmann, et al. “Chemopreventive potential offermented nuts in LT97 colon adenoma and primary epithelial colon cells.” Molecular Carcinogenesis, 2017.

3. I. Lushchak. “Free radicals, reactive oxygen species, oxidative stress and its classification.” Chemico-Biological Interactions, 2014.