DoctorOz: Your Ultimate Guide to Breast Cancer Prevention & Health

A whopping 87% of women diagnosed with breast cancer do not have even a single first degree relative with the disease. A statistic like that means for many women a diagnosis of breast cancer can strike without warning. But that does not mean that you are powerless. In fact the choice you make may be affecting your risk. That's why today I'm giving you the ultimate guide to preventing breast cancer and joining me now Dr. Christy Funk. She's not only the breast surgeon who's treated both Angelina Jolie and Sheryl Crow but also a world-renowned women's health advocate and a good friend. Thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. She says the first step to lowering your risk is to get a routine mammogram. You know the last time we were on the show it was earlier in COVID and a lot of women were not leaving their home period much less to go get a mammogram at a clinic where they might get COVID they thought. Has that rebounded? Are women going back to their clinics? Yes they are. So the pandemic that we saw in the beginning has completely flipped on itself. Pretty much everyone is getting their routine mammograms except our friends. So sisters if you're due make those appointments especially since a recent statistic from the National Cancer Institute shows that there will be an additional 10,000 deaths from breast and colorectal cancers in the upcoming decade largely because of the delay in screening from early in the pandemic. So remind everybody what the actual rule is. How often should they get their mammograms? So I side with the American College of Radiology and the American Society of Breast Surgeons and advise women at normal risk for breast cancer to begin at age 40. Don't stop and don't skip years unless you and your doctor decide otherwise. You've been very proactive in getting women to realize how much of their destiny they control. Otherwise people at home sort of no one wants to find out they have breast cancer they're scared of the diagnosis. You're saying we can fend off breast cancer with our forks. Absolutely you can. So you know all you do is chew and swallow but what's on the end of that fork literally becomes chemicals in your bloodstream that can feed or starve a breast cancer. You choose every time you lift fork to mouth. So the foods that best defend your cells against breast cancer always come from a whole food plant-based diet. You want to emphasize vegetables, fruits, legumes like lentils and peas and 100% full grains while at the same time you want to minimize all meat, dairy, eggs, saturated fats, simple sugars, refined cereals and processed foods you know like cookies, cakes, crackers. It's good for you anyway. Absolutely it's good for your brain, your heart, all your organs. And you get to have healthier breasts hopefully as well. Come on over here. The ultimate prevention plate according to Christy should look something like this right 70% fresh produce and then 30% proteins you know lentils, peas, soys. Did I get it right? Perfect that looks delicious. And colorful produce ideally as well because you get all the antioxidant benefits that are different in all different colors. It's all you know what's interesting is you eat something like that and except for maybe beets you never pee off the color. The nutrients are in the color it gets absorbed by your body. Yeah the beets come out both sides. Yeah both places. One of your favorite cancer fighting meals is called the breast torito. I love these phrases by the way. The breast torito walk us through how you make this. Yes so this is the beautiful by the way. Oh my goodness. It is and it's delicious too. So the reason why it just might reduce breast cancer risk comes from all of these power hitter ingredients. So the top two are going to be tofu and turmeric. Research suggests that the reason they can reduce breast cancer risk comes from the anti-estrogenic properties. 80% of all breast cancers are fed and fueled by estrogen. So lowering estrogen is protective. Next up you've got spinach. So your cruciferous veggies broccoli, kale, arugula, spinach all contain isothiocyanates. These compounds research shows can seek out and destroy cancer cells. Isn't that amazing it's even possible? I know right. Much more powerfully than we would ever have imagined now that we can actually understand how it works. It's not just moms saying it anymore the doctors the experts are saying it. I know it's a chemistry lesson inside your body and it's so powerful. So another power hitter is going to be your allium family onion and garlic. There's a French study that shows that 11 to 12 weekly servings of allium vegetables can drop breast cancer by 70 percent. And here's a pro tip you probably know it but the heat will destroy the magical enzyme allicinase that brings all the power to life. So whenever you cook your allium veggies like onions just throw in a little diced handful of raw onion at the end to bring the magic back into action because you add the enzyme back. I did not know that I appreciate the pro tip but I'll share one back with you. Yes. One of the beautiful things about garlic it keeps people away from you due to the stress in your life. All right. Oh and then the breastorito gets all wrapped in a hundred percent whole grain tortilla which contains fiber. Fiber binds estrogen in your GI tract and makes you poop it out. So I want you to get 30 grams of fiber a day. Let me push you on the tofu. It's a big slap here and probably wouldn't use that much but any amount of tofu has been maligned of late. People arguing that it actually might stimulate estrogen levels. Your response. Oh gosh. Okay so for 18 years I told my breast cancer patients spit that miso out of your mouth. It has phytoestrogens in the soy. Okay so then I went to write Breast the Owner's Manual my book and I dove into the soy science to prove with facts that I was right. Embarrassingly wrong. Like oops. Sorry ladies. So it turns out in fact the facts show soy to be quite anti-estrogenic and anti-carcinogenic because we've got two estrogen receptors in our body. Alpha which is attached to cancer cells and beta with which soy has a much greater affinity and when beta is activated it shuts alpha down. So since 2009 many human studies have come tumbling out looking at soy and breast cancer and they all consistently show a decrease in the occurrence recurrence and death rates in high versus low soy consumers on the order of 25 to up to 60 percent drops. Hot dog. My wife's vegetarian. Tofu has always been in our plate. She never believed the studies. Right. Didn't believe me because when I was saying what you were saying. Right. And she was right and she feels validated now which she never lets me forget by the way. I know. Well soy it up sisters. You know what you know why though we were we were kind of right because before 2009 there weren't human studies in soy and the mice that were fed soy had their breast tumors grow. So but turns out we're not mice. We're not mice. And tofu tastes so good. Thank goodness. Okay finally active function starts every morning with a cancer fighting matcha latte. So the meat power ingredient the secret weapon is ancient matcha. So no one disputes the antioxidant power in green tea but ancient matcha takes the entire organic leaf and a study has shown it to have 137 times the antioxidant content versus your regular basic green tea. So simple you can start with soy milk. A cup and a half of soy milk any plant milk but I love soy for reasons we just said. Then you're going to do two teaspoons of ancient matcha and if you'll throw in the two teaspoons of agave nectar or maple syrup then you throw in a little bit of ice cap blend until nice and frothy and you end up with this. Now that's first of all a beautiful drink. People can't tell there's not vodka in there. You can probably add vodka. You know I love having you on the show. I love all the wisdom. I mean it tastes so much quality control like everything you talk about makes you done. Keep it up. Thank you. All right up next why black women are 40% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. We're going to talk about breast cancer survivors that have taken the battle against disparities into their own hands. Black and white women in the United States are diagnosed with breast cancer roughly the same rate but black women are 40% more likely to die of it. Why is this happening? How do we change it? We're about to meet women who have taken the battle against health care disparities into their own hands. Breast cancer surgeon Dr. Christy Funk is here along with gynecologist and women's health expert Dr. Jessica Shepherd and cancer survivor Ricky Farrelly. Ricky was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer around 55 years of age. I'm sorry you had to go through that but I appreciate you speaking openly about it. What was it like at that young age to be diagnosed? It was not fun doctor. It was not fun. It was pretty devastating. I was your typical crazy black woman taking care of everybody. I was the bread winner for my family, the rainmaker for my company and all of a sudden I had this shock that I had breast cancer and not only breast cancer but triple negative breast cancer. So it was pretty devastating. My daughters were 19 and 26 at the time. The youngest one was in college and I was working to put her through school to put her through Dartmouth. You don't have a lot of options because a lot of the hormone treatments aren't going to work. Nothing works. Dr. Shepherd, why? Why does this happen? Why are black women more likely to die of breast cancer even though they're getting diagnosed roughly the same rates? Yeah I think that's an important question because breast cancer is the second most common cancer in women. Now one in eight women will be diagnosed in their lifetime with breast cancer but like you said earlier that black women are more likely to die from breast cancer. So that can come with access, education, awareness but also when we think of triple negative breast cancer like Ricky had that is a less common. It's only 50 to 20 percent of all breast cancers but it's more aggressive. You see it earlier and also you will also see that when it's diagnosed it's at a more aggressive form of the disease and it's harder to treat. So with all of that together we are seeing more black women die and that's why the messaging is ever so important that we've got to early detect. Early detection is key, it's critical and we want women to get their mammogram. The screening tools that doctors are using right now, do you think they're customized enough for women especially for black women? I don't. So black women tend to have denser breast tissue than white women. Dense tissue on a mammogram looks like a white bunch of splotches and fat is dark. Cancer is also white so now the radiologist has to look for a snowball in a snowstorm and they often miss tumors. So I do recommend black women and really any dense breasted woman to get a 3D mammogram which can see through the density better than your basic 2D. Plus talk to your doctor about maybe adding additional imaging like screening ultrasound or breast MRI. Ricky just from a patient perspective did you feel you're adequately informed when you were diagnosed? I don't believe that I was. I didn't really understand triple negative. When I went to Dr. Google there were three things that said you were going to die. Dr. Google? And there are three things that said you're going to die. My doctor didn't have a lot of experience with triple negative breast cancer and really couldn't couldn't speak to that to the um to the disease and what the impact was on black women but I believe our you know I believe our bodies are different and the drugs don't always work for us and I took I did the normal standard of care and my cancer came back and my doctor gave me two years to live and I'm on 10. Well thank you for making your doctor for proving wrong. Right, right. But I am sort of curious how this all comes about and Jessica you're taking this head-on and she's partnered with the Open Whimpery Network the Own Your Health Initiative. They are supporting a diagnosis and care for people in the black community. How is that going to change the future Rickies and whether they're going to listen to what their doctor says and maybe have a two-year life expectancy or go out and kick your tires other ideas. Yeah we have the statistics we know exactly what is going on so with the Own Your Health and also Whole Logic Project Health Equity partnering together to actually make actionable items to education and awareness but also allowing the access to care tangible to allow for black women to understand where you can go for care why it's so important but making all of that accessible because we know that black and hispanic women and women of color in general need care that they deserve and that they need. Thanks as always for being here. Find out more information on the Own Your Health Initiative by going to own social media channels.