Hello, my friends!

As many of you know, I'm a cancer patient, and food is one of the few levers I actually get to pull.

So when I found a great article from the American Institute for Cancer Research this week, I read the whole thing twice.

It even reminded me of something odd from my pregnancy, which I'll get to.

This is the idea at the center of it:

Almost half of all cancer cases can be prevented through diet and lifestyle.

You probably only hear the first half of that sentence: cut the bacon, skip the soda, cut back on alcohol.

But then, what about second half: If I cut this, what do I eat instead?

Today we’ll talk about:

Researchers estimate that close to 40 percent of cancer cases are preventable through healthy lifestyle choices, and diet is one of the biggest levers.

That's usually where people start hunting for a single miracle superfood. But no single food carries that protection on its own.

Nutrition experts focus on your dietary pattern instead, which just means what you eat consistently across meals and snacks throughout the week, rather than any single food.

That pattern, not any single day, is what shapes your long-term risk.

So cutting the bacon is a fine start. But if the bacon gets replaced with a bag of chips, you haven't built a protective pattern. You've just swapped one problem for a different one.

My cancer is in remission now. That doesn't mean recurrence is something I can rule out completely.

I can't control that at 100 percent, and I've stopped trying to.

What I can do is stack the odds through the choices in front of me each day.

The AICR describes the same shift when they explain why they study patterns instead of single foods.

Neither of us is chasing a guarantee. I can't promise my cancer stays away, and no single meal can promise protection.

But we can both build a pattern that tilts the odds over years.

I've never liked soda. Not even in my past life (before I knew anything about plant-based nutrition or lifestyle medicine).

Nope, I wasn't scared of the sugar. I just hated the fizz of it in my throat. That’s all.

If someone offered me one at a gathering, I'd take a few sips out of gratitude and leave it there.

But when I got pregnant last year, and I wanted soda so badly I couldn't explain it.

That was super weird.

So instead of reaching for regular Coke or Pepsi, I went for flavored sparkling water with zero sugar.

A few sips a day was just enough to answer the craving. A 500 ml bottle would last me a week.

That's the whole idea in one small choice. I answered the craving with a better version of the same thing, rather than cutting it and leaving a gap behind.

AICR put together a helpful guide of specific swaps. I organized their recommended food swaps into a swap table below for easy scanning.

You can find their complete list, along with the research behind it, at AICR's full article.

You don't need to overhaul your whole diet this week.

Pick one meal a day and apply one swap to it.

Choose a replacement that's already sitting in your kitchen, or add it to your next grocery list, so it becomes the easy option instead of the effortful one.

Give that single swap a full week before you add another.

The next time you go to cut something, ask the second half of the question. Not this, but what?

One swap at a time,

Grazelle 🌱