5 FOOD YOU MUST AVOID SO THAT YOU WON'T HAVE CANCER

1. Grilled or Smoked Meat and food

Red meat is a good source of protein, but also pretty high in saturated fat. Servings should be limited and when you do eat it, be careful about the preparation. Turns out, those beautiful char marks on grilled meat are a clear sign of acrylamide, that nasty cancer-causing byproduct of high heat. By some reports, charred meat ups your risk of deadly pancreatic cancer by 60%!

Preserved meats like bacon, hot dogs, and lunch meat, are especially dangerous because of the way they are processed. Carcinogenic chemicals like nitrite and nitrate are used to make the meat last longer, but do your body no favors. Even natural smoking is a dangerous method of preservation, as the meat takes on tar during the process.

2. Microwave Popcorn

Microwave popcorn is so easy to make, but the cook-in bags are seriously toxic. They’re lined with a chemical called PFOA that is known to cause cancer. The butter flavoring on some varieties is also quite dangerous. It contains a chemical called diacetyl, or else a close cousin of diacetyl that was meant to be safer but really isn’t.

Add in the fact that 93% of corn grown in the United States is genetically modified, and the once healthy snack of popcorn becomes pure junk. Luckily, you can still buy organic kernels to air pop and dress with a combination of olive or avocado oil and your favorite dried herbs.

3. Canned Food, Especially Tomatoes

Canned vegetables are often way less nutritious than fresh or frozen because a ton of sodium is added in the preservation process. Canned fruits may be packed in high fructose corn syrup. But that’s not even why canned food makes our list! The real problem lies in the cans themselves. They are lined with a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA.

BPA is a known hormone disrupter that has also been linked to cancer. There is no way to stop it from leaching into food that it touches, but the effect is greater with foods that are acidic, like tomatoes. It’s best to avoid canned food unless it is specifically labeled as BPA free.

4. Farmed Salmon

Wild salmon live mostly happy lives where they are able to enjoy the diet they prefer, which includes zooplankton and small invertebrates when they’re young, and larger fish like herring and krill when they get a bit bigger. Farmed salmon are typically fed a ground up mixture of random fish, vegetable matter, and antibiotics.

While wild salmon are naturally pink as a result of their diet, farmers add pink dye to the food of farmed salmon to make them look right. The end result is fish that’s full of carcinogenic PCBs, dioxins, and mercury. It also has less heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. Always buy wild-caught if you indulge in salmon – it is both tasty and nutritious in this form.

5. Non-organic Fruits & Vegetables

It’s a tough situation, because organic produce is quite a bit more expensive than conventionally grown stuff. But farmers in the U.S. routinely use chemical pesticides so dangerous that they have been banned in other countries. One scary example is atrazine, which has been linked to tumor growth and reproductive disorders.

Buy organic to minimize your consumption of cancer-causing chemicals, which typically don’t break down in the body but instead grow in concentration over your lifetime.

For your health and the health of your family, work on cutting these 11 carcinogenic foods out of your diet now! It may not be easy, but it’s totally worth it.