Dr. Roberta Troy might have found a new treatment for cancer.
On Tuesday, December 7th, 2014, I went to hear Roberta Troy talk about breast cancer. The name of her presentation was “Triple Negative Breast Cancer in women of the African Diaspora. To be honest, I chose this lecture because of the free food offered, not because I was particularly interested in the topic, but Dr. Troy changed my mind completely in only the first few minutes of her lecture.
Dr. Troy doesn’t just study any old breast cancer, she studies Triple Negative Breast Cancer or TNBC. TNBC is an extremely aggressive form of breast cancer that effects young women and is most common among women of African descent. In Dr. Troy’s studies in Ghana, she saw women as young as 16 years old with TNBC. In fact, of all the West African women with breast cancer, 60% have TNBC. African American women with breast cancer, many of whom trace their lineage to West Africa, have a 30% chance of having TNBC. That’s a lot of people who are affected by this extremely hard to treat cancer. The reason TNBC is so hard to treat is because it is not dependent on estrogen, progesterone, or HER2 like most other breast cancers. Because of this, it doesn’t respond to hormone therapies, and the usual treatment is a mastectomy. This is usually paired with chemotherapy and radiation, but still, the outlook for survival is slim.
Dr. Troy, however, thinks natural products are the way to combat TNBC. As a natural food advocate and GMO fighter, I was thrilled to hear this. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of research saying very similar things, that eating whole, unprocessed foods can prevent many of the diseases that ail us. Our modern American diet of processed carbs and meat has made us sicker and fatter, and Dr. Troy was finding similar patterns among TNBC patients. Many patients had poor diets and were not getting enough nutrients from fruits and vegetables. Risk factors for TNBC include a diet high in fat and processed foods and exposure to chemicals.
Furthermore, Dr. Troy found something in many natural foods that really made a difference when it came to TNBC. What she found was a carotene called lycopene. Lycopene is found in tomatoes, grapefruit, and watermelon, among other red fruits and vegetables. Women with diets high in lycopene are less likely to get cancer in the first place so Dr. Troy was interested in what lycopene could do to already progressive cancers. When she injected lycopene into cancer cells, something incredible happened. Lycopene was actually effective in reducing their cancer cell growth drastically, even without any surgery or chemotherapy. She thinks that she might be on to something and wants to further her studies on how lycopene inhibits tumor growth.
Overall, listening to Dr. Troy was an incredible experience and I’m very excited to see where she goes from here with her studies. She is a woman who is really making ground-breaking steps in her field, and that’s something we can all admire. It’s another study to prove to me that eating healthy is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. Everyone should really educate themselves on what they’re putting in their bodies, since so many diseases, including cancer, can be traced back to the gut. Why wait to fight these diseases when you can prevent them from even happening by making simple lifestyle changes.
