A good word to describe Christopher Lloyd's character Jim Ignatowski on the sitcom "Taxi" would be "disheveled." He's a mess-harmless when he's fixing taxis around the garage, just don't let him drive. But when a hard-driving protein named Dishevelled (we're not kidding) meets up with cholesterol-that can add up to a pretty harmful collision.
It's been known that a high-fat lifestyle (poor nutrition and obesity) increases your risk for cancer. It's implicated in cancer of the esophagus, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, thyroid, ovaries, colon, kidney, uterus and breast (in postmenopausal women); plus gastric cardia, a cancer of the part of the stomach closest to the esophagus; meningioma, a usually benign type of brain tumor; and multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. But no one was sure how it causes all that trouble.
So if fending off a heart attack and stroke aren't enough of an incentive to keep tabs on your waist size and your lousy LDL cholesterol level, here's another BIG one. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago have published a study in Nature Communications that reveals Dishevelled's role in the activation of a cell-signaling pathway linked to cancer.
Your goal: Keep your LDL less than 100mg/dL.
How: Avoid the Five Food Felons (all added sugars and syrups, most sat and all trans fats, and any grain that isn't 100 percent whole); eat 5-9 servings of produce a day; walk 10,000 steps daily or the equivalent; and do two to three 30-minute strength-building sessions a week. That should straighten you out!
(c) 2017 Michael Roizen, M.D. and Mehmet Oz, M.D.