The foods on your side.

Around a third to forty percent of cancers are linked to things within our reach: what we eat, how we move, how much we carry. I know how this fact usually gets used, as a stick to beat women with. I'm not interested in the stick. I'm interested in the other side of it, which is genuinely good news: your everyday plate is one of the most protective tools you own, and most of the work is adding, not restricting.

Here's what the research keeps pointing to. Fibre feeds the gut bacteria that keep your gut lining healthy and your hormones properly cleared, and every 10g of daily fibre is associated with a meaningful drop in bowel cancer risk. Colourful plants carry the compounds (polyphenols, carotenoids, sulforaphane in the cabbage family) that help your cells repair themselves well. And plenty of what protects us is already in the food we cook every week.

So here is your one action this week: a serving of beans or lentils a day.

A tin of chickpeas tossed into a summer salad. Butter beans stirred into a pasta sauce. Lentils simmered into soup. Black beans with rice. Hummus with crudites. Ewa oloyin with a little stew, or akara made at home. However your kitchen works, beans fit. They're the overlap in the diets of the longest-lived communities on earth for a reason: fibre, plant protein, and steady blood sugar in one inexpensive pot.

If you have a “complicated relationship” with beans (you know what I mean :P), start with half a cup and build up over two weeks. Your gut adjusts.

And when you've got your serving of beans in place, add colour around it. Spinach, peppers, tomatoes, courgette, aubergine, garden egg, carrots, whatever is in season this week. If you're in the northern hemisphere where it's summer, salads can do most of the heavy lifting. You don't need superfoods flown in from anywhere. The protective foods are the ones already in your trolley, and most of them cost less than the supplements sold to replace them.

Nothing to cut this week. Just one pot to cook (or one tin to open).

Health in your body, peace in your soul, purpose in your step.

Lolu :)