The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center offers research-backed nutrition and recipes to anyone for free, no matter where they are on their health journey, as part of its Cook For Your Life program, founded in 2007. The recipes are tailored to cancer patients and survivors.
“The Cook For Your Life program was founded by Ann Ogden Gaffney,” said public health researcher Dr. Heather Greenlee. “She, at the time, was a two-time cancer survivor and was going through treatment and found that nutrition information that she needed and wanted wasn’t being provided for her.” Greenlee is one of the researchers behind Cook For Your Life and said it’s a resource dedicated to advancing research on diet, cancer prevention and survivorship. One key feature is the web-based recipe finder.
We visited Fred Hutch’s research kitchen, the Human Nutrition Lab, where they whipped up an example of one recipe that can be found on the Cook For Your Life recipe finder: a cabbage salad consisting of cabbage, parsley, carrots, onions and more. They key: a variety of colors. Different colors mean different phytonutrients, which are natural chemicals known to be rich in antioxidants. Greenlee said the latest research shows they’re also key to cancer prevention.