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Dr. Véronique Desaulniers, better known as Dr. V, is the founder of Breast Cancer Conqueror® and the 7 Essentials System®, and co-founder of My Breast Friend™. Her signature process has empowered thousands of women in over 56 countries around the world. Her mission is to “save lives, one breast at a... Read More
Emmy-winning TV Host Samantha Harris may be best known for her eight seasons as the host of Dancing with the Stars and her many years as a host of shows such as Entertainment Tonight and EXTRA. From hosting every major Hollywood award show red carpet to starring on Broadway in... Read More
- Discover how to detoxify and focus on nutrition for health
- Embrace the importance of daily movement and stress-busting techniques
- Gain insights into combatting inflammation and chronic diseases
- This video is part of the Breast Cancer Breakthroughs Summit
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Welcome, everybody, to another interesting episode for our Breast Cancer Breakthroughs Summit. I’m Dr. Véronique Desaulniers, better known as Dr. V, and your co-host for the summit. Today we have a beautiful, vibrant guest. I’m sure you recognize her. Samantha Harris, if you don’t recognize her, she was an Emmy-winning TV host. She was on eight seasons as a hostess with Dancing with the Stars. She was also host of several shows like Entertainment Tonight and Extra. She’s been on the red carpet in Hollywood but something very interesting happened to her when she turned 40. A wife, a mom, and a go-getter. She received that diagnosis of breast cancer. The good news is she is now a thriver and she is helping women all over the world to reach their healthiest health. So thank you, Samantha, for taking the time to join us and to share your story.
Samantha Harris
Well, it’s such an important message to get out there for women who are looking to reduce their risk of breast cancer or have been diagnosed but are looking to really take even better control of their health and well-being, to reduce their chances of recurrence. And everything that you espouse and Dr. Jenn talks about and that I share with all of my following and clients and everybody as a certified health coach is that we have so much more power than we even realize. And I’m so happy to share that message with everybody.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
That’s so exciting. I love that because that’s exactly what our mission is to save lives one breast at a time. And it’s all about empowering women to understand how much control they really do have over their health. So let’s start off by hearing about your pain to passion story. So you got those shocking words. Well, you had an interesting lead-up to your diagnosis. So let’s start there. It’s kind of unusual.
Samantha Harris
It is. Well, what I thought was unusual turned out as I speak to survivor after survivor, sadly, more common than not. So I was about to turn 40. I thought, hey, I am in the best shape of my life. I’m super healthy. I’m rock and roll in this TV career. My two little kids. And I’m just going to get a mammogram, and set a baseline, right? So I go in and I get a clean bill of health. Good to go. And 11 days later, as I was changing after a workout, I found a lump. I didn’t stick my head in the sand, even though I just had a clear mammogram. I thought, you know what? I really know my body well, which is probably the biggest overarching PSA I can give to everybody listening and watching. Know Your Body and we’re going to get into the tips and the healthiest healthy hacks to be able to make sure you are doing that so that you can assess, hey, this doesn’t feel right or this isn’t what I have been experiencing the rest of my life. So I found this lump. I went to my long-term OB-GYN. She was the doctor whom I trusted more than anyone, delivered both my kids. She said, You know what? You’re turning 40 lumpy breasts. Welcome to your forties. You’re good to go. It’s nothing. So I went on my way. A month later, lumps were still there in her voice, starting to get a little bit louder. Samantha, get it checked out again. But it wasn’t cancer, so I went to see my internist. Same story. Quick feel. It’s nothing, sent me on my way. And then Dr. V, four months had passed. Holidays came. Time gets busy, and got away from me. And I thought, You know what? I came up for air and I did this pesky lump is still there.
I need to go see someone who looks at breasts every day as their specialty in case it’s something. It’s not cancer. But I’ll find my way to a breast specialist. Okay. The only type of breast specialist there is a breast oncologist. So there I was at a breast center for breast cancer, again, thinking I didn’t have anything to worry about. She did two ultrasounds, a needle biopsy, and a subsequent MRI, looked at the results from the mammogram, and she said, I have good news and bad news. The good news is it’s not cancer. The bad news is Samantha, she’s don’t know what it is. I want to suggest we take it out. So I figured, you know what? I’ll have slightly disfigured a slightly disfigured breast on my right side from this lumpectomy that we’re going to have. But my boobs did what they needed. They got me, my husband, and my kids. And here we go, let’s just give them up to science. A week later, when I went for those final pathology results after being told that it still wasn’t cancer, I told my husband to stay home. And that’s when I found out. Not only was it DCIS so contained within the duct, but she took a little sample of what she thought was healthy tissue on the border. That margin tissue ended up being invasive breast cancer. I was quickly staged from not having cancer to stage one. Then I opted after much hemming and hawing and cancer, you know, university to figure out what I needed to do. I opted for a double mastectomy with two-stage reconstruction. We found that I had gone to a lymph node. I had 11 lymph nodes removed. One node involvement. All of a sudden I’m stage two B and here I am 2014 to now. And I made a lot of changes to be as healthy, vibrant, and happy as I am right now, better than I ever was, even in my twenties.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
That’s so great. You know, I do want to mention something about your experience. There’s something called interval cancer. And this is a real thing. About 77% of women who have who are diagnosed with breast cancer have experienced this. And they go for a screening, year one and they say everything is clear. And by six months or seven months or before year two, they discover that they have a very aggressive cancer. So this is something to be very aware of. And even though you did a mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy, all of those things there was still some doubt about the diagnosis but it’s so good that you pressed on. A lot of women would have said, okay, but that’s a very important lesson for all of your listeners out there. You know, don’t if your gut is telling you something’s not right, you know, follow through with your intuition. All right. So talk a little bit about your journey. I mean you had reconstruction, you had the lump removed. And what was a message that you received from this breast cancer diagnosis?
Samantha Harris
Well, my background is as a journalist, and I had to really dig deep into my journalism and into the research. Because the turning point for me, Dr. V, was when I learned after all of the battery of genetic tests that I had, despite the fact that I lost my dad to colon cancer and there’s a colon breast connection. His mom was a breast cancer survivor and lived to 95. Amazing. Love that. It gives all of us survivors so much hope. But she was post-menopausal, with no genetic link. And then as I became a national ambassador for Susan G. Komen, the Breast Cancer Foundation charity, I learned that only 5 to 10% of breast cancers are genetic and that baffled me. So that’s when I put my journalism hat on and I started to research. And what I determined is everything that you and Dr. Jenn espouse well was very much new to me. That what we put in, on, and around our body affects our overall well-being that leaves on or leaves off or turns on certain DNA structures that then lead to not just breast cancer but other cancers, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disorders, and heart disease.
And this was this aha moment that turned this to my passion. And yes, I love the television world. And I still have a TV show on every day on game show network. And I love being on the red carpets, but I had a new purpose. And so I went back to school and I became a certified health coach. I began systematically since my diagnosis in 2014, working with women all over the country and now the world to help them take even better control of their wellness, elevate their health by swapping out products, changing up their nutrition, learning stress management techniques, being able to make sure they’re understanding how to get quality sleep, all of that holistic approach to what we can do because what I love the most is we don’t have to pick and choose the changes in our life we want to make to have the outcome of reducing. So just breast cancer or just type 2 diabetes, or heart disease, is still the number one killer of women or just heart disease. Because as Dr. Jenn always says, breast health is health. And so the changes we make for one outcome, thankfully, are across the board to have overall best health.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Absolutely. So, let’s take some of those pieces that you mentioned. Let’s start with nutrition. So three diagnoses. What was your diet like?
Samantha Harris
I know I’m a Minnesota girl. Technically, it’s land of 10,000 lakes. I think it’s more land. 10 million cows. Right. So I grew up eating every part of the cow from tongue literally to practically tail. And so when I moved to L.A. after college, I just, I had lost a taste of red meat, but I was still eating some sort of animal protein breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 21 out of 21 meals a week. So one of the biggest changes when I started to work with a breast cancer nutritionist after my diagnosis where she said, wow, Samantha, can we try to reduce that number? I’m not saying you have to give it up altogether. And for those who are listening, I’m not saying you have to give up your red meat. It’s about the size, right? The portion and how you’re sourcing. And I didn’t need 21 meals of meat or even fish, right? And I didn’t need an eight-ounce portion either. So I started to go from 21 meals to now when it comes to. But there’s still no red meat when it comes to poultry. I would say I have it maybe once, two tops, twice a month. Fish is maybe once, sometimes twice a week. And really turned over a new leaf, literally to become plant-based whole foods, you know, 80-20 or even 90-10 rule.
And also Dr. V, I was afraid of fat. I grew up as you did, too, in those nineties and 2000s that was like all about fat-free everything. The snack was cookies and the red vines that I would eat are fat-free, right? Full of high fructose corn syrup, and red dye 40, which we now know is incredibly harmful and carcinogenic. And so I started to look at two big things my animal intake and my sugar intake and not, I’m not saying, look, I still have ice cream once or twice a week. I have my dark chocolate. But it was the hidden sugars that were in my yogurt and my pasta sauce and my ketchup and the beyond the high fructose corn syrup. So the biggest change I made was to flip my plate and really aim to eat at least half a plate full of veggies at every meal and then add in the healthy fats. So the nuts season, avocados I have every single day, the extra virgin olive oil. All of these great things. All of a sudden as a byproduct and I was already at a very healthy weight, but my body found where it really wanted to be. And so if you guys are like, I don’t know if I can make this change or that change for breast cancer. Oh, but I do lose weight. If that’s what’s getting you. Fine. Go. Add in those little healthy fats because it will also whittle your waistline, which is just a sort of nice byproduct. And my body found where I really wanted it to be.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
All right. So that’s one piece of the puzzle. So in my world, that’s essential. Number one, let food be your medicine. So the next one is essential number two, reduce your toxic exposure so you spend hours and hours and hours with probably pounds and pounds of makeup and coloring and perfumes and all the things that make us look pretty but can be very, very toxic. So let’s talk about reducing our toxic exposure.
Samantha Harris
While horribly toxic. So, of course, again, I was in the makeup and hair chair anywhere from 5 to 7 days a week for well over a decade and a half.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Wow.
Samantha Harris
I didn’t realize because I never even thought to, oh, I should turn the packaging around, and look at the label. What’s in that? And as my eyes opened up and I learned about the Environmental Working Group and the resources they had that were evaluating the toxicity in certain chemicals or overall numbers for a product itself. I learned that we had endocrine disruptors and carcinogens and neurotoxins and even at the least allergens in these makeup, skincare, and hair care products that I was being shellacked with every single day. And I’m proud to say now this entire look that I have is all clean, toxic toxin-free makeup, and toxin-free hair products. The only thing that I do that is still, again, 90-10 year old ladies, right? I still do is my hair color. I extend the amount of time between the salon and then if I really need to do a touch-up, I use a couple of different products that I have that you can get on Amazon or Whole Foods that are free at the very least of formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen and free of some of the other really harmful ingredients in those that works to just kind of get that time out. But all the other makeup and skincare and this is something I talk about a lot on my Instagram and my Facebook page to share what those resources I’ve you know. We just shot 65 episodes of a game show that I hosted. And I said to my girls, who I’ve worked with forever, okay, here’s the deal only clean products and I need to vet them.
And we work here. When you have, you’re under the lights for 12 hours. You need staying power beyond TV to want that right. Any woman who’s getting up at the crack of dawn and going all day long, wall-to-wall meetings are driving. Your kids are doing appointments and going to bed at 10 or 10:30 at night. You want your products to work, look amazing, and last. So I basically created a list and it’s one of the things that we are offering today too with our free gifts and stuff for this summit. But it’s a whole list of vetted skincare and makeup and all of that. And the fact is, when I was diagnosed, there were very few companies that offered things that really worked well and were beautiful and fun and felt good and bright. We want to feel good with our products right now. Oh, thank goodness there is an abundance because the demand is there. With our consumer dollars, we can make that change.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Yeah, the awareness is there, which is so great and you mentioned something about endocrine disruptors. So a lot of the chemicals that we have to be aware of have women who’ve experienced breast cancer. And those of you that are listening, that have breast cancer are what we call, mimic estrogens, right? So, things like plastics and phthalates and everything from dryer sheets and perfumes and insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, all these things can stimulate and mimic estrogen in the body, even if you still have silver fillings in your mouth. You know, the heavy metals like mercury. Mercury is what we call a zino metallic. And so it can mimic and stimulate estrogen production in the body. So it’s great that there are so many good products available now. All right. So let’s shift from the products to exercise.
Samantha Harris
And one other thing, I’m not, I realize you guys, I am throwing a lot at you. And this is a slow, methodical process that I’ve gone through and that I share is being part of your healthiest health. It’s about small, manageable steps that lead to the big changes. Cancer itself is very overwhelming. So to then also take on all this knowledge of, oh my gosh, now I also have to change everything in my home, from my cookware to my makeup to my cleaning supplies to, oh, my gosh. And then we get paralyzed with that overwhelm and anxiety. And that’s not good because of the stress it’ll cause. And we’ll get to some of my best stress hacks in a bit. So what I want to suggest is to start small when it comes to your nutrition, start just at every meal. How can I add more vegetables to this? How can I increase my fiber intake?
Most women are getting 12 or 13 grams of fiber per day. Optimally, we need 30 to 35 grams per day. But it’s very easy to do when you add in your chia seeds, your flaxseed, you’re adding in your grains, or your berries, right? So it’s possible you can always come to me to get extra guidance. I respond to every single woman who’s a breast cancer survivor and basically everybody else as well through my Instagram DM and Facebook as well. So, I can always help guide you when it comes to your skincare. One simple thing, one simple move. Just start with your skin, which is your largest organ. Change up your lotions and your night cream. Change up your foundation. Start there. Don’t throw everything away overnight. If you use it up for another month, it’s probably not going to make that much of a difference. If been using it for the last 20 years. Okay.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
I know I’m glad you brought that up because it is overwhelming. It can be. But it’s like, how do you start a journey of a thousand miles, right? One step at a time. So it’s just little baby steps. And you’re right, just a little bit at a time. All right. So let’s talk about stress. I mean, we live in a world that’s so fast-paced and we can be fight or flight all the time if we’re not careful. So, first of all, how does stress affect our health and particularly breast cancer? And what have you learned about how to manage your stress and your pace of life? Obviously, you’re still a very busy, career-oriented woman, so let’s talk about how to manage that well.
Samantha Harris
I think that stress was a big player among all the other things we’ve talked about in my cancer journey because I was taking on every job that was offered while I was doing Dancing with the Stars and Entertainment Tonight. And oh, Good Morning America called they want you to be a correspondent. Okay, cool. Let me fly out to New York, cross country, and do that while I’ve got a three and a six-year-old at home. Oh, and I’m not complaining, by the way. Great jobs, great awesome opportunities. Okay, now there’s a summer to star on Broadway in the musical Chicago. Okay, I’ll do that. I’ll work seven days a week while I have my then three-year-old with or not even you know, two, my first child. So a lot of stress. And so what ends up happening when we have we need to have stress in our lives, right? We need that cortisol because it’s that fight or flight when we need to swerve out of an oncoming car and traffic. But what happens now is we are living as a society in a constant state of chronic stress. What that does is it elevates the levels of cortisol in our body, which leads to inflammation. And we know scientifically that inflammation, chronic inflammation, not the inflammation you see when you twist your ankle and your ankle swells. But the internal silent, unseen inflammation leads to chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and all of those.
So what we have to do is really take the time to mitigate our stress. So that and I’ll tell you, I was rushing around after I had my morning de-stressing in my infrared sauna, I took some breath work and also some time on my I will say I was answering some of my DMS while I was in the infrared sauna, which kind of defeats the purpose. Exercise in and I know we’ll talk about exercise which helps to reduce our inflammation and exercise helps reduce our cortisol as well as our insulin so that we’re not leading to insulin resistance, which also leads to disease. And so how do we mitigate that stress? While I was putting my makeup on to prepare for this, I realized I really acknowledging when the stress and anxiety or the anxiousness or the overwhelm is coming on, how does that feel in your body? So acknowledging it and just being mindful and present is really the first step. Don’t take big action. Just step number one, right? The small first step acknowledge that it’s there. So I acknowledged that it was there. And so what I did is on my phone, on my YouTube that I have in the app, I have a whole library of great whether it’s guided meditations. I was listening to some sound bath music, so I played that one. I was putting my makeup on and then I tried to be mindful and focused on.
Okay, I can see, oh, this is really calming as I’m putting on my eyeliner. And so that really helped to reset me and get me ready for the energy that I wanted to have for this interview and to talk with all of you. So when I had that diagnosis, I had a stress level I had never experienced before. I felt a constant coursing. And I’m sure a lot of you listening who have gone through this or another health diagnosis or family tragedy have had the same physical experience. I felt a palpating, almost frenetic, crazy feeling underneath my skin. That was a vibration that was really uncomfortable. And the elephant on the chest, the faster heartbeat, right? All of the telltale signs of stress and anxiety. And after about two or three weeks of feeling that way every single day, but needing to be present for my girls, who were three and six at the time, and a good, present wife and all of that, I said, I can’t feel this way. I don’t know how long this cancer journey is ahead of me. And this feeling really is bad.
So what can I do? I start to develop my own techniques. This was before I became a certified health coach. This was before I started to really seek out incredible experts that I interview as my community and learn from them. I all of a sudden just said, You know what, I’m stopping this down right now. I am flipping my perspective and I’m going to take on every next step in my cancer journey with a positive spin, not rose-colored glasses, not head in the sand, but positivity. So it started with positive self-talk, and it’s a wonderful technique that has really helped get me through everything from my diagnosis to when I had an earthquake in L.A. and felt the anxiety come on to the pandemic and realizing we were going to be shut in for who knew how long. So positive self-talk is really whether it’s in your head or I really prefer to say it out loud. I think that helps a lot. What is good in this situation and when you’re facing cancer, it’s really hard and you sometimes have to dig deep. But I found it. And Dr. V was okay, well, I’m in otherwise really great health and shape that is great because it’s going to help me get through surgery with fewer complications, recover faster. Okay, so we keep talking. What else is good? Okay, well, I have terrific health insurance. Excellent. What else? I’ve got a wonderful support network around me who are going to rally and be here for me when I get out of that surgical room. So the more I talk to myself and remind myself of that positivity, the more it helps and it snowballed in a good way to help get me through. And that really leads to gratitude, whether it’s gratitude practice from journaling or thinking up three things throughout the day that are at the end of the day that were good that day. Being mindful on a walk to listen to the birds feel the breeze, the warmth of the sun, even washing dishes. Do I feel the suds? Do I feel the warmth of the water?
Just being present and mindful brings it down but that leads me to my favorite step for reducing stress, which is breathwork. And it doesn’t have to be work. It can be something as simple as two or three methodical breaths inhaling, really filling the belly like a balloon, keeping the chest still at that time. So you get a deep diaphragmatic breath. You can do that in multiple ways, whether it’s the square breathing where you inhale for four, hold four for the top, exhale for four, and hold four for the bottom or six, seven, eight, breathing where you inhale four, six, hold for seven, exhale for eight. And what I love is when you put to a parking spot, you turn off the ignition. This is assuming you’re alone in the car and kids aren’t going crazy in the park, which is quite often for me. And you just take a moment to take a breath to reset yourself before you go on to whatever the next thing is. There’s something about turning the engine off with the windows closed and that quietude and that peace. So the next time you pull into your parking spot, I want to challenge you to just take two or three methodical belly breaths and breath work if you can expand it to a longer practice, great guided meditations, yoga, all of the different options you have out there are really great and you just feel what works in that particular situation to help de-stress.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
That is so good. That’s a little tip that we can all practice and it doesn’t have to be a long extended 60-minute meditation. You can break it down into little bite-sized pieces throughout the day when you know that the key is to bring your body into that relaxation mode so that your parasympathetic nervous system can really get to work and your immune system revs up. Your digestion is improving, and your sleep is better your hormones stay balanced. So that’s that’s some good, good work there.
Samantha Harris
And then I have just two last bits of stress.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Go ahead.
Samantha Harris
One of them is control what you can control and the other is worry when you have to worry. Very simple. We can only control so much. I couldn’t control that I had a breast cancer diagnosis. It had already happened. But what could I do while I could line up the best team possible? I could make sure I had my friends and family ready at arms to be there for me. I could start to change how I was approaching after cancer and after surgery. That’s when I took control about my diet and my exercise and my stress. And the other part is worry. When you have to worry, we are constantly, I think, what’s the statistic, like we have something like 80 or 90,000 different thoughts in our head throughout the day. All of these thoughts and these worries that maybe 90% of them never actually materialize. So let’s say you find a lump or you’ve had breast cancer and you find another lump. I’m going to go for the extreme there for a moment because most of us survivors have been there. Knock on wood, has been around long enough after our initial diagnosis. Okay. Instead of that freak-out, oh, my god, I have cancer again. And now the stress and the anxiety ramp up. Worry when you have to worry, take action. Call your oncologist or make an appointment with whatever doctor you can get seen and then take a breath. If you have a diagnosis or you have whatever the thing you’re worrying about. If it materializes, you’ll have plenty of time to worry. When you have to worry, don’t worry until you have to.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
That’s a good one. That’s a good one. All right. So let’s talk about exercise. We know that there’s actually a branch of oncology now called exercise oncology because they’re realizing the improvement for women who are going through conventional treatments and post-cancer, how their body benefits. So I know we all exercise very differently. I know I used to run six miles a day in my thirties and forties. Now not so much, but I do a lot of other things. So let’s talk about the balance of exercise and how your your exercise patterns have changed over the years.
Samantha Harris
Well, exercise in my twenties and thirties absolutely was for extrinsic reasons only. I wanted to look good. I was whether it was just my twenties just trying to get my career going. And you know, find a hot guy, or which I think my husband is pretty hot or in my thirties in the. The peak thirties and forties of my career when I just wanted to look good in a dress on TV, standing next to these professional dancers on Dancing with the Stars or wherever it was, the celebrities I was interviewing. And then after cancer, it changed. It changed because I realized I only have one vessel to get me through life, and that vessel has to be taken care of in a way that it can get me through doing the things I need it to do so that I also can do the things I want it to do. And so the brain shift became intrinsic.
I want my body to be in good shape and exercise to achieve that so that I can be able-bodied into life, late nineties. I want to go past 100 like the blue zones. I want to be the one I’m not doing gardening work or hoeing the fields, but I want to be able to do it if I want to. I want people to get on the ground of my grandkids and be able to get back up and I want to play and be able to chase them. I want to hike the world. I have such a bucket list of places I want to go to hike. I need to be able-bodied to do that. And so and also prevention, right? I want to prevent slips and falls because I mean, I just lost my aunt this year because she had been battling cancer, was doing great, broke a hip, and died four weeks later. And it’s the statistics of hip breaks and long and longevity afterward. I mean, it’s something like 50% pass than a year. I mean, it’s frightening as you get older.
So I want to exercise so that doesn’t happen. And grit and my energy level, right? Our energy level is so much better even when we are exhausted or tired or lethargic and don’t feel like exercising, we always feel better. So it’s a mood lifter, an anxiety reducer, a stress reducer. It helps us to manage our insulin levels because the muscles help to uptake that excess glucose so that instead of having that excess glucose stored as fat leading to insulin resistance and then disease, it helps to reduce that. So whether it’s that or a better night’s sleep, which we know we need essentially to be getting all of the repair to regenerate our cells and form our memories and have just a good night’s sleep. I’m sure a lot of you guys like me, the night sweats are real and disruptive, and so I don’t want anything else in the way of disrupting my sleep besides having to deal with that. So exercise really helps change the game for all of those reasons and more.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
So what kind of exercise do you do now?
Samantha Harris
So change it up. Every single day is different. Why? It keeps my body guessing. It helps to reduce overuse injury and it keeps me engaged and not bored. Right. The workout boredom. You’re on the treadmill every day. You are taking the same spin class every day? Just really boring. So I might do some online live kickboxing classes or yoga classes. I do an outdoor bike ride once a week. I hike, I run, I walk, I do strength training, HIIT classes. I teach a class every week as well for my community members. So there’s, I’m always figuring out how do I change it up for them so that they also have a wide variety of different types of classes to choose from. And whether it’s a dance party with your kids jumping on the trampoline, if you have one, or chasing the kids at the park, or taking the dog for a walk, we can also have that engagement when we can get movement, community and nature that try factor is a lifesaver. It will help with longevity.
We know for those of you who are familiar with the blue zones, those are the five areas of the world with the longest lived people who are able-bodied over age 100. Right. And one of those things is that they are outdoors, they’re moving their body and they’re associating with other people and having that sense of community. So grabbing a friend to go for a walk instead of meet for I’m not saying you can’t go out for coffee or you can’t go out for happy hour, although alcohol is a whole other thing. And I know you guys probably cover that in here. So we know there’s no amount of alcohol that’s safe for breast cancer. I’m not saying you can’t go out for a happy hour, but maybe you have in it, you know, some other option there. But instead of sitting and meeting people, get out in nature and have that same community while you’re walking.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Excellent. Very good advice. All right. So the name of the summit is Breast Cancer Breakthroughs Summit. So if you had some parting words of wisdom concerning breast cancer breakthroughs. What would you tell these women that are listening to us right now?
Samantha Harris
That you are in more control of your future diagnoses or not, than you may realize? There’s always going to be that percentage of flukes that exist. But when we realize we can take back our control and we can make the changes in our lives from how we’re eating to how we’re using products, to how we’re moving or not, how we’re stressing or not, and how we’re sleeping. It can make a profound change. And the breakthrough for me was realizing I had that power within me. And so that’s so beautiful.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
Thank you so much, Samantha, for sharing your words of wisdom and taking the time to support everybody who is listening to us.
Samantha Harris
It’s been so great and I love, love what you guys are doing and I’m so grateful to have been a part of it. Thank you.
Véronique Desaulniers, DC
You’re very welcome. So this is Dr. V, sending you a big healing heart hug. Bye for now.
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