At 105, I Don't Reheat 4 Foods It Causes PANCREATIC CANCER — Doctors Can't Explain It.

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]45 years ago when I was 60, an age when most people are just starting to think about retirement, about finally getting to relax after 40 years of hard work, I was sitting in a doctor's office being told that I had pancreatic cancer. It was the kind of diagnosis where the doctor looks at you with that specific expression, the one they've practiced so you can't read it, and says words that you stop hearing after the first sentence because your whole body goes cold and numb, [music] and you realize that right then and there you are being told about the end of your life. I drove home alone. I sat at my kitchen table, and I thought about everything I had ever put into my body.

[00:00:39]>> [music] >> I need to tell you about these four types of food because you might be trying not to be wasteful, but you are silently feeding cancer cells, pushing your life to the brink of hell just like I did. During my severe illness, I realized something that took me decades to understand, and that no doctor, YouTube video, or health channel has ever talked about. I learned something about how a life can end up healthy and happy in old age or plagued by illness, loneliness, and suffering in its final years like [music] the people I've witnessed around me. It happens through every single small invisible choice.

[00:01:16]This is the [music] secret that I believe is the real reason I'm sitting here at 105 years old, healthy, independent, and most days truly happy.

[00:01:24]Listen [music] to me because that last part is what will change everything. I'm Barbara Sue. I am 105 years old. I grew up in a household where nothing was ever thrown away. My mother [music] could stretch a Sunday ham into four days of meals without blinking. Sliced cold on Monday, fried up in a pan Tuesday morning, tucked into a soup on Wednesday, heated again on Thursday because that soup was too good to let go. I carried that habit into my own kitchen for 40 years. Sausages from Saturday's breakfast [music] reheated Sunday morning, hot dogs wrapped in foil, microwaved until they split. Deli ham layered into a pan with scrambled eggs. The smell of it frying was the smell of home to me. What I did not know, what nobody ever told me, is that processed meats are chemically [music] different from fresh meat before they ever reach your kitchen. The way these foods are made involves nitrates and nitrites, which are preservatives that keep the color bright and the bacteria at bay. When those nitrites interact with the natural proteins in the meat during processing, they form something called nitrosamines. These are chemical compounds that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified [music] as probable human carcinogens.

[00:02:37]They are in the food before you buy it.

[00:02:39]When you heat processed meat the first time, you [music] accelerate that chemical reaction. The temperature drives the formation of more nitrosamines than were [music] already present. When you reheat it a second time, which is exactly what I did routinely for decades, you accelerate it again. You are applying heat to a food that has already undergone one round of carcinogenic chemistry, and you are pushing that chemistry further with no protective compounds left to buffer anything. [music] I remember my friend Dolores. She ate sausage every single morning of her adult life, reheated in a cast iron skillet until the edges were nearly black. She died of gastrointestinal cancer at 67. I was at her bedside. I held her hand. At the time, I thought it was simply terrible luck. Now I understand that it was not luck at all.

[00:03:29]It was chemistry accumulated over a lifetime of mornings [music] playing out exactly as the chemistry was always going to play out. I am not telling you to never eat these foods.

[00:03:39]>> [music] >> I am telling you what I wish someone had told me at 40. Eat them once, fresh, prepared once, eaten immediately, and never [music] placed back in the refrigerator to be reheated. The time saved is not worth what you are doing to your cells at the molecular level. This one is the one that breaks people's [music] hearts when I tell them because I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that you eat your leafy greens because they are good for you. You have been told this your whole [music] life, and you are right. Fresh spinach is genuinely one of the most nutritious foods that exists. [music] Iron, folate, vitamins, antioxidants, all of it real, all of it beneficial.

[00:04:19]But here is what nobody tells you about what happens after the cooking is done.

[00:04:23]I used to make [music] a big pot of wilted spinach on Sunday evenings, sautéed with garlic and olive oil the way I had learned from a cookbook I bought in 1962 [music] and still have on my shelf. I would make far more than I needed because the advice I had always been given was [music] to cook in batches and refrigerate the rest. Efficient, practical, [music] smart. So I would put the leftover cooked spinach in a container and reheat it for Monday's lunch, sometimes Tuesdays. [music] I thought I was doing something good for my body. Spinach contains naturally occurring nitrates.

[00:04:58]In their fresh form, these compounds are not only harmless, they are actually beneficial for blood pressure and cardiovascular [music] health. But when spinach is cooked, the heat breaks down its cellular structure, and during the cooling and storage period, bacteria and natural enzymatic processes [music] begin converting those nitrates into nitrites. This conversion happens continuously [music] while the cooked spinach sits in your refrigerator. The longer it sits, the more nitrite it contains. [music] Then you reheat it. The heat drives the nitrite formation further, and the heat also drives a reaction between those nitrites >> [music] >> and the amino acids naturally present in the spinach, and the result is the same class [music] of compounds, nitrosamines, that we just discussed in processed meat, the same carcinogens in your healthy vegetable. A study published in a food science journal specifically [music] warned against storing boiled spinach for more than 12 hours precisely because of this nitrate to nitrosamine conversion pathway.

[00:05:59]The same concern applies to celery, beets, [music] kale, and carrots. Celery in particular has some of the highest natural nitrate concentrations [music] of any vegetable. If you have ever made a large batch of soup with celery and reheated [music] it multiple times over the course of a week, and I certainly did every winter for 30 years, >> [music] >> you were repeating that chemical cycle with every round of heating. My neighbor Ruth was a health-conscious woman all her life. She grew her own garden. She ate greens every day. She made enormous batches of vegetable soup and ate them all week. She was diagnosed with colon cancer at 64. She used to say [music] she did not understand how this could happen to someone who ate the way she did. I think about her often now. The correction is simple. Cook leafy greens fresh in the quantity you will eat at that meal. If you have leftover cooked spinach, [music] eat it cold the next day, on a salad, mixed into room temperature grain bowls, folded into something that does not require reheating. Cold does not drive the nitrosamine forming reaction. Heat does.

[00:07:04][music] That is the whole difference. My late husband Frank used to call me the queen of fried chicken. I had a deep cast iron pot that I would fill with oil on Friday evenings, >> [music] >> and that pot would see that same oil through two, sometimes three batches of frying [music] before I poured the remainder into a jar in the back of my pantry for next [music] week. Waste not, want not. That was the rule I lived by. I want to tell you exactly what I was doing to that oil and what that oil was then doing to everyone [music] at my table. When a cooking oil, particularly the polyunsaturated oils like sunflower, corn, soybean, or canola, is heated to frying temperature, a process called lipid peroxidation [music] begins.

[00:07:47]The heat and oxygen together react with the unstable double bonds in the fatty [music] acids, and they produce a cascade of oxidized compounds. Among these compounds are aldehydes, including acrolein and a compound called 4-hydroxynonenal.

[00:08:03]There are also polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and in the presence of starchy foods, acrylamide. These compounds are genotoxic. [music] That means they cause direct damage to DNA. The first time you heat that oil, these compounds are produced in measurable quantities.

[00:08:20]>> [music] >> When you cool the oil and store it and heat it again the following week, you are starting the process from exactly where it left off, but now with an oil that is already degraded, >> [music] >> already partially oxidized, with a smoke point that has been lowered by the first heating. The toxic breakdown [music] threshold is now reached faster, at lower temperatures, with less cooking time required to produce the same concentration of harmful [music] compounds. When fried food is reheated, particularly in a microwave, >> [music] >> the surface temperature becomes uneven.

[00:08:53]Parts of the food reach temperatures that scorch the surface at a microscopic level, >> [music] >> even when you cannot see visible browning. Those scorched areas are where the highest concentrations of all three classes of compounds are produced. Every Friday night of fried chicken, followed by a Saturday lunch of leftovers microwaved in the same container, [music] was a double dose. I used to keep that jar of used frying oil for weeks.

[00:09:18]>> [music] >> I thought I was being responsible. I now know that I was storing a concentrated vessel of compounds that the IARC classifies as probable human carcinogens, >> [music] >> and then heating them again and feeding them to people I loved. The practice I follow now is complete. I use fresh oil for every cooking session. I use it once and discard it. If I fry anything at all, I eat it immediately, [music] and I do not reheat it. If I need to warm fried food later, I use an oven at a moderate temperature >> [music] >> that warms evenly rather than scorching.

[00:09:52]And I cook far less fried food than I once did, not because I'm afraid of it, but because I understand now what heat does to oil at the molecular level and I respect that knowledge. This one surprised me the most when I learned [music] it. It surprised me because the danger is not chemical in the way the others are. The danger from improperly stored and reheated rice is biological and it is one that almost no one talks about [music] because the harm it does is quiet and cumulative. I made rice in enormous quantities, a large pot on Sunday evening that would last through Wednesday. I would reheat it in the microwave, [music] sometimes straight from the refrigerator, sometimes from the counter when I forgot to put it away properly. I did this for decades without [music] a second thought because rice seemed so simple. It is just rice. What could rice possibly do?

[00:10:43]>> [music] >> There is a bacterium called Bacillus cereus whose spores survive the boiling process. [music] When your rice is cooked and then left at room temperature or even cooled too slowly before refrigerating, those spores activate and the bacteria begins to multiply.

[00:10:59]Bacillus cereus produces two types [music] of toxins. One causes vomiting, the other causes diarrhea and this second toxin is produced specifically [music] during the storage phase, not after reheating. The critical point, the one that changes the equation entirely, [music] is that these toxins are heat stable.

[00:11:17]When you reheat the rice, you kill the bacteria, but the toxins they have already produced survive. They survive microwave reheating. They survive stove top reheating. The bacteria are gone, the toxins remain and you eat them. In the short term, those toxins are responsible for the nausea and stomach cramping that most people attribute to a general stomach bug and never trace to the rice they had for dinner. In the long term, repeated low-level exposure to heat-resistant bacterial toxins contributes [music] to chronic intestinal inflammation and chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal lining is one of the most extensively documented and replicated pathways [music] to gastrointestinal cancers in all of cancer epidemiology.

[00:12:04]>> [music] >> I ate reheated rice several times a week, every week for more than 30 years.

[00:12:09]Every time I was delivering a small inflammatory [music] insult to my intestinal lining.

[00:12:13]Individually, each one was survivable.

[00:12:16]Cumulatively, [music] across decades, I was building the exact cellular environment in which cancer finds its footing. [music] The correction is specific. After cooking rice, cool it quickly, within 1 hour, and refrigerate it immediately. Store it for no more than 24 hours. When reheating, reheat once only, all the way through to steaming hot and never reheat it a second time. Better still, cook rice in smaller quantities so there is less left over. The extra 20 minutes [music] of cooking time is a far better investment than the cumulative cost of weekly bacterial toxin exposure >> [music] >> across a lifetime. What saved me and what I learned. I followed every instruction my doctors gave me after my diagnosis. [music] I sat through treatments that felt like they were designed to break me in order to save me. [music] I changed my diet completely. I stopped reheating. I stopped frying. I read everything I could find and watched every video that existed at the time, though there were far fewer of them in those days, >> [music] >> and slowly, not quickly, not dramatically, but slowly and then with increasing certainty, [music] I recovered. My doctors called it remarkable. One of them, a man who had treated hundreds of pancreatic cancer [music] patients, told me he had never seen a full recovery in a patient whose cancer had progressed to the stage mine had reached. He used the word miracle and then looked slightly embarrassed for having used it, >> [music] >> as though it did not belong in a medical office. But I had a different word for it. [music] I did not call it a miracle of medicine, though I am deeply grateful for everything medicine did for me. I called it karma. And I do not mean that word the way it is often used today, casually, as though it simply [music] means that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad ones. I mean something older and [music] more precise than that. I mean the accumulated weight of everything you have ever done, every thought you have ever cultivated, every action you have ever taken, for better or worse, settling into the structure of your life and eventually into the structure of your body itself.

[00:14:24]I was raised in a faith tradition that taught me three things above all others.

[00:14:29]>> [music] >> Be truthful. Be compassionate. Be patient.

[00:14:33]I did not always live up to those teachings. There were years when I was harder than I needed to be. Years when [music] I let bitterness grow in me like a garden I had stopped tending. And I believe, I truly believe, [music] in a way that I cannot prove scientifically, but that I know in my bones, that those years contributed to my illness [music] as surely as the reheated sausage and the stored spinach and the twice-used frying oil. Because here is what I observed, not just in myself, but in the people I watched grow old around me. The ones [music] who aged hardest, the ones who ended up isolated, sick, confused, frightened, dependent, miserable in the final chapter of their lives, were not, for the most part, [music] people who had eaten badly. Some of them had been very careful with food. Many of them had exercised. Several had money and access [music] to the best medical care available, but they had nurtured something corrosive inside them for decades. Resentment, bitterness, dishonesty with themselves about who they were and what they had done. A habit of cutting corners in their relationships the same way I had cut corners in my kitchen, saving a little here, reusing a little there, thinking it was practical when it was actually accumulating damage nobody [music] could see yet. And the ones who aged well, who stayed clear and sharp and warm and present, who died when their time came without years of suffering preceding it, >> [music] >> almost universally shared something that had nothing to do with diet or exercise or supplements. They were honest. They were kind in a way that cost them something real. They were patient with life in a way that can only come from having genuinely wrestled with impatience [music] and chosen differently. They had, somewhere along the way, made peace with things [music] that are very hard to make peace with. I do not think this is coincidence. I have watched too many lives to believe it is coincidence. [music] The body keeps a record of everything.

[00:16:33]The science of psychoneuroimmunology, a field that studies the connection between psychological states [music] and immune function, has documented in increasingly rigorous terms [music] how chronic stress, chronic resentment, chronic emotional suppression compromises immune surveillance, [music] suppresses the body's ability to identify and eliminate abnormal cells and creates [music] the inflammatory environment in which cancers and autoimmune diseases and [music] cardiovascular disease find their opening. When you carry bitterness for 20 years, you are not just carrying a feeling, >> [music] >> you are bathing your cells in a chemical environment that weakens their defenses.

[00:17:15]When you practice honesty, not just with others, but with yourself, which is the harder and more important kind, you remove a particular category [music] of chronic stress that the body otherwise must carry indefinitely. When you extend genuine compassion to people who have wronged you, you are not doing it for them. You are doing it for your immune system, for your heart, for the body that has to live [music] inside the life you are building. I know that sounds like it belongs in a church, not in a conversation about cancer prevention, but I have had 45 years since my diagnosis to watch the evidence accumulate and I no longer feel any conflict between those two settings.

[00:17:53]>> [music] >> Here is what I will leave you with.

[00:17:55]Change the four things I talked about today. Do not reheat processed [music] meat at high temperature. Eat cooked spinach cold the next day rather than reheating it. Discard used cooking [music] oil and do not reheat fried foods. Cool your rice quickly, refrigerate it immediately, and reheat it once only, all the way through to steaming hot. These are small, specific changes. They are not hard and they will [music] meaningfully reduce your exposure to the compounds that fed my cancer and have [music] fed the cancers of more people than any of us will ever know, but do not stop there. Spend some time with yourself this [music] week, real time, honest time, and ask what you have been reheating in your heart. What resentments have you been putting back in the microwave >> [music] >> week after week, thinking that heating them up again will eventually resolve them? What [music] bitterness have you been storing in jars in the back of your pantry, telling yourself you will deal with it later while it continues to oxidize and degrade? Tell the truth. In your important relationships, in your conversations with yourself, in the small daily choices that nobody will ever audit or reward you for, tell the truth because a life [music] built on small deceits accumulates exactly the kind of chronic interior stress that the body cannot sustain indefinitely. Be compassionate, actively and specifically, and toward people who have not made it easy. [music] Not because it makes you a better person by some abstract moral accounting, but because the alternative [music] is carrying their weight inside your own body for the rest of your life and that weight will show up somewhere eventually. Be [music] patient with how slowly things change, how imperfectly people grow, how long it takes for good choices to produce visible results. [music] Impatience is a form of chronic stress with no exit. Patience is a form of physiological rest that compounds over time. I am 105 years old. I live in my own home. I cook my own meals. I tend my own garden. I have buried [music] two husbands, several close friends, one of my children, and I have survived all of it with something intact that I can only call, at the risk of sounding imprecise, [music] my spirit. I do not take credit for any of it. I give thanks [music] for all of it, and I share it with you today because I was sitting where you are sitting once with far less time left [music] than I thought I had, and I would have given everything I owned to hear someone tell me what I am telling you now. Take care of your kitchen. Take care of your body. And above all, take care of what you are cultivating in [music] the deepest and most private rooms of who you are. That is where health either begins or ends. God bless you. I will see [music] you next week.