Call it eating for a cause. You can plan your menu in a way that helps knock out the third leading cancer for both men and women: colorectal cancer. Here's how to tune up your meals:

Breakfast
Add sliced bananas. They're good sources of vitamin B6. People who get the most of this vitamin reduce their risk of colorectal cancer by 20% to 30%. You need about 4 milligrams a day for this effect, and you get 0.5 milligrams from a banana. Other B6 "bomb the colon cancer" sources are corn, eggs, spinach, and your multivitamin.

Lunch
Toss broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage into your salad. As part of the Brassica family (that's a family of vegetables, not a singing group), these contain compounds called isothiocyanates. They turn on the GSTM1 gene that produces a protein that causes many colorectal cancer cells to commit suicide. Seems to work for breast and prostate cancers, too.

Snack
Munch on an apple. The fiber in apples, pectin, increases levels of butyrate, a fatty acid that slows the production of a cancer-causing substance.

Dinner
Select the salmon. Men who eat fish and shrimp five times a week have a 40% lower risk of colorectal cancer. It's possible that fish keep you from eating red meat, a food that dramatically raises colon cancer risk. We recommend salmon: It's packed with vitamin D, a known colon-cancer protector (it has more than 500 international units in 3 ounces; a good start toward the 1,000 international units a day that adults under age 60 need and the 1,200 needed by people over 60).