Your Lifestyle, Your Genes and Cancer

Look at this logically. First, my wife, father, uncle, grandmother, grandfather and several cousins had forms of cancer. Some of them lead "clean" lives. Some didn't, and the source of cancer was clear; my father smoked a lot and got lung cancer. I've had to do a lot of research, and have had many conversations with doctors and specialists. But, I am not an "expert".
However, a few things are undeniably clear. First, we live in a kind of toxic soup; an environment and set of influences we've never historically experienced before. The air, soil, food sources, fertilizers, medications and the science of growing food are all different. And so is the way we process our food. Mix that with genetic tendencies and we have a complex set of interrelated circumstances in which cancer can better find fuel.
The quote in the article "...just beginning to understand how diet, a healthy body weight and regular exercise can protect us against cancer" is shocking. Don't these things make sense for our general well-being, regardless of cancer? Haven't they always contributed to quality of life, regardless of age or location?
My wife is completing her radiation for cancer and is doing, thankfully, quite well. What we experienced consistently, though, is an institutional ignorance of how these true fundamentals ??? diet, weight, exercise ??? can affect acquiring, and banishing, the disease. Even the "nutritionists" they sent in were clueless.
No, you don't have to stop eating red meat or sugar, but you DO have to moderate intake of many foods (like red meat once a month), and approach things like sugar and salt with informed trepidation. Think about it: sugar ain't what it used to be, nor is salt. Salt once had myriad minerals intact, nearly all of which were beneficial to health. Not today! Same with sugar, same with corporately-grown vegetables. Sugar is refined out of benefit then used in nearly everything packaged or cooked. And, the soil is so overworked there???s nothing good left in it.
So, here's the case for naturally-raised and organic food, animal or plant, as expensive as they are: Heart attacks and cancer cost more than organic food. Do any of you out there - including you research doctors - really know how trace pesticides and engineered DNA play against trace medications in our water, air pollution and the lack of daily nutrition? Of course not. But, doesn't approaching this problem this way simply make sense? If it walks and quacks???
The facts are we all have certain genetic tendencies, and we are not breathing, eating and medicating the way we once did (and for millions of years before this). The interplay is deadly.
Be very picky about what you eat. Read every label. Call the numbers on the packaging. It's your body, it's your life. Trust me and the thousands of people and families who???ve been through cancer. You're not doing yourself ??? or society ??? a favor by having that "occasional" Big Mac

Did you know that if McCain is elected you will have to pay income tax on the value of the medical insurance that your employer gives you? Worse still, he is offering a tax break for people who pay their own insurance, BUT only $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families.

Let's say you have a family of four. Your insurance policy costs would be at least $1,500-2,500 per month under a self-pay plan, which cost more than employer group plans. So, you pay $18,000 -$30,000 per year for insurance, and you get to deduct only $5,000 of that. If you paid $25,000 for you insurance, you would be out of pocket $20,000 per year. This is FAR WORSE than the current system, where if you are self employed you can deduct 100% of you medical insurance costs.

So, if you're not self employed, you would stick with your Employer's plan. Employer plans for a family of four have a value of $900-$1,500 per month totaling 10,800-$18,000 per year. Surprise! On April 15th, you owe tax on all of that as INCOME to you. Say your bracket is 25%, and the value of your Employer medical plan is $14,000. You will OWE THE IRS an additional $3,500, and that's ON TOP of whatever monthly premium you already pay to your employer for your insurance.

Many analysts say that McCain's new rules would encourage employers to stop offering health benefits. If that happened, then far fewer Americans would be insured than are insured today, because what family of four can afford $18,000-$30,000 out of pocket per year for self-pay health insurance?

Furthermore, McCain's plan does not require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions of people who self-pay their insurance. People under employer group plans have all of their pre-existing conditions covered. This is a hugely unfair aspect of the current system. Insurance companies can afford to cover the pre-existing conditions of the much larger pool of people with group insurance, but they refuse to pay the pre-existing conditions on the smaller pool of self-pay customers. They have been allowed to price gouge the self-pay customers, which is a form of market manipulation that should be illegal.

So let's say one of your kids had diabetes and you have high blood pressure, then your employer stops offering insurance. You now have to buy your own, but you and your child are INELIGIBLE due to pre-existing conditions. Oh, yeah, they will let you buy the insurance, but you can't use it for any pre-existing condition until you have paid on time every month for two years. And you know what happens at one year and 11 months? You get a letter saying your policy has been cancelled. I have many patients this has happened to.

McCain's plan SUCKS.

It does nothing to help middle class working Americans afford or obtain medical insurance. In fact, it makes the current system WORSE.

In 1993, I suffered from nose cancer. Fortunately it was diagnosed early enough before it spread to the brain and other parts of the body. After going through a week of chemotherapy and seven weeks of radiotherapy, I recovered.

The cause of cancer has always been attributed to a person???s food intake, tobacco consumption, life style, physical constitution and genetic mutation. The various combinations of these factors generate different forms of cancer.
It was believed that my nose cancer was partly due to the excessive amount of salted fish I had in my younger years, and Chinese are said to be more prone to have this kind of cancer compared with other races.

With the advancement of medicine and biotechnology, chances of surviving this life-threatening malignancy are growing. I pray that it will be curable in the not so distant future.

I enjoyed reading this article as it brings cancer origin onto a more controllable platform. It seems inescapable at this point of time to realize that our behavioral and lifestyle choices have the potential to leave an indelible imprint on our internal bodily systems and likely on our subsequent generations through an epigenetic pathway. The extent of the influence described in the above article is only now beginning to be appreciated.
Below is a brief abstract from a study highlighting the relationship of colon cancer and physical activity. Some of the relationships identified in this research paper are well supported by the above article.
Ivo P. Janecka, MD, MBA, PhD
???The effectiveness of physical activity in decreasing the incidence of colon cancer is likely the result of its biologic activity within not one or two but all of the major known colon cancer etiologies, demonstrating a powerful reciprocal relationship. Melatonin is identified as a plausible common denominator of colon cancer and physical activity.???
Janecka IP: Colon Cancer and Physical Activity: A Content Analysis of Reciprocal Relationship. Clinical Medicine: Oncology 2007:1 81???89 http://la-press.com/cr_data/files/f_CMO-1-Janecka-et-al_437.pdf

Anyone interested in the Battle Against Cancer can help. World Community Grid (http://worldcommunitygrid.org) has a project called Help Conquer Cancer. This is aproject in Public Distributed Computing, which uses the idle time and resources on thousands of home and offcie computers to process data for the project. Polease visit the web site and check it out.

There are also projects on AIDS, Dengue Fever, Human Proteome Folding, and Nyu=utritious Rice for the World.

You download a little piece of software called and "agent", provided by BOINC-The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (http://boinc.berkeley.edu). After you install it, you attach to any projects you choose.

BOINC also has many worthwhile porjects in which you can participate in the same way. At BOINC, the variety is very wide, from mathematics to cosmology.

All of the projects are non-profit, and the knowledge gained remains in the public domain. The cost is the cost of running your computer, about the same as a 100 watt light bulb.

Please give these web sites a look..

This article described tumor cells as criminals in the body; however, the authors have overlooked the counterplay of cops - those immune cells capable of eradicating tumor cells. Do people strengthen their immune system by following these guidelines? In addition, over-exercise can be worse than no exercise and the right amount of exercise differs from person to person. Please provide the audience with a revised guideline that will not cause harm.

It's animal fat. We should avoid all red meats, all meat from hooved animals - and drastically reduce the amount of animal protein (and thereby fat) in our diets. Go light on the chicken too. Mostly its the red meats. Being a vegetarian has been shown to reduce cancer growth even if the cells are cancerous. Read The China Study by T, Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell II. Eat high fiber and get your protein from vegetable sources, AVOID ANIMAL FAT.