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
Your Lifestyle, Your Genes and Cancer
New research explores the complex interactions that cause our most dreaded disease. A look into some of the steps you can take to reduce your risk.
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We've known for a long time that a high-fat diet, obesity and lack of exercise can increase the risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes, two conditions that affect millions of Americans. What we are finding out now is that those same lifestyle factors also play an important role in cancer. That's the bad news. The good news is that you can do something about your lifestyle. If we grew thinner, exercised regularly, avoided diets rich in red meat (substituting poultry, fish or vegetable sources of protein) and ate diets rich in fruits and vegetables, and stopped using tobacco, we would prevent 70 percent of all cancers.
The strongest evidence of the importance of lifestyle in cancer is that most common cancers arise at dramatically different rates in different parts of the globe. Several cancers that are extremely common in the United States—colon, prostate and breast cancer—are relatively rare in other parts of the world, occurring only 1/10th or 1/20th as often. Equally striking, when people migrate from other parts of the world to the United States, within a generation their cancer rates approach those of us whose families have lived in this country for a long time. Even if people in other parts of the world stay put, but adopt a U.S. lifestyle, their risk of cancer rises; as Japanese have embraced Western habits, their rates of colon, breast and prostate cancer have skyrocketed.
What is it about our lifestyle that raises the risk of many types of cancer? The main culprits seem to be the Western diet, obesity and physical inactivity. While we've known about the importance of tobacco and cancer for more than 50 years, we are just beginning to understand how diet, a healthy body weight and regular exercise can protect us against cancer.
A striking example of the profound influence of diet was reported last summer in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Doctors determined the eating habits of patients with colon cancer in the years following surgical removal of the cancer. Over the next five years, those who ate a traditional Western diet had a threefold greater likelihood of developing a recurrence of the disease than did those who ate a "prudent" diet rich in fruits and vegetables and including only small amounts of red meat. How had diet affected these patients? The surgery clearly had not removed all their colon-cancer cells: prior to the surgery, some cells had already spread from the primary tumor. The Western diet had somehow stimulated the growth of these small deposits of residual cancer cells.
Obesity is the second most important factor in causing cancer in Western populations after tobacco, and there is evidence that maintaining a healthy weight is protective against the disease. A study by the American Cancer Society in 2003 found that the heaviest people, in comparison with the leanest, had a significantly increased risk of death from 10 different kinds of cancer in men, and from 12 different kinds in women. The most extreme examples were liver cancer in men (nearly fivefold increased risk) and uterine cancer in women (more than sixfold increased risk).
Exercise has also been shown to play an important role in protecting against some cancers. For example, the Nurses' Health Study reported that women who had one or more hours per day of moderate exercise had a 30 percent lower risk of colon cancer than women who exercised less. Exercise protects against breast cancer, as well.
Lifestyle influences a person's risk for cancer by generating growth-promoting signals that affect cells primed to become cancerous, or that already are cancerous. What primes those cells to become cancerous in the first place are changes in their genes.
All tumors begin with one renegade cell. Initially the cell is just one of about 30 trillion or so in the body. It looks no different from the cells around it, and, like those cells, it divides only if the organ it's part of needs it to divide. Then, even though the organ around it has enough cells, the renegade cell begins to multiply uncontrollably: one cell becomes two, two become four, four become eight, until the descendants are beyond counting.
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