What Causes Cancer?

If you thought the God Blog entries were controversial, this one's going to cause an even bigger stir.

I hesitated writing anything about this topic for a number of reasons:

- This is mostly based on my own untrained, uneducated research from the Internet, books, and medical or scientific research papers, all of which are rife with misleading information, hidden agendas, and incorrect or contradictory "facts".
- Some of my understanding of these issues might just be PLAIN WRONG. Please correct me if you think I'm wrong.
- I don't necessarily believe all of this stuff, but am taking the "better safe than sorry" approach. Wimpy, I know.
- I don't want to impose my opinions on other people. I used to laugh at vegetarians, especially those who got all preachy about the evils of eating meat. Man has been eating meat for thousands of years. How can meat be bad for our health?
- I don't want people to start tossing out everything in their kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets on the basis of what they read here, without doing their own research and making informed choices appropriate to their lifestyles. Some of this information calls for DRASTIC changes in your life, many of which are logistically impossible, financially crippling, or just plain stress-inducing. And there's STILL NO GUARANTEE that any of these changes will prevent you from getting cancer.

I've finally decided to write about this because:

- People keep asking me to do it. Many of you are concerned about health issues but are too busy with work, family, and life to do the research. I used to be too busy as well, until keeping myself alive became a full-time job.
- People want to know why I have cancer when I'm in such a low-risk category.
- I've had genetic testing done and I do NOT have the breast cancer gene mutations. So people want to know why I have breast cancer, and such an aggressive form of it, when I don't have the gene mutations that cause breast cancer.

This is some of what I’ve learned about cancer, particularly breast cancer, in the past two years since I was diagnosed:

Only 5 – 10 percent of ALL cancers are hereditary. That means the other 90 – 95 percent are due to lifestyle, environmental factors, or just bad luck. Don’t confuse “hereditary” with “genetic”. ALL cancers are genetic, i.e., caused by genetic mutations. A cancer is considered hereditary when this genetic mutation is inherited.

There are thousands, probably millions of factors that INCREASE your risk for cancer, but no SINGLE, direct cause. In the case of breast cancer, most of these factors are out of our control: being female, menstruating at an early age, having a first-degree relative with breast cancer. But some of these factors ARE under our control, albeit to a limited extent: diet, exercise, level of exposure to carcinogenic substances and other toxins.

Maintaining an ultra-healthy lifestyle and living in a protective bubble STILL doesn't mean you won't get cancer. Christopher Reeve's wife didn't smoke and she died of lung cancer. I have friends who've been smoking a pack a day for two decades and they might live to be a hundred (Although I wouldn’t bet the rest of my short life on it.). But these are the 20 percent on either side of the bell curve. Most of us fall in the 80 percent middle portion.

One common analogy for cancer is farming. The soil is fertile and you scatter a bunch of seeds. Some seeds grow and others don't, although they all have the same soil, sun, and water. Our bodies are like the soil - fertile and ready to let those cancer seeds grow. The sun and water are environmental and lifestyle factors: exposure to chemicals, nutrition, exercise. Some of those cancer cells will grow and some will not, just like some of the seeds will grow and some will not. Nobody knows for sure why that is. I'll leave it to you to extrapolate from this to see how fiddling with the soil, sun, and water can encourage more or fewer seeds to grow.

In most bodies, the cancer cells start growing, but the healthy cells/immune system keep them in check and the cancer cells die a natural death, as all cells are meant to do. But in some cases, the cancer cells do NOT die as they're supposed to. They keep multiplying and dividing out of control, faster than the immune system can get rid of them. And when enough of these cells accumulate, you've got a tumor. There is a great deal of controversy over exactly what TRIGGERS these cancer cells to NOT die a natural death and instead grow out of control. But there are many, many studies (some less scientific and convincing than others) that point to diet and exposure to certain toxic chemicals as triggers.

Dioxin is one such toxic chemical that is now widely acknowledged as a cancer trigger - a carcinogenic substance. Do a Google search and you'll find plenty of info about dioxin. For example:

From Action PA's Web site (environmental activists, so they have a bias):

"A North American eating a typical North American diet will receive 93% of their dioxin exposure from meat and dairy products (23% is from milk and dairy alone; the other large sources of exposure are beef, fish, pork, poultry and eggs). In fish, these toxins bioaccumulate up the food chain so that dioxin levels in fish are 100,000 times that of the surrounding environment. The best way to avoid dioxin exposure is to reduce or eliminate your consumption of meat and dairy products by adopting a vegan diet."

From the World Health Organization (WHO) Web site:

"Although formation of dioxins is local, environmental distribution is global. Dioxins are found throughout the world in practically all media. The highest levels of these compounds are found in some soils, sediments and food, especially dairy products, meat, fish and shellfish. Very low levels are found in plants, water and air."

Other potentially carcinogenic substances that I've learned about in my research include:

- Acrylamide (in potato and corn chips, french fries, other fried or baked starchy foods)
- Aflatoxin (in peanuts and peanut products, especially peanut butter)
- Parabens (in personal care and baby care products such as lotions, shampoos, etc.)
- Formaldehyde (in building materials, cosmetics, medicines, diet colas, etc.)

There are also the myriad substances in our food, household products and environment that damage our healthy cells and immune systems so that our bodies can't fight those over-powered cancer cells and keep them from growing enough to do harm. Some say that ALL of us have cancer cells in our bodies. But not all of those cancer cells get to critical mass and become cancer. Or, they may take a very long time to get to that point - an entire lifetime of continued exposure to particular substances. According to the American Cancer Society, one out of two American men and one out of three women will get cancer at some point in their lives.

And then there are substances that actually FEED cancer cells. For example, sugar. When they do a PET scan to find where the cancerous tumors are in your body, they inject a glucose solution mixed with radioactive dye into your blood stream and then put you in a machine that will pick up the radioactive glucose tracer. The glucose solution lights up on the PET scan because cancer cells metabolize, or feed off the sugar and become active enough to be seen on the scan - like a feeding frenzy of sorts. That's why sugar is especially bad for people who already have cancer. It's like throwing lighter fluid on a fire.

Animal protein also seems to feed cancer cells. A good scientific study to explain this is "The China Study" by T. Colin Campbell. This is not a diet or nutrition book. It's a scientific study of the link between diet and disease, written, ironically, by a scientist who grew up on a dairy farm and set out to prove that malnutrition in Third World countries was due to lack of animal protein in the diet. He ended up finding out something completely different. The book is not just about one study either, but covers thousands of studies - both in the lab and in the human population. So animal products (meat, dairy, eggs) appear to be bad for TWO reasons: 1) they expose us to dioxin, 2) animal protein feeds cancer cells.

And in the case of breast cancer, which is thought to be connected to lifetime exposure to estrogen, animal products are bad for yet a THIRD reason: the growth hormones (estrogen) that are in meat, dairy, and eggs. Growth hormones are banned in Europe but widely used in the U.S. The use of growth hormones in our food and other increased exposure to estrogen in our environment in recent decades has been linked to teen-aged girls getting their periods earlier and earlier (and thereby increasing breast cancer risk).

I changed my family's food sources and switched to natural, eco-friendly household cleaners. But I did most of this during my first pregnancy, BEFORE I was diagnosed with cancer. I already had a fairly healthy lifestyle: I exercised, ate mostly fresh vegetables, avoided processed food, etc. After I was diagnosed, I got militant and cut out all meat, dairy, eggs, sugar, alcohol, and caffeine. Still, my cancer came back with a vengeance and began to spread throughout my body.

Does this mean the diet changes I'd adopted were hogwash? I don't think so. There's too much evidence, plus just plain common sense behind the notion that what we put into our bodies affects how well and long our bodies last. I've just been particularly unlucky. Or all those sausages I ate in my youth are catching up with me. (Yummm... LOVE sausages... and fried chicken, and cheese, and french fries, and... DOH-nuts... I'm not one of those vegetarians who WANTS to eat rabbit food all the time. I'd rather have a Big Mac than a bowl of sprouts ANY day! Disgusting, but true.)

Have I removed ALL suspected carcinogens from my family's life? That would be impossible. The very air we breathe puts us at risk. My kids still eat meat, dairy, and eggs, but mostly hormone-free or organic and in very small amounts. My kids eat peanut butter almost everyday, but only pure organic peanut butter that is refrigerated and therefore less prone to forming aflatoxin. And Tony's not about to give up his red wine and cheese, no matter how many relatives die of cancer.

Think of it this way: There's a way to reduce our risk of dying in a car accident to ZERO percent: Don't ever get in a car. But our modern lifestyle doesn't allow that. Instead, we use safety belts, airbags, car seats for our kids and take other measures to minimize our risk. Minimize, not eliminate. There's NO way to reduce our risk of dying of cancer to zero percent. But we can take measures to minimize our risk.