I have just returned from a wake - saying goodbye to an outstanding community member who touched my life in a way that can never be forgotten - or undone. I am blessed by having known her.
She did not die of natural causes. She died of Lung Cancer. I do not know what "caused" her cancer. We don't really know what causes anyone to end up with a disease because so many factors interplay.
A person can smoke and get lung cancer or not get lung cancer. A person can not exercise and stay healthy or exercise and stay mobile into their very late years. But it is not a crap shoot at all.
We have known risk factors and probabilities. It is possible to stack the deck in ones favor.
That being said:
- maintain a normal weight
- exercise daily (including strength training on 2-3 days)
- limit saturated fats, sugars, salt and empty calories (and sometimes calories in general)
- add fruits, vegetables, fish, whole grains and healthy oils to your diet
- don't smoke
- limit radiation (sun and medical)
- avoid environmental toxins
I want to add that we learn new things every day. It may be that what we thought was a risk factor turns out not to be and vice versa. I hope that you won't take that to mean that no one knows what they are talking about and instead take it as learning and getting better at things. You can only act on the information available to you today, but that does not mean that it won't change. You should act accordingly.
I won't add much of my voice to the headlines of today - that it has been 40 years since President Nixon enacted a law that led to much cancer research and subsequent medical breakthroughs.
But I will concur with those who attribute the decline in cancer death and cancer rates to
- screenings (i.e. pap smears, colonoscopy, and mammograms),
- a significant reduction in tobacco use and tobacco exposure,
- diets that are plant based and calorie controlled and
- to daily excercise
This is my last post for a bit - enjoy the holiday-
I do get focused on a few things - labels are one of them (nutrient/menu labels) and radiation is probably the other -
Because I have blogged about the risk of radiation, especially from medical testing, including chemical and imaging devices, I felt it important to take a minute from my studies to report the results of someone else's.
The referent study is published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal but the full article is not yet available in my University database. The gist: researchers used medical records to track the type of test and dose of radiation (perhaps estimate) that a group of persons who had had a heart attack received in the ten years following their event.
These persons, over 82,000 of them, did not have cancer before their heart attack. Approximately 12,000 of them did develop cancer afterwords. The scientists were able to show that the addition of doses, doses that accumulate over time, were positively associated with cancer cases. They found a certain percent increase with every 10miliservet (mSv).
As I said, I have not been able to review the full research report for things like sample size, statistical tests, and all that science stuff. What the abstract and news articles don't tell us is important. I would like to know how many persons who are similar to those 80+ thousand but did not receive radiation and also got cancer. Is it significantly less?
Dose response is one of the criteria for causation (exposure to outcome).
I have every reason to believe that radiation from our medical testing is putting us at increased risk of cancer. I have been very honest about that - still this is just one study, one headline even... so don't think it fact, but do think it important.
Blogs of note, re mSv - from me can be found here.
