It’s World Cancer Day on Sunday 4 February, and you’re probably going to be seeing a lot of stories about cancer in the media. Most of them will be about the latest ‘breakthrough treatments’, and how you should participate in cancer screening programs – even though the majority of these screening programs either cause more deaths than they save, or simply lack evidence that they save lives at all.
On the other hand, it’s unlikely that you’ll hear much about a recently-published study which calculated that nearly 40% of deaths from cancer in Australia – that’s almost 17 000 deaths per year – could be prevented by adopting better diet and lifestyle habits.
There are 8 major groups of risk factors that have been declared to be causes of cancer by international research bodies such as the World Health Organization, on the basis of solid and consistent scientific evidence:
- Tobacco smoke from both active and passive smoking;
- Dietary factors including inadequate intake of fruit, vegetables and fibre; and excessive red and processed meat consumption;
- Alcohol consumption;
- Being overweight or obese;
- Physical inactivity;
- Ultraviolet light exposure;
- Infections such as hepatitis C and human papillomavirus; and
- Use of hormonal drugs such as menopausal hormone replacement therapy.
Researchers from QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute used data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, which conducts regular surveys of Australians’ health-related behaviour, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, to determine how many cancer deaths each year are caused by these risk factors – all of which are modifiable – and therefore could be prevented.
They found that the most preventable cancers that afflict Australians are those of the lung, colorectum and breast, along with melanoma, and that 34% of cancer deaths in Australian women, and 41% in men, were attributable to modifiable risk factors.
Think about those numbers for a moment. 44 000 Australians died of cancer in 2013, the year the researchers used to make their calculations. Now put some faces on those numbers. Just about everyone knows several people who have died from cancer, whether it’s your old uncle Joe who smoked his way to an early grave, or the work colleague who died from breast cancer, leaving 3 teenage children to grow up without their Mum, or the nice lady in the sandwich shop who was dead 4 weeks after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
In my own practice, I’ve seen many people with cancer diagnoses, and not all of them have survived. Every one of those deaths – usually people who came to see me after they had exhausted all their medical options and been referred for palliative care, leaving nothing for me to do but hold their hands and try to make their last days on earth more bearable – haunts me to this day.
To think that 1 in 3 of those women, and 2 in 5 of the men, might still be alive today if they had made different choices in the way they lived their lives! It’s sobering, isn’t it?
The good news is, you can take this information and use it to improve your own health and reduce your risk of cancer. Which behaviour changes offer the most ‘bang for your buck’?
Priority # 1 – quit smoking
23% of all cancer deaths in Australia in 2013 – that’s 9921 deaths – were attributable to smoking and passive smoking. Smoking doesn’t just cause lung cancer, but cancer of the mouth and throat, oesophagus, stomach, colorectum, liver, pancreas, larynx, cervix, ovary, kidney and bladder, and acute myeloid leukaemia.
If you have tried to quit smoking in the past and failed, I highly recommend using EFT to assist your next quit attempt. Read Dr Peta Stapleton and colleagues’ paper on using EFT to quit smoking, and watch my interview with my client Heather on how we used EFT to help her quit.
Priority # 2 – clean up your diet
The research team estimated that 2329 cancer deaths in 2013 were caused by just 4 dietary factors: consuming too little fibre (less than 30 g per day for men, and 25 g per day for women); insufficient fruit and vegetables (less than 2 and 3.5 serves per day, respectively); and eating any red meat or processed meat at all. The types of cancer caused by these dietary factors are colorectal (bowel), mouth, throat, larynx and lung.
A wholefood plant-based diet is the obvious solution to this aspect of dietary prevention of cancer. It’s impossible to get insufficient fibre when your diet consists of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds!
Priority # 3 – reach and maintain a healthy weight
Being overweight or obese caused 1990 deaths from cancer of the oesophagus, stomach, colorectum, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, breast, endometrium, ovary, prostate, kidney and thyroid, and multiple myeloma.
Once again, a wholefood plant-based diet is the most effective way to lose excess weight and keep it off, because it does not require portion control, there are no hunger pains to grapple with, and you’ll feel better almost from the moment you change your way of eating… whereas most diets leave you feeling tired, hungry and grumpy.
I have hundreds of wholefood plant-based recipes to get you started, and my EmpowerEd program is packed with resources to make your transition to this way of eating easy and low-fuss.
Increasing physical activity, limiting or eliminating alcohol intake, breastfeeding, and avoiding sunburn and the use of menopausal hormone replacement therapy are also important considerations when it comes to reducing your risk of developing cancer.
The best part is, the steps you take to help prevent cancer also reduce your risk of other chronic illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and dementia. Why would this be? How could one set of behaviour changes affect multiple disease processes?
Quite simply, it’s because human beings are genetically adapted to eat a minimally processed plant-based diet, be physically active every day, not smoke or drink alcohol, breastfeed our babies, and to spend enough time outdoors to get sufficient vitamin D… but not to sunbake to the point where we burn. When we follow the lifestyle prescription that fits our genetic inheritance, every aspect of our physical and psychological function just works better, including our bodies’ capacity to repair the DNA mutations that can lead to cancer, and to control the growth and spread of cancer once it has developed.
Unfortunately, the reductionist paradigm in which our current ‘health care’ system is grounded places the emphasis on high-tech approaches to cancer – screening programs to detect cancer at an early stage, development of vaccines to try to prevent individual types of cancer, and of course, an ever-expanding arsenal of drugs aimed at treating it. Simple, cheap or free lifestyle strategies that have the capacity to prevent multiple types of cancer and to improve health in general, aren’t backed by wealthy and politically powerful industries that could spruik their benefits either to the public or to health professionals.
Cancer is now the leading cause of death in Australia, and the number of people who develop cancer and die from it is increasing year by year, despite declining rates of smoking, as diets worsen and our collective girth increases. But in the midst of all this bad news, this new study reminds us that when it comes to nearly 40% of those cancer deaths, our daily choices really do make a difference.
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