Even if bad luck
is a leading cause of cancer, it's still worth taking steps to minimize the
risks.
By
My
social circle was shaken a few days into the new year with an upsetting blog
post. A friend I will call Mary is seriously ill. The blogger requested loving
messages to her to be sewn into a quilt.
This
bombshell began a flood of phone calls, emails, and Facebook posts.
Mary
— sick? What? The blog post noted she doesn’t like to talk about her illness
and refrained from sharing what was wrong. If you read between the lines, it
sounded like cancer. It sounded terminal.
And
it was. Or is.
Because
Mary is still very much alive, albeit half her former size and completely bald
from the chemo that didn’t work. She’s now receiving palliative care and
preparing for a certain death.
It’s
the typical story of “only the good die young.”
I’ve
got my flight booked to go see her, but I haven’t truly allowed myself to
accept that she’s dying yet. That will hurt too much.
Meanwhile,
the media began to report a scientific finding that two-thirds of cancers were just
due to bad luck.
So
was my friend doomed from the get-go? Is a lifetime of eating organic food,
getting plenty of exercise, and doing every other good thing you’re supposed to
not enough to protect you?
The Guardian calls these headlines “bad journalism”
and “bad science.” (Because they’re British, they also call them “bollocks,” a
charming term from across the pond that can be loosely translated as “bunk.”)
In
other words, whether they’ve got good luck or bad, we still need to remind
people that smoking causes lung cancer. And while that’s a bummer if you’re
trying to quit, it’s actually great news because it gives us some control over
our own fates.
The
President’s Cancer Panel report gives some other good tips on reducing risk.
(Yes, the government did something useful.)
This
year, the focus was on getting more Americans to get HPV
vaccines to prevent
the virus that causes cervical cancer.
Even
more groundbreaking advice came from the 2008-2009 report, which addressed eliminating
environmental toxins. The report recommends washing work clothes separately
from other family laundry, drinking filtered tap water, storing liquids in
stainless steel or glass containers, and eating organic food.
These
feel like small, maybe insignificant actions. But if they reduce your
cumulative lifetime exposure to carcinogens, they’re worthwhile.
It
also calls to question why cancer-causing chemicals are allowed to be used at
all. Why is it an individual’s responsibility to seek out pesticide-free foods?
If certain chemicals are so bad they should be avoided, why is it legal for
growers to douse our food with them in the first place?
Nobody
should lose a loved one to cancer, and yet so many of us do. Whatever
percentage of cancer cases are simply due to bad luck, we as individuals and as
a society should pursue every avenue to avert the remaining cancer cases that
are preventable.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our
Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.