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Cancer
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How can cancer be prevented
Two things are happening. One is that we're understanding the biology a lot better--though sometimes that means people become more fatalistic because they think, "I've got the genes, I'll get the disease."
The second thing is that people are beginning to understand that cancer is preventable despite family histories, just as heart disease is.
But cancer is a lot more complicated. Unlike heart disease, which is primarily one disease, cancer is a hundred diseases that attack different organs and that have different risk factors. The nice thing is that some of the risk factors are in common and some of those include diet.
Do fruits and vegetables have much impact against breast cancer risk?
A: No. There are two things going on here. One is the likelihood that the relationship is true and another is the strength of the relationship. Although we think the relationship between vegetables and breast cancer is real, the impact isn't huge.
There isn't a lot about diet, weight, etc., that has a big impact on breast cancer. I'm sure we're missing something, but we haven't yet worked out what is going on. There's no question that gaining weight after menopause raises the risk. And we know that hormones and reproduction are really important because women who start puberty early or go through menopause late have a higher risk, and women who bear children at a young age have a lower risk. Rapid growth in childhood and adolescence also raise the risk.
Related topics to be discussed on the next chapter are:
breast cancer
lung cancer
prostate cancer
skin cancer
colon cancer
ovarian cancer
cancer symptoms
cancer research
cervical cancer
testicular cancer
pancreatic cancer
cancer treatment
liver cancer
bladder cancer
bone cancer
thyroid cancer
brain cancer
stomach cancer |
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