It wasn’t until my annual physical examination, and a simple question from the doctor about my family health history, that I found myself thinking, Uh-oh.
Fourteen years ago my mother died of lung cancer. Ten years later my aunt died of the same disease. Not long ago my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma. Of course I’d known all that. But somehow I hadn’t consciously admitted to myself how often cancer had struck. Brain tumors, skin cancer, prostate cancer–they all showed up somewhere in the family tree. Were we especially susceptible to this terrible disease? And was there anything to do to lower the risk?
Risk for some cancers, in fact, does run in families. Some inherited genes seem to make it easier for healthy cells to mutate into malignancy; others can impair the body’s built-in ability to disable cancer-causing substances before they cause trouble. Inherited risk helps explain why some smokers live until they’re 95 and others, like my mother and her sister, die of lung cancer in their sixties. Someday, genetic tests may be used routinely to assess a person’s risk of specific cancers. But I don’t want to wait for that. I want to do whatever I can to lower my risk. Now.
So I called Melanie Polk, a dietitian and director of nutrition education at the American Institute for Cancer Research, and she told me the same thing I would hear from almost every expert, alternative or mainstream, including the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society. “Eat more fruits and vegetables. That’s the single most important step most people can take to lower their cancer risk.”
To read the remainder of the article click The Anti-Cancer Diet.
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