Consuming Consciousness

Everyone is afraid of cancer, and most people feel helpless to avoid it. Aside from quitting smoking, some of the most important steps you can take to reduce your cancer risk have to do with your diet. A new report explains what you can do to help yourself, and provides a very useful chart listing foods and their associated cancer risks or benefits. The report is online at http://www.dietandcancerreport.org.

Like smoking, risky eating and drinking is a form of Russian roulette… except you won’t know for 15-20 years later whether you’ve won or lost. Russian roulette, if you’re unlucky at games of chance, at least has the benefit of blowing your head off in the moment you decide to try it — usually an unhappy moment when life doesn’t seem worth living. Cancer, on the other hand, takes you out later, at a time when you might no longer think your life is so awful or worthless that you’re willing to throw it away. Not much is worse than struggling through the hard times, making a life for yourself with people you love and enjoy, and then finding something stupid you’ve been doing without thinking for the last twenty years ago is going to take it all away…

There are certainly cancer risks you don’t have control over (genetic predispositions, environmental pollution, workplace hazards) but there’s no sense compounding them with things you can change.

AICR’s Second Expert Report, Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective, is the most comprehensive scientific analysis of cancer prevention and causation ever undertaken. This landmark document, authored by an international expert panel, reviewed 7,000 research studies and classified the accumulated evidence for specific diet-cancer links.

The most recent biennial survey commissioned by the American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR) shows that Americans rate cancer their number one health concern, believe it to be impossible to prevent, and continue to blame the disease on factors they cannot control.

“These are three distressing, interconnected trends, and they help to explain something we at AICR have been sensing for years,” said AICR Nutrition Advisor Karen Collins, MS, RD. “Popular frustration about cancer is on the rise. An ‘everything causes cancer’ mindset is taking hold, which causes Americans to throw up their hands and overlook the steps that can lower their risk.”

According to the 2007 AICR Facts vs. Fears Survey, which asked respondents about both proven and unproven risk factors for cancer, most Americans remain unaware that they can lower their cancer risk by changing their diet, getting more physical activity and managing their weight.

A new survey shows that education is linked to cancer death rates. Those with more education had lower death rates from cancer, across race and gender groups. The groups that benefit most in this regard are black men and white women, whose risk of getting cancer was cut 76% at the highest levels of education. Educated white men’s risk was cut by 48 percent, and educated black women’s was cut by 43%.

Data was collected on over 135,5000 cancer deaths from 2001 involving black and white men and women between the ages of 25 and 64. Overall, whites had lower cancer death rates than blacks with the same level of education. But black and white men with zero to eight years of education had almost the same level of cancer deaths, which was much higher than the other groups.

Let’s see… what might this tell us? The two groups with a single oppression to battle (white women and black men) are at the same level, and benefit the most from education. White men, with no oppression to battle, had almost the same level of improvement as black women, who suffer from the double whammy of gender and race oppression. But the white guys have a significantly lower cancer death rate than the black women. What do you think? Maybe things are already so good for white men that education isn’t the huge advantage it is for the other groups. And maybe things are so bad for black women that education doesn’t confer as much benefit as it does to their black male and white female peers.

Elizabeth Ward, co-author of the Study and the American Cancer Society’s director of cancer surveillance stated, “The difference between blacks and whites is most certainly due to socioeconomic conditions and access to care.”

No kidding. The people at the bottom always suffer the most. In every way, cancer being no exception.