What You Can Do to Prevent Cancer: Practical Measures to Adjust Your Lifestyle and Protect Your Health

Introduction

After heart disease, cancer has become the second leading cause of death in the Western world. However, many people have lived on this planet and not succumbed to cancer. There are still population groups around the world in which the cancer rate is very low or zero. Admittedly, most of these groups have little contact with Western civilisation.

However, even if you live smack bang in the middle of a Western city, you can still minimise your risk of developing cancer. In other words, it is entirely possible to prevent cancer from taking hold in your body. All that is required is for you to become aware of the root causes of cancer and how to reduce your risk. Creating such awareness is the purpose of this book.

I have written this book with the purpose of showing you that most cancers are completely preventable. From this I exclude cancers due to genetic factors. But since only five to ten per cent of cancers are genetic, it follows that 90 to 95 per cent can be avoided. Drawing on scientific and medical research, this book will describe what adjustments you need to make to your lifestyle in order to protect yourself.

It is not exposure to individual carcinogens, or substances that can cause cancer, such as pesticides in food that dictates whether you will develop cancer. Rather, it’s the ability of your immune system to protect you that decides your fate. A factor that has a pronounced weakening effect on your immunity is stress. Most people who develop cancer have had ongoing stress in their lives prior to the diagnosis.

If you combine ongoing or previous stress with exposure to carcinogens and a Western diet rich in processed foods, the likelihood of developing cancer increases significantly. The main aim of this book is to highlight simple things that you can do to boost your defence against cancer.

First, in Chapter 1, we will look at why cancer is essentially a Western disease. Chapter 2 deals with the less well-known carcinogens in your immediate environment, while Chapter 3 examines the dangerous substances in the food and drink you put into your body every day. Chapter 4 highlights the role of the gut in a healthy immune system and how gut problems can be rectified. Chapters 5 and 6 examine diet and food in specific detail, including foods to avoid and foods with anti-cancer properties, while Chapter 7 gives advice on where to buy your food. I look at the critical issue of stress in Chapter 8 and provide practical advice on overcoming stress, including simple exercises you can do. Chapter 9 is an overview of the role of obesity in cancer. The book concludes with a chapter containing practical advice for the avoidance/treatment of specific cancers.

If you follow the advice in this book, you stand an excellent chance of avoiding cancer. If you pass it on to your children and relatives you will be helping your family and community at large. Following this advice means you can start preventing cancer right away. There is no need to wait for some magic pill because the power lies with you. You can take control by eliminating harmful elements in your environment, altering your diet, boosting your immunity and overcoming your stress.

Recently I read that a number of cancers are the result of bad luck and have nothing to do with diet, poor gut health or stress. If this truly were the case, then the rates of these cancers would have been as high historically, and people such as the Inuit of Greenland and the Sami of northern Scandinavia would have similar incidences.

There is as much misinformation out there as there is information. There are vested interests at work whose aim it is to confuse you. I’m referring in particular to drug companies, food manufacturers and politicians. Be skeptical about everything you hear, see or read about cancer, including material based on scientific and medical research, especially industry-funded research. Before reading any article I always check first to see who funded the research. If it is a drug company or other industry I tend to discard it.

However, even government-funded research, which makes use of public funds, can be biased. Two eminent professors, one from Harvard Medical School and the other from Stanford Medical School in the US, have been accused of carrying out illegal drug trials while using public funds to conduct their research. Both of these professors had strong financial links to the drug companies that manufactured the drugs used in these illicit trials (Campbell et al. 2007).

I would urge you to take charge of your own life and not be dependent on the system to help you. If you implement even some of the measures I have outlined, you should notice an improvement in your overall health. Always keep in mind the fact that Nature is there to assist you.

I wish you and your loved ones excellent health so that you get full enjoyment out of living.

JOHN MCKENNA

March 2015

Chapter 1

Cancer is a Western Disease

Many parts of the developing world have major health problems but cancer is not one of them. I worked on and off between 1977 and 2002 in different parts of Africa and, during my time there, I observed three population groups with three different disease spectrums – the rural Africans, the white settlers and the urban Africans.

The rural African very occasionally presented with cancer but this was cancer associated with chronic infections. In southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho and South Africa), for example, hepatitis B can progress to cause chronic active hepatitis, which is an infection of the liver that can ultimately result in primary liver cancer. In medical school, we were taught that primary liver cancer occurred in only two parts of the world – southern Africa and South-East Asia – where the carrier rate for hepatitis B is very high. Common cancers such as breast, prostate and colon cancer were rare or absent in rural Africans.

Over the years, the British, French, Germans, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch and others colonised various parts of Africa. Many of these white European settlers lived a Western lifestyle and ate a Western diet. In this population group the disease pattern was very different: cancer was remarkably common.

However, once Africans moved to the cities and began to eat a Western diet, refined carbohydrates in particular, and suffer the stresses of a modern lifestyle, they became more susceptible to cancer. They represented a transitional population group who still presented with a disease spectrum similar to their rural relatives, but the longer they spent in urban areas the more their disease pattern resembled that of the white folk.

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the incidence of cancer increased quite markedly, especially in the USA, UK and Continental Europe, cancer was described by many as the disease of the affluent. The only type of cancer found in less developed areas of the world was that associated with a chronic infection, such as primary liver cancer. This type of cancer was referred to as the poor man’s cancer.

THE RISE IN CANCER

Since 1940 the incidence of cancer has increased in all major industrialised countries. Figure 1.1 shows the marked rise in breast cancer as an example.

As you can see, in 1940 the incidence of breast cancer in the USA was approximately 40 per 100,000 of the population or, put another way, 4 in every 10,000 people developed the disease. By 1970, this had doubled to 80 per 100,000; by 2000, it had risen to 120 per 100,000.

When you compare these figures with those of China, for example, the difference is very marked. However, once the Chinese migrate to Western countries, their chance of developing cancer increases (Servan-Schreiber, 2011).

Figure 1.1: Breast Cancer Incidence in USA, 1940–2000

Source: Quoted in McGrath, K.G., ‘An earlier age of breast cancer diagnosis related to more frequent use of antiperspirants/deodorants and underarm shaving’, European Journal of Cancer Prevention, 12(6), 2003: 480.

The incidence of prostate cancer has risen even faster still.

Many experts in the field are calling this an epidemic of cancer in the West.

When I was at medical school many moons ago we were taught that cancer for the most part affected the very young and the elderly because the immune system was not well developed in the young and was less efficient in the elderly. Since the mid-1970s, this pattern has changed very dramatically. Now any age group can be affected. It is not uncommon for fifty-year-olds and even forty-year-olds to test positive for cancer. I was shocked the first time I saw breast cancer in a woman aged thirty-five. She was under the care of an oncologist, but after having had a mastectomy she refused to take chemotherapy and opted to come to see me.

Also, the type of cancer seen in younger age groups tends to be faster growing and more virulent. For example, prostate cancer in an eighty-year-old tends to be quite slow growing and often the man will die of other causes, but prostate cancer in a fifty-year-old tends to be much more aggressive and is more likely to kill.

It is clear that the dynamics of this disease have altered significantly. Not only is it increasing in incidence and so affecting many more people, it is also creeping into younger and younger age groups and presenting a much more aggressive picture. There must be an explanation for this phenomenon.

A major research study, published in the journal Science in 2003, showed that the risk of getting breast cancer before the age of fifty has tripled for women born after the Second World War compared to the risk for women born before the war (King, 2003). Other studies show a similar pattern for other cancers. These studies suggest that the problem began around the time of the Second World War. So something quite significant changed in the 1940s/early 1950s.

In 2000 a research article published in the New England Journal of Medicine stated that many lines of evidence indicate that the factors that determine the great majority of cancers are largely exogenous (external) and thus preventable. These include factors related to lifestyle as well as toxins in food, air and water (Lichenstein et al., 2000). If we alter our lifestyle, especially our diet, and clean up our immediate environment, we stand a good chance of fending off up to 80 per cent of cancers. This is an incredible admission that the war on cancer should be fought on the basis of educating people about altering their lifestyle and about the sources of toxicity in the environment to avoid.

More money should be spent on preventive medicine. The truth is that there is no profit to be made in preventive medicine and so it would not attract private funding. Since Western scientific and medical research is dependent on funding from the drug companies, most research is directed towards finding some miracle cancer drug that can be patented to serve the insatiable appetite for profit. Politicians are also dependent on drug companies for taxes and for the employment of their citizens, so there is little political will to fund preventive medicine.

Therefore, once again it is up to you, the reader, to take responsibility for your own health and to educate yourself in how to prevent cancer. If you do this you have an excellent chance of avoiding cancer. You will also have much better health and get more out of life.

Before we look at what changed in the 1940s to bring about such an increase in the incidence of cancer, I would like to outline how cancer develops within the body, and to illustrate the role of lifestyle and environmental factors in this process.

THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF CANCER

Cancer Comes from Within

Some people believe that cancer is something that comes from outside your body and attacks you. They believe that cancer is like influenza or MRSA in that you contract it and it takes hold in your body and harms you – like some gruesome monster in a horror movie.

The truth is rather different. The creation of cancer cells is a normal natural process that occurs every day in your body. It is what happens when things go awry in the natural process of cell division, a process by which a parent cell divides into two or more daughter cells. Cells in your body multiply every day in an effort to replace old cells or to repair a wound, for example. As with any process, things can go wrong. When this happens, an abnormal cell is produced which we call a cancer cell.

In most cases this is not a problem as your immune system will detect it and dispose of it rapidly. Our immune cells, especially a particular type of white blood cell called natural killer cells (a very appropriate name), take care of these abnormal cells by destroying them. They are the special forces of the immune system. Therefore, every day your body produces cancer cells and every day your immune system deals with them. Now you can see how foolish it is to think of cancer as some alien from outer space or some monster from the dark side of the moon coming to attack you. So the real reason why cancer can occur and be allowed to take hold in your body is because your immune system has been weakened. It is more accurate to view cancer as a malfunction of the immune system. This is why cancer used to occur only in the elderly and the very young because, as I explained earlier, the immune system is not well developed in the very young and is going downhill in the elderly.

There is a wonderful example of the role of the immune system in protecting the body against cancer from tests done on laboratory mice. To study cancer, scientists inject high doses of cancer cells into the bodies of lab mice. The high doses of cancer cells are to ensure that the animals consequently develop the disease and therefore can be used for cancer research. (Thousands of mice, rats, guinea pigs and other animals suffer and die at the hands of medical science every day around the world.)

In 2002 something very strange happened in a lab at Wake Forest University, North Carolina: one of the mice that had been injected with the standard dose of cancer cells did not develop cancer. This was a great surprise to the researcher. She consulted with her supervisor, who suggested using double the dosage. Still the mouse showed no signs of developing cancer. The researcher then injected ten times the dosage, sure that this would do the trick. Still the mouse did not develop cancer. They had found a mouse that was most unusual in that it was resistant to cancer. They named him ‘Mighty Mouse’ (Cui, 2003).

Mighty Mouse had a very strong immune system that enabled him to mount a powerful immune response once the cancer cells were injected into his body. This is a very important message to keep at the forefront of your mind when reading the rest of this book.

Preventing cancer is fundamentally all about finding ways to avoid harming the immune system and to strengthen immunity. In particular, if you strengthen your immune system and avoid too much exposure to harmful agents in your environment, you will be able to take care of whatever cancer cells arise in your body on an ongoing basis. You can become like Mighty Mouse.

From now on, view cancer as a natural process that happens every day in every one of us and that will not develop into anything sinister if our immunity is in top form.

How Are Cancer Cells Different?

Cancer cells are abnormal cells and behave abnormally. They do not obey the rules that normal cells follow. Cancer cells can be thought of as rogue cells running amok and creating havoc in the body.

An amazing control system operates in your body. This control system operates at all levels, from the control of essential nutrient levels to the control of individual cells. For example, if the water level in your bloodstream decreases, the thirst centre in your brain is triggered to tell you to drink more water. Similarly, when you cut your skin with a knife, skin cells are triggered to multiply to replace those that have been damaged. But this multiplication, also called cell division, stops when a sufficient number of cells have been made. So, there are triggers that initiate cell division and triggers that stop it, in the same way that your sensation of thirst is initiated and then stopped, once you drink enough water.

With cancer cells, the same control system does not function correctly and so cancer cells multiply in an out-of-control manner, creating abnormal lumps and bumps. This is sometimes referred to as cell division gone mad.

Normal cells that are damaged beyond repair by cuts, bruises and so on are triggered by the body’s control system to die. This is a normal, natural process that allows the body to remove cells that are no longer of any use. With cancer cells, this normal process does not work.