I would like to dedicate this to all the people who keep insisting that I should spend twice as much on organic pears as I do on regular pears by saying what everybody in my hometown knows. You will get cancer anyway.
I say this because my home county has one of the highest per capita rates of cancer in the state (possibly in the country, but I can't remember for sure). This in a place where almost everybody grows their own vegetables (becuase we're poor) and has their own well (because we're poor). I don't think my grandparents ate a store bought vegetable a single day in their lives, and both of them have had cancer, and my grandpa is probably not going to make it through his. They ate nectarines from time to time, which they couldn't grow themselves, but most of our food came from our farm. We raised our own beef, like so many others around us, and we never fed the cows anything but "organic" feed. We never allowed growth hormones to enter our minds, much less our herd. Hell, for half of my life, we had farm fresh milk and eggs, too.
And here we are, living the same damn nightmare that everybody else in my county has to live at one point or another. I can't think of a single family I know whose lives haven't been touched by cancer in some way. And since I know pretty much every family in the county, you can imagine how many people that is. Nobody knows why.
I'm trying really hard not to be bitter about Grandpa being so sick. He's had a really good life, and he's been a significant part of mine. I'm extremely lucky to have had him around this long, and I want what's best for him, even if that means that he has to leave us. But I get so fed up with people acting like microwaving my food in a plastic container is the 8th deadly sin (for the record, my grandparents don't even own a microwave) that I just want to smack them upside the head.
The chemicals that cause cancer are in the air and in the water and in the ground. They get into the food supply from there. Yes, it's true that you add risk when you add pesticides to foods, but part of the truth is that the pesticide residue is already in the soil, regardless of whether or not the current owners use pesticides because previous and neighboring owners use pesticides. The chemicals fall from the sky in the form of acid rain (and we don't even have any industries). The groundwater gets polluted and nobody realizes it. A million things can cause cancer, and the only thing that is going to stop it is a complete lifestyle change, which no one is willing (or able?) to do. We can't support the population of the planet if we go back to an unidustrialized way of life, and we can't keep ourselves healthy if we continue to live in the way we live now. The bottom line is that you can't feed the planet on organically grown crops because they don't yeild enough, hence their incredibly high costs. We have grown beyond our resources and cancer is the price we pay for our expansion. Pretending that you have some kind of control over who gets it and who does not is not going to change the fact that you don't.
So stop hassling me. My sedentary lifestyle, stress-filled existence, and salt-heavy diet is going to cause me to die from heart disease long before I have to worry about cancer (which, if I do get it, will be caused by the fact that I don't eat enough vegetables and fruits, not because I don't eat the right kind), all right? (I have my mom's heart and my dad's habits, which is a potentially deadly combination.) I'm not going to waste money on something that is unlikely to help or cause the world to change in anyway. Neither should you.
Posted by LoWriter at January 19, 2006 08:47 AMHmm, I've been reading a fair bit about cancer recently (part of the whole "pre-med requirements" curriculum). I wouldn't say I'm an expert by any means, but I have a fair handle on a lot of the concepts behind cancer and I can confidently say that these people are living in a dream world if they think that eating fruits and veggies means theyre never going to be bitten by cancer.
I think that there's a strong compulsion by people suffering cancer (directly or sympathetically) to try to find a reason for it. I remember my grandfather insisting that he got cancer because he smoked in the army. Nevermind the fact that he hadn't smoked in over forty years, he was confident those cigarettes were killing him now.
From what I've been able to glean, the fact is the DNA of all of our cells are constantly being damaged and when I say constantly I mean a LOT (think trillions) of the base pairs are being transcribed incorrectly, or mutated or otherwise damaged. The thing is, the cell actually knows about this and has an army of special enzymes and worker proteins that are constantly going around and repairing damaged DNA. It's pretty damned incredible when you stop to think about it. Every one of our cells has a war going on where entropy is trying to create cancer, and our cells are fighting to maintain order.
Additionally even if these repair-bots fail and a cell becomes evil, there are additional mechanisms to make the cell commit suicide before it can duplicate and thus become cancerous.
There are actually even greater subtleties to how cancer start and propogates (for example, most cells have a built in "shelf-life" where they'll automatically stop replicating and die, but cancer cells don't abide by this restriction, effectively making them "super-cells" because they don't die!), but they are really too complex for a reply. The fact is, that despite all these hints as to what starts cancer, most scientists in cancer research can't say with absolute confidence what sorts of behaviors are absolutely best to avoid the disease.
If I were to guess though, one big one would be to never go outside on hot sunny days. The sun has a lot of energy and those UV rays have been shown to mutate DNA. Not very practical, but if you're really interested in maximizing your chances you can start there! Otherwise I'd say you're much better off focussing your energy on living well instead of living scared. Oh, and eat your vegetables ;)
Posted by: rhett at January 27, 2006 07:15 PM