Ways to prevent cancer....

Today's post: Monday, 12-10-2007

Mercifully, the list of things you can do to prevent cancer is LONG.

Here are just a few.

1. Don’t smoke. And, if you smoke now quit. Also, stay away from second hand smoke as completely as you possibly can.

This is the number one thing to do. Here’s why:

Half of all cancers are caused smoking from the evidence I’ve seen.

(Smoking is even WORSE for producing heart attacks, strokes, & other cardiovascular disease, by the way.

Some smokers don’t get cancer; but ALL smokers, even young ones, damage their blood vessels & start getting heart disease & extra plaque in their blood vessels. )

Doctors now can help with a drug, Varenicline, that has a very strong track record of helping smokers quit. And, the American Cancer Society or your doctor or health plan may be able to find you a good support group. For those who fail at quitting cold turkey on their own, both of these methods dramatically increase your chances of success.

My suggestion is to do BOTH if you have tried to quit on your own & failed. Why not hammer the deadly addiction to start with?

What if you still haven’t quit?

Believe it or not, you can get some protection against cancer, maybe as high as
50 %, possibly even more, by ALWAYS lighting up with a match. And, NEVER use a cigarette lighter. The much hotter flame of the lighter produces really frightening & harmful short lived compounds while the cooler flame of a match produces less of the different compounds & MUCH less of the ones it does produce.

2. Also, avoid herbicides, room fresheners, & most pesticides in your home, yard, & garden. There’s evidence that these are more carcinogenic than is generally known.

3. You can eat cabbage as coleslaw; cauliflower florets, &/or broccoli each week as these foods have so many & so much cancer preventers, they will cut your risk of cancer & even better, the more deadly forms of cancer about in half. (Other cruciferous vegetables like brussels sprouts, kale, & horse radish also work.)

Eating such vegetables also helps prevent fat gain & enable permanent fat loss if you do enough of it most days.

4. Get regular exercise. Doing so cuts your risk of dying from all causes by fifty percent or more. And, if you do enough exercise without overworking yourself, it apparently boosts your immune system & slows aging enough, it also helps prevent cancer.

5. Eat nuts; beans; nonfat & very low fat dairy foods; lightly cooked wild caught salmon & other health OK seafood; & eggs that have been boiled, poached, or lightly fried in extra virgin olive oil -- instead of fatty meats for 95 to 99 % of your protein.

Even though eating organic produce is really good for you as it has fewer herbicides & pesticides or none, or none AND it is more nutritious besides.

Did you know that following this step of minimizing excess animal fats is about ten times more powerful in reducing your exposure to herbicides & pesticides than eating only organic produce?

Here’s why? It’s actually quite simple. The animals bioconcentrate the herbicides & pesticides so much in their fat, that eating their fat is something you should limit to rare occasions due to the exposure it gives you to herbicides & pesticides.

It also helps prevent strokes, heart attacks & high blood pressure. Not bad.

6. Make meats with nitrates added very rare in your diet. Once a month total or less is what to aim for. In this group are hot dogs, bacon, sausage, & virtually all packaged ham & other packaged, sliced, lunch meats.

7. Make barbecued fatty meats very rare in your diet also. Cooking fatty meats at high temperatures does similar things to them that lighting cigarettes with a lighter does. You get a MUCH larger dose of carcinogenic compounds.

8. Take antioxidant supplements like vitamin C, natural vitamin E including other tocopherols besides the alpha form,* & selenium. (*Gamma tocopherol apparently helps prevent prostate cancer, for example.)

9. Eat plenty of orange & green vegetables high in carotenoids. This includes carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, & broccoli, in which the green color prevents you from seeing the orange of the carotenoids. Many kinds of salad greens are similarly high in carotenoids.

Do all these things & your chances of escaping cancer skyrocket.

Why not try some or all of them?

Bad health habits cause avoidable diseases & HUGE health care costs….

Today's post: Thursday, 8-30-2007

“How we set up to pay for our ballooning health care & medical costs is both irrelevant & insoluble if five to ten times more people are getting sick than should be doing so. And, this is now the case.”

Virtually no sane & unstressed people volunteer to die early.

And, if you were to ask for people who are interested in taking a lethal dose of rat poison or who are at all interested in getting an obnoxious, disabling, or fatal disease, you would find no takers.

Incredibly, by the way they eat; don’t exercise; & fail to manage their health risks, most Americans today are doing just exactly those things.

It was recently announced that the percent of Americans who are really fat is continuing to go up.

Depending on the state, between 17.6 % in Colorado, the median of about 24.4 %, & 30.6 % in Mississippi – or an average of roughly one out of four Americans is now really fat.

(Obese is the medical term for people with a BMI of 30.0 or higher. Very few people (who are very heavily muscled) are not really fat at that level. And, many people who don’t exercise are really fat at a lower number. But it’s a pretty accurate gauge for most people.)

The effects of being that fat -- and the bad health practices that cause it -- also produce or help cause diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, other cardiovascular problems, many cancers, & early mental decline.

So, our health care costs are going through the roof already. And, the productivity of our workforce is less than it easily could be, so there’s less income to pay for the added & unnecessary health care costs.

Worse, in the near term, the baby boomers are about to began entering their 60’s in huge numbers. And, even in people who follow good health practices, these disease become much more likely after age 60. In people who don’t follow good health practices, almost everyone begins to get these diseases.

The day the obesity statistics were announced in the San Jose Mercury News (& across the country) they quoted Jeffrey Levi, the executive director of the Trust for America’s Health as saying this:

“…every candidate for president talks about health care reform and controlling health care costs, if we don’t home in on this issue, none of their proposals are going to be affordable.”

I totally agree with him & wrote almost the same comment several days before I read his comment. I wrote:

“How we set up to pay for our ballooning health care & medical costs is both irrelevant & insoluble if five to ten times more people are getting sick than should be doing so. And, this is now the case.”

How can this be fixed?

1. Virtually all soft drinks & foods made with refined grains; foods made with any high fructose corn syrup; those made with ANY hydrogenated vegetable oils, whether partially hydrogenated or fully hydrogenated; many of the foods made with added sugar; & beef and poultry or farmed fish that has been mostly or totally grain fed tend to make people fat and sick.

Many of the Americans who are the fat people in this study eat very little else. Ouch !!

These foods are not as painful or fast as rat poison; but they kill you and make you sick about as well if you ingest them long enough.

And, much of this kind of food & drink is cheap today. So poor people & young people in their formative years tend to eat it.

Half of all food today is eaten away from home. Most fast food & a good bit of restaurant food is this kind of health harming food. And, employers today tend to have vending machines that make this kind of food available and serve these kinds of foods at company functions.

Why not make it a serious federal crime to put any hydrogenated vegetable oil or high fructose corn syrup in any foods or drinks anywhere in this country?

Why not tax all foods made with sugar or refined grains by having fifty percent of their purchase price fund government health care & disease prevention programs?

Why not tax all soft drinks by having 80 percent of their purchase price fund government health care & disease prevention programs? (Diet soft drinks harm health as much as regular soft drinks according to recent research.)

2. If people really knew how much exercise did FOR them and how much NOT exercising did to them, almost everyone who isn’t quite sick or disabled would do regular exercise.

About a quarter of all Americans get NO exercise at all. And another quarter gets too little to support good health and avoiding obesity.

Why not make it a requirement that to receive any federal funds or state funds from any state all K through 12 schools and all organizations that accredit K through 12 schools must have all of their able bodied students in some kind of exercise program?

(These programs can be individualized & managed by computer over the web. They don’t all have to be in group PE classes. This has already been done successfully in Minnesota.)

Why not have a federal tax on any company that doesn’t have a program to encourage its employees to exercise & to make it easier for their employees to do?

(People who get enough regular exercise either avoid getting fat or stop being fat or stay healthy even if they are still somewhat fat. And, they get far fewer of these avoidable diseases—including cancer--according to research I’ve seen reported.)

3. Despite having only about 20 percent of Americans who smoke or a bit more, if no one smoked, about half the cardiovascular diseases of all kinds & about half of the cancers would no longer happen.

(And, that doesn’t even count the deaths, burn injuries, property damage, & avoidable health care costs caused by fires that wouldn’t have happened it the people who caused them didn’t smoke.)

Why not make it a federal law that any kind of company from a corner gas station or convenience store to a cigarette company that sells cigarettes or other tobacco products in this country at all has to pay an extra ten percent penalty on top of its existing federal income tax bill?

What can you do as an individual?

A. You can ask any presidential candidate you can reach:

Do they support disease prevention efforts like these?

Do they know such efforts could cut the number of people getting these avoidable diseases by at least 80 percent?

What else will they do as president to make this reduction happen?

B. You can follow good health practices yourself.

1. You can stop ingesting the foods listed above as disease causing & eat the foods we listed in our last blog on Tuesday, 8-28-2007 as being low in glycemic load instead.

2. You can do regular exercise every week on at least three to five days including two sessions of strength training.

&

3. You can not smoke yourself & avoid second hand smoke.

C. You can teach your own children to follow good health practices.

David Ludwig has a superb book called, Ending the Food Fight, that can be very helpful for parents of kids who are old enough to make their own decisions but who are following bad health practices now.

D. Lastly, since most employers want to cut health care costs, if your company does things that sabotage good health practices, consider letting your employer know it would save them money to do things differently.

You may not be in a position to or work in a company where you can access your CEO or work in one that has a Wellness Director.

But, if you can, it’s well worth doing.

If you can’t, wish me luck in my efforts to do it for you.

One of my personal goals is to have nearly every company in the United States to promote good health practices and to stop helping to support harmful ones.