Every Three Minutes, Another Canadian CHOOSES TO PICK a Fight With Cancer

Even Though Studies Find, Two-Thirds Of All Cancer Cases Are Largely Preventable and 80% of cancers are caused by behavioural factors and are fully under human control. 

We know that cancers are not caused by a virus, 

 as once thought.

"We know a third of cancers are caused by smoking,"

up to a third are caused by obesity

and lack of exercise."

We know that many cancers can be caused by bad 

dietary choices (comfort, fast, highly processed, snack 

foods and/or generally poor diet lacking in fibre).

We now also know that there are up to ten different 

types of  breast cancer. 

So as many as two-thirds of cancers are potentially preventable. The ones linked to obesity are cancers of the esophagus, colon, kidney, pancreas, uterus, and -- in post-menopausal women -- breast."
WASHINGTON: Half of all cancers could be prevented if people just adopted healthier behaviors, US scientists argued on Wednesday.

Smoking is blamed for a third of all US cancer cases and being overweight leads to another 20 per cent of the deadly burden that costs the United States some $226 billion per year in health care expenses and lost productivity.

For instance, up to three quarters of US lung cancer cases could be avoided if people did not smoke, said the article in the US journal Science Translational Medicine.

Science has shown that plenty of other cancers can also be prevented, either with vaccines to prevent human papillomavirus and hepatitis, which can cause cervical and liver cancers, or by protecting against sun exposure, which can cause skin cancer.

Society as a whole must recognise the need for these changes and take seriously an attempt to instill healthier habits, said the researchers.

Society as a whole must recognise the need for these changes and take seriously an attempt to instill healthier habits, said the researchers.

'It's time we made an investment in implementing what we know,' said lead author Graham Colditz, an epidemiologist at the Siteman Cancer Centre at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Exercising, eating right and refraining from smoking are key ways to prevent up to half of the deaths from cancer in North America expected this year, a toll that is second only to heart disease, according to the study.

But, a series of obstacles to change are well enshrined in all of North America; and especially in the United States, which will see an estimated 1,638,910 new cancer cases diagnosed this year.
Those hurdles include scepticism that cancer can be prevented and the habit of intervening too late in life to stop or prevent cancer that has already taken root.
Also, much of the research on cancer focuses on treatment instead of prevention, and tends to take a short-term view rather than a long-term approach.