70-90% of Cancers Caused by Lifestyle

Quote of the Month:

A new study in the Journal ‘Nature’ has suggested that only 10-30% of cancers are a result of ‘bad luck’ and that 70-90% of cancers are contributed to by lifestyle and avoidable factors.

Professor Kevin McConway from the Open University said, “the study provides pretty convincing evidence that external factors play a major role in many cancers, including the most common.”

“This study demonstrates again that we have to look well beyond pure chance and luck to understand and protect against cancers.”

“There is a statistical chance all of the time that we can get cancer but we increase that chance if we do certain things, such as smoking, not eating fruit and vegetables, getting too fat, not doing enough exercise and so on. About 70-80% of cancers are caused by lifestyle, and of course the longer we live … the more chance that we get cancer. This is another reason why cancer is going up in Britain and in all western countries.”

“It is estimated that a third of people would not get cancer if we all lived a perfect lifestyle.”

“There are some inherited cancers; you have absolutely no control over the genes that have been passed to you by your mother and father, but say you come from a family with a high incidence of breast cancer, it is very clear that what you need to do is to look at lifestyle and diet even more importantly,” says Prof McConway.

Dr Emma Smith, from Cancer Research UK, said, “While healthy habits like not smoking, keeping a healthy weight, eating a healthy diet and cutting back on alcohol are not a guarantee against cancer, they do dramatically reduce the risk of developing the disease.”

From a chiropractic point of view this makes perfect sense. It is the body that heals the body, so the immune system and cellular repair systems are required to work well to prevent cancer.

Is Your Body Too Stressed?

If your body’s systems are too stressed (toxins) or undersupplied (lack of nutrients) then the body will work less well, be less adaptable to challenges and more likely to allow cancer to slip past the immune net and take hold.

Also the nervous system is what detects and helps us adapt to external factors as well as those such as diet. Too much stress, psychological as well as physical, will result in our nervous systems ‘running in the red’ and this results in our bodies operating in ‘survive’ mode and not ‘thrive’ mode.

Whilst this study only takes cancer into account, we know that lifestyle plays an enormous role in heart disease and diabetes — and increasingly there is evidence that diseases such as dementia have a firm correlation to lifestyle.