Baby Boomers enter their cancer years
Baby Boomers enter their cancer years
Elizabeth Nickson
National Post
Urban myths run hot and irrational. There's practically not a soul I know, (and I have been guilty myself), who does not think organic produce is safer than food sprayed with pesticides, and that organic beef, chicken and wild fish is better for you, even if it's twice or three times the price. And you really should eat only soy protein, brown rice and vegetables. Water must be drunk from bottles, coffee should be shade-grown and herbicide-free, because the water and earth are increasingly poisoned and you must take precautions. Detoxification programs, yoga, supplements and clean food are the only ways to escape getting cancer. And the air! Every friend I have envies my "clean air" because where they live, they and their children are slowly being poisoned and there's just no convincing them otherwise. It is a collective hysteria that bubbles beneath the surface, breaking into flat-out panic when threats such as SARS, BSE, West Nile -- which are real, but statistically negligible -- occur.
Giveaway magazines and newspapers in every city prey upon this fear. Their advertising and text promote products that claim (with little proof) to prevent cellular change and death (for which read cancer). And the vast and profitable nutritional supplement business, as useful as it no doubt is, utterly depends upon the collective belief among its tens of millions of repeat customers that our food is de-natured, that GMOs are allergenic, and the modern world is killing us softly. As boomers enter a vibrant and largely prosperous middle age, (in the First World at least), cancer prevention is the surreptitious hex we all make as we reach for the bottle of high-potency vitamins for athletes (because we're all athletes), or ginseng enhanced yogurt to increase the bacteria in our intestinal tract to kill the cancer cells proliferating like rabbits inside our unpredictable bodies.
Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Facts don't quite bear out that all this expensive avoidance does a thing. The Fraser Institute published a pamphlet in February titled the "Misconceptions About the Causes of Cancer." In about 100 pages, the Institute's researchers gathered together data from various and many studies done by many and various institutions, that measure the impact of what the food business does to increase and protect its various crops, and how that plays out in the human body. They are not making it up, nor has the information hitherto been collected in such elegant and succinct fashion.
The most important fact is that virtually no one dies of cancer caused by pesticides. Two per cent of cancer patients die from pollution, but that pollution is mainly of water, some air, but even then our air is much cleaner than decades (or centuries) past, as is the water. The worst case study found that between 3,000-6,000 deaths in the United States each year are caused by pesticides, a statistically insignificant number, those mostly among farmers who are heavily exposed. Furthermore, pesticide use is declining, since alternatives are becoming more cost-effective. Despite this, most women believe that breast cancer is spiraling out of control and that it is because we are paying the dues of our chemically obsessed society. Completely untrue. The organic, shade-grown coffee we consume is 50% more carcinogenic than DDT before it was banned because of natural substances found within the plant. Equally 1.7 beers a day is 2,100 times more risky than the most dangerous pesticide. In fact, despite the belief of most women, estrogen-like substances have been found in follow-up study after follow-up study, to have no synergistic effect. Breast cancer deaths dropped during the '90s because of early detection and drugs like Tamoxifen. The slight uptick in incidence, researchers are now convinced, is caused by women delaying having children, not having children, and vastly increased obesity. But cancer in general? Take out smokers and it drops 27%. If we all ate more fruit and veg, researchers predict an additional drop of 35%.
So what about that very last 38%? And in fact, what about those smokers who do not get cancer or those fast-food addicts who slip out of the noose to die of creaky old age? Out of the West Coast, another book, called When the Body Says No, hit the stores this spring, and can barely be kept on the shelves. Written by Vancouver physician/writer Gabor Mate and published by Random House, it is a collection of research around the topic of the emotional causes of cancer, ALS, Alzheimer's and auto-immune illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, sclerodoma and Epstein-Barre. Canadians could be said to have invented stress (in Montreal with Hans Selye) and Mate pushes the boat out further. Inability to express or acknowledge your own emotions and weakness, creates internal conflicts that literally trigger the desire not to fight, or, in other words, the immune system to collapse. This is called psychoneuroimmunology, or PNI and is increasingly respected in the more out-there sections of the medical community. Treasuring yourself, treating yourself well, setting good boundaries, in fact the emotional life boomers have created for themselves, with its emphasis on feeling good, and doing due diligence on your internal audits, Mate claims, with as much elegant bolstering of argument as the economists of the Fraser Institute, will keep you alive, and healthy long into your 90's.
Organic produce and supplements may be useful, therefore, for making yourself feel as treasured and loved as that precious person you, I'm certain, are. Not to mention keeping all those charming organic boutique farmers in business, and the idea of happy dreaming Canadian fields full of butterflies and un-bioengineered wheat. The market wins again.
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06-07-2003, 01:55 PM
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