Cancers and Carcinogens
The World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded that at least 80% of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences, specifically human-produced carcinogens¹.
Cancer kills one in five Americans.
More than a thousand die everyday in the U.S. from cancer.
In just the past 50 years, cancer has gone from ninth to second place in claiming lives of American people. Alarmingly, most of the 75,000 to 80,000 synthetic chemical compounds in common industrial use came into existence during that same period. Researches have estimated that between five and ten percent of them are probably carcinogenic. Approximately 1,000 new chemicals are being added to that number each year².
Cancer has distinct and identifiable causes, and these are mainly exposures to chemical or physical agents in the environment."³
Between 1950 and 1991 the incidence of cancer (all types combined) increased 49.3%.4
The U.S. National Cancer Institute takes the position that there is no level of exposure to a carcinogen that is small enough to be safe.
High-Risk Cancer Foods To Decrease in Diet5
Bacon, luncheon meats, frankfurters, knockwurst, and smoked fish: contains nitrite, an additive that can interact with natural chemicals in our foods and bodies to form nitrosamines, potent cancer-causing substances.
Butter, margarine, mayonnaise, oils, liver and high-fat meat, tobacco, and alcohol. Women who have even one drink a day increase their risk of colon and breast cancer, because alcohol limits the absorption of folic acid.
Coffee is implicated in bladder and pancreatic cancers.
Food additives: highly suspect carcinogens; particularly BHA, BHT, Food Dyes, Red No. 3, Blue No. 2, Green No. 3, and Citrus Red No. 2; propyl gallate and sodium nitrite.
¹J. Brady, "The Goose and the Golden Egg," One in Three: Women with Cancer Confront an Epidemic, ed. J. Brady (San Francisco and Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1991).
²J.H. Cushman, Jr., "U.S. Reshaping Cancer Strategy As Incidence in Children Rises," New York Times, September 29, 1997, p. A13.
³A. Lorde. The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980) 77. p. 73.
4S.Steingraber. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Inc. 1997) 357+vi. p. 40.
5Earl Mindell, New Vitamin Bible, 2004