Today, three decades later, the cancer conundrum still resists easy solutions; cancer continues to plague an aging America. While we now know a great deal about lowering your risk of cancer, victory against cancer continues to elude us.

Aging and Cancer
The aging of America is a key reason why cancer rates continue to persist at high levels. An older America that lives in a world saturated with chemicals and stress gets more cancer.

Researchers have found good cause to believe that as we age the genes which regulate our cells are subject to significant changes that make them more liable to give birth to cancerous growths.

In an investigation of cellular reproduction, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle found that middle-aged cells are subject to more than 200 times the cancer-prone, destructive changes than younger cells (Science 9/26/03).
These researchers theorize that these molecular changes play a primary role in causing four out of five cancers to occur in people over the age of 55.

Environment and Cancer
America's love affair with the automobile also fosters many new cases of cancer.

If you want to know the extent of the cancer risk in your community linked to vehicular air pollution, count the cars and trucks that traverse your local streets, say researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland.

According to a study these scientists recently performed at a tollbooth at Baltimore's Harbor Tunnel, the amount of carcinogens you inhale goes up and down with the traffic.

The lowest levels of automobile-related airborne carcinogens occur in the middle of the night, when streets are deserted. The most destructive pollutants fill the air at rush hour (Jrnl of the Air & Waste Management Assoc 6/03).
" Mobile source emissions [from cars and trucks] present a unique public health threat," warns Timothy Buckley, PhD, professor of environmental health sciences at Hopkins.

Dr. Buckley and his colleagues measured the air levels of pollutants given off by vehicular traffic that included corrosive substances called particle-bound polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), benzene and butadiene. Not surprisingly, the larger the vehicle that goes past you, the more intense the pollution you can expect to experience. The Hopkins study found that buses, tractor-trailers and motor homes give off about nine times more benzene, 32 times more butadiene and 60 times more PAHs than smaller cars.
The source of these carcinogens: the diesel engines that power most oversized vehicles.

Consequently, people who live in traffic-jammed cities and suburbs are almost certainly at increased risk of cancer. " In Baltimore's urban communities as with many other US cities, many people live in close proximity to busy streets," points out Dr. Buckley. For future reductions in cancer risk, he and his fellow researchers believe that exposure to traffic pollution should be used "for evaluating exposure, risk and control strategies in these urban environments."

Promising Future
In lowering the risk of cancer, researchers have also uncovered great promise in the use of supplementary antioxidants like vitamins C and E as well as arabinogalactan 6. Arabinogalactan is a polysaccharide (long chained molecule) taken from the larch tree. Studies show it may boost immune response and thereby enhance the immunological resistance to cancer (Biochem Biophy Res Commun 1991;174:107-114).

Plus, new research increasingly points to ways in which dietary and supplementary antioxidants support the body's anti-cancer efforts. In a study of almost thirty thousand Finnish men (the Alpha-Tocopherol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Study), scientists found that those who consumed more vitamin E lowered their chances of prostate cancer by up to fifty-three percent (Amer Assoc Cancer Res[AACR], Annual Meeting, 3/27/04, abstract 1096). Meanwhile, a study in Texas found that a form of vitamin E called alpha tocopherol can also lower the chances of bladder cancer (AACR, abstrat 3921). The best food sources of this kind of vitamin E include almonds, spinach, mustard greens, green and red peppers and sunflower seeds.

Weight Increase Increases Cancer Risk
Many factors in the modern environment contribute to continually rising cancer rates. Aside from an aging population and a growing number of pollutants from cars, trucks and buses, scientists who study our lifestyle habits believe that the significant increase in people who are overweight and obese has also boosted the US cancer risk.

When you gain weight and add more fat cells to your body, your body's production of cells linked to inflammation may also increase. The chemicals secreted by those cells (and which then circulate throughout your body) are believed to inflame your chances of cancer; fat cells produce proteins called cytokines that are linked to this inflammatory process.

A 16-year study that carefully analyzed the medical records of about 900,000 Americans found that overweight people suffered and died more often from a wide variety of cancers, including colon cancer and cancers of the liver, rectum, gallbladder, pancreas, kidney and esophagus, as well as multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NEJM 4/23/04).

According to this study, the more you weigh, the more you risk cancer. The researchers discovered that the heaviest men died 52% more often of cancer. The heaviest women suffered an even greater toll. They succumbed to a startling 62% increase in their risk of dying from cancer. Obesity seems to boost the chances that certain organs will turn cancerous. Men who are extremely overweight run their greatest risk of dying from stomach or prostate cancer. On the other hand, overweight women run the most deadly risk of cancers of the uterus, cervix, ovary and breast.

World Problem
During the global epidemic of obesity, researchers are finding that the United States is not the only part of the world which is proving that growing waistlines may lead to a growing cancer problem. While about half of American citizens are now overweight, the rest of the world is also gaining weight quickly (though not as quickly as the US has).

The World Health Organization (WHO) has discovered that today about a billion people worldwide are overweight, while 300 million are overweight enough to be labeled obese. Soon, scientists reason from current trends, the US may no longer be the obesity champ.

Kids Gaining Weight
For instance, the United States has experienced a troubling increase in the rate of obesity among teens. It now tops one out of ten and continues to climb. But in a place like Thailand, which traditionally has not had a weight problem, the rate of obesity in five- to twelve-year-olds has jumped from about 12% to about 16% in the last two years.

As a result, the worldwide obesity epidemic may lead to an even more troubling cancer epidemic. For example, Swedish research published in Cancer Causes and Control (1/01) found that Swedes who are seriously overweight now face a significantly greater cancer risk.

This study, which involved almost 30,000 obese Swedes over a 30-year period, found that those who weighed the most were 33% more likely to suffer cancer than the rest of the country's population. In that country, being overweight was found to lift your chances most often of endometrial cancer and cancers of the brain, ovary, bladder, pancreas, cervix, gallbladder and colon.

Scientists now believe that most cancer risk can be attributed to lifestyle. Dennis Savaiano, PhD, dean of the School of Consumer and Family Sciences at Purdue, notes that, "...one-third of cancers...are related to smoking, one-third to poor diet and lack of exercise and one-third to genetic or other factors."

So if you lose weight, don't smoke, exercise, and eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, you can count yourself among the foot soldiers in the war against cancer. Neglect them, and you may end up a casualty.