Judith Timson at the Globe and Mail penned an opinion piece about the latest breast cancer worry for women. A study has found that women who drink daily are more likely to suffer from breast cancer. Add this to the other risk elevators, some proven like taking HRT’s and others speculated like high fat diets, lack of exercise, not breast-feeding your babies or having those infants late in life or not at all. One of the things I found interesting is the tendency to downplay the cancer risks that are more out of our control than our heredity and that is the effect of pollution. I started thinking about this recently while reading the Devra Davis books, When Smoke Ran like Water and The Secret History of the War on Cancer. Both books are fascinating in that they detail studies and events dating back to the early part of the last century that clearly show that many of the chemicals and pollutant by-products that we absorb, drink, eat and breathe in daily have been known to cause cancer by the companies that make and use them and by the United States government. In the first book there are two chapters, one detailing Bella Azbug’s call to the war on breast cancer and the other discussing known risks to the male reproductive system that should lay to rest the idea that men and women can do much to prevent themselves from becoming cancer victims.
Bisphenol A, in the news lately due to Canada’s possible ban, is one of those supposedly benign modern wonders that has infiltrated daily existence at what we have come to discover is our own core levels. We should exercise, eat healthy and lean and just say no to alcohol, but how do we avoid plastics? How do we keep ourselves and our children safe from genetic damage that we inherited from our own parents?
If you have the time and inclination, I recommend checking out Ms. Davis’s books. Readable, fascinating and horrifying, they are eye-opening to facts about the effects of modern life on our bodies at levels not detectable until it’s too late and about how companies and the government have known all along yet chose to ignore the evidence in the name of profit and for the good of the economy. The economy, after all, is why the United States exists, right?
anniegirl1138 
And that is the bottom line. Money. Money is why gasoline was leaded until the 1980’s despite the fact that the manufacturer and the U.S. govt knew it was toxic and being absorbed by just about anything you can name – including people.
There isn’t much we can do but try to regulate out of existence things we can’t deny are harmful anymore and be vigilant about our health otherwise.
Devra Davis’s stuff is eye-opening and in an “OMfuckingG they did what?!” way.
I don’t know how any thinking person can look around and see how cancer has touched his/her life, and to such a degree, and not think it’s “mysterious” cause is not environmental. I don’t smoke, I try not to eat completely charred meat, and that constitutes my cancer-avoidance strategy. By that, I mean to say that I don’t think I can avoid it. As you say, carcinogens are in everything. It’s in the air we breathe and the food we eat and the carpet we walk on and the water we drink. I cannot live in fear of something I have no control over; that is not living. The best we can do is learn and try to stop it overall, for Katy and all the rest of the generations that follow us. But where there is money to be made, ethics become weak. And that really is the root of the problem.