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?