Carcinogens and Cancer page 3

Obesity is a cancer magnet. If you are overweight, and especially if you are obese, you run a much higher risk of cancer than "normal weight" people. If your excess body fat is centered around your abdominal area, you run an even higher risk. Researchers have found that up to 20 percent of male cancer deaths and 14 percent of female cancer deaths can be attributed to obesity. Excessive sugar and other simple carbohydrates lead to obesity.

Exercise is known to reduce cancer risk, so if you are one of those people that does not get exercise on a regular basis, you have a higher risk. The exact reasons that exercise reduces risk are unknown, but the statistics clearly demonstrate this. Aerobic exercise seems to be better than anaerobic exercise. One of the reasons exercise helps prevent cancer is that it usually keeps you from becoming obese, although it is believed there are other reasons.

Age of first period

It has been found that the earlier a woman gets her first period, the greater her risk is for cancers of the breast and cervix. A woman that had her period before the age of twelve is at significantly higher risk because she will have had higher estrogen levels in her body for a longer period of time. Higher estrogen levels have been associated with increased cancer risk for women.

Use of oral contraceptives and Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)

As mentioned above, higher estrogen levels can lead to cancer in women. Taking estrogen in the form of contraceptives or HRT raises the estrogen levels circulating through women's bodies, and this raises cancer risk, especially of the reproductive organs. See Appendix III for other risk factors for women.

In the introduction of the book we say that cancer is an immunodeficiency disease, yet we've been telling you above that it has other causes. This is not a contradiction, since it is a weak, undernourished immune system that allows these carcinogens that we come into contact with every day, or other conditions that we experience, to cause cancer. An immune system that is fortified by the proper amounts of the right nutrients will usually impede a cell's DNA from mutating or will kill the cell if its DNA changes.