Smokers & Drinkers and Cancer
Section III: Recommendations
Chapter 10 – General Recommendations
Remember that today you probably have a one in two chance of developing cancer over your lifetime if you are a man and a one in three chance if you are a woman. If you were told that you had a 50 percent chance of crossing the street and making it across, would you do it? Probably not, but you don't have much of a choice of whether to keep on living, so most people just keep going and hope for the best. Well, you can do a lot more than just hope.
As we mention in the introduction of the book, you have two choices in preventing cancer. One is to avoid as many carcinogenic substances as you can, and the other is to get enough of the right nutrients to protect yourself. You cannot avoid all carcinogens because they are all around us. So the only real alternative to preventing cancer is getting the right nutrients to protect you from all the cancer-causing agents that you surely come into contact with every day. There are, however, two major carcinogens you can avoid, namely smoking and alcohol, and there is one more that you can help reduce in our environment.
Smoking has been proven to cause lung cancer. What most people don't know is that it has also been linked to other types of cancer, including stomach, breast, pancreatic, esophageal and mouth cancers. So, if you smoke, even a little, STOP SMOKING. By smoking you are contributing to the escalating rate of cancer incidence, and you will probably become one of the statistics that others will be reading about in the future. However, if you insist on smoking, the least you can do is follow all the other recommendations that we lay out in this book. You can smoke and not develop cancer, but you need to make sure you get most of the nutrients that we discussed in the previous section. What's more, you need even larger doses of many of these preventers than the average person.
Alcohol consumption, especially when done in excess, has also been linked to several forms of cancer. You should try to limit your alcohol intake to an average of one glass per day and preferably make it red wine.
In the previous section we outlined the different chemicals, substances and foods that have been found to be powerful cancer inhibitors. In this section we tell you how to put them into practice, namely how to incorporate them into your diet in different ways. Therapeutic quantities of some of them can be obtained by eating certain foods in certain quantities. However, most should be taken to some degree in supplement form to ensure you get the amounts required to really be protected.
Although there are many supplements in tablet, capsule, liquid, suspension, and powder form available, we believe that in some cases the cancer preventers alone might not be enough. What we mean by this is that it very well could be that they need other substances found in the foods that they come from to provide the maximum benefit. For this reason, besides taking supplements, we highly recommend that you eat the whole foods that the preventers come from to make sure that you are getting the complementary nutrients that probably boost the effectiveness of the active compounds.
Some supplements can be toxic when taken in doses that are much higher than those we recommend or when people have certain conditions. Whereas we mention the recommended levels that the average person should take, people should consult with their doctor before using some of the supplements. For example, your doctor might know that you have a stomach condition that prevents you from having acidic foods, so he or she would tell you not to drink orange juice.
There are few guarantees in life, and we can't guarantee that following the recommendations in this book will absolutely prevent you from developing cancer. However, what we can tell you is that following our recommendations, which are based on empirical evidence that has been gathered by scientists all over the world for over a century, will dramatically reduce your chances of developing cancer.