Comment by Theodores
The thing is that we are led to believe that cancer just strikes at random, and anecdotally we know of someone that never smoked to get lung cancer that spread everywhere to strike them dead.
Yet we also know it is not quite like that. If you smoke, drink, make sculptures out of asbestos dust, eat processed meats, shoot depleted uranium rounds down at the range and work with radium in a gun sight factory then you probably have stacked the odds.
Now imagine you have an identical twin, maybe not cojoined, but living with the exact same stacked odds. However, you eat a strict diet of highly processed foods and only play tiddlywinks for physical activity. Meanwhile, your twin rides eats a strict diet that is mostly whole food, plant based and gets a lot of physical activity due to a passion for dancing.
One of you is going to be likely to suffer a cardiovascular event before the other and that same person is going to run the risk of catching cancer first.
Now we all know that eating processed foods, maybe with the exception of processed meat, isn't going to 'give you cancer' and neither is playing tiddlywinks. Equally, a few extra antioxidants and a bit of fibre from eating a few more carrots isn't going to spare you from cancer, neither is dancing for that matter. Nonetheless, cardiovascular and gut health is important for reducing cancer risks.
I say this with anecdotal evidence provided by a car dependent relative that chose not to eat a fibre rich diet and now has cancers that I would not wish on anyone, with his digestive tract having to be trimmed from the far end due to cancer.
Because he took the medical route with meaty pies and moderate alcohol levels, his life might only be cut short by three years. However, by then, there will be two decades of extreme medical interventions and a smorgasbord of medications that have to be taken daily. Lifespan is not as important as healthspan and there is much we can do through diet and physical activity to maximise healthspan.
The trouble with my relative is that advice to go absolutely teetotal, stay off the processed meats and to eat fibre (as in vegetables) was not a message that was well received. This advice is in line with WHO recommendations but this can be simply ignored once lifestyle choices have been decided on.
This is getting scarily close to “most people who get cancer only have themselves to blame” which can be a comforting thought if you’re putting in a lot of effort to reduce your own risk of cancer but at the end of the day it’s not true and kind of a shitty thing to say when we’re commemorating someone who fell victim to this horrible disease.
Reduce the odds it’ll get you too as much as you want, you’re wise to do so, but keep in mind it can still get you too and it is never somebody’s own fault.
More importantly, you can (almost) never say that if a cancer patient had done this and that or not done such and so they wouldn’t have gotten sick. You just can’t know and even if you did it’d still be a shit thing to say.