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Breast cancer – shall we scare women or empower them?

Sometimes a thing just sticks in your head.

The organic food and pesticides story, which we featured in our last newsletter, threw up many questions for me – only some of which got articulated on the day.

Given Cancer Research UK’s (CRUK) dismissal of the pesticide/cancer link, one of these questions was: what is the purpose of a cancer charity?

We’ve all seen the commercials – the pleading, the soppy, the angry and the just plain manipulative ads asking for money to so they can help beat cancer. Some may have bought ribbons or keychains or lapel buttons. These things have raised awareness – of a sort – and they have certainly raised money, but sadly they have not beaten cancer.

In part, I believe it is because cancer charities continue to focus so singularly on drug treatments that may or may not prolong life but which, decades of evidence have shown have not helped us “beat cancer sooner”, to borrow a slogan from CRUK.

They also place unnatural faith in tech, such as mammographies which a recent 25-year-long study has shown do not reduce the risk of death from breast cancer.

The message, always, is that science will save us – but the meta-message is: only if it is the particular science that cancer charities sanction.

I didn’t have the space to address these things but Georgina Downs did. In a searing piece in the Ecologist the long-time campaigner against pesticides, highlighted some reasons why cancer charities fail at their own jobs.

One is the sheer bureaucracy and size of them. By her calculations, since 2007, the amount that CRUK alone has spent just employing people is well in excess of £750 million.

She also asked why CRUK was so dismissive of the link between pesticides and cancer. That the current chairman is also the founder and one time CEO of Syngenta, manufacturers of bee-killing neonics, and CropLife International, which promotes agricultural technologies such as pesticides and plant biotechnology – came as a surprise even to me.

It is eternally frustrating to me that environmental causes of cancer are given such short shrift and that prevention, particularly vitamins and supplements, seems to be considered little more than a distraction.

On the prevention front, women are more likely to be told that supplements of vitamins and antioxidants will more likely kill them than help them.

Such claims are patently ridiculous, especially in the face of evidence that the risk of dying from invasive breast cancer is 30% lower among multivitamin/mineral users compared with nonusers.

Another recent study found that women with breast cancer are twice as likely to survive the disease if they have high levels of vitamin D in their blood.  Yet another found that tiny levels of a vitamin A derivative, retinoic acid, can help turn pre-cancer cells back into normal healthy breast cells. Other evidence suggests that women with high blood levels of antioxidants are at reduced risk of developing breast cancer.

Just this week a new study suggested that women with breast cancer may live longer if they increase their intake of vitamin C by the equivalent of 1 orange a day. Another suggested that the antioxidant polyphenols in peach extract – equivalent to 2 peaches a day – could stop breast cancer from spreading.

We’ve seen studies in the last year or so suggesting that eating more antioxidant-rich tomatoes could help lower breast cancer rates better than soya. Another study found that eating more flaxseed, as part of a healthy diet, could also help reduce the risk of breast cancer. Yet another has shown that healthy levels of vegetable protein and fat intakes, including peanut butter and nuts, during pre-adolescence could help reduce the risk for benign breast disease – a risk for breast cancer – by up to 68%.

The scientists who conduct these studies are not outsiders. They are not ‘less’ in some way because they are studying vitamins instead of drugs. They are, however, subject to huge bias amongst certain scientists, the media and other ‘establishment’ figures which often prevents rational evaluation of supplements.

This research, it could be argued, is much more empowering to women than the drug trials which inevitably show a complicated risk/benefit ratio for conventional cancer drugs and which can often make women feel so helpless in the face of a challenging disease.

The best way to ‘beat’ cancer is to stop it developing in the first place. Come on cancer charities, what’s so wrong with empowering women with information that they can use to protect themselves?

Pat Thomas, Editor