The Mayo Clinic published 10 tips to reduce cancer risk in their most recent issue of Mayo Clinic Women’s HealthSource.

Here are the tips and below there’s more explanation:

1. Stop smoking
2. Limit alcohol intake – some alcohol is okay, too much is not
3. Follow recommended intake of fruits and vegetable (daily!)
4. Decrease the amount of fat in your daily diet
5. Lose weight if you’re too heavy, try to gain weight if you’re too thin
6. Move! Get active
7. Watch your skin (from the sun and don’t use tanning beds)
8. Don’t take chances when having sex. Protect yourself.
9. See your doctor regularly and take part in recommenced screening tests
10. If you have had cancer or are at particularly high risk, speak with your doctor about chemoprevention, which is taking medications to reduce the risk of new cancers

How and why do these steps help?

First of all, none of these are a surprise. All these recommendations, save for the last one, are recommended to help reduce the risk of developing many health problems, such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and more. So by following these tips, you’re helping your body more than you may realize.

Smoking: Did you know that smoking not only increases your risk of developing lung cancer, but also mouth (tongue, cheek, palate, throat, gum) cancer? Your risk of bladder cancer also climbs quite a bit. Smoking affects your whole body, not just your lungs. Also, the social act of smoking is often accompanied by other not-so-healthy lifestyle factors, like drinking alcohol, limiting exercise, and so on. By quitting the cigarettes, your risk drops every day you’re no longer a smoker.

Alcohol: Many of us like to enjoy a good glass of wine, a cold bottle of beer, a good scotch – and many of us limit ourselves to a moderate number of glasses. However, if you drink too much, more than the recommended amount for your sex, you increase your risk of mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, liver, colon and rectum cancers.

Fruits and vegetables: It’s not that difficult to add the recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables into your daily diet, but it does take planning. Unfortunately, with the hectic lifestyles many people lead these days, food planning often goes out the door. Five servings of fruits and vegetables daily are the minimal amount that you should be taking in. The thing is, servings are not huge, so this is not impossible. Two and a half cups of fruits or vegetables over the course of the day is maybe one apple, one tomato and a couple of stalks of celery. That’s not too much, is it?

Limiting fat: This one may be of the easiest things to do. Fat is an essential part of the human diet; we need it for our body to function properly. However, the type of fat and the amount you get is important.

This table, from the USDA, shows you how much fat you should have according to the number of calories you should have per day:

And this table, from the same source, gives you an idea of what foods have what fat:

Source: ARS Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 17.

Weight control: Being a healthy weight for your body build helps your body in many ways. It can even help reduce the pain of osteoarthritis for some people. Being too thin also has health issues, so keep that in mind if you are trying to lose weight.

Get active: Enough said!

Watch your skin: Tanning is not beautiful – any change in your skin color means there is damage going on. Don’t use tanning beds – they’re even worse than the sun. Plus, too much sun exposure doesn’t just contribute to skin cancer, it makes your skin old, dry and wrinkly well before its time.

Protect yourself from sexually transmitted infections: Sex with people without protection exposes you to hepatitis and HIV, both of which are very high risk for cancer, let alone the disease itself. Human papillomavirus (HPV) causes genital warts, some of which can cause cervical cancer, cancer of the cervix.

Screening tests: Screening tests for prostate cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, are all over the news, but don’t forget the other screenings that you can have done. You can have a colonoscopy to check for the beginnings of colon cancer and you can have your skin checked regularly to look for signs of skin cancer. If you are at high risk of a particular type of cancer, speak with your doctor about screening for that, as well. And, don’t forget your dentist. He or she is the one who can detect signs of oral cancer.

Chemoprevention: This is a relatively new area, most commonly known for women who take Tamoxifen to help reduce the risk of breast cancer coming back. You may want to speak with your doctor about this if you are at a high risk of cancer or you have already had it.

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Images: MorgueFile.com

Post from: Blisstree

10 Tips for Reducing Cancer Risk

Screening played a large role in colorectal cancer prevention and detection, which helped lower the numbers. Colonoscopies can detect polyps, overgrowth of tissue, that can become cancerous. If they’re detected and removed through colonoscopy, that’s one less chance of developing the cancer. And, if colorectal cancer does occur, if it’s detected early enough, colorectal cancer has 90% cure rate. But, this is really only for people over 50 years old as regular colon screenings aren’t usually suggested for younger people who aren’t considered to be high risk.

Now, however, according to an article published in the June 2009 issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention,

American Cancer Society researchers led by Rebecca L. Siegel, M.P.H., looked at trends in colorectal cancer incidence rates between 1992 and 2005 among young adults (ages 20 to 49) by sex, race/ethnicity, age, stage at diagnosis, and anatomic subsite. The study found that among individuals ages 20 to 49, incidence rates of colorectal cancer increased 1.5 percent per year in men and 1.6 percent per year in women from 1992 to 2005. Among non-Hispanic Whites, rates increased for both men and women in each 10-year age grouping (20-29, 30-39, and 40-49 years) and for every stage of diagnosis. They found the largest annual percent increase in colorectal cancer incidence was in the youngest age group (20-29 years), in whom incidence rates rose by 5.2% per year in men and 5.6% per year in women.

How could this be? It may very well have to be with the rising obesity and high fat diets, as well as the popularity of fast food in the country, both of which are risk factors for colorectal cancer.

People who eat a lot of fast food eat much more meat and drink a lot less milk than those people who don’t eat a lot of fast food. Processed meat and red meat are both known to contribute to colorectal cancer risk, while milk seems to provide some protection. If a child is raised with this type of lifestyle, this increases the likelihood of them developing cancer later on in life.

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Images: iStock.com, Newscom.com

Post from: Blisstree

Young Adult Colorectal Cancer Rates Rising

My mother was diagnosed with Colon Cancer several days after her 40th birthday. She had seen the signs of it on her actual birthday, May 9; the day before Mother’s Day and also the day before her father passed away. Can you imagine that? She had one child in middle school, one in second grade, and one in preschool and I remember her holding her composure so well. As children we had no idea she was internally struggling with the possibility of Cancer while also grieving her father’s death. And all in a weekend where we should have been celebrating her 40th birthday and her motherhood.

Later, after a scope we found out that she had large mushroom shaped tumors and that they were malignant. Her doctors opted for surgery since they had caught the cancer early enough and they scheduled surgery for June when we would be out of school and my father could manage things on the homefront. They sent all of us off to camp.

They took 18 inches from her colon but unfortunately they opened her up vertically and cut all of her stomach muscles, thus making her recovery very difficult. (If anyone remembers, this is also the time that Ronald Reagan had colon surgery and they opened him horizontally. My mother was very upset about this because he bounced right back.)

20 years later my great-aunt (my mothers aunt) passed away from colon cancer.

In 2002 my uncle passed away from Rhabdomyosarcoma, a very rare and typically a childhood cancer.

In 2006, just months after AJ came home, my father in law passed away from Esophageal Cancer.

All three of us children are scheduled to have colonoscopies beginning at age 30 and every 3 years thereafter. My older brother has had two so far and his doctors have already removed several benign polyps.

I had my first colonoscopy last month and it was very difficult for me. My history of endometriosis made the procedure very difficult for the doctor and a procedure that typically takes 20 minutes took over an hour. Additionally, I kept waking up (the doctor blamed my hair color) and I was able to feel the procedure and watch what was happening. Because they had to do a lot of maneuvering of my muscles and ligaments I was very sore for several days, something that is not typical.

They removed two very large benign polyps that had they not been removed would have become cancerous. If benign polyps are not removed from the large intestine, they can become malignant (cancerous) over time. Most of the cancers of the large intestine are believed to have developed from polyps.

Today I’m tagging all of my readers who have been touched my cancer. Make sure to link back here when you write…and for this one you only need to write about today, no need to do all 7 things unless you really want.

Post from: Blisstree

Seven Things, Day Five