Natural Health and Herbal Remedies Blog

•    Hot drinks and food are linked to cancers of the gullet. The preventive answer in this case is obvious.

•    Early first childbirth and having many children reduces the incidence of breast cancer. Whether breastfeeding does so is still open to debate, even after numerous worldwide studies. Cancer of the ovary is more common in women who have had few children. This could be a cause that continues to become more common worldwide as family size shrinks almost everywhere.

In contrast to cancers of the breasts and ovary, the figures for cancer of the cervix are higher amongst women who have had more children. This effect is almost certainly due to early, promiscuous sexual activity. No one knows what the connection is but smegma and/or sperms might be capable of being carcinogenic, as might herpes virus type 2. Genital cleanliness and barrier methods of contraception (especially the sheath) will help reduce this cancer, as will a smaller number of sexual partners. There is now a rather virulent ‘epidemic’ of cervical cancer in younger women-and this is occurring against a background of general improvement in the cervical cancer picture overall. Even a woman who has never had intercourse before can ‘catch’ cervical cancer from her promiscuous partner. Japanese women, traditionally virgins until marriage, have a high incidence of cervical cancer, perhaps as a result of their males having had premarital sexual experience with prostitutes. If a man’s first wife dies of cervical cancer his second wife stands a greater chance of dying from it. These facts tend to suggest an infective cause. Prevention involves minimal penis-in-vagina sexual activity before the age of 20 and the use of barrier methods of contraception. Clearly neither of these is very realistic for most people so we can expect to see a rise in the number of women suffering from this particular cancer.

•     Air pollution is probably not a major contributor to cancers but the prevention of cancer obviously must include the provision of clean air. Drinking water too can have carcinogens in it, according to recent studies.

•     Hormones and certain other medications can cause cancer. The contraceptive Pill has now been positively incriminated in cervical cancer (women who have been on the Pill for five years or more have double the risk of getting the disease, according to a massive World Health Organization study), and there are debates over its role in breast cancer. Oestrogens given ante-natally can produce cancers of the vagina and the uterus in the female children of such women. Oestrogens given to relieve menopausal symptoms increase the risk of endometrial cancer about four to eight times. Undoubtedly other drugs will be found to be carcinogenic as our knowledge increases. The answer must be to take only drugs that are absolutely necessary and to keep dosages to the minimum levels.

•    Certain viruses seem to cause cancer and the avoidance of those with the viruses could be a sensible preventive measure. Herpes simplex type 2 virus is now thought to play a part in the production of cervical cancer-we saw above how to reduce the chances of contracting this virus. A herpes-type virus, the Epstein-Barr virus, is suspected of being the cause of a tumour called Burkitt’s lymphoma, a cancer which occurs among children in certain areas of Africa. There are suggestions that the same virus is the cause of nasopharyngeal cancer and Hodgkin’s disease.

•    Too little dietary fibre has been proposed as a cause of cancer of the large bowel and rectum. The hypothesis is that carcinogens, whether produced by the body or occurring in food itself, are diluted by the bulky stools that a high-fibre diet produces, so reducing their effect. Because such a diet also makes food residues pass quicker through the bowel the hypothesis is that any carcinogens that are present are rushed through the bowel so quickly they do not have time to exert their carcinogenic effect. There is a considerable debate as to how feasible such a hypothesis is and many other theories exist as to how large-bowel cancers come about. None of this detracts from the provable value of a high-fibre diet for other conditions.

•    Zinc deficiencies have been found in prostatic cancer patients, and recent work at the Sloane Kettering Cancer Center in New York concluded that ‘zinc is intimately involved in immune function’. Selenium, a trace metal, has been found in many studies to reduce the likelihood of cancers. Studies in one part of the US compared cancer death rates in high- and low-selenium soil areas and found high selenium levels to be protective. To get plenty of selenium you need to eat whole-grain cereals, organ meats and seafood. One study of seventeen countries found that cancer death rates were very clearly linked to selenium lack.

The most reliable way of taking selenium is to take a daily dose of high-selenium yeast. This is probably best because so many dietary sources are unreliable in their selenium content and any way may have been grown in a selenium-poor soil.

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