Is Getting Cancer Under Your Control or Luck?

As I work on finishing my book, I'm actively researching this question for one of the chapters.  The world seems to be heavily weighted toward those who think it's luck.  I'm probably in the minority, then, but as I complete this chapter that makes my case, I wanted to blog about it today.  There is a lot of science for my position that there are specific things to prevent cancer.  By implication, I think they also have a place in treatment.  I'm not sure anyone is doing studies on such treatment, but I'd sure like to get the word out there more and see some cancer patients trying these strategies...well, that's another subject.

Today, I just want to give you two small arguments for cancer being entirely a lifestyle thing, not luck.  These from a historical perspective.

In the development of the early and later hominid species, only healthy individuals (without cancer, of course) produced children and lived to raise them and contribute to the social groups that insured that survival.  Granted, most cancers in our own time are problems for older people--but certainly not all. Today in modern humans, one of every four deaths in the US in 2014 was by cancer.  If that were the case in a developing species, it could never succeed as a viable species, much less spread to populate the entire globe.   I (as have others) postulate that the prevalence of cancer was probably absent or nearly absent in early humans.  Clearly something else is going on, now.

So let's look at a primitive culture that extended into the modern era.  The Inuit.  They were untouched by modern civilization well into the 20th century.  Here's some data about this group of hunter/gatherers from J.A. Urquhart, a physician who practiced medicine in Northern Canada in the early 1900′s.

       “First, as regards cancer, I have not in my seven years’ experience in the north seen a single case of malignancy in either Eskimo or Indian. It has been suggested to me that perhaps I have not met enough of the older, cancer-age people, or that perhaps the natives do not come to the hospitals as readily as in other parts of Canada. To this I may reply that my practice takes in amongst the tribes very intimately, and I frequently have to live in their campments while making my patrols among them. I therefore meet all types and ages. As for the hospitals, the natives appreciate them to the utmost and use them freely. It is for someone else to explain this absence of cancer amongst these people."

Nor were the Inuit the only primitive peoples studied.  Mind you, these are groups still eating their native diet, not "civilized diets".

Dr. F. P. Fouché, who was a surgeon stationed in Africa, was quoted in the British Medical Journal in 1923:

“For six and a half years I was District Surgeon in the Orange Free State. The district in which I practised had a native population of 14,000, the large majority of the Basuto race. During the whole of that period I never saw a single case of gastric or duodenal ulcer, colitis, appendicitis, or cancer in any form, in a native, although these diseases were frequently seen amongst the white or European population."

There is plenty of documentation how these impeccable health conditions changed as the native populations adopted Westernized diets.  A dentist named Price, traveled the world and extensively documented changes in native populations as they changed from native foods to 'civilized" foods.  As a dentist, he was most interested in teeth and facial structure, but documented much more.  The book is "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price, and was first published in 1939.  Worth the price on Amazon if just for the photos (hundreds).

Cancer does not jump out and get us.  It is not luck but nutrition.  When you give the body what it needs and do NOT give it what is toxic, it is designed to last to the far end without disease.  Join me for this journey of discovery!