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World Health Organization: 90% Of Cancers Caused By Unhealthy Lifestyle
The World Health Organization (WHO) has admitted that 90% of cancers are caused by bad lifestyle choices, especially unhealthy diets.
Their statement supports a study conducted by Yusuf Hannun and his team of cancer researchers at New York’s Stony Brook University who analyzed mathematical models, epidemiological data, and cancer cell mutation patterns to determine the contribution of environmental factors to cancer risk.
Anonhq.com reports: They found that mutations during cell division rarely resulted in cancer — even in tissues with relatively high rates of cell division— and in nearly all of the disease instances, some level of exposure to environmental factors, like carcinogens, was necessary to trigger cancer.
Ultraviolet radiation and smoking were found to be other avoidable risks.
The Cancer “Bad Luck” Hypothesis and Its Aftermath from The Linus Pauling Institute » The Linus Pauling Institute https://t.co/0EzxoawjnK
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Hannun and his team also looked at how cancers change according to where people live like when people move from a low-risk area to a high-risk area and take on the risk of the high risk area. Hannun told the BBC:
“External factors play a big role, and people cannot hide behind bad luck. They can’t smoke and say it’s bad luck if they have cancer. It is like a revolver, intrinsic risk is one bullet. And if playing Russian roulette, then maybe one in six will get cancer – that’s the intrinsic bad luck. Now, what a smoker does is add two or three more bullets to that revolver. And now, they pull the trigger. There is still an element of luck as not every smoker gets cancer, but they have stacked the odds against them. From a public health point of view, we want to remove as many bullets as possible from the chamber.”
Stressing that 10 to 30% of cancers were down to internal factors or ‘luck’ but external factors such as exposure to toxins and radiation increased the risk of developing cancer by 70 to 90%, the Stony Brook University researchers concluded that results “are important for strategizing cancer prevention, research, and public health”.
While Johns Hopkins mathematician Cristian Tomasetti, a study author for the January paper, argued that the Stony Brook study doesn’t account for certain characteristics of tumor growth, other specialists welcomed the new findings.
Great chart @UCSDCIM on risk factors for cancer. Lifestyle changes are more important than any others! @ACLifeMed pic.twitter.com/1Scg2IaKlI
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