Approximately fifty percent of cancer deaths could have been prevented by making healthy lifestyle changes and it is possible that the percentage could be even higher. According to David L. Katz, MD, founding director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, as much as eighty percent of chronic diseases and premature deaths could have been prevented by healthy living. A 2016 study by Harvard researchers who received data from more than 135,000 people who have been followed for over forty years, found that not smoking or chewing tobacco, drinking in moderation, maintaining a healthy weight, avoiding fast or unhealthy food, exercising regularly, adapting stress control techniques, and improving quality of sleep could prevent forty-one percent of cancer cases and fifty-nine percent of cancer deaths in women and two-thirds of cases and deaths in men.
An additional perspective is presented by Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. He wisely stated that “Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We do not know why… but some people who share the same cancer, same age, class, health, and socioeconomic status, in general, those with positive attitudes, with a strong will and purpose for living, a commitment to struggle, with an active response to aiding their own treatment and not just a passive acceptance of anything the doctors say, tend to live longer.”
Renzo J. Bustamante-Wendorff, B.S., M.S.
Research & Development
References: Cohen, Lorenzo, PhD, Anticancer Living, 2019.
