4 Steps to Take Now to Lower Your Breast Cancer Risk

It would be helpful if Dr. Susan Love looked about more.

Two years ago, the Susan G. Komen organization and the Silent Spring Institute published “Environmental Factors in Breast Cancer,” described as the most comprehensive review to date of scientific research on environmental factors and breast cancer risk. Researchers concluded that environmental pollutants contribute by “damaging DNA, promoting tumor growth, or increasing susceptibility by altering mammary gland development.” Because breast cancer is so common and the chemicals so widespread, they said, "if even a small percentage is due to preventable environmental factors, modifying these factors would spare thousands of women. Regulators have not paid much attention to potential mammary carcinogens.” The study concluded that cancer is an environmental disease.

Because this conclusion conflicts with so many of SGK's sponsors, the organization virtually buried the report. A public education campaign to prevent cancer was never launched.

SGK advocates annual mammograms. Thus they advocate an annual dose of radiation. As ABC News pointed out 9-1-09, up to 75 percent of biopsies performed as a result of mammogram findings reveal benign conditions. In the U.S. alone, it is estimated that the cumulative risk for a false positive result after 10 mammograms is nearly 50 percent.

SGK would do much better to advocate thermography - but that would run afoul of their sponsors as well. Thus they turn a blind eye to modern day thermography, the technology that can often detect cancers ten years earlier than mammography.

One of SGK's million dollar sponsors is M&M candies. Otto Warburg won the Nobel Prize in the 1930s by demonstrating that cancer cells use much more sugar than normal cells. In fact, PET scans are based on this principal. Because the cancer cells take up the sugar so much faster than normal cells, the radioactive agent is delivered with a sugar solution. And yet SGK promotes candy...

In the grocery store this week, I saw a large display of items with the pink ribbon. Among the items was a brand name air freshener. These products are full of VOCs regulated as either toxic or hazardous.

In 2008, Donna Jackson Nakazawa wrote "The Autoimmune Epidemic" and it was endorsed on the back jacket by leaders at John Hopkins and NIH. She documents that a woman is 8 more times likely to come down with an autoimmune disease than breast cancer. SGK collects a lot of money and has little to show for it. Let's shift our focus, shall we?

We know the majority of American women (and children) are deficient in vitamin D and that it is protective against cancer - it increases the self-destruction of mutated cells. One recent study showed that calcitrol (the active form of vitamin D) can induce a tumor-suppressing protein that inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells specifically.

Please look elsewhere than Dr. Love for answers.

Mary Budinger of AZ 1:47PM October 10, 2009