Cancer is a growing risk. Medical companies are building up big studies and creating loads of new medicine to cure cancer or medicine.

Which is more important: Life or the money?

We are living in times in which we live longer than before and we have an easier life than the generations before us. We have easy access to food and transportation, while still having less physical work than before.

This has a very bad effect on our health on long term, if we are not working towards our health

Cancer is getting more and more common, not only because we are living older and as cancer is more common with elderly people, but we are having less healthy lifestyle. As we are suffering from different effects of bad health, big pharma companies are making a big buck by selling us medicine to cover all the damage we are doing to ourselves.

The problem is though, how nobody is willing to bring up how we could prevent most cases of cancer by changing our habits and lifestyle.

Mortality of cancer

Even if we are getting new medicines and new kinds of treatments to fight cancer, at least with elderly and for those whose cancer has been found in a late stage have a very poor survival rate. Even with the young and fit, who's cancer is found in early stages, we have too many failures in treatment, as every single death is too much.

5 and 10 year survival rates are typically less than 90% even with luckiest ones, many cases have less than 50% survival rate!

Preventing cancer by doing better choices

We can prevent most types of cancer with good choices:

• Eating properly
• Getting enough exercise
• Avoiding smoking

Eating properly is a broad subject, but it can be narrowed down to most important factors, which have been most researched on:

• Avoid added sugar and processed high-starch foods
• Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables
• Keep the amount of calories in control

When comparing those who eat low amounts of vegetables and those who eat high amounts of vegetables, those with low intake of veggies can have DOUBLE risk of cancer, at least in most sites.

Getting higher amount of vegetables and fruits, including berries, could help in preventing a great deal of cases of cancer.

In the US consumption per capita of fruits and vegetables is half of what is recommended

And what's even worse, eating more than the recommended minimum is beneficial!

If even a fraction of money used on cancer treatment research would be put in spreading information about cancer prevention, we would improve our life quality and lifespan

However once again, it's only small bucks and not making any money. We all have to watch our others backs and share the knowledge we get.

Sources:

ALL IMAGES FROM PIXABAY!

"Cancer treatment and survivorship statistics, 2012"
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac.21149/full

"Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective"
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/4841/1/4841.pdf

"Fruit, vegetables, and cancer prevention: A review of the epidemiological evidence"
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01635589209514201

"Primary Prevention of Colorectal Cancer: Lifestyle, Nutrition, Exercise"
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-26980-0_13