Skip to main content

Prevention of cancer. Is it possible?

Is it possible to prevent cancer by making life style changes? This question just crossed my mind and I immediatedly Googled. The answer was a very clear yes. That is, it is possible to decrease the risk of cancer in people who are at high risk for cancer. It is also possible to reduce the complications and prolong life after cancer treatment. Best of all, many of the required life style changes are simple and doable. At a quick glance, these are most noted life style changes:

- Healthy diet: at least five portions of fruits and vegetables per day (one portion = 80 grams). High fiber.  Whole grains. Less red meat. Less saturated fats. Less salt and sugar. Less processed food.
- Active life style. Exercise.
- Keep good weight. Obesity is a risk factor.
- Avoid smoking. Avoid tobacco.
- Be mindful of your alcohol intake i.e. keep it low or avoid.
- Take special measures to reduce exposure to UV radiation.
- Reduce exposure to pesticides and environmental pollutants.

Fact: 40% of cancer incidences are preventable. More than 50% of cancer-related deaths can be prevented. These are facts backed by abundant literature evidence.

In the context of dietary interventions for preventing or potentially even treating cancer, Dr. William Li gave an impressive TED talk about his work on anti-angiogenesis therapy for cancer and foods that can starve angiogenesis (http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li?language=en).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Set up for analysing genome-scale metabolic models on ubuntu

I wanted to start analysing genome-scale metabolic models. I am interested in metabolic modelling to study human diseases. At least as of now, my idea is to use R for the analysis. This post describes all the technical set-up that I am doing on my ubuntu 10.04 LTS machine in order to eventually start working with these models. As I am interested in human metabolic network, my model of interest is the reconstructed human metabolic model, recon 2. I googled to see where I can download it from. It has a web site http://humanmetabolism.org/. But the model is available for download from the supplementary material of this paper . There was a zip file that contained many files which I interpret as the generic human model and cell specific models for a variety of cell types. I first wanted to see the contents of these files with my eyes. I know that I could open these files with any text editor, but I also knew that there is something called SBML editor which is specifically designed fo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Chetta idea - 1

Alternative title: proposal for a health care project. Diseases such as hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, obesity are becoming so common nowadays. It is hard to find people with no diseases. The lifestyle is certainly to be blamed. But what is the use if we just shut our mouth after finding the right thing to blame? Or how would I be different if I leave it there. So, here is a proposal for an automatic health-care system. Well, I know there maybe some treatments, but the idea here is to prevent the diseases. But, prevention really demands prediction of the disease occurrance much before the disease symptoms show off. But, since I am not a palmist or an astrologist, my proposal is to develop a method to stop the disease as soon as its onset or the symptoms appear. OK... it will become more clear as I go with the concrete examples. I would like to concentrate on hypertension and diabetes, because they appear to be the most common diseases. As most of you know, the best cure...
3 comments
Read more

Setting up R packages for CBM of genome-scale metabolic models on Ubuntu 13.10

Long ago, I posted here the steps involved in setting up R packages for performing constraint based modelling (CBM) of genome scale metabolic models. It was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS back then. Now, I am trying to reproduce the same set-up on Ubuntu 13.10. As a quick summary, we need the following R packages: "sybil", "sybilSBML", and "glpkAPI". The "sybilSBML" R package requires the Bioconductor package "rsbml" which requires "libsbml" library, which in turn depends on "swig". The "glpkAPI" is an R wrapper for glpk library which is the optimization engine. I have been able to install all these packages by executing the following steps. 1. Install swig from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install swig 2. Install python-dev from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install python-dev 3. Install openjdk from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk 4. Install libxml2 and libxml2-d...
1 comment
Read more