“Lifestyle” and Environmental Cancer Risk

By Kamyar Enshayan, Director UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education

“Ninety percent of all forms of cancer are attributable to specific environmental factors.”

I recently had the honor of discussing a few key ideas from Living Downstream by biologist (and bladder cancer survivor) Sandra Steingraber with a group of young cancer survivors.

We started with a 2007 investigation published by the American Cancer Society which identified 216 chemicals known to cause breast cancer in animals. Of these, 73 are found in food or consumer products; 35 are air pollutants, and 29 of them are produced in the United States in large amounts every year. “And yet public education campaigns about cancer consistently emphasize lifestyle and downplay the environment, or subsume the latter into the former,” Steingraber points out.

She compared the language of fliers about cancer (available in doctor’s waiting rooms) with a basic human genetics textbook (Human Genetics: A Modern Synthesis, by G. Eldin.) On the topic of causes of cancer, the flier said “In the past few years, scientists have identified many causes of cancer. Today it is known that about 80% of cancer cases are tied to the way people live their lives.” The textbook reads “As much as 90 percent of all forms of cancer are attributable to specific environmental factors.”

Such the air, the water, work place, home, food. On the topic of prevention, the cancer fliers emphasize individual choice and responsibility, “You can control many of the factors that cause cancer. This means you can help protect yourself from the possibility of getting cancer. You can decide how you are going to live your life—which habits you will keep and which ones you will change.” The genetics text book: “Because exposure to these environmental factors can, in principle, be controlled, most cancer could be prevented… reducing or eliminating exposures to environmental carcinogens would dramatically reduce the prevalence of cancer in the United States.”

Steingraber explains how the cancer fliers “by emphasizing personal habits rather than carcinogens, they frame the cause of the disease as a problem of behavior rather than as a problem of exposure to disease-causing agents.”

The focus on “lifestyle” implies it is all our choice and is dismissive of the threats that lie beyond personal choice. In Iowa, it is not our personal choice to drink hormonally active corn weed killers in our drinking water; it is not our personal choice that are kids will be playing in schools and parks that are sprayed with war defoliants.

It is not our lifestyle choice that the parks department fogged the entire neighborhood with neurotoxins, or that a manufacturer in our community may be emitting illegal amounts of air pollutants.

Here is the conclusion of a consensus statement offered by many members of the cancer research and advocacy community to the President’s Cancer Panel in 2008: “The most direct way to prevent cancer is to stop putting cancer-causing agents into our indoor and outdoor environments in the first place.” We can work together to change these known and preventable environmental health threats in our community.

If you are interested please contact me. Kamyar Enshayan is director of UNI’s Center for Energy & Environmental Education. He can be reached at kamyar.enshayan@uni.edu or 273-7575.

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