Not counting the number of people who will fall prey to nonmelanoma skin cancers, by the year 2000, two of every five persons will develop a cancer (Simone, p. 3). The American Cancer Society reports that there will be an estimated 1.2 million new cases of cancer this year, that there were more than 560,000 lives lost to cancer last year as our second leading cause of death, and that more than $110 billion is spent on total health and related costs.
One out of every two men in this country and one out of every three women will develop some type of cancer (American Cancer Society, Food, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective). One out of every four deaths in this country is now from cancer, and we have experienced a steady rise in cancer mortality over the past half-century (American Cancer Society, Food, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective).
Research indicates that proper nutrition and diet can help control, and in some instances prevent, cancer.
Why will the two who are diagnosed have a cancer and not the other three? What causes a person's cells to mutate and grow and overtake and destroy other healthy cells? A number of causes have been suggested, and a lot of research has been conducted. Though findings are constantly being updated as new data is compiled, cancer has been found to have a variety of causes, ranging from the currently uncontrollable such as genetics to the personal choices regarding lifestyle such as diet.
Genetic makeup has been found in numerous studies to play a role in a person's predisposition for developing cancer. Detailed research exists that describes exact spots on the human genome where the presence of a certain sequence of nucleotides can indicate a person's increased or decreased risk of producing a certain type of cancer. When the Human Genome Project has completed its task of mapping the entire human genome, it is hoped that these...