Most cancers are slow-slow growing diseases, eating away silently at your body for years before they show themselves. Despite the overblown claims of sucessful treatment by the National Cancer Institue, once a cancer emerges medicine is usually powerless.
Anytime you feel reassured by the pronouncements of the cancer industry, remember the swift deaths of Michael Landon of pancreatic cancer, and Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis of lymphoma. If there was an effective treatment anywhere in the world, dont you think such immensely rich people would have bought it? So, if a little exercise can pervent cancer, its worth more than all the gold in Fort Knox. And like all of the other best things in life- its free!
You dont have to be a marathoner, a half-hour of exercise several days a week can drop your risk dramatically. Breast cancer is the most frequent female cancer, and the third biggest cancer killler in America. Proportionately more women are developing and dying of breast cancer today than in the 1960s. Just to load the dice, we will add uterine cancer, ovarian cancer, and all other cancers of the femal reproductive system. Thats four of the leading six catergories of female cancer. Together they wipe out 220,000 American women every year. If simple exercise can help prevent such devastation, then its a winner for every women in the nation.
The major mechanism by which exercise prevents these cancers is regulation of estrogen and other stress hormones, which left unchecked, cause proliferation in the female reproductive system. It is likely that women who exercise regularly are simply activating an essential health mechanism in their bodies, designed to be activated in just that way by the miraculous hand that crafted all life upon the Earth.
What about exercise and male cancer? The examples I want to use are colon and rectal cancers, although these are also a leading cause of cancer death in women. Colo-rectal cancers are the second leading cancer category, with more than 155,000 cases every year. And incidence of these cancers has jumped since 1970. Red meats and animal fats are major causes, but so is inactivity.
The mechanism by which exercise probably prevents colo-recatl cancers is simple, and is also part of the human design. Exercise naturally promotes regular bowel movements, and increases the speed of excretion of food wastes. It therefore reduces time for carcinogen formation, and also prevents prolonged contact between carcinogens and intestinal walls.
In our constipated society that spends a sickening 700 million a year on harmful (oops, gentle, safe and soothing) laxatives, this sort of evidence should be a clarion call to exercise.