image courtesy of the Breast Cancer Fund
I read a really sad breaking story this morning about the death of Dana Reeve, Christopher Reeve’s wife, from lung cancer. Besides all the tragedies she had in her life, she also didn’t smoke! She was only forty-four, only a few years older than I. That hit home.
Our family has been “involved” with cancer on quite a few occasions, unfortunately. It’s odd that in Korea, with my older relatives having to overcome amazing hardship with the wars, poverty, etc., cancer was pretty unheard of in our clan. A few female relatives had osteoporosis, something you get from a starvation diet that your body never quite recovers from, but the fact that it’s the “newer” cohort of people who live in America that are getting the cancers that makes me wonder if it has something to do with the toxic burden that we all face as a result, ironically, of technical progress.
As opposed to something like osteoporosis, which happens when you take something away that’s needed, like calcium, cancer occurs when a gene’s mutation signal is “tripped” (and yes, I’m a science person, not an intelligent design type), which REQUIRES an environmental factor.
There’s a lot more cellular-level science, like methylation, that goes with it, that’s not appropriate for a blog. Just let me say that having spent an unseemly amount of time in oncology wards, I have been scared straight that cancer isn’t something that happens to other people.
And it’s interesting, the more research I do on fertility, the more the cancer stuff converges. It makes sense, as the things that are involved in fertility–sperm, eggs, and the sub-cellular stuff–are fragile things, easily damaged. I wrote in an earlier post that of the more than 10,000 (industrial, petroleum derived) ingredients in cosmetics, only about 11% of them have been tested. In Europe, the stuff has to be tested and be proven safe FIRST before you can put it in stuff. Triclosan, for instance, that stuff that’s in almost every anti-bacterial product there is, has been banned forever. It’s not a coincidence that the one time I had to rush out and buy makeup for a photo shoot, I ran out and got something made in Germany.
And, back to Korea. When I was living in there, occasionally I had the opportunity to get out into the country, and this gave me a little idea of what Korea must have been like when my parents were growing up. No plastics, no cosmetics, no pesticides. Rice was cooked the old fashioned way in these huge iron pots without a teflon coating–and they managed without it! And without those plastic scrubbie things! And without Scotch Guard to keep their clothes clean! And they didn’t know about deoderant, those poor people! Somehow, this culture survived for more than five thousand years.
People also had to walk everywhere, as there were no cars. No xerox machine toner, no oil spills, no nail polish. I’m not saying life was perfect, or even better, then, or that there wasn’t any cancer, because there was. But I was sad to see, as the bus would bring me back to Seoul, that the closer I got to the city, the more I’d see things like industrial spraying or pesticides, etc. In our world, we have become used to all these things, and as Rachel Carson said, they take on the “safety of the familiar.” But they aren’t necessarily safe.
So for today, I’m only focusing on cosmetics. Next time you get your hand lotion, take a look at the label and try to identify the ingredients. Bet you won’t know what 3/4 of them are. Do a google search on a few and see…
And for you MAN FERTILITY guys, listen up: I’m not just talking about lipstick, I’m talking deoderant, shaving cream, lotion. If you put bad stuff on your body every day, it puts stress on your cells. So preserve your fertility and drink to your health.
Every time I buy a bag of perfect, organic carrots that cost twelve times what a bag of already plastic-wrapped Bunnyluv would cost, my husband and I gag at the price, but then buy it, saying, “Well, it’ll save us lots of money in chemotherapy down the line.” We’ve also joined a local organic food coop that helps local farmers but it’s prohibitively expensive. We don’t have cable TV, and we consider the veggies our “cable.”
The funny thing it, it isn’t really funny. And after reading about Dana Reeve today, it becomes even more real.
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