Cancer Research Worth Writing Down This Year

If we really knew everything about cancer, we’d be able to cure it by now. While the success rates of modern cancer treatments have steadily improved outcomes for most types of cancer, we might still be scratching the surface of truly understanding how to fight this disease.

What we do know, however, is that incremental changes in behavior can make a difference. Over the past year, researchers have established stronger links to the cancer risks associated with certain products and lifestyles.

Drinking

Having a glass of wine or a nightly beer can increase your risk of developing cancer. It’s no surprise that alcohol is a carcinogen, but the amounts thought necessary to promote cancer cell development were considered relatively high. New research has found that just two drinks day can be enough to increase your cancer risk. That daily intake alone was linked to 103,000 cases of cancer per year.

Deodorant

Not all deodorants have the ingredient, but enough do that it’s worth checking the list of 18 types of deodorants that P&G pulled in 2021. Those products had traces of benzene when tested, but “traces” might not be doing the amounts justice. The results found levels of the chemical more than nine times the FDA limit, exposing tens of thousands of consumers to a known cause of blood cancer and leukemia.

Soda

Have a Diet Coke everyday? It’s a habit plenty of Americans have picked up, but it’s influencing cancer rates. Women that drink more than one serving of soda every day were twice as likely to develop colorectal cancer before 50 than their peers. The study also found that the earlier this habit starts, the more likely it is to cause colon cancer.

Pesticides

There’s nothing safe about ingesting foods covered in poison. Most of the highest-risk pesticides have been removed from the market and banned around the world for decades. Unfortunately, the effects of pesticides like DDT are still reverberating today. Banned in the US way back in 1972, there’s a growing body of evidence that high levels of DDT in the late 60s and 70s affected two more generations of women.

The study found that women whose grandmothers were pregnant when DDT was used are more likely to struggle with obesity. Not just their daughters, but even their granddaughters share a higher risk of obesity and were shown to be more likely to start menstruating at a younger age. This can increase the risk of other health problems like cancer and high blood pressure.

How Less Cancer Can Help

Advocacy from groups like Less Cancer and others can take research from studies like these and make it a point of focus. By adding this information to programming, sharing it with legislators, and empowering healthcare providers to monitor patients, we can improve lives and reduce cancer risks for millions of Americans. Simply putting a doctor in a position to ask questions about alcohol or soda habits and passing along information concerning health-related recalls can make a difference.

Learn more about our work at LessCancer.org.


Cancer Research Worth Writing Down This Year was originally published in Less Cancer Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.