Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

of getting any specific cancer is far more random than they realize. I recently read the book The Cancer Chronicles by George Johnson. He wrote it after his wife got a rare and aggressive cancer and he was trying to puzzle out why this happened to her. For one thing, she'd been eating organic foods for years -- maybe even a vegan or vegetarian life style, can't recall all the details right now -- and this terrible thing still happened to her. Among the things I learned from the book is that even dinosaurs got cancer, and really good analysis of old burials shows that cancer rates today are essentially unchanged throughout human history, meaning cancer is NOT an artifact of modern civilization.

The one risk factor that is clearly linked to cancer? Yep, it's smoking. Don't smoke and you'll vastly reduce your odds of certain cancers as well as heart disease, but beyond that live your life more or less as you want to and hope you have good genetics as well as the good luck not to get cancer.