Cancer! I tell someone each and every week, probably every day of my life – we are already effectively living in a world where half of the population will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime.
But still, I hold hope because it does NOT have to be this way.
📽️ NO, you don’t have to get cancer
Because of epigenetics.
Our health destiny is far more in our hands than people realize.
As much as 90% of our health outcomes are a consequence of the environment we put them in, which creates their expression. What do I mean? A gene can create normal proteins for an entire lifetime. Or, that same gene, put into toxic pressure from radiation or heavy metals, will create cancerous cells.
Dr Stephen Rapport’s 2006 seminal paper Genetic Factors Are Not the Major Causes of Chronic Diseases attributes no more than 20% on average of disease to genetic destiny.
And cancer actually was the major disease with the LOWEST genetic factor, what he calls “population attributable fractions” (PAFs). “Cancers had the lowest PAFs (median = 8.26%)”, with something like leukemia at only 3.4%.
Fig 2. Numbers of Western-European deaths in 2000 estimated for ischemic heart disease and nine cancer types
And according to Matthew Walker PhD’s sleep science, something as simple as ensuring you sleep at least 6 hours a night reduces your epigenetic risk to these types of cancers by as much as 50%.
And that’s the big point. If committing to 6 hours of sleep is too much of a commitment, now you know cancer was almost surely not a bad roll of the genetic dice.
