Reporting a study on carcinogenic lifestyles can involve walking on eggshells. Some confirm what we thought was obvious (although, actually, these things do have to be confirmed) and others can throw us into a state of blind panic, excising certain products from our diets in a flurry of New Year-style detoxing, before failing spectacularly and feeling guilty about it. And collections of studies such as those reported in The Independent are even more difficult to accept because they involve an entire change of outlook and behaviour, and that can be almost impossible to put into effect.
Still we need to pay attention. Although not quite exclusively a female cancer - a fact that's oft neglected - it is none the less clearly the case that many more women than men suffer from breast cancer. Like most cancers, its development and current status as a "global epidemic" (The Independent's words) can be partially attributed to better screening and diagnosis, but increased rates have also been linked with increasing prosperity and the "Westernisation of traditional lifestyles. Can that possibly be correct, and if so, what can we do about it?
We're eating more and with greater variety, including plenty of processed foods and refined fats and sugars not available in previous diets. We're drinking more. We're having fewer children, later in life, and we're not choosing breastfeeding as the default option.
In isolation, each one of these things can be taken apart and examined ad nauseam (the breastfeeding debate in particular stirs up almost as many emotional reactions as a discussion of abortion). But taken together, you can't help but have some uncomfortable thoughts not just about breast cancer but about the general healthiness of the modern lifestyle beyond mere diet.
The evidence that is revealed as betraying the correlation comes from countries that, until recently, have had notably low rates of the illness. Japan, Singapore and Korea have all seen numbers of cases double or triple in the past 40 years and women who move from Japan to the US quickly become more at risk from the condition than if they had stayed in Japan. China has seen 20 - 30% increases in the last ten years, India and Africa have seen a notable spike in numbers too. These cases are just part of the estimated 1.3 million new cases worldwide, statistics that make breast cancer the most common cancer in the UK and Europe, despite the female bias, outstripping lung cancer since 2006.
Evidence that's quoted in the article includes two leading experts in Seattle, Washington and at Cancer Research UK's epidemiology lab at Oxford University each insisting that some aspect of Westernised life is to blame. Peggy Porter of the Fred Hutchinson Research Centre blames sedentary lifestyles, diet and reproductive control. Valerie Beral, in Oxford, thinks looking at massively decreased family sizes is just common sense, and therefore some sort of hormonal therapies to make up for the lost lifestyles must be developed.
So is it our Western influence that is causing cases to rise in countries that otherwise might have seen low incidence? Are there other considerations? The likes of Olivia Newton-John, a famous breast cancer survivor, would say that pollutants in the environment also have their toll on the body and China is currently hitting the headlines far more often in discussions of climate change than cancers.
And what if these breast cancer researchers speak the truth? It's not easy to change our lives, particularly in the case of having many more children. While they're working on producing medical synthetics to make up for what might be lost physically as we gain our emancipation, what else can we do to protect ourselves?
It turns out, perhaps encouragingly (since some of us are doing those things already), that it's exactly what we've thought for some time.
We might not be able to do very much about controlling our exposure to oestrogen (beyond assessing our birth control and discussing the long term implications with a GP or gynaecologist), but we can improve our diets, exercise, try to breastfeed where possible and nag, nag, nag.
Nag the governement to provide funding for screening programs, not just where you are but for all women, and support charity campaigns; attend your appointments, check your breasts regularly and for your sake and that of your family and friends never, ever be embarrassed to check out a lump or bump. Most of the time it will not be malignant anyway, but the earlier you find out if it is, the better your prognosis.
