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Originally Posted by JonDoeUK
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While this is true, it's a matter of mitigation versus prevention. You can be a vegan marathon runner and develop cancer in your 20s (I know of many). You can smoke a pack a day for 60 years and die warm and happy in your bed at 100. We should all absolutely mitigate our chances of developing cancer (and other illnesses) by maintaining a healthy weight, eating a balanced diet of whole foods predominantly based on plant matter, getting exercise, not smoking, and limiting alcohol intake because you don't know if your body is going to be one that is particularly dependent on those factors to not have any cell mutations.
In my case, those factors have no proven connection to my cancer. There is a slight connection to exposure to smoke as a young person - in my case, my mom smoked until I was 8 or 9 but never in the house and stopped when I begged her to when she once lit up in the car. The biggest risk factors are uncontrollables - being male (nope), certain ethnic decents including Ashkenazi Jews (check), a sibling with Hodgkins (nope - though I accost my brother's lymph nodes every time I see him), and exposure to mono. I never had mono, though who knows if I came in contact with someone who did. Bad luck.
While we absolutely need to focus on the mitigating effects for many health reasons - cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and the list goes on - sometimes that focus results in a kind of othering of those with cancer. It becomes a bit easy to blame someone who has cancer for their illness by questioning all their health choices. One of the most frustrating things when going through treatment was the searching look I got as people asked me what caused it - looking for a reason why I got it and they couldn't possibly. It's human nature. I took to responding "One too many dips in toxic sludge."
My cancer is one that primarily hits healthy young adults between 15 and 30. It is a small community as a fairly rare cancer and I can say with confidence that I am in the minority as one who was diagnosed when overweight - and much of my weight gain was due to medications given to me while I was misdiagnosed as well as the cumulative impact of cancer growing in me unchecked for 5 years. Many of us had never been sick before developing lymphoma. In my 23 years before diagnosis, I had only been to the doctor 5 times about illness - when I got poison ivy in my eyes when I was 5, a cough that I wanted to get me out of an upcoming midterm when I was 16, twice with skin rashes that ended up being cancer when I was 18 and 21 (and more often, just calling in to get prednisone when the rashes appeared), and once for severe back pain when I was 19 that also ended up being cancer. That's pretty typical of people with my cancer - and now I'm sick all the time (including bronchitis as I type).
It's funny - in the years leading up to my diagnosis, I became VERY health conscious due to my vague, seemingly benign symptoms and dramatic weight gain. I drank several glasses of lemon water every day, removed dairy and most wheat products from my diet (for awhile, doctors thought my symptoms were celiac disease but I didn't want to go through an endoscope if the treatment was just to avoid gluten anyway), limited meat intake, and exercised a lot. That might have slowed down the progress of my cancer - it would normally be fatal after two or three years without treatment and I made it more than 5.
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