Think Genetics Plays a Major Role in Cancer?

Scott: You mentioned genetics a little bit earlier.  Isn't it true that we're finding out that fewer and fewer cancers are really genetic and more happens to be just what the environment is around us?  I mean if your parents had it, you often times follow the same patters that your parents did and we internally think that's genetic but that's probably not necessarily the case.  

Robert Wright: So a guy walks up to me and says my grandfather died of a heart attack when he was 40 years old.  My dad died of a heart attack when he was 39 years old.  I'm going to die of a heart attack by the time I'm 40.  And I look at him, and he weighs 350 pounds.  And he's been eating all the wrong things and living the same lifestyle that his dad and grandfather had lived.  That's not to say that there's not in some cases something genetically awry.  Because we know that happens on occasion.  But again, it's a matter of the epigentics.  How do you live?  Everyone talks about Angelina Jolie, you know, carrying the BRCA 1.  She had both breasts removed, she had her ovaries removed, I believe.  And with the idea that somehow that would prevent her from getting cancer.  We know that that's false.  We see women who have had bilateral mastectomies getting cancer in their reconstructed breasts.  And so that's not the solution and it's never been the solution.  So genetics may be a player and a factor and most people agree and maybe up to 5 percent of cancers, give or take a percent or two.  But again, it depends on how you live your life.  If you're going to live a life, a wild life that pummels your body with chemicals and radiation and things of that nature, that 5 percent genetic predisposition is going to play in your life as you move forward.  On the other hand, if you live a life where you eat mostly the right foods, you exercise, you detox your body, you take supplementation, the chance of those genetic predispositions exposing themselves are very, very minute.  

So it's really a cop out to say 'you carry that gene, it's defective, you're going to get cancer'.  It's another thing that comes from modern medicine.  Angelina Jolie I believe was told that she, you know, was 80 percent chance of getting breast cancer.  That was a lie to begin with because it's based on a bell curve, and they put her right at the top and said 'that's you'.  And it wasn't true.  And so we have to be very careful when we listen to genetics and the human genome project which was, you talk to the guys that were involved with that and they say it's largely a fraud.  I'll let all your listeners do all their own home study on that but I wrote about it in my book.  Oh, incidentally, Killing Cancer, Not People.  On our website, AmericanACI dot org.  But we write about that because it's important for people to know that.  And it's important for them to know what part genetics play, which is very minute.  But what part epigenetics plays, and that's major.  But that's something we can control ourselves.  And so it's very important.  We can't control our genes or what we're given to begin with.  But we can control if genes are exposed and allowed to hurt us.  And you know it's possible, but not probable if you do the right things.