Genevieve Simms

Don’t be fooled by the service smiles, stacked aisles and savings coupons: your friendly neighbourhood supermarket is trying to kill you!

At least, that’s one conclusion to be drawn from Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer, a 660-page report released by the American Institute for Cancer Research last week. Based on a five-year study of more than 7,000 research papers, the report determined not only that there is a clear link between obesity and many forms of cancer, but that all but a moderate consumption of red meat and alcohol puts you at risk, as does any amount of processed meat, e.g. bacon, sausage or salami.

Still, there is some good news. “Cancer is preventable,” declared Phillip James, one of the report’s authors. “There are changes you can make in your daily life…. Let’s get more vegetables, fruits…. Let’s get off our backsides however and whenever we can.” Appropriate changes in diet and exercise could, he concluded, reduce the incidence of cancer by 30 to 40 per cent — worldwide, this translates into as many as 40 million lives saved per year.

Sounds promising, but it took only two days for the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente to weigh in with her usual contrary response. “Unless you are genetically blessed with skinny genes,” she wrote, “avoiding cancer means a lifetime of vigilance, calorie-counting, portion control and deprivation. The alternative is a lifetime of guilt and fear.”

More seriously, Wente noted that the AICR report had been selective in its research, choosing not to include those studies that found no link between eating fruit and vegetables and a lower risk of cancer, or between red-meat consumption and an increased risk of colorectal cancer. She also questioned whether there was, in fact, an “epidemic of cancer among fat people,” but rather “among people who live in the developed world in comparison to the Third World.”

Still, there can be no doubt that cancer itself has reached epidemic proportions in North America. It was in 1971 that president Richard Nixon launched the so-called “War on Cancer.” Since then, the U.S. alone has poured $40 billion into the fight. Yet the spread of cancer has continued. Between 1950 and 2000, the incidence of all cancers rose by more than 85 per cent. Prostate cancer rose by almost 300 per cent, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by 250 per cent. In Canada, 160,000 people will be diagnosed with cancer this year. More than 73,000 existing patients will succumb to it.

And yet, if we are to believe the AICR report, there is much we can do to minimize our risk of joining these statistics. Namely, exercise more and be more careful about our diet. The trouble with this advice, however, is that it assumes that individuals are in any sort of position to isolate themselves from the risks of cancer, even if they wanted and were determined to do so. That’s simply not the case.

What both the AICR and Margaret Wente fail to note is the wider context of what happened to food in North America during the 20th century. As Randall Fitzgerald points out in his recent book, The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals that are Destroying Your Health, the convergence of three key industries — processed foods, chemicals and pharmaceuticals — created a “synthetics revolution” that transformed the very nature and composition of what we shovel into our stomachs.

This is especially true for the decades after the Second World War, a period characterized by the instant gratification and insatiable appetites of the baby-boom generation. In part to meet the demands and wants of this unprecedented cohort, the volume of synthetic chemicals used to manufacture processed foods jumped from one billion pounds in 1940 to 50 billion by 1950. By the late 1980s, it had reached 500 billion pounds.

Today, the cost of this shift from natural to synthetic foods can hardly be questioned, even if its full magnitude has yet to be determined. Referring once more to the processed foods-chemical-pharmaceutical triumvirate, Fitzgerald laments that, “The control we give them over our lives springs directly from our acceptance of this belief system’s primary conceit: their lab-created synthetics are as benign as… naturally occurring foods and medicines.” The persistent spread of cancer is just one sign of how wrong this belief was.

And yet there remain those who still insist that science will save us from the perils it helped to create. In The Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues that new cancer vaccines “could be used as a prophylaxis to prevent cancer, as a first-line treatment, or to mop up cancer cells after other treatments,” even though he admits that no one has yet identified all of the specific cancer antigens needed to develop such a vaccine.

But someone will, Kurzweil believes, for we stand on the brink of revolutions in biotechnology and nanotechnology that will free us from the shackles of biology. By eliminating a specified list of diseases and treatable conditions, the human lifespan will soon reach 150 years, he claims. Once that list covers 90 per cent of all medical problems, we can expect to live to 500; once it hits 99 per cent, a lifetime of 1,000 years should not be impossible. There’s something freaky, not to say obscene, about this proposition. A thousand years of doing what?

Even if Kurweil is right, extending the span of adult life will mean nothing unless we take steps right now to reverse our culture’s toxic impact on the lives of children. The fastest growing rate of cancer for any age group over the past two decades has been among children. In the case of acute lymphocytic leukemia, 64 per cent of victims are under the age of 20. And in a study of the years 1998-2002, it was found that half of all cancer deaths and diagnoses were among those aged 34 years old or younger.

While the AICR report may be sound in its recommendations, the larger question is, surely: Why the hell is my Superstore deli selling carcinogenic sausage meat in the first place?