Everyone is at risk from cancer: one in three people will contract it during their lifetime, and one in four of those people will die. However, you can reduce your risk by living a healthy lifestyle.
Knowing Your Body
Knowing your body is important. Being able to recognise change, including lumps, pain or unexplained bleeding, will make it easier to get the advice you need at the right time. So check yourself regularly so you know your body.
Another aspect of knowing yourself is your genetics. A genetic test can predict the likelihood of a person developing certain diseases. The test looks at genes, chromosomes, or proteins to help predict the risk of disease, as well as identify carriers. No test can give certainty of contracting a disease, but it can tell the percentage of risk that a person will develop a disease over the general population. A famous, and extreme, example of this recently is Angelina Jolie. Her risk of breast cancer was so high that she decided to have a double mastectomy. You can buy genetic predisposition testing kits from places like Easy DNA Canada online. Once you have this information, it is yours to do what you like with.
Balanced Diet
The risk of contracting certain diseases can be significantly reduced by maintaining a healthy diet. There’s forever a new superfood that will prevent cancer in the media, and this is because diet and cancer are heavily researched. However, because there are so many different factors involved, there’s no single food that will cause, prevent or cure cancer.
Therefore, a balanced diet is key to making sure your body gets all the nutrients it needs.
Healthy Weight
Obesity and being overweight can increase your risk of cancer, including bowel cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer and oesophageal cancer as well as others. Therefore, you should make the necessary changes to make sure that you’re a healthy weight.
Drink Less, Smoke Less
These are the obvious ones. Alcohol is known to increase your risk of a variety of cancers, including mouth cancer and breast cancer. You shouldn’t regularly drink over the guide line of 2-3 units a day for a woman, and 3-4 units a day for a man.
90% of lung cancer cases are related to smoking, and stopping smoking reduces the risks exponentially. The earlier you quit, the greater the impact.
Protect Skin
It’s important also to protect your skin from the sun’s harmful rays. Try to make sure that you don’t burn, and use a sunscreen of at least 15.