Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/07)
Cancer touches countless lives every day. Chances are that either you or somebody very near and dear to you has had to fight it at some point in your life. While medicine has certainly advanced greatly in the past, mortality rates from cancer are still high and still scary.
While it seems to me that the American way of medicine tends to be geared much more towards curing the disease once it manifests itself than to preventing it in the first place, I found "Avoiding Cancer One Day at A Time" a very refreshing departure from the usual pattern. Extremely well researched and comprehensive, this incredibly readable book leads the reader through many facets of possible cancer prevention. While it is obvious that the authors have done an incredible amount of serious research, the book never gets too technical for an average reader. From a simple introduction to cancer prevention to an eye-opening Cancer Prevention IQ Pretest and a chapter on what cancer is and what causes it, the authors alert us to numerous things that we could do to increase our chances of not being one of the scary cancer statistics in the future.
While authors primarily focus on primary cancer prevention - as in before it actually happens, there is also a chapter on secondary prevention (finding cancer and preventing it from spreading) and some notes on tertiary prevention (support methods for individuals with cancer). Each of the chapters concludes with a list of practical points, and if you start your journey just by reading those, you'll have to agree that there are very many simple and eminently sensible steps we can take to increase our chances of staying healthy. If any of the topics discussed in the particular chapter really intrigue you, there are very comprehensive lists of resources and further online information available for advanced research.
Chapter 10, the "Avoiding Cancer Recipe Collection," features not only mouth-watering, yet sensible recipes, but also stories of people whose lives were changed by cancer forever. Do take a particular note of the conversion table for the recipes there: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care.
The book concludes with Appendices, the first Appendix being the worksheets for applying cancer-prevention principles, the second one a scarily long list of carcinogens; and a nearly 30-pages long list of references.
"Avoiding Cancer One Day at A Time" was a fascinating read, which showed me how little most of us know about proper cancer prevention and how easy a great majority of those prevention steps really are. This book should find a permanent place in every American home, where it should be read, re-read and used often.
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Avoiding Cancer One Day At A Time: Practical Advice For Preventing Cancer Books In Print, Audio Books.