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What is the real origin of cancer? Is it due to lack of exercise and eating the wrong foods? originally appeared on Quora: the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.Answer by Petter Häggholm, on Quora:
What is the real origin of cancer? Is it due to
lack of exercise and eating the wrong foods? The real origin is this: In
every cell in your body, maybe thirty-seven trillion of them, there is a
copy of your genome, with about 3,235,000,000 pairs of nucleic acids
arranged in two rows; most of them divide and create copies of
themselves. Thus, throughout your lifetime, your body will silently make
quadrillions, quintillions, probably sextillions and septillions of
copies of base pairs. Is it any wonder that this process isn’t perfect?
Sometimes, things go wrong. Sometimes it’s just
chance: the copying machinery isn’t completely perfect, sometimes it
slips up. Sometimes, it’s due to various risk factors: ionising
radiation (as from sunlight or radon gas or nuclear fallout), or damage
from cigarette smoking, or papillomaviruses, or maybe some dietary
factors. There are dozens upon dozens, maybe hundreds of different
cancers, quite distinct diseases although unified in the basic
underlying principle: a change or copying error (either way, a mutation)
causes the cells to fail to stop reproducing when they should;
uncontrolled cell division. The cells fail to respond to the normal
signals of “you’re done, die now” (apoptosis), and grow into a tumor.
Cancer is not just a disease of humans. Rats get cancer. Dogs get cancer. Tasmanian devils get a really nasty kind of infectuous cancer that threatens their survival as a species. Sharks get cancer.
On a side note, this makes the notion that shark
cartilage can cure cancer because sharks are immune to it doubly
idiotic. Not only is there no reason why eating an immune creature would
protect you, but it’s blatantly untrue to begin with that sharks are
immune.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, when the great dinosaurs walked the Earth, dinosaurs had cancer.
Unless you subscribe to the ABC sitcom’s model of
dinosaurs, I think you’ll agree that dinosaurs probably were not prone
to sedentary lifestyles with too much smoking, TV, and fast food.
There are some facets of modern living that do
increase the risk of cancer—smoking, air pollution, probably some foods
(though not cell phones; that one seems to be a myth, and certainly not
microwave ovens). The main reason why cancer is on the rise is simply
that although we’re getting better at treating cancer, we’re still much
better at treating many other diseases than we are at treating cancer.
That is, more people die of cancer now because they survive past the age
where their ancestors would have died of malaria, smallpox, or the
plague.
Cancer, you see, is a disease of old age: the longer you live,
the more chances your cells have to make errors. Doctors are excellent
at keeping people alive long enough to get cancer; now they just need to
catch up in treating cancer as well. Though a cancer patient today will
likely live much longer than the same cancer patient thirty years ago. (forbes)
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