"You're only as clean as your colon!"

Or so cried Jim Carrey's environmental guy on the hilarious SNL skit. As funny as the parody was (I forwarded a copy to friends and asked if that was how they saw me) there is some amount of truth to his words.  Study after study over the past few decades have successfully linked diet to disease lending credence to Hippocrates' statement, "Let food be thy medicine".  

But what about genetics?  Doesn't that play a role in disease and health.  Absolutely.  Science has fairly conclusively shown the positive (or negative, depending on how you look at it) role genetics plays in the game of health.  But how big of a role?  The jury is still out on that one.  But typically it isn't as big of a role as we like to give it.  At least, from what I can tell, it isn't a big enough role to justify the fatalism I hear from the media or friends and family.

This was brought home to me recently when my sister texted me and my brother telling us we had better follow her example and make an appointment for an endoscopy ASAP.  She said, "It's in the genes!".  Colon cancer runs in my family and the usual recourse is to start getting tested yearly for this the disease after the age of forty.   Now I'm not arguing against the prudence of getting tested.  I am, however, going to argue with the typical fatalism I hear from people.  You have a family history therefore you have a [blank] percentage change of getting cancer.  What would you put in that blank?  30, 60, 90 percent chance?   Do you even know?  The fact is no one really does know.  One thing we do know is that countries with a non-western diet consisting of little animal product intake have a far less chance of contracting disease, including cancer, of the colon.  So what is our response going to be to this information?   Well, for most people it is simply to do nothing but get tested and have their bodies dissected and exposed to deadly chemicals or radiation should disease rear its ugly head.   And to me that is very sad.

I have looked into this over the years and over and over again diet is indicted as a culprit in the disease process.  It won't necessarily stop it, but the numbers are rather startling.  So what do I have to lose?   For me I completely dropped all animal products over five years ago because it seemed worth it.  At least it seemed better than the alternatives.  I wasn't willing to say, "Oh well, I guess that's it.  Colon cancer is in the family so I'll just get tested and deal with it when it shows up."  I decided to deal with it now, before it had a chance to show up.

The strange, but predictable, behavior of people, regardless of the reams of evidence in support of a plant based diet, who simply refuse to modify their diet to any appreciable extent always leaves me a bit speechless.  If I told you a plant based diet will potentially decrease your chances of getting cancer by even 1% wouldn't it be worth it?   But for most people it isn't.  And the percentages are even larger.  We like our food too much.  Call it gluttony, stubbornness, ignorance or what have you, we simply will not change until it is too late and even after the point of no-return we will continue to argue that there was nothing we could do about it. It really is tragic on so many levels.

[NOTE: I could include stats here but the fact is no matter what I show someone will argue with me that they are wrong or the Doctor, agency, study is wrong. Recently I was told that diet has nothing to do with my cholesterol.  Besides this being unscientific, I told them my blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides improved greatly when I changed my diet to one that was plant based.  Their response? They still didn't believe me and demanded I show them the test results.  They actually thought I was lying to them.  I have done the research to my personal satisfaction and I suggest you do the same.]