Lorenzo Cohen - Anticancer Living: Transform Your Life and Health with the Mix of Six

What if we could make basic, sustainable lifestyle adjustments that might push back the onset of cancer or even prevent us from ever getting it? What if those with cancer could change the way they live to reduce their risk of recurrence and improve their chances of living long, vibrant lives? What if the missing link to cancer prevention and treatment is not the next pill or the latest scientific breakthrough but the choices we make every day that influence our bodys natural ability to maintain and restore balance and health? What if we could make changes in the way we live now, today, that would help us beat the odds, survive a diagnosis, or possibly remain cancer-free for life? Ive devoted my career to trying to answer these questions.

We have reached a critical moment in terms of cancer research, treatment, and prevention. It is now clear from scientific research that how we live in our bodies, in our communities and the broader worldhow we eat, sleep, work and play, manage stress and face lifes challenges, create our support networks and make choices about our environmentshas a profound effect on our health and wellness; and on cancer in particular.

The work that forms the basis for this book was inspired in part by David Servan-Schreiber, author of Anticancer: A New Way of Life and a true pioneer in the quest to demonstrate the links between lifestyle and cancer.

My own work and Davids had been running on parallel tracks for decades, but there was a significant difference between us: David was living with a brain tumor, diagnosed at the age of thirty-one. Davids original cancer had been treated successfully with surgery, but it had returned five years later, and the prognosis was not good. The average survival time for this kind of recurrence is typically twelve to eighteen months, with five years considered to be the maximum. David had no choice but to undergo another risky surgery, followed by a year of chemotherapy and radiation.

This marked the start of his journey to the work that emerged in book form as Anticancer: A New Way of Life. As the title suggests, for David this became a new way of livingwith cancer. David made a deeply felt and very personal decision to listen to his body, to learn to tune in to its signals with a different kind of attention, and to trust its guidance. He amassed all the scientific evidence available at the time and used this to help guide his lifestyle choices. He became curious to the point of obsession about how our daily actions and choices affect what he called the cancer terrainour genetic, cellular, and regulatory systems. He became interested in how he might influence his own biology in ways that would enhance his immunity, decrease inflammation, and suppress the tendency of cancer cells to proliferate, while simultaneously improving his quality of life. He quickly discovered that with each lifestyle improvement he made, he felt better, healthier, and more presentnot just in body, but also in mind and spirit.

David set out to answer this question: Does how we livethe quality of our relationships, what we eat, how we care for ourselvesdetermine cancers progress? He dedicated the rest of his life to understanding how our finely engineered bodies can sustain health, even in the presence of cancer. He wanted to find out if we could modify how we behave in our daily lives to prevent cancer, prolong remission, or simply improve and extend a cancer patients life. In fact, after making some of these adjustments himself, he led a rich and productive life for another nineteen years, outliving his statistical prognosis by a factor of four.

In 2009, following the publication of his book Anticancer, David and I hatched a plan to raise money for a clinical trial to examine the effects of comprehensive lifestyle change on survival and quality of life for cancer patients. David was instrumental in helping us design the early phase of our Comprehensive Lifestyle Study, a study of women with stage II and III breast cancer, which is now fully under way and ongoing here in Houston. Formal data will be available once the study is completed, but we are already seeing profound transformations in the lives of the study participants. They are truly the inspiration for this book. I also find inspiration in the broader community of patients, doctors, care providers, researchers, and scientists, all of whom are adding to the literature on how lifestyle heals.

The publication of Anticancer Living coincides with the tenth anniversary of Anticancers initial publicationand is in part a celebration of Davids achievement and clear evidence of how far weve come. A decade later, its undeniable that lifestyle should be as vital a component of comprehensive cancer treatment as traditional frontline medical treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, immunotherapy, and new targeted therapies. In fact, the pace at which new scientific evidence is connecting the dots between lifestyle factors and cancer progression and recovery is accelerating. It is, we are discovering, the synergy of both specialized medical treatment and lifestyle changes that offers cancer patients the best outcomes. But what the anticancer community has been wanting is a complete and simple plan for living the anticancer life. This book is intended as a road map toward the journey ahead, how we as individuals can work in tandem with the scientific community and doctors to support our own health even as new discoveries are being made. Mounting research suggests a clear link between lifestyle and wellness, and we will share the scientific evidence alongside the stories of cancer survivors to help bring that science to life. While each persons journey is unique, we believe the cumulative impact points to a clear path forward.