Inside Prevention

If the food's in plastic, what's in the food? (Washington Post, 4/16/2012)

A new article in the Washington Post about chemicals used in food packaging leads with a study published by the Breast Cancer Fund and Silent Spring Institute that demonstrated a significant dip in families' BPA and phthalate levels when they cut packaged food from their diets for just a few days. How common are these chemicals and what can be done to protect people from exposure?:

[S]cientists are beginning to piece together data about the ubiquity of chemicals in the food supply and the cumulative impact of chemicals at minute doses. What they’re finding has some health advocates worried.

This is “a huge issue, and no [regulator] is paying attention,” says Janet Nudelman, program and policy director at the Breast Cancer Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on the environmental causes of the disease. “It doesn’t make sense to regulate the safety of food and then put the food in an unsafe package.”

How common are these chemicals? Researchers have found traces of styrene, a likely carcinogen, in instant noodles sold in polystyrene cups. They’ve detected nonylphenol — an estrogen-mimicking chemical produced by the breakdown of antioxidants used in plastics — in apple juice and baby formula. They’ve found traces of other hormone-disrupting chemicals in various foods: fire retardants in butter, Teflon components in microwave popcorn, and dibutyltin — a heat stabilizer for polyvinyl chloride — in beer, margarine, mayonnaise, processed cheese and wine. They’ve found unidentified estrogenic substances leaching from plastic water bottles. (Read complete article.)

Learn more about chemicals linked to breast cancer that are found in food and food packaging.

Quit the pesticide man (Huffington Post, 1/5/2011)

The "Dirt Diva" herself, Annie Spiegelman, has a great recommendation for your new year: ditch the pesticides. That includes household weed killers, chemical fertilizers, rat poison, ant traps, cockroach killer...all that stuff designed to kill other living things is likely not so good for you.

She wrote a piece on the Huffington Post this week featuring our Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) colleague Kristin Schafer, and together they do a great job weaving strawberry pesticides, breast cancer (and our State of the Evidence report), the problem with the EPA, safe cosmetics and being a Debbie Downer into something that you really do want to read:

Annie: Recent scientific studies show that the weedkiller atrazine changes the sex of male frogs. The pesticide methyl iodide, which is a known neurotoxin (nerve poison), will now be legal to fumigate onto California strawberry fields. American beekeepers believe the pesticide clothianidin, with a soil half-life of up to 19 years in heavy soils, is taking away their livelihoods. The latest President's Cancer Panel report on carcinogens in our environment is especially gloomy. Should we all just go hide under the covers?

Kristin: No. The more we know, the smarter choices we can all make. For the first time ever, the President's Cancer Panel analyzed the contribution carcinogens in our environment play in causing cancer. The Bush-appointed cancer scientists on the Panel found that the importance of these chemicals has been dramatically underestimated. They were so concerned that they actually recommended President Obama do something: get toxic chemicals that cause cancer out of our food, water and air. (Read complete article.)

Documentary Puts Moral Imperative on Banning Cancer-Causing Chemicals (Huffington Post, 10/17/2010)

Living Downstream. It's an arresting concept, especially in the hands of Sandra Steingraber, an ecologist and cancer survivor who penned a book under that title, which has now been made into a documentary.

For Sandra, it means looking at the practices upstream—factories polluting waterways with carcinogenic chemicals is one example—and connecting them with the health of those living at the other end.

Fellow author Annie Spiegelman wrote a piece on the Huffington Post yesterday that puts the documentary in the context of new developments and new thinking on environmental health, including the President's Cancer Panel report from earlier this year. We co-hosted a special screening of the film for Annie and others:

When I was invited to a private screening of Living Downstream, the new documentary about biologist, author and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, I was a bit hesitant. The showing was sponsored by the Breast Cancer Fund and Pesticide Action Network North America, two organizations that like to scare me out of my complacency. Both groups are determined to make us aware of the latest medical and scientific studies linked to cancer, our environment and our collective health. They want us to wake up, pay attention and be an educated, clued-up society. SAY WHAT? But that would mean turning off Dancing with the Stars and Jersey Shore. ...

Living Downstream is a poignant, enlightening and visually graceful documentary that was released earlier this year. ...The film weaves in scientific research and interviews with several experts in the fields of toxicology and medicine along with the personal story of Steingraber's struggle with bladder cancer. Watching her attend periodic cancer check-ups shows the harsh reality of what a cancer patient and their family must endure, always wondering if the next phone call is going to bring them bad news from the pathology lab. (Read complete article.)

Now Living Downstream is coming to a city near you (check upcoming dates).

Sandra will also be speaking at two events in California this month: October 25 at the Women's Conference in Long Beach and October 28 in San Francisco. The Breast Cancer Fund will be at both and we hope you'll join us!

It's Time for Breast Cancer Prevention Month (Huffington Post, 10/12/2010)

Read Breast Cancer Fund President Jeanne Rizzo's opinion piece on the Huffington Post about why it’s time to move beyond breast cancer awareness to prevention—very timely as we’re all awash in pink this month. Here's an excerpt:

It's that pink time of year again, Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But when virtually every American has been touched by the disease, who among us is not aware of breast cancer? What we need is Breast Cancer PREVENTION Month, and a focus on identifying and eliminating the preventable causes of the disease so fewer people ever have to receive that life-changing diagnosis. What we need is a national breast cancer prevention plan.

We know that 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and that no more than 1 in 10 of them has a genetic history of the disease. We know that breast cancer rates have increased dramatically since the 1930s, when the first reliable cancer incidence data were established, and that, strikingly, the increase parallels the proliferation of synthetic chemicals. Today, approximately 85,000 synthetic chemicals are registered for use in the United States, more than 90 percent of which have never been tested for their effects on human health.

(Read the full article.)

New report catalogues chemical and radiation links to breast cancer

On the first day of what we at the Breast Cancer Fund consider Breast Cancer Prevention Month, we released the 2010 edition of our landmark report, State of the Evidence: The Connection Between Breast Cancer and the Environment.

What emerges from the latest scientific research is a clearer picture than ever of how exposures to chemicals and radiation affect breast cancer risk. From this evidence, we create a roadmap for a national breast cancer prevention plan.

Read the full report and explore online content at www.breastcancerfund.org/evidence.

Read an excerpt from our press release:

New Report Catalogues Chemical and Radiation Links to Breast Cancer
Scientists, health advocates call for national breast cancer prevention plan

San Francisco – A report released today by the Breast Cancer Fund presents a comprehensive summary of the scientific data on the environmental causes of breast cancer. The report catalogues the growing evidence linking breast cancer to, among other factors, synthetic hormones in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and meat; pesticides in food; solvents in household cleaning products; BPA in food containers; flame retardants in furniture; and radiation from medical treatments. The report also highlights impacts on the most vulnerable populations (including infants, pregnant women, African-American women and workers), and outlines the policy initiatives required to develop a national breast cancer prevention plan.

The report, entitled State of the Evidence: The Connection Between Breast Cancer and the Environment, is the sixth edition published by the Breast Cancer Fund. “With each new edition of the report, the growing scientific evidence compels us to act to prevent breast cancer,” said Jeanne Rizzo, R.N., president of the Breast Cancer Fund. “This Breast Cancer Awareness Month, our message is clear: we must move beyond awareness to prevention.”

(Read full press release)

Clermont breast-cancer survivor to climb Mount Shasta (Orlando Sentinel, 6/15/10)

We just told you about Joey Beauregard, one of two climbers carrying talismans up Mt. Shasta today and tomorrow with the Breast Cancer Fund team. Today the Orlando Sentinel told more of Joey's powerful story:

"I feel that the conversation about cancer needs to change from talking about finding a cure to find the causes of cancer so that it can be prevented in the first place," she said.

Her climb up the fifth-highest mountain in California — the Cascade Range's second-highest peak — is a way for Beauregard to begin that conversation, she said. Beauregard, who has no family history of the disease and has no children, said she's interested in learning of the environmental links to cancer, a main focus of research for the Breast Cancer Fund.

She questions whether her cancer is connected to her home's close proximity to the former Tower Chemical site in Clermont, which was poisoned by toxic chemicals and pesticides in the 1980s and placed in the Superfund program for the nation's most-hazardous sites. (Read complete article.)

Will the War on Cancer Evolve to Take on Environmental Risks? (Huffington Post, 5/6/2010)

Jeanne Rizzo, Breast Cancer Fund president and CEO, on the Huffington Post today:

After 40 years of war on cancer, this year more than half a million Americans are expected to die from cancer - about 1,500 a day - and nearly 1.5 million new cases will be diagnosed. That doesn't sound like success on the battlefield. But today, with the release of the President's Cancer Panel report Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, we may see a fundamental shift toward a winning strategy. (Read complete article.)

Weekly roundup: Tips for breast cancer prevention

We took Monday off for the holiday, so we have four tips in this week's roundup of breast cancer prevention tips, courtesy Dr. Janet Gray and the Daily Green. If you missed them on Facebook, find them now, right here!

1. Avoid weed killers -- on your lawn, around the house and in kids' play areas.
2. Use natural pesticides. Chemicals meant to kill bugs can harm us, too.
3. Avoid bleach and chlorine, including bleached paper and personal care products.
4. Use safe cosmetics -- and ditch the toxic chemicals in products from shampoo to lotion to lipgloss. 

We'll be back on Facebook Monday to bring you another week of tips you can use to protect your family and yourself from everyday exposures to chemicals linked to breast cancer.

These are small changes, but they're part of a bigger effort to get toxic chemicals out of our environment -- at home, at school, at work and out in the world. Help us make these tips obsolete for future generations: Ask your elected officials in Congress to sign on to our Prevention Platform for big change and better health for everyone.

Frogs and funding for cancer research: connecting the dots

Yesterday’s New York Times front-page story lamented that funding for cancer research is too timid and, therefore, not likely to lead to significant scientific breakthroughs.

A few pages later, op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about how exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals used in agriculture, industry and consumer products, are linked to alarming health problems, including cancer.

It was thrilling to see both of these important topics—topics we at the Breast Cancer Fund talk about every day—covered in one day's paper. But the pages separating the stories only served to remind me of the disconnect between mainstream cancer research and the growing scientific evidence of the environmental causes of breast cancer.

As Kristof points out, endocrine disruptors have been linked to early puberty (a risk factor for later-life breast cancer), as well as to cancer itself. He quotes the recent Endocrine Society report that states that “endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer,” among other health effects. (Read about our take on the The Endocrine Society report in our blog post.) Yet, back on page 1, there is no mention whatsoever of funding research into the environmental causes of cancer. It’s all about research into personal habits, detection and cure.

When no more than 1 in 10 women with breast cancer has a genetic history of the disease, it’s clear that we urgently need more investigation into its environmental causes. Let’s connect the dots: the Times’ call for bolder cancer research and its call for more attention to endocrine disruptors should be one and the same.