What Cancers Can Be Prevented?

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. Kenneth Fink. I'm a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center at New Hanover Medical Center, Wilmington, North Carolina. Prevention of cancers are very important topic and I think folks are very interested in that, treating cancer is one thing but preventing it is certainly the better approach to cancer in general. As it turns out that cancer definitely can be prevented and things that seem to cause it are believe it or not, are food. When we look at causes for cancer, 70% of them can probably be can be said to be caused by the food that we eat. Now, eating an a healthy diet is what your doctor will almost always tell you but the way we eat the food and the way we prepare some food is also very important. One of the most important things we tell folks is to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. We know that in within in nature there are just so many good forms of ways in preventing cancer in the food that we eat, are foods that contain antioxidants especially the fruits and vegetables. Eating fruits and vegetables at least 5 times a day is probably the best preventative form for getting, for getting these types of cancer. The type of cancers I'm talking about are mostly colon cancers, cancers of the gastrointestinal system, of course, where your food will actually be digested. But other cancers as well, prostate cancer, breast cancer can also be related to, to the food that we eat. So, avoiding, oh sorry, so emphasizing fruits and vegetables is the, is the one of the most important things. As far as avoiding certain foods, it's not so much the foods that we need to avoid but the way we prepare food. When we take meats for example and we put them on a high temperature grill or fry them, we're putting the protein in that kind of meat and putting it at high temperature, that can cause carcinogens or cancer-causing chemicals that actually being formed by the way it's being cooked. So, I generally recommend that folks try, try not to eat foods cooked at a very high temperature, try not to grill them too much, try not to fry them too much. Baking and broiling are probably a little bit better, boiling would be the best. But of course, that's a little bit hard to do. Once in a while, eating foods that those that cooked at high temperature is definitely okay but try to reduce it as much as possible. As far as other cancers that can be prevented, certainly lung cancer can be prevented by avoiding smoking, every one really knows that pretty well at this point, that that's to be emphasized though 'cos obviously there's still a lot of smokers and we try to tell everybody, get off to smoking as soon as possible and we have various ways of getting people helping in that regard. We have new medications that can help people get off cigarettes. As far as the other cancers that can be prevented, certainly skin cancer can be prevented by reducing sun exposure. Need a little bit of sun exposure 'cos it's good for your bones, it gets some more vitamin D into your blood stream and helps your bones. By keeping your sun burns way down, try to use a lot of, using a lot of sunscreen can certainly emphasized by all doctors and it's highly recommended. Just those are some of the ways that cancer can be prevented."