Cancer is an immune deficiency disease. Based on available studies, maintaining healthy diet and lifestyles, can help the body keep this malignant disease at bay .
The prevention and treatment of cancer, experts say, revolve around nutrition in addition to keeping fit through regular exercise.
Though the non communicable disease so far has no cure, studies have shown that cancer can be effectively treated with high powered nutrition supported with appropriate diet and lifestyle changes.
As healthy diets have been proven beyond reasonable doubt to prevent cancer and also help survivors to lead a normal life, so has unhealthy lifestyle and lack of physical exercise been discovered to fuel the deadly disease globally, especially in Nigeria where people consume much carbohydrate and fatty foods without regulation.
Experts have time without number stressed that breast cancer can be avoided if one adopts a healthy lifestyle, which include exercising regularly, proper diet, avoiding junk food and other unhealthy habits.
Excessive intake of foods rich in carbohydrates, fats and oil, they say, could predispose an individual to obesity, which is a risk factor for non-communicable diseases like diabetes, coronary heart diseases, hypertension and cancer.
A recent study from the Breast Cancer and the Environment Research Programme at Michigan State University revealed that eating a high-fat diet at puberty can accelerate the development of breast cancer and may actually increase the risk of cancer similar to a type often found in younger adult women.
In addition to the accelerated breast cancer development, this type of diet the, study added, produces a distinct gene signature in the tumors consistent with a subset of breast cancers known as basal-like that can carry a worse prognosis.
Another study published in the British Journal of Dermatology has also shown that heavy drinking can increase the risk of developing the deadliest form of skin cancer by more than half.
The study revealed that even as little as one drink a day can raise the chance of getting melanoma by 20 per cent, while for heavy drinkers the risk increases by 55 per cent.
Furthermore, scientists have discovered that high blood sugar coupled with diseases such as obesity and diabetes can raise the risk of breast and other cancers.
These findings, no doubt, showed how critical healthy lifestyle and diets are in taming the scourge of cancer in Nigeria.
Hence, Nigerians have once again been reminded of the need to adopt a healthy lifestyle to reduce the burden of the disease in the country.
A Professor of Public Health Nutrition and Former President, Nutrition Society of Nigeria(NSN), Prof. Prof. Ngozi Nnam, told The Point that the increasing rate of burden of cancer in Nigeria could be associated with the food consumption pattern and life style of the people.
“There is a shift from consumption of nutritious traditional foods to consumption of over processed foods with poor nutritional attributes. This is mainly due to urbanization, industrialization, modernization, economic development and market globalization. Families are too busy with their work that they don’t have time to plan for their meals to ensure dietary diversification to include nutritious foods in the diet,” she said.
She affirmed that poor lifestyle is associated with the increasing rate of cancer.
According to Nnam, Nigeria, as well as other countries of the world, experienced burden of diseases as a result of inadequate dietary practices
“The problem is not necessarily western diet but improper choice and poor combination of foods leading to nutritionally inadequate diet that could precipitate malnutrition, and burden of diseases. Adequate dietary practices and moderate physical activity would significantly reduce the burden of cancer and other diseases experienced in Nigeria” she noted.
Nnam advised cancer patients on the need to eat nutritionally adequate diet that contains all the essential nutrients and substances required for healthy growth, adding that such diet should be rich in antioxidants.
Antioxidants, she explained, are substances in food that protect the cells by reacting with free radicals, to neutralize them thus protecting the cells from damage and proliferation.
