Save Yourself

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"Life isn't worth living without a couple of vices." "Something's going to get you in the end." "I'll take my chances."

We all love to feign insouciance about cancer, or to tell apocryphal stories about its apparently random nature — of some haggard two-pack-a-day smoker who lived to be 96, versus the exquisite gamine who never smoked, always used sunscreen and did yoga, but went in for a routine checkup and was told she wouldn't see her 25th birthday. But while it used to be difficult to know who would and who would not be its victims, cancer is easier to predict these days. Its causes are actually very well understood, and many types of the disease are preventable — which helps to explain why braggadocio isn't heard in the oncology ward, a place full of regret. Picture yourself lying in one as your dumbstruck spouse and children hover over the bed. Are you really going to tell them you're glad that you ate the wrong foods, never set foot on a treadmill and never stopped smoking? That it was all worth it for a curtailed lifetime of artificial flavorings, binge drinking and postponed health screenings?

Of course not. But are you willing, in the meantime, to modify your behavior? Well, I wonder.

Late last month, the World Cancer Research Fund released a report — Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective — that unambiguously spelled out the things we can do to substantially reduce the risk of getting the disease. Based on an analysis of 7,000 previous studies, the report was billed as the most sweeping examination ever conducted of the relationship between cancer and the way we live. It advises us, inter alia, to be as slim as is healthily possible; limit red meat consumption and avoid processed meats completely; exercise every day; drink with scrupulous moderation, if at all (no more than two standard drinks a day for men, one for women); and forgo the gratuitous calories in things like soft drinks and fruit juice.

We have all been impatient for the time when the damnable vagueness that surrounds public discussion of cancer prevention (Is red wine O.K. or not? Is it cool to order extra bacon with that double cheeseburger?) would be finally dispersed. That time for clarity is now, and the report should therefore have been greeted by a global outburst of thanks, with copies duplicated and shoved in every letterbox. Instead, it has been met with either irritated silence or trite complaints. The feckless comments made to a discussion thread on the BBC news website were typical: "So the choice is, eat boring food, drink no alcohol and spend all my spare time in a gym in exchange for 10 extra years in an old people's home," read one. "If we listened to these scientists we would all be like supermodels eating a lettuce leaf for dinner," scoffed another wit. A couple of entries inevitably referenced the old debauchees that so many of us claim to have heard about but hardly anyone has met: "Can we have a study to find out why some people spend their lives doing everything that is supposed to be bad for them and yet still live until they're ninety?"

Whenever I read remarks like those, I am reminded of the fact that only 4% of our DNA sequences are different from those of chimpanzees, and that like our fellow primates we are but dumb mammals, powerless in the presence of cheap stimulants (Salt! Sugar! Fats!). The arguments we use to justify our dependence on them are callow and banal — why, for example, is eating healthily equated with being "boring," when nothing could be more boring than being dead? Why do we obsessively focus on the one-in-a-million 90-year-olds who survive against all odds, and ignore the countless multitudes who have had their lives radically foreshortened because of cancer related to drinking, smoking or obesity? Why do we utter banalities like "life is for living," even as we pay good money for foods and substances that are little better than poisons?

In the end, a few people will read the World Cancer Research Fund report and act upon it. Most people won't read it, or even want to hear about it, because they have no intention of ever putting down those pork franks or cigars or going on that 30-minute run. They will go on telling any one of the fairy tales that people who are committing slow suicide always tell themselves and each other: that they are happy with their choices, that they have no regrets, that when your time is up it's all to do with the archaic cosmological notion called fate and nothing to do with you.