Cancer and Carcinogens

The word “cancer” alone can strike fear into many people.  To many of us, we associate cancer with death and sickness.  But what is cancer and how does it work?  Well, a cancer cell is formed when the DNA replication process is messed up.  This is referred to as a mutation.   You may not have cancer, but the cells in your body have probably “mutated” millions of times without you knowing it.  So why do we not all have cancer?  Well this is because the cell has several series of fail-safes.  Each cell has a sort of spell check, but for DNA oppose to words.  Your cells will recognize a mutation in DNA and cut it out, replacing it with the correct sequence.  But even this does not work 100 percent of the time.  If the cell recognizes that the mutation cannot be fixed, it will attempt to kill itself.  This is done to prevent the repeating of an incorrect DNA sequence in future cells.  However, sometimes mutations make it past both of these fail-safes.  When this happens it can result in a cancer cell.  This is bad because this incorrect cell can reproduce.  The cells can than spread its wrong DNA to daughter cells.  These cells can also lack the ability to stop reproducing.  Normal cells will pick up an external signal to stop reproducing, or start reproducing.  Cancer cells just continually dived.  This is where your tumors would form.  And within these tumors, the cells can still mutate from each other. 

This means in one tumor there can be numerous different types of cancer cells.  This is bad because different cells may than be immune to different drugs used to treat them. This is one of the main challenges the medical community faces when dealing with cancers.  So what causes this type of thing to happen?  Why do we see such a rise in cancer and other terminal illnesses recently?  Well diet is a big part of it.  And so is your environment and other ways chemicals enter your body.  An example of this is smoking.  Smoking cigarettes is known to lead to cancer because the cigarette contains many carcinogens.  A carcinogen is any substance capable of causing cancer in any living tissue.  Many times when talking about carcinogens we are referring to some sort of chemical.  But that is not always the case.  For example, processed meat is now considered a carcinogen.  This is alarming because many of us put that in our body every day.  Many of the pesticides on our food are considered carcinogens.  Even a lot of the chemicals in our personnel care products contain carcinogens.  This includes chemicals for fragrance in our shampoos and conditioners.  Another massive source of carcinogen is pollution.  This can enter the body through the air we breathe, water we drink, food we eat etc.  Whether you like it or not, you probably come in contact with a good amount of carcinogens a day in small doses.  The FDA and other organizations are in the continuous process of identifying as many carcinogens as they can for our safety.