Emerging Risk Factors

Emerging Risk Factors (for breast cancer survivors)

Emerging Risk Factors

The terrain is everything.
—Louis Pasteur

Goal: Learn about emerging risk factors for breast cancer

In mid-nineteenth-century France, a vigorous war of ideas raged in the upper
echelons of the scientific community. On one hand, Louis Pasteur was developing
his germ theory of disease, and on the other, Claude Bernard was focused on the
milieu interieur, or the internal environment of the host. Bernard felt that the
nourishment of the body, its ability to get rid of toxins and wastes, and the strength
of its immune system provided the foundation for successfully confronting both
acute and chronic disease. Although Pasteur and others fought long and hard for the
supremacy of the microbe theory of disease, Pasteur experienced a dramatic
turnaround late in life and, on his deathbed, is said to have uttered, “Bernard was
right. The microbe is nothing. The terrain is everything.”

We wholeheartedly agree that healthy “terrain” is the foundation for a healthy
body that can mount a strong defense against cancer. In this chapter, we’ll cover the
basics of emerging risk factors for breast cancer, the ones that deal with the internal
terrain as Bernard or Pasteur might envision it today. These factors include dietary
and nutritional influences, toxic exposures, and the health and equilibrium of the
body’s own internal systems, such as the hormonal, digestive, and immune systems.
We consider these risk factors to be so important that we’ve devoted entire chapters
to many of them later in the book. Others we’ll just touch on briefly in this chapter.