The main reasons for my getting breast cancer at 35 appeared to be genetic ones. There was talk – in literature, informal conversations between friends, and research involving women newly diagnosed with breast cancer – of stress being a contributing factor to the development of cancer. All I knew was that the only environmental factor that I could name as a possible contributor was stress. In caring for my mother and my son I experienced a lot of it. However, I didn’t blame stress for my cancer, but rather I believed I inherited the tendency towards cancer from my mother.
Stress comes in two forms: from working hard or from a situation you have no control over. The latter was what allegedly could dupe you.
Scientist Dr Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2009 for her research into telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes. She worked with psychologists on telomeres, stress and meditation. It appeared that she had proven a mind–body connection. Her Australian voice with its US West Coast twang came to me over the radio in my kitchen. She said, In my lab, we’re finding that psychological stress actually ages cells, which can be seen when you measure the wearing down of the tips of the chromosomes, those telomeres.
Dr Blackburn’s work helped us understand why breast cancer cells divide without normal control. Her work also had a lot to say about bad stress and good stress. She said:
… there’s all sorts of good stress; I just came back from the gym and believe me I stressed my body and I’m incredibly happy. And so this is a stress where you rise to a challenge, you control it and that’s something that we’re evolved to do very well, you know, the zebra runs away from the lion and so forth. So we can do all the kind of acute reaction to stress and acute stress situations very, very well. But what happens is that in the long term if the stress situation is something that the individual sees always as a threat or continues to see threatening rather than challenging situations, doesn’t identify resources to cope, etc. etc. That’s the kind of stress that’s been long known to have clear clinical outcomes which are poor outcomes. So that’s been known from a number of studies for a number of years. But the part of the puzzle that we added in was that we said well let’s look at ageing of cells right at the heart of the cell’s decision to renew or not and that’s the decision that a cell makes based on many things. But one of them is whether it feels its genetic material is at risk, and if the telomere is run down the cell will stop operations and will not self-renew.
So we looked and said, does the running down of telomeres with ageing have any relationship to stress? And we found in one case a causal direction that the chronic stress was, we think, causally related to the telomeres running down. In other words – the longer the number of years a person was under an objective stressor … the more years the person was under stress the worse was their shortening of their telomeres over and above what normally would happen just in the normal course of ageing. So that to us was very interesting, because it said somehow chronic stress is having effects on the brain, which we clearly know, which is having effects on physiology in all sorts of ways, and one end result of that is that the telomeres are running down and our cells are losing the ability to renew.
The attention to detail of my obsessive tendencies re-focussed on a healthy diet and exercise, as the stress of caring for my mother was behind me but the stress of having cancer and a high-needs child was smack in front of me. I was doing everything possible on the conventional medical front, so I turned to my Self. What opportunities did I have to improve? The first thing that raised its sugary head was chocolate. Oh to swim in Willy Wonka’s chocolate stream. I loved the stuff. I cut back on my consumption.
My breast surgeon recommended I read a well-researched book about new ways of eating to support your body, written by a clinical professor of psychiatry, Dr David Servan-Schreiber, who’d had two brain tumours. He kept cancer at bay for years longer than his prognosis. A friend of his had asked how he was treating his terrain: the body’s underlying health, separate to medical intervention. At the time he was working so hard at the hospital he had a lunch of chilli con carne, a bagel and a can of Coke. He reflected later how this was an explosive combination of white flour and sugar, together with animal fats loaded with omega-6s, hormones and environmental toxins. He had also reduced his exercise and dropped his interest in meditation. He had done nothing to look after himself – to support his body to reduce his chance of relapse.
After reading his section on diet I had another light-bulb realisation. It was like the decision to stop re-touching door handles and to stop taking ecstasy. This time I immediately excluded all pastries and fried food, in addition to the hot chips I’d already eliminated, from my diet. Easy. I haven’t touched any since and never will again. I modified main meals to include more steamed greens like Brussels sprouts, and I took up green tea to replace my English tea with milk habit. (I converted back to English tea six years on as the taste was too good to miss.) With chocolate I reached for 70 per cent cocoa, which was higher in nutrients and therefore better for you, or I didn’t eat
