Day 88 – A Celebration, A Setback, And A Smoker’s Lament

“A cautious people learns from its past; a sensible people can face its future. Canadians, on the whole, are both.”

~ Desmond Morton

190.2 lbs

Yay, it’s Canada Day! For non-Canucks this is the day we celebrate having become a Dominion. Fireworks, festivities, music in the park… think “4th of July” but 3 days earlier and with stronger beer.

Of course this year I can’t touch the stuff. First I postponed my birthday, now Canada Day. Starving ones self for social awareness tends to have its inconvenient side.

Canada Day fireworks in the locak park. Or a smoker's damaged lung. I forget.

I’m fatigued. I’m cranky. I have constant headaches. I have trouble sentencing together a string at times.  Half my friends think I’m nuts for doing this. The other half know the first half are right, but feign support because they know WHY I’m doing this.

But the physical result? Despite muscle loss and organs planning to rebel and overthrow my regime, I’ve had no appreciable weight loss in 22 bloody days – almost 1/4 of the starvation phase of this project. This is really starting to get on my nerves.

I have 12 days left, in which I hope to drop at least 10 more lbs. I know, I know – there’s just no pleasing some people.

Well, there is pleasing some people: Some eggheads at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said that they may have a clue why some smokers never get lung cance, yet some non-smokers or former smokers do. Lung cancer is the most common form of cancer in the world, killing 1.2 million people per year, and 90% of it percent of it is caused by cigarette smoking.

About 10 to 15% of smokers get lung cancer. Quit cheering that raspy, wishful cheer smokers: there’s still heart disease, stroke or emphysema waiting to take you down like hyenas on a lame impala.

the IARC study found a link between those who developed lung cancer and their levels of vitamin B6, found in meat, nuts, veggies, and bananas; and an amino acid called methionine, found in meat, fish and nut protein.

“What we have found” says lead egghead Paul Brennan, who published the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), “is that these two things are strong markers of lung cancer risk, but we have not shown they are causing that rise in risk. This indicates that diet may have an important role in lung cancer development”

But? “…it’s still a little premature to say simply that if you change your diet and eat more foods with these vitamins then you’ll change your future lung cancer risk.”

Yup, non-smokers can get lung cancer too, pussibly from a combination of second hand smoke and/or these nutritional deficiencies. But the risk of getting lung cancer was much higher in smokers to start with.

“For the two nutrients together, the risk reduction was about 60 percent,” Paul said. “Obviously if you had a very high risk because you smoke, then a 60 percent reduction of that is quite important, although not as important as quitting smoking.”

Brennan said his findings seem to bolster other research that linked vitamin B deficiencies to increased probability of DNA damage and subsequent gene mutations. For instance, a Swedish study in 2005 found that women with high levels of vitamin B6 had a lower risk of developing colorectal cancer.

“Basically, these B vitamins and nutrients are all involved in the pathway which is responsible for the creation and maintenance of DNA,”  – again, Paul. “So obviously you would want that pathway to work as well as possible.”

So yep – smokers: don’t just cut down the cancer sticks you put in your mouth. Put more healthy meats and veggies in there instead.