Newsletter #37–Aug./Sep. 1996
Letters
San Francisco resident Donna M. Lane, age 44, wrote the following letter to Judy Brodsky, program coordinator of WHEL (Women’s Healthy Eating and Living Trial), at the Northern California Cancer Center, with a copy to BCA. We reprint the letter here with the permission of the author.
Dear Ms. Brodsky:
I received your form letter today asking if I would be interested in participating in your Women’s Healthy Eating and Living Trial. The pamphlet you enclosed suggests that the study wants to investigate whether or not a low-fat, high-fiber diet might affect the recurrence of breast cancer in patients like myself.
I don’t know how much you know about me or from what source you found out that I had breast cancer four years ago, but I want you to consider a few thoughts I had about your research proposal.
Why would anyone who faced a life-threateninq illness in the prime of her life and survived it, at least for the time being, want to spend the next eight years listing everything she ate for such a study, so that everything she ate became infused with the idea of recurrence? Every meal, every snack, every beverage? I already feel guilty when I buy produce at Safeway because I know I can’t wash off the pesticides, and then major news reports tell me the pesticides aren’t carcinogenic so don’t worry about it. Would you be buying…pesticide-free organic fruits and vegetables for the participants?
I grew up in San Francisco during the 1950s. If I get a recurrence, maybe that’s why. I ate a lot of processed foods when I was a child. I had many x-rays on my lungs when I was 17. 1 never had a child. I was breast fed. I had none of the known risk factors for breast cancer when I was diagnosed and no one else in my family had had it.
I am athletic and ate a low-fat diet for 20 years prior to my diagnosis. I have lived in Bernal Heights, which is downwind from Bayview/Hunter’s Point. I am two blocks down the street from a huge microwave dish at the top of Bernal Hill. I am a professional gardener and have used and been exposed to pesticides and to environmental pollution.
If I get a recurrence, no one will know why. But I feel very sorry for the people who participate in such a study, thinking that obsessing with their diets and having their nutrition tainted with their own thoughts and fears of recurrence will be of help to anyone now or in the future. Because maybe the poisons a young person eats seal her future, and no change in diet as an adult has any effect on reversing it. Because maybe fruits and vegetables that are full of pesticides are carcinogenic in spite of news reports to the contrary. Because maybe if my mother and grandmother ate Safeway fruit and vegetables and a low-fat diet, they would have gotten breast cancer before I did.
Remember, the 1950s introduced MSG, DDT and a bunch of other things little children didn’t get in their food, no matter how poor they were, prior to that time.
I think your research will attract a lot of anorexic and obsessive compulsive cancer survivors who will be devastated after adhering to a low-fat, high-fiber diet diligently for, say, five years, only to find another lump. They will think, “God, I’ve done everything for my health and I’ve got it again.” Cancer and health, however, are two different things. I was healthy and fit when I found my cancerous lump, and I am right now, but I don’t know why and you don’t either…
I think breast cancer, testicular cancer and prostate cancer are occurring at earlier ages than ever before because we are eating and breathing and bathing in things that have a direct effect on our reproductive systems. Some of us are more sensitive to these toxins than others and end up with cancer.
Cancer treatment, as you know, is an industry that is probably more lucrative financial than finding a cure is. I think intelligent scientists know this. I think asking victims of this disease to give you eight years of their lives (if they have them) so that you can blame their deaths on dietary fat is pretty unscientific and pretty heartless. Actually, the acronym for your program spells WHELT, not WHEL. Take me off your mailing list.
Donna M. Lane