One of the most exciting reports I have ever read, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk – What We Can Do Now, was released this week by the President’s Cancer Panel, along with significant coverage by Nicholas Kristof in The NY Times, Lyndsey Layton in The Washington Post and Liz Szabo in USA Today.

This signals a pivotal change in how we approach cancer (and, I hope, how we approach other illnesses that have increased in our lifetimes). The report acknowledges that we face “grievous harm” from chemicals that surround us every day and that we have “grossly underestimated” the amount of illness caused by these exposures – illness “that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.”

Why is this so exciting? By recognizing the importance of chemical and environmental causes of disease, we open the door to achievable environmental solutions. We can run in the right direction as we race toward prevention – not just race toward a cure. This report is about cancer – but the same issues apply to asthma, autism, learning disabilities, allergies, and more.

And it starts with kids. The report highlights the game-changing Environmental Working Group studies on umbilical cord blood that I helped EWG develop and release, where we found 180 carcinogens in babies (and 217 chemicals that were toxic to the brain or nervous system), even before the babies were born – chemicals that could set a trajectory for disease much later in life.

Parents can take simple steps right now to lower their children’s risk, from the cleaners you use in your home, to the plastics you use around food and beverages (watch our for BPA and phthalates!), to the sunscreens you put on your family’s skin.

In particular, the report highlights the value of organic food. There are ten foods (eleven, if you count wine) that I see as most important to choose organic.

And we can work together to change our chemical laws, under which the government has only assessed about 200 chemicals for safety out of the 80,000 chemicals on the market.

It’s a new era in our fight against cancer. It’s a new era for health.

Each day 3,000 kids start smoking.  One third of them will die from their addiction.

Most preschool children today view smoking as an unhealthy, negative behavior.  Somewhere around the time of kindergarten, however, this often begins to change.  They begin to think of positive aspects of smoking – that it is cool, that it can help you calm down, that it’s grown up, etc.  Many kids become quite ambivalent about smoking at this age.  Your greatest opportunity to prevent smoking lies between about the ages of 6 and 12.

When my son, Kevin, was a participant in the California State Scholastic Chess Championships.  During the lunch break, we grabbed a quick bite to eat.  Over lunch, another of my children (who shall remain nameless) picked up a straw, placed it still-wrapped in the mouth and began to pretend to smoke a cigarette – feeling very grown-up.  Quickly I checked to make sure no one in the restaurant recognized us (just kidding!).  Actually, we used it as an opportunity to talk again about all the people who are killed by cigarettes, and why smoking is not a game.

During this age, children need to hear you reinforce the consequences of smoking often, particularly the short-term consequences.  Get your kids talking about what they think about cigarettes.  Their ideas will guide your teaching.

Children also need to hear the truth about smoking from their schools.  Check to see that your children’s schools have smoking curricula.  The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) have free guidelines for curricula available, outlining what should be covered, how it should be communicated, and when these lessons are most important.  School-age children often look up to their teachers a great deal.  If the teachers’ lounge smells like smoke, children will notice the smell on their teachers.  When kids hear one thing from their teachers and see (or smell) another, the message is badly undermined.  If teachers who smoke wish they could quit (and a great many smokers do), it could be helpful to tell the children this, giving them a vivid example of the addictive powers of nicotine.

A teacher could even ask the class to encourage her in a stint at trying to quit – the class could function as a kind of support group.  If the teacher succeeded in quitting, the message to kids would be that they can be powerful health-promoters.  If the teacher failed, the message to kids would be that cigarettes are indeed terribly addictive.  In that case, she could promise to try again in a few months.

Avoid pretend smoking and candy cigarettes.  Some of the packages of candy cigarettes available look amazingly like the real thing.  If some other industry had their product copied, lawsuits would quickly ensue.  But not in this case!  The tobacco companies are glad to have kids imagine and model smoking behaviors.  Bubble gum is also available in packaging that looks like a tin of smokeless tobacco.

Help your child to notice the marketing campaign that is actively trying to deceive children and adults.  If your child sees a tobacco ad full of smiling, active people in a magazine, ask what the tobacco industry is trying to trick you into thinking about cigarettes (that smoking makes you happy and athletic).  Ask what the truth is (that smoking discolors the teeth, gives you bad breath, causes cancer in the mouth and throat, and decreases your athletic ability).  Kids can really get into this game, and it helps make them wiser.

In addition to emphasizing the health dangers of tobacco, children at this age need to be taught a vital skill – how to say “no.”  Throughout the school years, peer opinions and behavior gain increasing sway.  Sometimes children will start to smoke if they don’t want to, just because they’re afraid to refuse a friend.  Teaching refusal skills to your school-age child is well worth the investment.  A great way to do this is to practice.  If your child is able to say that cigarettes are harmful, ask “What would you say if your best friend offered you a cigarette?”  Let your child try out several answers.  Kids who have practiced and who have ready responses will be more free to make their own choices regarding tobacco, sex, alcohol, drugs, and nutrition.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, colon cancer is the third-most common cancer in both men and women, and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the US.

Since colon cancer tends to strike people over the age of 50, parents with kids at home might not be thinking about colon cancer prevention right now, especially if you’re dealing with everything from potty training to soccer practice to keeping everyone in the house flu free. I’d guess that most of the DrGreene.com community hasn’t had a colonoscopy, which is recommended for older age groups.

We who are busy wiping noses and going to PTA meetings are fortunate, in a way, that colon cancer has gotten so much attention as more cases come to light. This means that researchers are looking into more ways to prevent the problem so that we may not have to face the dismal news of a cancer diagnosis.

Aside from the always-applicable advice to eat more fresh vegetables and other fiber-rich whole foods, two recent studies give us even more hope for colon cancer prevention and provide more reasons to love two of my favorite nutritional building blocks: soy and vitamin D.

In one exciting recent study, results suggest that a family of natural fat molecules in soy, called sphingadienes, both prevent colon tumor cells from forming within the body (prevention) and are even potent at causing already cancerous cells to die (possible treatment) Click here for more information to help you sort out the soy facts from the myths.

The vitamin D study reported that people with higher levels of vitamin D have a 40 percent lower risk of colon cancer. This is consistent with a number of other studies about the protective effects of vitamin D.

It’s so simple to make changes to your life today to capitalize on these newfound insights into this deadly disease. Vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin: our body makes its own nutrients when our skin is exposed to sunshine. But most of us have learned to cover up with sunscreen and protective clothing (which we should). Click here to learn how much sun exposure is needed to get plenty of vitamin D. If you’re not sure your child is getting enough from the sun, I recommend getting at least 400 IU a day from some kind of milk or from a multivitamin or vitamin D3 supplement.

And adding soy to your diet in the form of foods made from the whole soybean can also give you the other health benefits of this wonderful bean. With the other benefits of vitamin D and soy, you’ll get much more out of the switch than just a reduction in the risk for colon cancer.

Your turn… what’s your favorite soy recipe or food, and how do you get your vitamin D?

Fryst H., Oskouian, B., Bandhuvula, P., Gong, Y., Byun, H.S., Bittman, R., Lee, A.R., Saba, J.D. “Natural Sphingadienes Inhibit Akt-Dependent Signaling and Prevent Intestinal Tumorigenesis.” Cancer Research, 15 Dec 2009, 69(24):9457-64.

Jenab, M., et al. “Association Between Pre-Diagnostic Circulating Vitamin D Concentraion and Risk of Colorectal Cancer in European Populations: A Nested Case-Control Study.” BMJ, 2010, 340:b5500.

A recent analysis of several studies about soy* consumption concluded that women who eat the most soy may decrease the likelihood of developing ovarian or uterine cancers by up to 40 percent. The December 2009 analysis, published in BJOG, An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, examined the data from 169,000 women, including about 2 percent who had one of the two types of cancer. Their findings suggest that women who regularly consume soy or soy components from foods such as legumes, soy curd, or soy protein were less likely to have either cancer.

As the researchers pointed out, this is not definitive proof that a daily dose of tofu will protect you from ovarian or uterine cancers, but we have other evidence that eating soy can be very beneficial. An earlier study of the eating habits of people who lived to be 100+ in Okinawa, Japan, (the largest population of centenarians in the world) concluded that about two servings a day of whole soy foods (tofu is a staple in their diets), may be one of the main reasons they found 80 percent fewer heart attacks and 75 percent fewer hormone-dependent cancers, including breast, prostate, ovarian and colon compared to Americans.

Soy lives a complicated life in the American diet, thanks to its most common format, soybean oil. Soybean oil accounts for about two thirds of all vegetable oils or animal fats consumed in this country. And nearly 90 percent of all soy is genetically modified.

Whole soy products should be your focus when you choose soy as a healthy life choice. Your choices these days are endless, as creative food producers have made great strides to create great-tasting non-GMO or organic whole soy products. Far beyond tofu and edamame of yesteryear, today you can choose soy yogurts, soy burgers, soy milk, soy nuts and more – even soy ice cream! The point is to incorporate healthful iterations of soy into your diet to benefit from its best health benefits.

For more information, read my series on soy at DrGreene.com.

*DrGreene.com teamed up with Silk Soy Milk from September of 2009 to January 2010 to help teach families about important issues concerning nutrition and soy.

In case you didn’t catch my article in this month’s Glamour magazine, here’s a summary of what I consider to be the most important organic switches every woman should make, if she eats these foods.

1. Yogurt: Most women don’t drink a lot of milk, but perhaps you’re reaching for yogurt in the dairy case when you need a snack on the go. Organic yogurts are made without the use of added hormones or antibiotics have higher levels of omega-3s. Organic dairy products are not only good for our bodies – they can be much less damaging to the environment. Watch more about organic dairy choices….
2. Super Salads: Conventional lettuce has some of the highest levels of toxic synthetic pesticides of any food. Choose fresh organic greens as a salad base, then slice in organic veggies to add color and vitamins. You’ll benefit from almost an extra serving of fruits and vegetables a day when you choose organic greens because organic can average more than 25 percent more antioxidants.
3. An Organic Apple a Day: Apples are second only to bananas on our fruit shopping lists, but most people don’t know they can contain toxic synthetic pesticides including organophosphates, even when they’re washed and peeled. Choose organic apples as well as nectarines, peaches, pears, strawberries, cherries and imported grapes, as all these fruit are more vulnerable to pesticides. Watch more on apples….
4. You Say Tomato, I Say Organic: The average American consumes about 90 pounds of tomatoes a year, mostly in sauces and catsup. Organic tomatoes can have significantly more lycopene, an antioxidant that may lower cancer and heart disease risks and may do other wonderful things. Watch more on catsup….
5. Organic – It’s What’s for Dinner: Besides not making use of the added hormones. grass-fed beef is often leaner than conventional beef and can contain about 5 times the good omega-3 fats. And choosing free-range beef promotes farming practices that help our environment as well. More about beef…
6. Bonus – Red, Red Wine: Scientists were happy to discover the health benefits of drinking a moderate amount of red wine.  Resveratrol, an antioxidant in the skin of red grapes might help slow aging, prevent cancer and do other wonderful things. Organic wines can average about 32 percent more resveratrol and go splendidly with a nice organic marinara and organic salad. More on red wines….

Want more organic recommendations for the whole family? Click here for Dr. Greene’s Organic Prescription.

Parents are often surprised when I tell them that a great number of the products we use in our homes are not necessarily evaluated and declared safe by a government entity. The paints that cover your walls, the stain-resistant fabric that covers your furniture, the very carpet under your feet… these things can contain toxic chemicals that could be harmful to you and your family.

This fall I filmed a short video for Healthy Child Healthy World (I’m proud to be a member of their advisory board) that talks about how you can be a knowledgeable, diligent advocate for products that are good for your family and for the planet. Kids have the most to gain. According to the EPA, carcinogens average 10 times more potent for your kids than for an adult – and in some cases 65 times more potent – or even more – at the same dose that adults get. And kids get typically get higher doses. Adults may eat about 1/40th of their body weight each day; kids may eat 1/10th of theirs. Pound for pound, kids eat more than we do, drink more than we do, and inhale more fumes than we do.

Many of the biggest health concerns for our children are on the rise: asthma, ADHD, allergies, cancer in babies, diabetes, etc.. All of these are linked to environmental exposures. When you’re making decisions about the products in your home, cast a knowledgeable eye from the ground up. Think about the carpet and the pad underneath, the paint on your walls, the antibacterial cleansers you use throughout the home – even the personal care products you use on your body. The choices you make today are opportunities that could give your kids a better chance for the best of health throughout their lives.

Today at our annual meeting in Boston, the American Academy of Pediatrics doubled the recommended amount of vitamin D that children get each day to 400 IU, in response to mounting evidence of the life-long health benefits of getting plenty of the sunshine vitamin.

I applaud this move, and have felt for some time that the old 200 IU recommendation was too low. Taking the vitamin daily will be important for many kids, because they do not get enough from their sun exposure and diet. Over the summer, research showed an astonishing forty percent of healthy babies and toddlers were not getting enough – and the same was true of American teens.

The more closely we look at vitamin D, the more we learn about how important this sunshine vitamin is to both short and long-term health for children. Exciting research has linked getting abundant vitamin D to helping to prevent asthma, eczema, diabetes, and cancer – among other things.

It’s become more difficult to get enough vitamin D in recent years because kids spend more time indoors, wear more sunscreen (appropriately), eat less tuna (because of mercury concerns), and drink less vitamin D-fortified milk (in favor of sweetened drinks with less nutrition). It would take a quart of milk a day to get the levels now recommended.

I just heard from Gary Kreps, Professor of Health Communication at George Mason University and e-patient pioneer, reporting about drastic cutbacks to the Cancer Information Service programs. Excellent up-to-date information is an important foundation for Participatory Medicine.

The National Cancer Act mandated that the National Cancer Institute provide the latest cancer information to the general public. To do this, NCI should be expanding the Cancer Information Service, not slashing its programs.

The CIS has been an invaluable resource for many of us. We are in an economic time when any discretionary spending should be considered very carefully.

But new cancer diagnoses will continue, in good times and in bad. We will need to spend money on this problem one way or another.

I suspect that widely disseminating the best information on prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer is one of the most cost-effective investments we can make in this area. If you agree, you may want to help mobilize congressional support.

By the way, for those of you who know Gary, he is in Milan for the month teaching a seminar on Communication and Cancer at the University of Milan. He is an expert on the research surrounding the impact of the major cancer information deficits in our society, and surrounding the power of quality information to improve outcomes. If you haven’t had a chance to hear him speak, do.

As a father, I have a desire to teach, provide for and protect my children. For me, one way to do all three of these is to choose organic foods for my family. I now know this as a physician, but I first learned it as a father and a husband.

That’s often the way it is. Medical textbooks don’t contain all the answers. Intuition and personal experiences often pave the way for later scientific understanding.

Today there is a strong, mounting body of science that is illuminating the benefits of growing crops organically. There is also evidence showing the harm of certain chemicals used in foods. And where we just don’t know the effects of new chemicals, we can proceed with precaution and protection for our children and their world. But I didn’t always feel this way.

When my first son was born, I was still in medical school. His knowledge of food came from what we fed him and what he saw us eat. Children learn more from what we do than from what we say. As a busy medical student, intern and then resident, I ate a typical rushed American diet: convenience foods, fast foods, junk foods. I ate some fruit most days and even less in the way of vegetables.

I was more interested in nutrition than my peers and went out of my way to take additional nutrition courses to supplement the meager offerings in the core curriculum. Still, I knew little. And what I did know was pushed aside by habit and a busy schedule.

By the time my youngest son came along, I was an established pediatrician. I had learned a lot about many aspects of health and wellness. I knew that there were benefits to foods grown organically, but I didn’t believe this deeply enough for it to become a priority in my family’s life. Then everything changed…

Crashing Insight When my youngest was a baby, my wife, Cheryl, was radiant and full of life. We were enjoying parenting and working together. Life was great!

Then Cheryl was diagnosed with stage III, high-risk, inflammatory breast cancer. The prognosis was grim. She was not expected to live to see the New Year. I grappled with the question “Where does breast cancer come from?” Like so many women with breast cancer, Cheryl had no history of the disease in her family. But she grew up on a farm.

It turns out that even though farmers in the United States are healthier than the general population in many ways, they have higher rates than the American public at large for several cancers, including leukemias, lymphomas, myelomas, brain cancers, and cancers of the lip, stomach, skin and prostate. But it’s not just the farmers themselves who get sick. Their children also have higher rates of reproductive tumors, leukemias and brain cancers—kidney and bone cancers, too.

As a girl, Cheryl could hear the pesticide sprayers rumble as she lay in her bed. She drank water from a well on the farm, a water source we later learned had been contaminated with pesticides. She bathed in this water. Her family cooked with it.

Several lines of reasoning suggest that agricultural pesticides used on farms are partly responsible for the increased cancer rates we see in farm families . The structure and function of these chemicals, their effects on animals and what we are learning about their effects on people are all reasons for concern.

The first studies I read about pesticides and breast cancer were a startling wake-up call for me . If these chemicals are hurting people and animals on the farm, how might they be harming the rest of us? Why wait for science to answer this question? The enormity of what we still don’t know about their effects demands thoughtful choices.

Against all odds, Cheryl survived her cancer. Did her early toxic pesticide exposure cause her cancer? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I don’t want our children and other children put at this risk.

A Father’s Protection Most children today don’t grow up on farms. Does choosing organic food make a difference for them? Researchers at the Department of Environmental Health in the School of Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Washington started tackling this question by measuring pesticide levels in urine samples from preschool children in suburban Seattle. They divided the children into two groups: those who were fed mostly conventional foods and those who were fed mostly organic foods.

The urine samples of children who ate what people call conventional diets had mean pesticide concentrations about nine times higher than did those of children who ate organic! The results indicated that these preschool kids had exceeded the safe pesticide exposure levels set by the EPA and that their health was at increased risk. By contrast, those children who ate organic foods were well below the EPA levels deemed to cause negligible risk. By feeding your family organic foods, you safeguard them from harm and help them build healthy bodies.

Choosing organic for my family is one way I protect it. Additionally, when we provide our children with organic foods, we are often giving them an even bigger edge—like organic blueberries instead of partially hydrogenated snacks or organic orange juice instead of high-fructose sodas. What a gift! What an important part of our responsibility!

Whether or not cell phones cause cancer remains very controversial, but a renowned neurosurgeon has released a provocative paper reviewing over 100 scientific and medical studies, and concluded that the link between cell phone use and brain tumors on the same side of the head is now clear, and that tumors from cell phone use are now a bigger public health threat than cigarette smoking.

With cigarettes, there is a very long time lag between starting the habit and developing lung cancer. It’s not surprising that it took decades to discover the link.

Even though cell phones are now used by 3 billion people, they have not been very common for very long. Data in this study suggest that brain tumor rates may double after only 10 years of regular cell phone use, and continue to rise. Cell phones emit a plume of electromagnetic radiation that can penetrate our brains, a major electrical organ. Whether or not this proves to be the looming public health crisis the author predicts, I expect that any risk would be greatest for young children.

The protection surrounding a child’s brain is thinner, the penetration of the radiation is deeper, the brain tissue is more conductive, their brains are changing more rapidly, and they could have a longer lifetime of exposures. Studying chemical exposures, the EPA has found that physical carcinogens average about ten times more dangerous in young children than in adults. Within five years the extent of the risk should be very clear, one way or another. While these issues are being sorted out, it makes sense to me to minimize the time young children spend on the cell phone unless it is important. Keeping the phone at least 8 inches away from the head by using the speakerphone greatly reduces the radiation – but even an inch or two helps. Bluetooth ear pieces and regular unshielded headphones, though, aren’t recommended in this paper, because they can turn the head into an antenna for the phone signal. Shielded headsets or those with an air flow gap can greatly reduce radiation exposure to the head.

We shouldn’t assume that because radiation is invisible to the naked eye it is harmless. Nor assume that because a danger hasn’t been proven in the first decade of widespread child-use that the habit is safe. Nor should we panic. New brain tumors occur in about 15 out of 100,000 people in the general population each year. Doubling that rate would only raise it to 30 out of 100,000 people. The odds against a tumor for an individual cell phone user would still be more than 3000 to 1. On the other hand, with 3 billion users, cell phones could potentially cause about 500,000 new brain tumors a year after 10 years of use – a big public health issue. And the rate after using a cell phone for 40 years? I hope we never find out. I hope that if these risks are proven, safer technologies will be developed long before then.