The other day I was exploring the grocery store, trying to find myself a suitable snack to have in the interim of my classes. As I did, I was reminded of how alarming the “food” we eat can be in terms of its effect on our health, with ingredients such as BHT, a cancer-causing agent, tagged on to a long list of ingredients.
This got me thinking about what, in fact, causes cancer and illness in general in the first place. In the classic model of biology, we are taught that certain stimuli are known to “turn on” cancer genes and everyone carries in them some number of cancer cells. Only when this cancer cell production is uncontrolled does cancer itself become more rampant and destructive in the body. More
