Cancer rates stayed low in traditional African and Inuit populations until they adopted Western diets and lifestyles. The speaker argues genetics play a smaller role than diet and environment in whether someone gets cancer.
If you go back, so Dennis Burkitt was this sort of legendary Irish surgeon and he went to Africa and you know he discovered Burkitt's lymphoma and stuff and it's very interesting story but you know he looked at these Africans who were eating a traditional diet, living a traditional lifestyle and he said, boy, these people just don't get cancer and the whites of course were getting colorectal cancer at the same rate as they were in the UK, for example. And so they called these things diseases of civilization. So obesity, type two diabetes, and cancer would come as people changed their lifestyle. But you see this actually all over the world. So the Inuit in the far north, some people used to call them Eskimos. So again, eating a traditional diet, very high in, say, animal meat, you know, whale meat and seal blubber and stuff. That's their traditional diet. They never get those cancers that we get. I mean, they get some viral cancers, but they don't get colorectal cancer, breast cancer. In fact, the University in Ontario, Canada used to send an expedition to the Arctic Circle sort of every year to find out why these people were immune. But of course, they weren't actually immune because as soon as in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they changed their lifestyle to Western sort of lifestyles with sort of bread and sugar and all that sort of processed foods that we ate. Then you started to see all the cancers. So clearly it wasn't a genetic problem because the gene pool of these Africans or these Inuit were not changing. But it was the soil that, and it comes back of course to diet and lifestyle, which is the most important thing because that's the main thing that's changing and these people come over. That is what is the biggest determinant of cancer.
