As we recognize Breast Cancer Awareness Month, you are probably sobered to learn that you have a one in eight chance of getting breast cancer, just like celebrities Supreme Court judge, Sandra Day O'Conner, champion ice skater, Peggy Fleming, and singer, Melissa Etheridge. In addition to wearing a pink ribbon or running in one of the races to raise money for the Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Foundation, I would like to encourage you to take a look at your lifestyle and take steps to reduce your own potential for this disease.

Doctors say that genetics do play a part in the statistics of your probability of getting breast cancer, but there are other factors in our American lifestyle that contribute to those chances as well. Those things, you have control over.

Your cells are designed to live in a healthy environment, which includes proper hydration levels, a healthy pH balance, proper mineral balance, the absence of toxins, proper oxygen levels, etc. If your internal environment balance is upset and your immune system weakened, your cells become stressed and your body can develop diseases, including cancer.

How does your cell environment become unhealthy? Many components can contribute to this imbalance in your cells' environment: an acidic pH balance, improper diet, lack of exercise, low water consumption, improper breathing, and high toxic levels.

Be sure you keep track of your pH balance. If you test your saliva pH in the morning before eating or drinking anything, you should have a reading of 7.0. If your system is too acidic, you can suffer from excessive fatigue, weak kidneys, easy weight gain, excessive stress, reluctant weight loss, constipation, aches, pains, headaches, malaise, proneness to catching colds, mental confusion, and even lack of clear thinking. Research is showing that cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment as well.

Wouldn't you like to take steps to put your body into the best shape possible for fighting this and many other diseases? As you can see, one way you can do that is to keep your body's pH balance in an alkaline range. Here are a few ways to achieve that goal:

Design your diet to produce an alkaline environment for your cells. Concentrate on alkaline-triggering foods like fruits and vegetables. (Avoid those vegetables grown in mineral depleted soils.) Limit very acid-triggering foods like meats, fish, and poultry. Eat reasonable amounts of acidic eggs, dairy products, and carbohydrates like breads, pasta, and cereals.

Relax! Learn to handle your stress more effectively. Tests have proved that strong negative emotions like pent-up anger and bad reactions to stress cause the body to produce acids that destroy proper pH balances. Get plenty of rest to refresh yourself and exercise to relieve stress's effects from your body. Remember, even your thoughts contribute to your body's environment. Research in this area suggests that lack of control over stress has negative effects on immune function and contributes to tumor growth.

Breathe deeply! It's important to manage your body's oxygen levels. Another effect of acidic pH balances is that your body falls into an anaerobic condition when body pH balances falls below 7.0, leading to organs becoming acidic. Your body now is susceptible to many diseases, including cancer. The lack of proper oxygen in the body contributes to a cancerous environment.

Nobel Prize winner, Otto Warburg proved half a century ago, that a lack of oxygen respiration in cells causes cancer. His work, "The Prime Cause and Prevention of Cancer" explains that cancer occurs when any cell is denied 60% of its oxygen requirements. Instead of normal oxygen respiration, the cells experience a fermentation of sugar, which feeds cancer cells. Research shows that cancer cells can't exist when there is enough oxygen.

So, how can you increase your oxygen levels? Start by breathing properly and deeply, increasing oxygen intake, and exercising regularly to increase cardiac flow carrying oxygen to the cells. This changes the internal environment to one that which cancer doesn't thrive in.

Drink! Drink! Drink! Another contributor to an unhealthy cellular environment is improper consumption of water. I'm sure you've heard that a great percentage of the body is made of water, but did you realize that every system in your body depends on water to function properly? Without enough water, you don't absorb nutrients and vitamins, you become constipated, have more kidney stones and urinary infections, and you can become dehydrated. If you become dehydrated, your blood gets thicker, your heart has to work harder to circulate it, your brain feels sluggish, and you can have trouble concentrating. Can you believe that water, or the lack of it, can affect your body to such degrees?

Incidentally, as you balance these areas of your lifestyle, you could reap other rewards besides maintaining a healthy cell environment. You could lose weight, sleep better, have more energy, have better hair and skin, and enjoy a greater level of wellness than you have ever experienced.

Copyright (c) 2006 Dr. Eileen Silva