David L. Katz, MD, responds to a reader in the September 2007 issue of The Oprah Magazine about the merits of eating soy in relation to preventing cancer. His response causes me to pause even more about jumping on any diet bandwagon.

Katz says we should eat soy foods -- just not too much because the evidence linking soy to breast cancer, for example, is mixed.

In comparing soy-eating Japanese women with American women who eat very little soy, researchers find lower rates of breast cancer in the Japanese women. But in a test tube, soy's plant estrogens can speed cancer cell growth. Maybe soy behaves differently in the body than it does in a tube. Or maybe soy has both negative and positive effects on breast cancer. Perhaps it's not soy at all. It could be that the populations eating soy are benefiting from not eating something else, like meat -- the saturated fat found in red meat has been linked to higher cancer rates. Replacing steak with something else may be the protective key.

Prostate cancer has been on the rise for the last thirty years. A small but growing group of scientists are beginning to prove with research what environmentalists and activists in the cancer community have been saying for some time -- the link between environmental toxins that mimic estrogens in the body and reproductive cancer is not coincidental. University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Cincinnati researchers have just completed a study that shows a direct link between the chemical, bisphenol A or BPA -- that leaks from plastic products we use in daily life -- to the development of prostate cancer in later life.

According to the researchers, these findings could have major implications for human disease, and could, at least in part, explain why the prostate cancer rate has surged. Used for about half a century, BPA is a key component in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastic and is one of the world's most widely used industrial chemicals. Unlike carcinogenic chemicals that can cause profound damage to DNA and trigger cancer, BPA seems to cause subtle changes that are passed from one generation to the next generation. It all starts in the womb. To read more, go here.

An oncologist's teenage son once remarked that he was not personally worried about cancer, because he believed before he reached an age where cancer became a real threat for him, cancer will be a disease of the past. I will give you that teenagers tend to be idealistic by nature, but I think he is right. Cancer is our present day mysterious elusive killer, a set of diseases that loom larger than our ability to protect life from them. However, to put it in perspective, the thought of anyone dying from a scratch in modern times seems ridiculous. Before penicillin, infection from something as simple as a scratch was a common killer of many people.

On April 7, at the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, University of Kansas and University of Nebraska researchers will present the discovery of a unifying mechanism into how specific metabolites of natural estrogens react with DNA to cause specific damage that begins the series of events leading to breast, prostate and other cancers.

"We have a novel approach to cancer. We know the initiating step," states Dr. Ercole Cavalieri of the University of Nebraska Medial Center's Eppley Cancer Institute. "We think prevention of cancer is a problem we can solve by eliminating this initiating step. Estrogens can induce cancer when natural mechanisms of protection do not work properly in our body, and the estrogen quinones are able to react with DNA. In fact, if these protections are insufficient, due to genetic, lifestyle or environmental influences, then cancer can result." With each new step of the thousand mile journey towards a better understanding of the inner workings of cancer development, we are coming that much closer to effective methods of prevention in making cancer a disease of the past. Good news for the start of Cancer Control Month.