Rick Foster

As you take a drink of water this morning, you consume a little glyphosate, a little PFAS, a little Lead. As you breathe, a cloud of benzene, ultrafine particulates, and formaldehyde follows you. As you eat, you consume the flotsam and jetsam of the chemical age. They are mostly not exceptional exposures - they are constant, daily, and invisible.

The News Media gushes about ultra-high-cost cancer management. They let cause slip through their sieve, even implying that vegetarian cancer victims “ate too much red meat.” Big Pharma, Big Med and “The News” are a giant cancer massive wealth transfer. Prevention is not as profitable as “treatment.”

The Core Cast: A Toxic Who's Who

Here are the prime suspects, how they get in, and what they do.

Asbestos

Entry: Inhaled microscopic, jagged fibers.

Punchline: The sharp, indestructible dagger that scars lungs, inducing mesothelioma – an ugly and almost exclusively asbestos-linked cancer.

Benzene

Entry: Inhaled from air pollution, tobacco smoke, or through the skin from solvents.

Punchline: The bone marrow saboteur, it shuts down the manufacture of blood cells, inducing leukemias.

Formaldehyde

Entry: Breathing in from off-gassing furniture, flooring, and adhesives.

Punchline: The preservative that does not just keep the dead alive; it is a known cause of nasopharyngeal cancer and leukemia.

PFAS (The "Forever Chemicals")

Entry: Ingestion through contaminated food and water; inhalation through dust.

Punchline: The clingy, uninvited guest that never leaves your body, linked to kidney and testicular cancer, and a weakened immune system.

Glyphosate

Entry: Ingestion from residue on food (e.g., oats and wheat) and water.

Punchline: The weedkiller that has been implicated in court of causing non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Atrazine & Simazine

Entry: Ingestion from drinking water (key contaminants of groundwater).

Punchline: The gender-bending hormone hackers that destroy your endocrine system and are strongly linked to hormone-related cancers.

PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls)

Entry: Ingestion from contaminated fish, meat, and dairy (they bioaccumulate).

Punchline: Banned but not gone, these persistent poisons are a classic cause of cancer, neurotoxicity, and reproductive damage.

DDT/DDE

Entry: Ingestion through contaminated food, particularly from soil that still harbors this banned pesticide.

Punchline: The "miracle" pesticide turned nightmare, thinning eggshells and weakening our own defenses, linked to cancer and developmental issues.

Dioxins & Furans

Entry: Ingestion through animal fats (meat, dairy, fish) where they bioaccumulate.

Punchline: The unwanted byproduct of combustion and industry; some of the most toxic chemicals known, causing cancer and wreaking havoc on reproductive and immune systems.

Heavy Metals (Cadmium, Lead, Mercury)

Entry: Inhalation of dust or fumes; ingestion from contaminated food/water.

Punchline:

Cadmium: The fake zinc that builds up in your kidneys, causing lung and prostate cancer.

Lead: The ancient neurotoxin that shrinks kids' brains and causes cardiovascular disease in adults.

Mercury: The neurological wrecking ball that bioaccumulates in fish, poisoning the nervous system.

Radon

Entry: Breathing radioactive gas seeping from soil into buildings.

Punchline: The invisible, radioactive gas that is the world's second leading cause of lung cancer.

PAHs (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons)

Entry: Breathing from vehicle exhaust, tobacco smoke, and charbroiled meat.

Punchline: The toxic campfire residue, formed when organic matter burns, a major contributor to lung and skin cancers.

Ultrafine Particles & VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds)

Entry: Direct inhalation into the deepest reaches of the lungs, entering the bloodstream.

Punchline: The tiny, airborne taxis that bring toxins directly to your cells, causing systemic inflammation, heart disease, and cancer.

The Extended Universe: What Douses Our Food, Clothes, and Water

The exposure is constant and comes from all sides.

• On Our Food: Conventional crops are bathed in a cocktail of glyphosate, atrazine, and simazine, which then flow into waterways and end up on our plates.
• In Our Water: Agricultural runoff (pesticides), industrial effluent (PFAS, solvents), and aging infrastructure (lead pipes) render every sip a potential dose.
• On Our Fiber: PFAS render fabrics stain-resistant. Formaldehyde resins render garments wrinkle-free. We wear these chemicals next to our skin all day, every day.
• In Our Homes: The air is a brew of off-gassed formaldehyde from furniture, VOCs from air fresheners and cleaners, and PFAS from dust off treated carpets.
• In Our Lungs: The smallest particles - hydrocarbons, benzene, ultrafine pollution - are sucked in deep, bypassing our body's defenses to travel directly into the bloodstream and brain.

The Final Scene: The Cocktail Effect

Picture a smoky backroom in which all the above villains are present. One of them fractures your DNA. Another disables your repair crew. A third flips the hormonal switches that tell the injured cell to divide rapidly. This is not a one-time exposure - it is a daily, low-dose conspiracy. Regulators like to test chemicals one at a time, but life does not work that way. We are living in the mixture. Cancer victims are simultaneously engaged in cancer management and being re-exposed to daily doses of Industrialized Chemical Society.

And the mixture is political. Decades of regulatory capture - where industries lobby and even write the rules meant to regulate them - have diluted safety standards. Deregulation efforts, spearheaded typically by Republican lawmakers, have stripped away oversight in the name of "business freedom." Democrats, on the other hand, have played triangulation politics - taking just enough from industry and conservative proposals to appear "centrist" - and have left many poisonous loopholes intact while crowing about progress.

The result: a system where the watchdogs all too often serve the wolves.

The snipers of death among us today fall from lineages that have their own brand of destruction. Endocrine disruptors, or hormone disruptors, like atrazine, simazine, PCBs, DDT, and ubiquitous PFAS, penetrate our systems and mimic natural messengers, confusing reproductive and development signals in ways that bring on the potential for hormone cancers.

Industrial poisons such as asbestos fibers, formaldehyde resins, and radon gas find their way into our home walls, floors, and even air, penetrating deep into tissues with a force that kills lungs and implants leukemia or mesothelioma. Smoky residues of combustion, from exhaust benzene to PAHs on barbecues, and ultrafine particulates and VOCs that wheel invisibly through dirty air are the smoky afterbirth of a fossil civilization-microscopic killers that penetrate through blood and brain. Pesticides to farm with, whether the herbicide glyphosate or groundwater contaminants atrazine and simazine, arrive in plate and cup, feeding us on a residue of chemical war masked as agriculture.

The poisonous legacy of the ongoing organic pollutants, the forever chemical PFAS and PCBs, taunts time and law: banned decades ago or loathed now, they continue to inhabit our ground, water, fish, and bloodstream, unbreakable and indissociable from flesh. Heavy metals, with the malignant persistence of the periodic table, infest us through pipes, dust, smoke, and seafood-cadmium piling up in kidneys, lead ballooning kids' brains, mercury killing nerves. And radioactive invaders, as represented by radon escaping from the earth, stealthily irradiate millions to ionizing damage, second only to cigarettes as a cause of lung cancer.

Blended, these courses do not work individually but collectively, producing what scientists have the decency to call the cocktail effect: a chemical conspiracy wherein one agent relaxes DNA, another blocks repair, a third interferes with hormonal regulation, and a fourth immunizes the body against itself, leaving it open to cancerous growth.

Many of these chemicals are from products you buy, retail. You work two jobs to buy your current or future cancer. One example is if you are a Leukemia patient taking the cancer management drug Gleevec, you are managing cancer and simultaneously ingesting Lead in your water, Glyphosate, Atrazine, Simazine, Carbamates and Organophosphates (insecticides) in your “fresh produce” and “canned or frozen foods.” You inhale, in every single breath, VOC’s from burned gasoline and diesel. Plainly, your cancer treatment is not in a vacuum bag, your “treatment” includes your daily dose of PFAS from food wrappers. Deregulated, of course, “business freedom.” Your cancer was cocktail-curated by industry, by the people eating into your paychecks.

What You Can Do

This is not a horror tale - you can do something about it:

• Test Your Water: Use home testing kits for pesticides, PFAS, and heavy metals.
• Filter Aggressively: Reverse osmosis systems and high-quality carbon filters can remove many of these toxins.
• Go Organic When You Can: Especially for grains, leafy greens, and produce known to have high pesticide residues.
• Ventilate Your Home: Reduce indoor VOCs with fans, open windows, and air purifiers.
• Advocate: Strive for increased chemical regulation, bans on PFAS, and bring corporations to account instead of their routine of regulatory and media capture.
• Learn about The Dirty Dozen Fruits and Vegetables (always buy these as “Certified Organic:” Strawberries, Spinach, Kale, Collard and Mustard Greens, Grapes, Peaches, Pears, Nectarines, Apples, Bell and Hot Peppers, Cherries, Blueberries, and Green Beans
• Learn about the PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Pesticide Dirty Dozen: Aldicarb, Aldrin, Atrazine, Chlordane, DDT, Dieldrin, EDB, Endrin, Heptachlor, Lindane, Paraquat, Parathion, Methyl Parathion, Pentachlorophenol, and Toxaphene. Learn how these bad actor chemicals permeate their way into your life via Industrialized Factory Farming, Retail Grocers, Regulatory and Media Capture.

Cancer by the numbers, Agrarian vs Industrialized Nations:

Numbers used (ASR - age-standardized incidence rate, per 100,000; GLOBOCAN 2022 fact sheets)

3 countries with very low cancer ASR

• The Gambia - 79.2. Global Cancer Observatory
• Niger - 83.7. Global Cancer Observatory
• Bhutan - 87.6. Global Cancer Observatory

9 countries with highest cancer ASR

• Australia - 462.5. Global Cancer Observatory
• New Zealand - 427.3. Global Cancer Observatory
• Denmark - 374.7. Global Cancer Observatory
• United States - 367.0. Global Cancer Observatory
• Norway - 357.9. Global Cancer Observatory
• Canada - 345.9. Global Cancer Observatory
• Ireland - 344.7. Global Cancer Observatory
• Netherlands - 341.4. Global Cancer Observatory
• Belgium - 324.7. Global Cancer Observatory

List of the corporations that profit most from carcinogens in the Western world:

Bayer/Monsanto, Syngenta/ChemChina, BASF, Corteva Agriscience (DowDuPont spinoff), ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, Saudi Aramco, 3M, DuPont, Chemours, Honeywell, Arkema, Dow Chemical, Koch Industries, Georgia-Pacific (Koch), International Paper, Saint-Gobain, Owens-Corning, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Alcoa, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Freeport-McMoRan, Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Roche, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, UnitedHealth, Cigna, Anthem (Elevance), CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Albertsons/Safeway/Vons.

Endnotes

[1] International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Monographs on the Identification of Carcinogenic Hazards to Humans.
[2] National Cancer Institute, Carcinogen Profiles.

[3] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).
[4] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) IRIS Database.

[5] Hardeman v. Monsanto Co., Case No. 16-cv-00525 (N.D. Cal. 2019).
[6] U.S. Geological Survey: Atrazine and Pesticide Occurrence in Groundwater.

[7] World Health Organization: Dioxins and Their Effects on Human Health.

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The Path to Cancer: A Who's Who of the Toxins in Our Modern World

Rick Foster