Inhale for health

This research is a bit old (October 2013) but recently caught my eye:

Research out of Japan shows that walking in the woods also may play a role in fighting cancer. Plants emit a chemical called phytoncides that protects them from rotting and insects. When people breathe it in, there is an increase in the level of “natural killer” cells, which are part of a person’s immune response to cancer.

“When we walk in a forest or park, our levels of white blood cells increase and it also lowers our pulse rate, blood pressure and level of the stress hormone cortisol,” Michelfelder said.

There is rare evidence of cancer (osteocarcanoma) in prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations (see here for a nice public science summary) and mummies (another public science review is found here). This may be because we can’t detect it and accurately determine its frequency. Modern techniques like CT scanning make inroads into non-invasive paleopathology data gathering but skeletons have a limited capacity to reveal diseases of the past. This is partly because the lesions (like most pathologies) often don’t reach the bones, take too long to reach the bones before death, or are nonspecific.

The rarity of evidence for cancer may also be because it simply wasn’t there. Most cancers occur at the end of of or after reproductive years; the shorter human life span ‘in the wild’ would likely lead to fewer cases of cancer experienced by our prehistoric relatives and not impact net reproductive success (meaning any cancer-causing genes would persist in human populations). Persistent cancer-causing genes interact with the modern environment and longer life span to reach modern cancer frequencies. I wonder if lifestyles that take one into the woods for significant periods of time (e.g., prehistoric hunter-gatherers, modern populations leading ‘traditional’ lifestyles) reduce cancer incidence?

I am reminded of something I heard when I was a kid about the actor Dirk Benedict (from Battlestar Galactica–the original Starbuck!–and the A-Team) having had overcome prostate cancer by disappearing into the woods and the wilds of the country and eating a macrobiotic diet. I looked up his story to see if I remembered correctly. I had mostly:

When I learned I had a tumor—I refused to be tested for malignancy—I weighed 180 pounds. When I came out of the mountains of New Hampshire six weeks later, I weighed 155. I went to stay in a friend’s cabin because I didn’t want any distractions, any temptations, anybody calling up to say, “Let’s go have a bagel.” Well, all hell broke loose. Some days I felt on top of the world, and other days I couldn’t get out of bed. Sometimes I couldn’t walk up the stairs, and sometimes I’d ride, run and chop wood for 24 hours.

…

I never did go into a hospital. Instead, I packed up my duffel bag and became a vagabond, traveling to Montana, Maine, California, New York City, Wisconsin, hitchhiking across the country once and driving across twice.

Did the woods help? Maybe! The sense of smell–yet another benefit!