Cancer and other degenerative diseases are increasing to epidemic proportions in all industrialized countries. Many of these degenerative diseases show some familial association, thus a genetic basis has been assumed. Yet, the nature and frequency of genetic variants in the human population has not changed significantly in the past 50 years, even though the incidence of these diseases has climbed continuously (Wallace, 2005). Therefore, because the increased and increasing incidence of cancer cannot be attributed to population-wide genetic change during this short timeframe, the cause must be external to the genome, in the “environment”, which with relation to diet and chemical exposures, has altered radically in the past few decades.
