It's still a shock though that people with access to the best diets, best lifestyles and best medical care still get felled by cancer. Yes they will get better treatment than the rest of the population but as a family we've learned the hard way that private healthcare doesn't mean better by any stretch of the imagination.
There's a common mythology grown up as a result of all the well-meaning dietary advice we get for health etc, that cancer is somehow 100% preventable through having some mythological perfect diet and doing a lot of exercise.
Although eating well and physical fitness will help you remain healthier, leaner and more capable and physically mobile and maybe a bit mentally sharper as you age, and improve our ability to survive illness and accidents, the idea that all cancer is 100% preventable it couldn't be further from the truth. It does seem humans like to lean into a fairness and justice fallacy, in that we believe if we do certain things correctly, life will be fair and things will work out as we want it to, when the reality is life isn't fair and you can do all recommended mitigation activities for health and still get hit with a hideous illness just because.
Yes, we may be able to lessen the known cancer risks - quite a lot from stuff like refraining entirely from smoking or being teetotal, and not sunbathing and inflaming our skin regularly - and a little from having a better overall diet, but we can still get cancer as long as we're alive, because all you need is a replication error or a gene switching off, or even less fairly, to inherit a bad gene from our parents.
If you have the abnormal, mutated version of the BRCA 1 or 2 gene - that deals with repair of damaged DNA in cells that could turn into malignant cancer - you are much more likely than someone with the normal BRCA 1 or 2 gene to get cancer of the breasts or ovaries no matter what diet and fitness mitigation activities you undertake.
The largest risk for cancer is simply old age. The older you get, the more likely you are to spring a tumour in one part of your body or other. The vast majority of cancers occur in older people, even though we do see them in children and younger people. As long as you are alive, you can get one form of cancer or another. Doesn't matter how rich, clever, fit or pretty you are. The body is complex and prone to errors.
<sarc>
