Last week I attended a webinar run by my medical insurance company about cancer, and I was most interested in the research the doctors being interviewed presented.

One of the things they talked about was the significant increase in early-onset cancer — cancer diagnosed before the age of 50. A large global study looking at 29 different types of cancer found that the number of early-onset cancer cases increased by a staggering 79.1% between 1990 and 2019. I was quite shocked by that statistic!

So what is causing the increase in early-onset cancer?

The doctors were clear that there isn't one single explanation, but in their view, diet and exercise are the two biggest factors that have changed over the past few decades and they therefore think that changes in this area might be helpful to health. Here is a slide that they shared during their presentation:

We're eating too much processed food

Back in the 1950s, there wasn't the enormous range of highly processed food that we have available to us today. People largely ate whole foods: fruit, vegetables, meat, eggs, bread, potatoes and dairy, along with some home baking. Over the decades, highly processed food has become increasingly normal. Walk around a supermarket now and the fresh food sections are vastly smaller than the processed food sections.

Dietary recommendation

This webinar specifically identified ultra-processed foods, changes in the gut microbiome, low fibre and low plant-food intake as factors that may be contributing to the rise in early-onset cancer. They said we should aim for 30 or more different plant foods each week and switch to more fresh food rather than processed food. Plus they said to limit alcohol and avoid smoking or vaping.

We're also exercising much less

In this webinar, the other major change the doctors highlighted was exercise. People used to get much more physical activity naturally. Jobs were often more physical, domestic chores required more effort and people generally walked more. Children spent more time outside, riding their bikes up and down the street, climbing trees, playing games and kicking a rugby ball around.

Today, so much of our lives can be done sitting down. We drive instead of walking, use technology to make our jobs and household tasks easier, and children have an extraordinary amount of entertainment available to them through phones, tablets, gaming and television.

Exercise recommendation

During this webinar, the doctors said to aim for around 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, as well as prioritising sleep. And get your kids outside more and off their devices!

Then they talked about the role of emotional support - this really caught my attention

I was thrilled to hear this coming from mainstream doctors. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 32 randomised controlled trials involving 5,704 cancer patients. The researchers found that people who received psychosocial interventions alongside their medical treatment had a 20% lower hazard of death than those who didn't receive the psychological intervention.  My medical insurance company now provides free therapy sessions for people undergoing cancer treatment because they recognise the benefits of psychological support. Isn’t this great!

And of course, on one level, this makes perfect sense. A cancer diagnosis is terrifying. The treatment can be physically and emotionally harrowing, and there can be enormous amounts of fear, uncertainty and stress. Having someone help you process what you're going through is obviously going to be valuable.

But I believe it goes further than simply helping someone cope with the experience.

Research is starting to understand more about stress and cancer

A 2025 review published in Science Bulletin examined the relationship between chronic stress and cancer development and progression. It described growing evidence that chronic stress can influence processes within the tumour and its surrounding environment through stress-related biological pathways.

Another recent systematic review found associations between chronic stress and poorer cancer outcomes, including potential effects through neuroendocrine and immune mechanisms. The researchers were careful to point out that these associations don't prove that stress causes cancer, but the biological connections are becoming increasingly interesting.

There is also some fascinating research looking much further back into our history. Another paper examined the link between early childhood trauma and later cancer, suggesting that unresolved trauma and the stress and repressed emotions associated with it may affect immune function and contribute to illness many years later.

To me, that's a pretty fascinating direction for medicine to be moving in.

What if our emotional experiences affect the formation of cancer?

This is something I have been fascinated by for more than 20 years since I developed a large goitre over the course of a year. Doctors told me it was incurable and that I would need to have both my thyroid glands removed.

Around that time, I read The Journey by Brandon Bays, in which she described resolving a basketball-sized cancer tumour in her uterus by releasing the emotions she believed were stored in her body.

I decided to try the process on my own goitre. Within a week of doing the emotional-release work, my goitre started to shrink. Within two months, it had disappeared completely! That was about 20 years ago. I still have my thyroid glands, I take no medication and I've had no problems with them since.

Obviously, one person's experience doesn't constitute scientific proof. But it was a pretty extraordinary experience to have, and it fundamentally changed my view of what might be possible when we work with the emotional side of our health.

I've subsequently seen some similarly exciting things with clients.

One woman I worked with had so many growths throughout both breasts that her doctor told her she needed a double mastectomy. We did an emotional-release process together, and a number of powerful experiences connected with her mother and with being a mother emerged during the work. I remember thinking that it was pretty interesting that these issues were emerging in relation to her breasts. Within the following two weeks, her breasts had shrunk so dramatically that her surgeon put the surgery on hold. By two months later, she was clear and she still has both of her breasts.

Neither of us received any other treatment during those weeks following our emotional-release sessions, so I personally believe that the emotional release was having a significant impact. I don't expect everyone to accept that conclusion. But I think experiences like these are worth being curious about rather than simply dismissing because they don't fit neatly into our current medical model.

Sometimes cancer can become a blessing

During my interviews for The Recovery Project, I interviewed a woman who developed breast cancer a few months after losing her beloved husband. She came to see her cancer as a strange kind of blessing. Not because cancer itself was a good thing, but because it forced her to stop and address the grief and emotional issues in her life that she might otherwise have continued carrying.

She went through mainstream cancer treatment, but she also did the emotional work. And she believes that her life is now so much better because of the journey she was forced to take.

You can watch her interview here:

How do I support people on their cancer journeys?

As well as working with people who want to explore the emotions that might be contributing to their cancer, I’ve also worked with people who have finished cancer treatment and have been given the all-clear but have been left with chronic fatigue or chronic pain. Others are left living in constant fear that their cancer is going to return.

I've seen people make wonderful changes in these areas through emotional work. One woman said that she spent all day long on Facebook Cancer Survivor Groups, constantly researched cancer and had not reconnected with activities from her former life. She couldn’t sleep and was anxious all the time, just waiting for a relapse. She was particularly amazed that after doing The Switch, she simply stopped thinking about cancer. We were both amazed when, two years later, she couldn't even remember the name of her original diagnosis! She still attends yearly scans with her doctor to make sure everything is OK, but these scans don’t freak her out anymore. It just feels like routine stuff now.

I also worked with a man who was currently undergoing chemo.  He was seeing it as poison that was flooding his body. We reprogrammed his thoughts to see the chemo as a summer breeze of life-giving help.  He was amazed how much smaller his reactions to the chemo treatment were.   Another lady used The Switch to cope with her radiation treatment.  The doctors were amazed that her skin hardly blistered or scarred at all.

You can use mainstream approaches and emotional work side-by-side

If you are diagnosed with an aggressive cancer, you might choose to have mainstream treatment immediately to deal with it as quickly as possible. You can also work on your emotional health at the same time or afterwards once your treatment is over.

If you're sitting on a waiting list for treatment, you could do some emotional work while you wait and be curious if that could change your need for treatment.

Of course, if you have a cancer diagnosis, I am not suggesting that you delay or replace appropriate medical treatment. But I don't understand why we would treat the physical body and ignore everything happening emotionally at the same time.

The Switch® - a great strategy for emotional release work

The Switch^®is a carefully tailored programme to address a wide range of factors in emotional well-being and recovery. As well as learning techniques to calm a currently dysregulated nervous system (which many mind-body programmes offer), The Switch^® also has a whole day dedicated to tracing your illness back to the original emotional root that underpins it and then doing emotional release work through The Deep Switch.  Clients report profound shifts in their health and wellbeing by releasing trauma in their past that is still affecting them now.  The Switch^® also has a whole day dedicated to lifestyle choices, which it would seem from this webinar that I attended, is a very forefront approach supported by the latest scientific research.  And we have a day dedicated to resolving beliefs that are keeping you stuck in any area of your life.

You can sign up for The Switch^® here.

Summary of actions you can take today to help reduce your likelihood of getting cancer

• Eat more whole foods.
• Eat a wide variety of plants.
• Move your body.
• Get enough sleep.
• Limit alcohol and don't smoke or vape.

And while you're looking after your physical health, don't forget your emotional health.

 While mainstream research is still in its infancy in this area, it is already clear that reducing stress can help your physical health in many profound ways.  And maybe in time, we will see more research emerging to show that past trauma resolution is another powerful preventer of cancer… or even perhaps a natural solution to cancer... 

References:

Global trends in incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer from 1990 to 2019 - Zhao, J., Xu, L., Sun, J., Song, M., Wang, L., Yuan, S., Zhu, Y., Wan, Z., Larsson, S., Tsilidis, K., Dunlop, M., Campbell, H., Rudan, I., Song, P., Theodoratou, E., Ding, K., & Li, X. (2023).  BMJ oncology, 2(1), e000049. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjonc-2023-000049

Psychosocial interventions indicate prolonged survival in cancer patients in a systematic review, meta-analysis, and multiverse meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials - Asakawa-Haas, K.D., Spiegel, D., Bossert, L. et al.  Commun Psychol 4, 49 (2026).

Chronic stress in cancer development and progression - Xin Niu, Ting Wu, Linghui Zeng, Fangwei Wang, Weiguo Lv, Long Zhang, Fangfang Zhou,
 Science Bulletin, Volume 70, Issue 22, 2025, Pages 3885-3907.