In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer” by signing the National Cancer Act, which was designed to funnel money into research to find a cure.

By 2010, the budget for the National Cancer Institute had reached $5.1 billion. And what do we have to show for the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars we’ve spent? Not much.

Today, cancer is striking more and more Americans, and continues to kill at high rates, even though we are using ever more toxic drugs to treat the disease once it has taken hold.

Would you believe that for the most common cancers, the age-adjusted mortality rate is virtually unchanged since 1930? While there have been a few bright spots — notably in the treatment of leukemia and testicular cancer — mortality for the most common cancers, including breast, ovary, lung, uterus, pancreas, and liver, have remained high.

In fact, the death rate from lung cancer is much higher now than it was in 1930.

What can we do? For starters, it would be nice to see the powers that be — including the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and the Komen Foundation — reallocate resources into research on what is causing cancer instead of putting the vast majority of their money into diagnostic procedures such as mammograms and biopsies.

If we could identify the underlying causes of cancer, then we would be able to focus our efforts on treatments designed to prevent getting the disease in the first place.

We need to study the environmental chemical load that all of us are being exposed to. There is no doubt that exposure to certain chemicals predisposes a person to cancer.

Aside from limiting your exposure to known carcinogens, the three most important things you can do to prevent cancer are eat a healthy diet, detoxify your body, and take nutritional supplements that have anticancer properties.