Talk about a potential teaching problem.

At the Palmerton Area Junior High School, the supplementary class called RTII is taught during the last period of the day to seventh graders, and it is also not graded. Despite that, my class had been behaving, volunteering, and working until the bell.As Thanksgiving approached, however, the class lost a bit of its focus.I explained this to another teacher and that I had set up the next few lessons to be done in game form to provide a change of pace. I'm not normally one to offer rewards for doing what should be done in school, but since RTII isn't graded and I knew recognizing the different types of figurative language could be a challenge for some, I asked her what she uses as a reward.Jolly Ranchers, she said. Kids work like crazy for a single Jolly Rancher.I grimaced, not because I doubted her, but because I didn't want people seeing me buying candy, especially one that's pure sugar.Talk about a potential image problem.It may seem foolish, but writing this column affects my purchases or at least my visibility making them around town. While I'll always buy my father or brother a hoagie or pizza if they visit and stay for supper, I always ask them to pick it up, too.I'd feel like a fraud purchasing foods I sometimes rant against. And I hate feeling like a fraud.Because of that, you're now going to learn what happened to me twice in the last seven months.I've had surgery to eradicate cancer.Now the cancer has been odd to say the best possible type, a skin cancer called basal cell carcinoma. It grows slowly, rarely spreads, and only takes a few minutes to remove.At first I felt like a bit of a fraud simply for contracting cancer, but my dermatologist believes nothing I've done as an adult caused it. (I use sunscreen every time I ride the bike, even in winter.) Basal cell carcinoma, he says, comes from prolonged exposure to the sun.A more likely reason, he offered, were those summer days in my teens when I spent hour upon hour playing basketball without sunscreen. (I tried using it once after I got sunburned, but it commingled with my sweat, got in my eyes, and burned like the devil.)But this admission of cancer serves a greater purpose than cleansing my soul. It's the lead-in to show that eating the right way does more than allow you to maintain a healthy weight and make you feel good.I say this, you see, because even though I've had basal cell carcinoma twice, I've never had melanoma, the most serious and sometimes fatal form of skin cancer. Yet both my parents had serious cases of it my mother early in her life which makes me a prime candidate for the disease.But, according to a theory offered last year at the 10th Annual Nutrition and Health Conference held in Seattle, the plethora of phytochemicals and the lack of refined grains, sweets, and meats present in my diet could be keeping my genetic disposition to develop melanoma at bay.In "Alter Genetic Destiny with Diet," an article penned by Sharon Palmer, RD, and published in the November 2013 issue of Environmental Nutrition, Palmer explains that in the same way that your genes determine physical traits, they also determine "disease susceptibility." What they do not do, according to Roderick H. Dashwood, PhD, a speaker at the Seattle conference, is create fate.The new belief in the medical community, Dashwood asserts, is that your genes can be switched On and Off like a light switch by elements in the environment and lifestyle choices, including diet.In essence, in the same way you can turn on the high-intensity lamp to help you read, you can turn on your tumor suppressor genes to help you battle cancer cells.I'd like to think that's what my diet is doing, and a study published last year in Nutrition Journal and cited in Palmer's article suggests that's the case. In it, researchers found gene expression that suggested "a potential increase for cancer risk" in the subjects who ate what is considered the typical Western diet, a diet filled with "refined grains, sweets, and processed meats" all stuff I don't eat.But the Nutrition Journal article is not the only one to support what I'll call the light-switch theory. A 2010 Norwegian study also cited by Palmer linked the triggering of genes that aid the body's defenses with the consumption of fruits and vegetables high in antioxidants.Additionally an animal study published in Endocrinology in 2010 found that diet choices affected not only the dieter but also future generations. When a high-fat diet was fed to females, the genes of their offspring and their subsequent eating patterns demonstrated a desire for high-fat foods.For years, a theme throughout this column has been that selecting food is serious business. The title of the column just two weeks ago, in fact, said as much.While eating certainly should be a source of pleasure, if that is its sole purpose, the tradeoff is immediate pleasure for eventual pain.You need to realize that the best form of medicine is preventative, and the best preventative medicine is found not only in exercise but also in diet.