Between 70% and 90% of common cancers are due to environmental factors and therefore potentially preventable.Greater than 30% of cancer deaths could be prevented by avoiding risk factors including: tobacco, excess weight/obesity, poor diet, physical inactivity, alcohol, sexually transmitted infections and air pollution. Further, poverty could be considered as an indirect risk factor in human cancers. Not all environmental causes are controllable, such as naturally occurring background radiation and cancers caused through hereditary genetic disorders and thus are not preventable via personal behavior. Dietary
While many dietary recommendations have been proposed to reduce cancer risks, the evidence to support them is not definitive. The primary dietary factors that increase risk are obesity and alcohol consumption. Diets low in fruits and vegetables and high in red meat have been implicated but reviews and meta-analyses do not come to a consistent conclusion. A 2014 meta-analysis found no relationship between fruits and vegetables and cancer. Coffee is associated with a reduced risk of liver cancer. Studies have linked excessive consumption of red or processed meat to an increased risk of breast cancer, colon cancer and pancreatic cancer, a phenomenon that could be due to the presence of carcinogens in meats cooked at high temperatures.
Such environments can include the presence of disruptive substances called carcinogens, repeated physical injury, heat, ionising radiation or hypoxia.The errors that cause cancer are self-amplifying and compounding, for example:

A mutation in the error-correcting machinery of a cell might cause that cell and its children to accumulate errors more rapidly. A further mutation in an oncogene might cause the cell to reproduce more rapidly and more frequently than its normal counterparts. A further mutation may cause loss of a tumor suppressor gene, disrupting the apoptosis signaling pathway and immortalizing the cell. A further mutation in the signaling machinery of the cell might send error-causing signals to nearby cells.The transformation of a normal cell into cancer is akin to a chain reaction caused by initial errors, which compound into more severe errors, each progressively allowing the cell to escape more controls that limit normal tissue growth. This rebellion-like scenario is an undesirable survival of the fittest, where the driving forces of evolution work against the bodys design and enforcement of order. Once cancer has begun to develop, this ongoing process, termed clonal evolution, drives progression towards more invasive stages. Clonal evolution leads to intra-tumour heterogeneity (cancer cells with heterogeneous mutations) that complicates designing effective treatment strategies and requires an evolutionary approach to designing treatment. Characteristic abilities developed by cancers are divided into categories, specifically evasion of apoptosis, self-sufficiency in growth signals, insensitivity to anti-growth signals, sustained angiogenesis, limitless replicative potential, metastasis, reprogramming of energy metabolism and evasion of immune destruction.