This week, I attended the first of three outstanding talks on campus about breast cancer risk, and I found useful information that not only affects me, but also my mother and daughter. For instance, did you know that 80 percent of diagnosed cancer is not hereditary? In today's world, no one is immune from this risk. A lifetime of little tiny exposures to environmental estrogens can add up -- and it only takes one mutant cell to start a cancer.

Environmental estrogens are everywhere -- in cosmetics, sunscreen, plastics and more -- but with a little knowledge, you can learn where they are and how to avoid exposure to them.

In two upcoming talks Suzanne Snedeker, associate director of translational research for the Program on Breast Cancer and Environmental Risk Factors (BCERF) at Cornell, explains the science of environmental estrogens and estrogen-like chemicals in simple terms. In the previous talk, she focused on cosmetics; the next two talks cover estrogen-like compounds in plastics and estrogen-like compounds that go down the drain and get into our water and environment.

Snedeker is a toxicologist and cancer biologist who assesses the cancer risk of environmental chemicals and develops public health outreach programs to teach different target audiences about their risk and ways to decrease or eliminate exposures to chemicals of concern.

If you miss the talks or want to share their content with others, BCERF has easy-to-understand information and videos on its Web site. You also can find the videos on youtube.com by searching for enviroestrogen.

The next two talks on campus are:

For more information about BCERF, go to http://envirocancer.cornell.edu.

Beth McKinney is director of the Cornell Wellness Program.