Actress Gwyneth Paltrow has lost five family members to cancer -- and she fears the disease may one day strike her. So she's taking action now and is trying to beat back the cancer curse that seems to loom over her loved ones.

Ever since losing her famous father in 2002 to throat cancer, Paltrow has been approaching life from a biological perspective.

"Cancer has been the curse of my family,"she said. "I am challenging these evil genes by natural means. I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid the growth of tumors. I began this crusade soon after my father's death. Since then the fight against tumors has been my mission."

Paltrow and her husband, Coldplay's Chris Martin, have embraced a strict vegetarian diet for their young family, and they hope their commitment to healthy eating will ward off the illness they fear may be headed right for them.

As Oral, Head and Neck Cancer Awareness Week just ended yesterday, I am a little late to the party. However, while I was looking up information about smoking, I visited their website to discover an eye-opening section profiling historical and famous people throughout history who suffered from cancer as a result of smoking. Sigmund Freud, considered by many to be the most important historical figure in the areas of psychology and psychiatry for his theories on the subconscious, was so addicted to nicotine, that he hid a cancerous growth in his mouth for years because he did not want to be admonished for his smoking habit.

In the few times Freud did manage to quit smoking, he wrote to a friend, "I have not smoked for seven weeks since the day of your injunction. At first I felt, as expected, outrageously bad ... with mild depression, as well as the horrible misery of abstinence. These wore off but left me completely incapable of working, a beaten man. After seven weeks I began smoking again ... Since the first few cigars, I was able to work and was the master of my mood; before that life was unbearable." Despite experiencing the last fifteen years of his life as a series of painfully dangerous surgeries, and the replacement of most of his jaw, Freud smoked until the day of his death.