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Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

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21–30 of 67 posts

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#21
This is the inevitable result of clueless reporting on bad epidemiological studies.

Look at any study behind one of these headlines and there will be a raft of confounding factors that were never controlled for. The data is close to meaningless at a certain point.

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#23
post #12
post #9

If you live long enough you will eventually die of cancer. It's inevitable.

Do the oldest people predominantly die of cancer?

The parent’s comment is tautologically true: if nothing kills you first, cancer will eventually kill you.

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#26

Wow, that was quite a read. What does seem to stand out is the danger of negative results not being published. 99 studies look at an ingredient, find nothing, don't publish. Through pure chance, the hundredth study finds a correlation, and everyone is immediately convinced that yet another ingredient is unhealthy.

The study will fail to replicate.

Doesn't matter; before anyone even thinks of replicating it, it's already all over the fitness & lifestyle magazines and news columns regular people read.

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#27
post #8

At this point I almost expect an article titled "All oxygen-breathing organisms are a fatally flawed design and are doomed to never live healthy no matter what". :(

Well, that's basically true, isn't it? Oxygen is extremely reactive and was poisonous to early life: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#29
post #8

At this point I almost expect an article titled "All oxygen-breathing organisms are a fatally flawed design and are doomed to never live healthy no matter what". :(

On the upside, oxygenation led to the explosive diversity of complex, high-energy organisms that led to us[0]!

Without living on the edge, you don't get complex, powerful organisms (like mighty trilobites).

Plus, there's no telling how much reprogramming for stronger oxidization-repair mechanisms can provide. Mammalian mitochondria are inferior to bird mitochondria (and birds have them in their blood cells unlike us which may help[1]), allowing birds to live longer even with higher metabolisms than mammals. Evolution hasn't exhausted the possible. There's hope!

Just not for us. :) Which is fine; everything's fine.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Increase_in...

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3686644/

Re: Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

#30
I think we as humans are just associated with cancer. Regardless of what we eat.

My soul mate exercised, ate well and natural but still got breast cancer. Because it was in her family. Cancer hits so many people that it seems like it's just a natural way of population control to me.

Or perhaps a side effect from being multi-celled creatures in a universe with background radiation.

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