Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

startribune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#11

Post by frozenport »

001sky wrote: post #3
epistasis wrote: post #2

This shouldn't surprise anyone... People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence. The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a per…

This is all true, but the atricle says something quite different than what you are commenting on. The "original findings" which are being reversed were based on 4,000 pieces of peer-reviewed research. After reviewing more than 4,000 studies, the [1997] authors were persuaded that green vegetables helped ward off lung and stomach cancer. It's easy to dismiss a single instance as an arbitrary data point. When you can d…

You need to weight them by quality, from experience in my field of E&M the papers with 2k citations are correct and the ones with 4 citations aren't.

Also 4k papers is too much to go through by hand, so something else was done.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#12

Post by joshpadnick »

The primary thrust of the article seems to be that because (1) the American Association for Cancer Research conference had a very small number of sessions on diet and cancer, and (2) a single follow-up study in 2007 concluded there was little link between diet and cancer that it must be true.

This is only one view and hardly comprehensive. If you read http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vegetables_cancer.aspx by Joel Fuhrman, MD, you'll get a perspective on why the devil is in the details with many of these studies and why broad sweeping headlines like this one are often inaccurate.

Based on everything I've read on this subject -- The China Study, Eat to Live, and a few others -- I side with the Fuhrman article over the one published in the Star Tribune, a statewide newspaper for Minnesota.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#13

Post by tachyonbeam »

epistasis wrote: post #2

This shouldn't surprise anyone... People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence. The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a per…

It's not just that. There's a huge problem with selective bias here. People think that "healthy foods" automatically means good health, and bad health is automatically a result of processed foods, "bad health habits", etc. Bad health is your own damn fault for profoundly insulting mother nature by feeding your body Kraft Diner a few too many times.

News at 11: cancer is a natural occurrence. You could exclusively eat prime quality fish, raw organic fruits and veggies and still get a heart attack at 52 and cancer at 58. In other news, I seriously question the idea that paleolithic humans had incredible food wisdom and perfect health. They probably ate whatever the hell they could find at a given time of the year in their immediate environment, and that was probably hugely lacking in nutritional value when it's the winter, all the plants are dead and most animals hibernating.

I agree that making an effort to eat well is a good idea, but it doesn't make you immune to diseases, and diseases are not necessarily a result of bad habits. There is also a huge amount of conflicting information as to what is healthy food.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#14

Post by joshpadnick »

joshpadnick wrote: post #12

The primary thrust of the article seems to be that because (1) the American Association for Cancer Research conference had a very small number of sessions on diet and cancer, and (2) a single follow-up study in 2007 concluded there was little link between diet and cancer that it must be true. This is only one view and hardly comprehensive. If you read http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vegetables_cancer.aspx by Joel Fu…

So, interesting follow-up as I researched this further. First, this article was just published last week in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/science/an-apple-a-day-and...). The Star Tribune was merely syndicating it.

Second, it looks like the Joel Fuhrman, MD wrote a direct response to this article: http://eathealthyandthrive.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/the-nutr...

It's on a random Wordpress blog here, but this was sent out to his eNewsletter earlier this week (though not posted on his website).

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#15

Post by revelation »

hamai wrote: post #9
EGreg wrote: post #7

Cancer is like a random process. When enough mutated cells gets into a certain neighborhood of events which lead to cancer, that's how it starts. When I went to Aruba with my friend, a sailor there told us that most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time. That's what made me realize this.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/

Only 5–10% of all cancers are due to an inherited gene defect. Various cancers that have been linked to genetic defects are shown in Fig. 2. Although all cancers are a result of multiple mutations (9, 10), these mutations are due to interaction with the environment (11, 12).

That 5% figure is much less interesting when you realize they mean _inherited_ genetic defects.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#16

Post by yaketysax »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #13
epistasis wrote: post #2

This shouldn't surprise anyone... People need to realize that research publications are not textbooks. They are communications to other researchers about the way that the evidence is pointing, that helps them design new experiments, that justifies expensive and spendy clinical trials, which eventually find conclusive evidence. The idea that one can open a science journal and find interpretable truth revealed is a per…

It's not just that. There's a huge problem with selective bias here. People think that "healthy foods" automatically means good health, and bad health is automatically a result of processed foods, "bad health habits", etc. Bad health is your own damn fault for profoundly insulting mother nature by feeding your body Kraft Diner a few too many times. News at 11: cancer is a natural occurrence. You could exclusively eat…

"News at 11: cancer is a natural occurrence."

So what? Something being "natural" has no bearing on whether it is favorable or preventable.

"You could exclusively eat prime quality fish, raw organic fruits and veggies and still get a heart attack at 52 and cancer at 58."

Of course it's possible. But if you had any amount of sense, you wouldn't be making conclusions from a single case.

"In other news, I seriously question the idea that paleolithic humans had incredible food wisdom and perfect health."

Who's making that claim? The claim most paleo advocates seem to be making is that you should eat food that the body is adapted to eating.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#17

Post by wdewind »

EGreg wrote: post #7

Cancer is like a random process. When enough mutated cells gets into a certain neighborhood of events which lead to cancer, that's how it starts. When I went to Aruba with my friend, a sailor there told us that most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time. That's what made me realize this.

> Cancer is like a random process.

> most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time

These two statements seem in conflict to me.

Re: There’s scant evidence that healthy foods prevent cancer or fatty foods cause it

#19

Post by gohrt »

wdewind wrote: post #17
EGreg wrote: post #7

Cancer is like a random process. When enough mutated cells gets into a certain neighborhood of events which lead to cancer, that's how it starts. When I went to Aruba with my friend, a sailor there told us that most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time. That's what made me realize this.

> Cancer is like a random process. > most sailors eventually got melanoma from being out allthe time These two statements seem in conflict to me.

Why?

It's lke saying "Craps is a random. If you roll the dice at Vegas all the time, eventually you will lose your bankroll."

Post reply on HN