Signs of cancer can appear long before diagnosis, study shows

... can appear in the genome long before ...

> “What’s extraordinary is how some of the genetic changes appear to have occurred many years before diagnosis, long before any other signs that a cancer may develop, and perhaps even in apparently normal tissue,” said Clemency Jolly, a co-author of the research based at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

According to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer: https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s

In a word? No.

There have been a couple studies done that suggest vegetarian diets are modestly cancer protective (~10% lower incidence). There have also been some that link increased meat consumption with increased risk of cancer. It's absolutely not clear that eating meat causes cancer. Dietary habits change your cancer mortality risk and being a vegetarian probably correlates with something like a 1-4% decreased risk.

I would be wildly surprised if there weren't animal protein inclusive diets that are good in other ways that surpass the cancer risk reduction of "being vegetarian".

Vegetarians are more likely than the general population to be non-smokers - an obvious cancer risk that many studies do not control for.

Lately I've been doing 7 day fasts two times a year mostly to reduce visceral fat and reduce my chance of type 2 diabetes. However a lot of science is pointing to it being a good way to reduce cancer risk. Nothing definitive, but it's nice to think I may be helping my body fight possible cancer too. Maybe I will catch some of these things early during these phases where the genes are present but the cancer hasn't begun to be diagnosable or slow it down.

I've also heard some doctors suggest that fasting during cancer treatment improves the effectiveness of chemotherapy.