golanggeek
12 hours ago
> The BMJ Oncology study concludes that “dietary risk factors, alcohol consumption, and tobacco use were the main risk factors for major early-onset cancers.” But it adds that “prospective lifetime cohort studies are needed to explore the etiologies [causes] of early-onset cancers.”
> In the UK, specialists have specifically flagged up the risks of processed foods, which includes ready-made meals and pizzas, which young people tend to consume more of.
Food seems to be the main culprit..
dpeckett
11 hours ago
Dietary fiber is well established to reduce the risk of Colorectal cancer [1]. If there's one thing that's seriously missing from an ultra-processed diet it's fiber.
Almost certainly multifactorial though.
jb1991
12 hours ago
there is also an extraordinary amount of plastic and chemicals getting absorbed by nearly all food, as per a study last week:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/16/health/food-packaging-che...
gomerspiles
10 hours ago
> [.. &] alcohol consumption, and tobacco use were the main risk factors for major early-onset cancers
This would be a good explanation for any decline in early onset cancer given that a 40 year old could not have been binge drinking and smoking at their height in 1970s UK.
linsomniac
11 hours ago
As a small data set, my mother and grandparents all smoked like there was no tomorrow and drank plenty, but never had any cancer issues. Though my mother and grandfather both had COPD, my mother in particular spent the last few years of her too-short life (late 60s) basically drowning because she couldn't expel the CO2.
Prepared and ultra-processed foods, gut feel, seem to be a huge problem in many ways. A buddy of mine, his girlfriend is a big health nut and her rule of thumb is: Don't eat anything that has more than 4 ingredients or comes in a bag, and that seems like a good idea to me.
gklitz
10 hours ago
Here is some general advice about how to translate between “your life” and statistics.
Imagine that some new product gets released that increases your chance of chancer by 10x, so something extremely bad and very noticeable in studies. Now let’s say 2/10000 typically get this type of cancer normally and that it’s an extremely popular product so 50% of the world population use it. Start consuming it straight away.
That leads us to having 2/10000 cases before the product and 7/10000 afterwards, and you’ll have 4994/5000 of people who use the OBVIUSLY bad product stating confidently that there can’t be any issue, because they aren’t effected. Imagine they all have 2 kids who have two kids and suddenly the common sense attitude that “this can’t be dangerous because my grand parents…” is the overwhelming majority opinion.
You don’t have “a small dataset” you only have a bias, nothing more, nothing less. You can’t translate between data and your personal life how you’d expect to, it’s just not possible.
Also regarding your buddies girlfriend’s advice she’s completely wrong. It’s actually anything with less than 3 ingredients or more than 5 but less than 7 you shouldn’t eat. Everything else is safe. You can trust me because “I’m a huge health nut”.
Disclaimer: numbers might be slightly off, corrections are appreciated, but the point stands.
rrr_oh_man
8 hours ago
> Also regarding your buddies girlfriend’s advice she’s completely wrong. It’s actually anything with less than 3 ingredients or more than 5 but less than 7 you shouldn’t eat. Everything else is safe. You can trust me because “I’m a huge health nut”.
Wtf?
DigiEggz
7 hours ago
I think he's making fun of the arbitrary number that was originally given. Obviously healthy foods can have far more than four ingredients, such as dozens of spices (or really anything). I think many people want to be able to follow some sort of broad guideline in life and it frequently causes those to arrive at meaningless conclusions.
user
11 hours ago