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teach

I would disagree that there's no "exposure" component for many of those other cancers.

* Eating red meat

* Eating processed meat

* Drinking 3+ glasses of milk daily

* Inadequate levels of vitamin D

These are all well-known to the nutrition community to increase cancer risk.

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Science in the "nutrition community" is really not very good (this isn't surprising... it's hard to control what people eat (even willing study participants), and even harder to blind anyone involved). Nutrition research is almost entirely based on cohort studies, which are certainly valuable in helping our understanding, but are not great at rigorously proving anything. This isn't a slight on the field of nutrition research, it's just a really hard problem to solve. Much harder than many people tend to think...

I think it's overstating it a bit so say those things are "well-known". There are some indications that those things may result in slight increases of risk for certain types of cancer.

My wife has a PhD in nutrition, so I don't think it's overstating things at all. We're well-aware of how nutrition studies are done and their limitations, but these are clear results shown in study after study for years.

I would seriously question the credentials of any PhD nutrition researcher at a decent university that disputed any of those factors.

Wow. No. Just no. This comment is so wrong, to remotely compare any of these things to smoking and drinking. And even if we stipulate (even if, since the science is poor) that these are contributing factors, nobody thinks they increase risk enough to make a dent in the statistics we're talking about here.

I think nobody may be a bit of an exaggeration, e.g.

"The risks of a high-protein diet are even comparable to smoking, the researchers said."[1]

1: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/diet-high-in-meat-...

High protein or high in red meat? There's a huge difference there. If I eat a high protein diet with my protein coming from e.g. soy, am I still under the same risk?

The study that article is based on (well, there are several layers of 'articles' between the SA article and the actual study) is particularly bad (in a field where bad research is pretty much the norm)...

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/will-eating-red-meat-kill-you...

> Drinking 3+ glasses of milk daily

Huh? There's some correlation with prostate cancer[1] but that's it.

[1] http://www.pcrm.org/health/health-topics/milk-consumption-an...

Walter Willett has published some good research on the link between milk and cancer. It's in his book, and he spoke on it when my wife and I went to go see him speak recently, but I don't have a good non-blog link to give you right now.

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