But that means people eating more fruit and vegetables will actually increase the cancer rate in the society, as fewer people die before they develop cancer (which is an almost inevitable event in an ageing body). Of course, this is related to the effect that you can double the number of people that suffer from a aggressive form of cancer by finding a treatment that makes them live twice as long after diagnosis (if you count all current cases and not only all new cases). Statistics and epidemiology are, ahm, fun is not quite the right word.