Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review | Hacker News Reader

Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review

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127 pointssridca61 comments

See also Kill or Cure, a comprehensive index of every Daily Mail article claiming that something causes or prevents cancer.

https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/

This is the best I've ever seen.

Looks like it does subject/verb plurality agreement based on the presence of an 's' at the end of the subject. Thus: "Asbestos prevent cancer". Heh. Software.

I looked at the site again to see that it actually says "asbestos cause cancer", because I was really curious how it could ever prevent cancer...

No mention of Cheetos or Doritos though.

“Asbestos” is a plural, though (in Greek and in Latin—where the word originates—by declension.) The fact that English bungled the receive doesn’t mean that the algorithm is wrong. I would expect a sufficiently-intelligent pluralizing algorithm (something like GPT trained on individual grapheme sequences) would pluralize asbestos too (in absence of direct evidence of its pluralization; and maybe even then.)

Huh, I think you meant to say "Asbestos cause cancer". It'd be really interesting if some news articles claimed asbestos prevents cancer.

Wow, that was quite a read. What does seem to stand out is the danger of negative results not being published. 99 studies look at an ingredient, find nothing, don't publish. Through pure chance, the hundredth study finds a correlation, and everyone is immediately convinced that yet another ingredient is unhealthy.

The study will fail to replicate.

Yes, but how long does that take, and what is the cost of people acting on misinformation in the meantime?

Doesn't matter; before anyone even thinks of replicating it, it's already all over the fitness & lifestyle magazines and news columns regular people read.

Not necessarily, it's just a new random pick :)

This is the big way for p-value science to fail, even if every actor is honest. It's obvious once you understand what a p-value is (it literally takes 5 seconds to understand) but nearly nobody does. Even people I've worked with at a FAANG, which you'd expect have an above average understanding of mathematics.

https://xkcd.com/882/

P values don't work at all if there's a lot of people working in a field!

For some it might take more than 5 seconds though https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/not-even-scientists-can...

Cancer Research UK (a medical charity) has a good summary of some common food controversies - foods that are claimed to either cause or curtail cancer.

The entry on 'super foods' states:

> "...the term ‘superfood’ is really just a marketing tool, with little scientific basis. It’s certainly true that a healthy, balanced and varied diet can help to reduce the risk of cancer but it is unlikely that any single food will make a major difference on its own."

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...

Also worth a read:

Bacon, salami and sausages: how does processed meat cause cancer and how much matters? (April 2019)

https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2019/04/26/bacon-sa...

You can basically dump all mouse studies, since the standard kibble was something high sugary/starchy. Add fat -> cancer; add more sugar -> cancer...; add more protein -> cancer Epidemiological stuff is flawed as well. Unless the people are kept in a closed ward and every meal is kept under close observation, it's probably not "clean" data.

There is hope though... annecdotal evidence seems to point towards unprocessed food as a good tool to fight cancer. Even better when it's low carb.

http://www.diagnosisdiet.com/meat-and-cancer/ source for the mouse model studies

http://meatheals.com/category/cancer/ anecdotal evidence, you'll prolly find some vegans as well if you go looking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tteYZfMat4 some interesting talk about the efficiency of treatment in some cancers. Might help to make a better informed decision if it ever hits you.

This is similar to a problem with exercise studies: they under-dose in intensity and volume, and are then surprised that nothing much helps.

I'm surprised to see your comment in good health. Everytime I link to Georgia Ede or meatheals I get downvoted to oblivion lol, just as this comment too will (as if there is a vegan bot on HN targeting my comments?).

don't go down the path of conspiracy theory xD that's unhealthy, but I don't care much about upvotes here

Ask the mods. They have flagged my account so that new comments in some threads begin with 0 points.

Agree on the upvotes thing; it is a health sign of skepticism.

HN software has no such flagging mechanism.

I think we as humans are just associated with cancer. Regardless of what we eat.

My soul mate exercised, ate well and natural but still got breast cancer. Because it was in her family. Cancer hits so many people that it seems like it's just a natural way of population control to me.

Or perhaps a side effect from being multi-celled creatures in a universe with background radiation.

You could generalize that to "... we as mammals ..." without much loss of precision.

* allowing naked mole rats & elephants as outliers

Sorry to hear about your partner :-( The first part of the last paragraph makes sense. Multi-cellular -> more cells dividing -> more chances of mutations -> more chances of cancer. The second half of your last para implies that cosmic radiation / something similar causes cancer. I’m genuinely curious : is there some link between cosmic microwave radiation and cancer ? Any sources ?

There's no known link between cosmic microwave background and cancer. Would do for one hell of a difficult thing to study, too.

There's perfectly ample evidence for cosmic rays (ie. high energy radiation from astronomical sources) increasing risk of cancer as does any ionizing radiation. Maybe GP conflated the two?

Everything we do on a daily bases has a chance to increase or decrease the chances of each part of our body of getting it. Even if you do nothing

This is the inevitable result of clueless reporting on bad epidemiological studies.

Look at any study behind one of these headlines and there will be a raft of confounding factors that were never controlled for. The data is close to meaningless at a certain point.

A subtle way to suggest fasting ?

If you stop eating for a few weeks it probably does lower your chances of getting cancer significantly.

that's what I meant, since it seems all types of food are linked to cancer, fasting is the best of them

I remember reading a few studies where malnourished individuals and with certain nutritional deficiencies had lower cancer incidence. There could be some truth to it. Time to dig into PubMed.

Not only that, enough time without food can free you of all the worries that are common to mere mortals :)

I heard coffee is still good

Tell that to the state of California

Not if you believe acrylamide is carcinogenic.

From the abstract:

“Statistically significant results were more likely than nonsignificant findings to be published in the study abstract than in only the full text (P < 0.0001).“

It's probabilistic, the best you can do is minimize your chances but everything causes harm to some degree until you're dead.

If you live long enough you will eventually die of cancer. It's inevitable.

Do the oldest people predominantly die of cancer?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4043499/

Has pneumonia and 'frailty' as the predominant causes.

I think infections are the primary cause of death for the oldest people. If lifespans were several times longer, most of us would be dying from an immune deficiency caused by cytomegalovirus. We just don't live long enough.

The parent’s comment is tautologically true: if nothing kills you first, cancer will eventually kill you.

That is, given that humans eventually die.

No, but they mostly die with cancer(s), iirc.

I’m sure I read that once you reach a certain age the risk starts to fall off.

At this point I almost expect an article titled "All oxygen-breathing organisms are a fatally flawed design and are doomed to never live healthy no matter what".

https://lowres.cartooncollections.com/doctors-medical-parano...

The SENS people say, if you live long enough, you will eventually have cancer.

I was under the impression that everyone has cancer all the time at about the same rate the body can fight it before it becomes an actual, detectable problem.

Yup. So shoukd we should worry about our ability to fight it, rather than what 'causes' it, outside agressive carcenogens?

Is there a SENS newsletter like hacker news?

Well, that's basically true, isn't it? Oxygen is extremely reactive and was poisonous to early life: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/the-great-oxygenation-e...

It still is. If you live at sea level, your chances of getting lung cancer are much higher that of you live at higher elevations.

Huh. I didn't know that. What's the altitude at which cancer risk starts increasing again due to radiation exposure?

Interesting; could that be caused by most cities being near sea level and most people living near cities, and thus pollution rather than oxygen might be the root cause?

I don't have a link to the study, but the researchers of the study I read were very meticulous and did discard all other obvious explanations before concluding that altitude was the best explanation.

On the upside, oxygenation led to the explosive diversity of complex, high-energy organisms that led to us[0]!

Without living on the edge, you don't get complex, powerful organisms (like mighty trilobites).

Plus, there's no telling how much reprogramming for stronger oxidization-repair mechanisms can provide. Mammalian mitochondria are inferior to bird mitochondria (and birds have them in their blood cells unlike us which may help[1]), allowing birds to live longer even with higher metabolisms than mammals. Evolution hasn't exhausted the possible. There's hope!

Just not for us. :) Which is fine; everything's fine.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion#Increase_in...

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3686644/

That's exactly the problem with cancer. You know - vaccination causes cancer! Allows you to live long enough to die of cancer. :-)

There are scientists who argue that what the mitochondria does is fundamentally cancerigenic on a long enough timeline, so in a sense, yes, everything we eat is associated with cancer.

https://www.nature.com/articles/cr2017155

Wow this is pretty fascinating.

Metabolism is a process with chemical and energetic exhaust that can damage machinery critical to cellular processes. And at some point it becomes evolutionarily favorable to just accept that damage and expend effort starting over again (offspring) as opposed to attempting complete repair of all the damaged systems.

In that way, all metabolic processes will logically lead to cancer (damage to dna). The world is on fire.

Seems that nature favors the 'big rewrite'

Related - meat & cancer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20029519

(Ctrl+F "cancer" in that thread for amusement)

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