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Comment by kylebenzle | Hacker News Reader

Good point. Do practicing Muslims have lower cancer rates?

You'll have to account for increased rates of smoking in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim populations in non-Muslim-majority countries.

From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360407/

> A fifth of the world's population is Muslim, and most Muslims live in areas where the prevalence of smoking is high and often increasing. But even among the many Muslims living in Europe, smoking prevalence (particularly among men) remains high. For example, in England in 2004 the overall prevalence of smoking was 40% in Bangladeshi men and 29% in Pakistani men compared with 24% among the male general population.

That's interesting. I believe smoking is discouraged in Islam, so I wonder why the uptake is higher. Guessing it's a general education issue?

As a Muslim and live in a country with 90% Muslim, I can tell, most of the people are Muslim, because they have a Muslim parent. Rape, corruption, addiction, sexual harassments, hate speech are common things here. No Muslim can do these. 5 times prayers (Salah) in a day is absolutely mandatory, absolutely no excuse for Muslim. But most people don't even care, including me :)

As far as it goes for Muslims in Pakistan, laws/rules given by religion are mostly take literally instead of what they might mean. Drinking is forbidden, that's agreed upon, as far as other drugs go its up if the person is following teachings of any religious scholar.

Smoking is therefore not considered forbidden (haram) in the same sense as alcohol. I am a little too sensitive to drugs and smoke and betel leaves ('paan') make my head go south just as much.

So it correctly is issue of education I would say.

Smoking, like alcohol and other vices are prohibited.

It is in fact an unfortunate reality that is a matter of miseducation for those who are not victim to the statistical conflation of nationality as an indicator of belief.

Smoking not so much, alcohol is considered "haram", you see smoking to be a lot more prevalent.

Tobacco companies actively and aggressively advertise and market their products in LEDC countries:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363897/

Surely smoking wasn’t a thing back then, looks up Wikipedia

> The Spanish introduced tobacco to Europeans in about 1528

Perhaps there is an inference of prohibition

Islam tends to prohibit things that "affect" your mind, or are addictive, as well as things that might harm the body since the body is apparently "on-loan" from god. That's why I thought Smoking would fall under that. \

After doing some searching, it does seem that Smoking is mostly considered to be prohibited in Islamic Law, now people likely don't follow that but that's a different story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_fatwa

I don't see any predominantly Muslim country listed high up here- https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/cancer-trends/data-cancer... . Which is kinda surprising to me. My father never smoked and still got cancer. I am from a Muslim-majority country and I know of a bunch of other friends/family who suffered or perished from cancer.

Nothing stand-out from https://ourworldindata.org/cancer that would indicate that.

Alcohol would also be a factor in play as that would increase the risk of some cancers, so the lack of you would of thought also be a factor with that lifestyle.

They're only fasting for a month out of the year.

A lot of practicing Muslims also fast Mondays and Thursdays and the “3 white days” of the month[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting_in_Islam see “Days of voluntary fasting”

TIL! Thank you!

So do they have fewer early stages cancers diagnosed in the months after?

The duration in the article is 4 months.

The real issue is small sample size. (14 people)

From the title: "Intermittent fasting from dawn to sunset for four consecutive weeks..."

Also, not just 14 people, but 14 people with a metabolic disorder.

That's a really small sample size. Are they allowed to publish a study like this for such a small sample? Does anyone know if there is a minimum threshold size?

Allowed to publish? First it's a pilot study. Second, it's actually not a small sample size if you reasonably anticipate big effects and have multiple measures for each of the people at multiple time points. It isn't an observational study, though believers might have wished for a matched control group - - the anticancer effects might have come from the Ramadan prayer vs fasting!

That’s literally the fasting term in the study.

Not significantly affected, as most Muslims eat too much when breaking the fast.

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