Palm oil favors tumor expansion
irbbarcelona.org
irbbarcelona.org
Xenographs (implanting human cancer cells into mice) have their own caveats (the immune system is almost always severely compromised), but this seems like a cool study. I'm no expert on oral cancers however.
Curious to see the implication of the neuronal cells here, I'm looking forward to reading the whole manuscript.
So much of this sounds weird to me and I'm not sure if it's my ignorance or if this is some wacky theory.
It's why I'm interested to read the manuscript closely and see what they reference re: this neuronal growth.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5682332/#B81
If there's no uptake by tissue, then wouldn't the tumor have a plentiful energy source once it vascularizes? (Assuming they can metabolize palmitic acid)
blanket statements like this are almost never correct. our bodies are certainly equipped to fight cancer, having evolved a number of mechanisms in that regard, it's just that cancer is relentless and the cumulative probabilities tend to catch up with a number of us eventually, which necessarily skews mortalities older.
with that said, we're certainly unlikely to naturally evolve ourselves out of cancer risk in the next few millenia, so yes, technology is one of our best bets (along with developing tech to reduce novel carcinogen risks).
But we are? The immune system is constantly at work killing malignant (or otherwise dysfunctional) cells. Cells themselves have mechanisms to commit suicide (apoptosis) if they are not working properly.
It's only when the several mechanisms we have get defeated at the same time (often due to mutations) that cancer can even develop.
If you mean, we are not as equipped as elephants or whales to fight cancer, then that's true.
> there’s little survival advantage for people who can effectively fight cancer after their reproductive age
There's some advantage, but as far as nature's concerned, there's indeed diminishing returns. As in, for the individual that has already reproduced there's no reason to stay alive, but this is beneficial for the offspring - until they are adults. So there's some selective pressures there, specially if you are competing against another group.
So to say we are not equipped to fight them is incorrect.
There's some debate as to whether they have better cancer fighting mechanisms, or whether their size means they are less fast affected by cancers, and/or whether they are large enough that their cancers split into competing cancers before they are affected.
But you're right insofar as there's fairly little selective pressure to prevent cancer over the entire lifespan of a human. We probably could have much better protection from cancer, but the energy investment for that isn't worth it from an evolutionary perspective.
Maybe, certainly since the advent of nuclear families. But our much longer genetic lineage selects around tribes, such that direct grandparents' longevity may not be as critically important. Third-and-fourth cousins likely easily filled this role.
Out of curiosity, do you have any citations regarding prevalence of exogamy vs endogamy in tribal societies?
I don't know how to quantify it, but having healthy grandparents in the picture is a survival advantage.
Grandparents 600-4k years ago would have been in their late thirties, mid forties for all but a very few. Still unlikely to generate significant selection pressure considering that the vast majority of cancers are late in life.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144...
https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/354235
On the role of Oxidative Stress and cancer, it's complicated, but it is there:
https://www.med.or.jp/english/pdf/2001_12/535_539.pdf (PDF)
Go to Trader Joe's and look at the ingredients, everything has Palm Oil as an ingredient.
This is important, and having a diet that suits your oxidative stress profile is important. And I do not care what anyone tells me, these oils are not something the body can handle well and are probably healthy only at low levels.
In the 19th century common folk did not have access to the large amount of calories as we do today. Plus there was much lower air pollution, pesticides, etc. To compare someone's health outcomes in the 19th century to someone living today is impossible. So all we can focus on is the now. And today we have an awful lot more people with metabolic disorders walking around.
While there's less evolutionary advantage, it's far from trivial. See, for instance, https://www.pnas.org/content/100/16/9637 :
> In some species, postreproductive females make substantial contributions to their descendants, either through direct parental care or through grandparental care. Such contributions continue after birth in all mammals (most notably primates), all birds, many insects, and some fish (15). Postreproductive bottle-nose dolphins and pilot whales baby-sit, guard, and even breastfeed their grand-children (15). Selection against the mortality of postreproductive individuals in such species would be expected to continue.
The article says palmitic acid, formally hexadecanoic acid, which is one of the most common — if not the most common — saturated fatty acids. It's named for palm oil, where it is predominant, but it is also found in coconut oil, lard, butter, cacao, and in smaller amounts in practically all liquid oils, with higher concentrations generally in solid fats.
Better to say "Palmitic acid favors tumor expansion" or even just "Common saturated fat favors tumor expansion".
> Nutella maker, Ferrero, launched an advertising campaign in response to reassure customers that their product is safe. The company insists on keeping their recipe the same, claiming that “making Nutella without palm oil would produce an inferior substitute for the real product, it would be a step backward,” according to Fererro’s purchasing manager, Vincenzo Tapella. The smooth texture Tapella is referring to could be achieved by more expensive oils like sunflower or rapeseed but would increase the cost of production by as much as $22 million.
This was basically the same BS that Johnson & Johnson used to defend BPA baby bottles before the ban.
[0] https://www.prescouter.com/2017/02/dangers-palm-oil-nutella-...
Makes me think twice about having yan yan snacks and pocky's.
The problem is that yes, it takes less land, but the land that it can be suitably grown on is very important for other things.
It's also the most abundant fatty acid in you, even if you don't eat any.
There's also a skeleton inside you right now! Spooky.
i say that as i consume primarily meat and cheese on a daily basis.
At some point you have to ask yourself if everything but water gives us cancer.
In all seriousness, things like pasteurization and refrigeration make our food supply a lot safer than it used to be.
You are also skipping out a lot of newer stuff that wasn't possible back then, but after serious study seems safe. Most of what was done 200 years ago is accepted as safe, but there is no actual evidence for it, and in many cases we know it wasn't. (the obvious example of using lead in finishes for food contact items)
"Humans used oil palms as far back as 5,000 years. In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered a substance that they concluded was originally palm oil in a tomb at Abydos dating back to 3,000 BCE.[4] It is believed that traders brought oil palm to Egypt"
It seems a lot more people today are taking a critical look at what they eat, though often excluding broad categories based on feeling rather than hard science. At first this looks reactionary, but on closer inspection one realizes that the science involved is typically biased or just lacking. We've invested comparatively little into understanding the downsides of modern food products like vegetable oil, but the little windows we have indicate they may be causing whole hosts of human maladies from dementia to type 2 diabetes [1]. Nutrition constitutes the inputs to the complex biological system, and large changes (eg disease) can end up being the result of nonlinear processes started by changing these inputs. Another example is a lack of magnesium in the western diet, through both soil depletion and food processing, leading to large scale deficiencies [2].
What's really dizzying, though, is that this information isn't widely known, and is typically found through either self-directed study or through listening to podcasts. When the average person makes decisions regarding their nutrition, they're relying on outdated and probably harmful advice, despite intending to make "healthy" choices. Maybe we need an app to scan a barcode or read a list of ingredients and respond with the known potential for harm and confidence. All I know is I'll never look at fried chicken the same way again (unless it's fried in lard, of course).
[0] https://livestock.extension.wisc.edu/articles/the-chicken-of... [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190303234503id_/http://pdfs.se... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11104-013-1781-2
Humans have been barbecuing meat for millennia. Possibly even before Homo Sapiens Sapiens was around. And yet, it has carcinogenic properties, specially if charred.
What's so special about 100 years ago anyway? 1000 might make a difference - but then again, life expectancy wasn't that great back then.
It's only because we are living so much that cancer is such a large problem. Also because, due to modern medicine, we can often diagnose the person before they just get sick and die from 'unknown' reasons.
Your best bet is to eat food from as many different sources as you can and not eat too much of any single specific thing (which is a modern thing btw, 100 years ago, it wouldn't be as easy to do) and let averages do the rest.
That's so weird.
Some part of you decided to go in a different direction. You're not advanced enough to support both. The strain on resources starves you both.
Kind of like a cannibal parasite. That sure sounds like a death metal band.
A transformed cell is most likely to occur in a "cancerised field" of cells. Those fields might be induced to be transformed in-turn by the original transformed cell(s).
It's in this way that the snowball turns from a pea to a boulder, but all along the way there are trees ready to stop its momentum. Be it DNA repair systems, the immune system, the extra-cellular matrix, etc...
An oncologist once told me (and its not hard for me to conceive), that we're all likely die with a number of tumours in us... just not likely from them.
All this to say, yes everything causes cancer. When you consider the molecular biology behind it all, it's a wonder we're anything but giant, spherical, innervated tumours.
Just like everything else, you make your own risk assessments in life, but the advice boils down to: avoid undue risks of cancer if you can. What "undue" and "if you can" here mean is deeply personal.
[0] A fun euphemism for a cell that is cancer-like.
(about is all simplified of course)
No need to take the optimistic route.
If it makes you feel better: some cancers.
The study claims that palm oil promotes the growth of metastasis of an original cancer tumour. So it is not that palm oil _causes_ cancer but that it will _potentially_ promote more agressive copying of tumurous cells into other regions of the body.
If errantly reproducing cells can use a substance, it must be bad: is that the reasoning here?
I would imagine that a source of water also favors tumor expansion. Cut a tumor off H2O and it will shrivel and die.
(Could be that I'm just throwing a lot more shit at the wall, more of which is sticking than not.)
For those wondering:
> The study has been funded by Worldwide Cancer Research, the Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer, the Marató de TV3, the BBVA Foundation, the European Research Council, the Government of Catalonia, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain, the Lilliane Bettencourt Foundation, “la Caixa” Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Palm, Canola, Rapeseed, Soybean, etc, they're all terrible. I avoid this shit like the plague.
This is also sometimes the topic in those subreddits: https://www.reddit.com/r/StopEatingSeedOils/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SaturatedFat/
Mind elaborating? Without specific details it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy or the "good old days".
Mouse experiments showed weight gain and memory loss/alzheimers [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3]
While mice are not humans, American obesity has grown since the use of seed oils has grown.
Seed oil advocates themselves appeal to "the good ol days", as many peoples have allegedly used rape seed oil over history.
What gave you the indication I was appealing to modernity? Being against naturalistic fallacy or the "good old days" doesn't mean I'm arguing "well it's new so it must be better!". I'm simply saying that we shouldn't give either side preference just because it's new or old.
>Consider that for years the "new" advice was to recommend aspirin to prevent heart attacks. [https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000678] If you ignored this advice some smarmy pill pusher would say you're appealing to nature. What about non-addictive painkillers like oxycotton.
This seems like a massive strawman/misrepresentation. People weren't taking/recommending asprin because it was new, they were taking it because it's what the clinical evidence was suggesting. Some reasonable objections might be that the studies were poorly done, or wasn't replicable, but "it's not natural" isn't one of them. Just because "it wasn't natural" produced the right result, doesn't really mean we should endorse it, or continue using it. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_(epistemology)
>Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence" [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13835...].
>Mouse experiments showed weight gain and memory loss/alzheimers [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17373-3]
Early studies showed that aspirin was beneficial for preventing heart attacks. You seemed to suggest that was bad. However, trusting one study saying that glyphosate causes cancer is okay? The wikipedia article for glyposate describes the overall evidence for glyposate causing cancer as "inconclusive". The IARC also said there was "limited evidence" for the type of cancer you described. If you want to make the case that appeal to nature is good, you really should have used something less contentious.
>Then the oil is bleached for a more palatable color.
Well is that bad? If they're literally dumping household bleach into the oil, I might be a little worried. Then again, they also put bleach (chlorine) into tap water, so should we be worried about that too?
> It refined like other industrials oils and often interchangeable for machining uses.
We also put nuclear plant coolant (dihydrogen monoxide) into our foods. Should we be worried about that as well?
>Seed oil advocates themselves appeal to "the good ol days", as many peoples have allegedly used rape seed oil over history.
Right, and that's bad regardless of which side it's on.
This is not a fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Ray Peat has been warning about seed oils for decades, I'm not sure if its bullet-proof but at least its interesting: https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/unsaturated-oils.shtml
I know I'm still consuming it when I eat in a restaurant. Best you can currently do is just not buy it for home use.
Heard it too causes cancer if you fry it though...
Frying at low temperatures with olive oil is one of the "healthier" ways to fry, though. Less volatile aromatic hydrocarbons are produced when frying with olive oil compared to other fats, and some of the compounds in non-extra virgin olive oil reduce the production of free radicals.
Most vegetable oils like canola and soybean have much less palmitic acid.
The same thing happens to flour. We process the living shit out of it, then bleach it, then we have to add-in all the stuff we removed so that it still has some semblance of nutrition.
It's like the deep fried pickle. A pickle in and of itself is a pickle, but when you deep fry it, is it still a pickle? Some will argue yes. Does it still have the same general health characteristics, or more importantly, the lack of negative characteristics as the deep-fried one? No.