Yet another thing on the cancerogenic pile sigh
At some point you have to ask yourself if everything but water gives us cancer.
At some point you have to ask yourself if everything but water gives us cancer.
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.
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.
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.