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Comment by catchclose8919 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the things where it matters more how healthy/unpolluted your environment is.

I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole.

I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases.

...like in, I'd rather have a petrol/gas plant to replace a local COAL power plant FAST, than a nuclear alternative that would take 20 years to get funding and have the delayed-as-usual building process finalized. And I'd rather have all the hydro and windpower we can built asap, and we can figure out later if we really care about the western-golden-lyre-bird or whatever going extinct because of dams or windmills. In the end, tbh, I've come to terms with a +5/7 C deg global warming (100y timeframe) happening, but not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer because of chemical and particulate air pollution or god-knows-what from the latest untested and unidentified pan or sportswear coating!

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The effect sizes of carcinogenic (or potentially carcinogenic) environmental risk factors are small compared to the very high baseline risk of getting cancer over the long lifetimes we are blessed with. Some cancers, like prostate cancer, don't have any proven environmental or lifestyle risk factors.

Consider smoking - the exposure of the lungs to cigarette smoke is very high and very consistent compared to almost all other environmental exposures which are also generally less carcinogenic.

The key question is - are cancers getting more common without a good explanation [1], and if so which ones? The answer is that upper gastrointestinal cancers do some to be getting more common. These are plausibly due to dietary changes and/or obesity. Personally, I think ingesting huge amounts of added sugar, particularly fructose, is the potential unifying culprit.

[1] Many cancers are increasing in incidence because of better screening and detection. Breast cancer is a good example. Other cancers like leukaemia or pancreatic cancer couldn't even be reliably diagnosed 100 years ago, so obviously they are more common today.

>Some cancers, like prostate cancer, don't have any proven environmental or lifestyle risk factors.

Prostate cancer is associated with contracting STD's:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15988645/

Conclusions: This meta-analysis provides evidence of a higher rate of prostate cancer in men with a history of an exposure to gonorrhea, HPV, or any STD.

This evidence is preliminary and the odds ratios are small. Also, consider the very high prevalence of prostate cancer - it is implausible that STDs are a major or important cause.

According to the CDC the majority of sexually active adults in the US will get HPV at some point in their lives.

HPV is extremely common, usually asymptomatic, and already known to contribute to other reproductive cancers. Why is it "implausible"? It seems this study at least shows it is plausible.

The effect is weak. The ubiquity of HPV infection should show a stronger association if it were important. It could contribute to a subset of prostate cancers, but this has not been proven beyond correlation. There are other issues - HPV related cancers like cervical cancer or head and neck cancer show an age related peak and decline, whereas prostate cancer incidence continues to rise with age.

But the HPV vaccine is certainly worth having for males that have not engaged in any sexual activity.

True, it's interesting that it doesn't peak. Is that initial onset, or simply occurance?

I ask that because prostate cancer has a very positive long term survival rate but also recurs in almost a third of cases. I wonder if the peak in other cancers is because long term survival is lower, or lomg term survival is also high but recurrence is lower.

That is incidence, ie first diagnosis for the patient.

Other HPV related cancers like head and neck cancers tend to have a good prognosis.

HPV almost certainly doesn’t cause direct viral oncogenesis in prostate ca. It may cause chronic inflammation which promotes prostate cancer. It may also infect/accelerate already malignant cells - this is the likely mechanism in nasopharyngeal carcinoma and EBV.

The effect will necessarily appear weak when incidence of HPV is over 80%. At 95% it would appear weaker yet. That any signal shows up under the circumstances means the effect is huge.

With respect, this isn’t an accurate interpretation of an odds ratio. If you look at other cancers with a clear viral cause (EBV and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, HPV and cervical cancer), you will see that nearly 100% of tumours show evidence of viral infection and the odds ratios are very high, even though the viruses are ubiquitous.

The data for HPV and prostate cancer suggest, at best, an indirect effect such as inflammation rather than direct viral oncogenesis.

In any case, how do you modify this potential risk factor? Celibacy or vaccination. As I said, I would encourage any teenage male to get the HPV vaccine. It is worth paying for, if you can.

For cancer categories that are caused only by HPV, the signal would be clear even at 95%. But many categories have multiple possible causes. A cancer that could be caused by HPV or something else is still sufficient reason to get vaccinated.

Everybody not already exposed to HPV should get vaccinated against it. All insurance companies should be obliged to pay for such vaccinations.

"cancers like leukaemia or pancreatic cancer couldn't even be reliably diagnosed 100 years ago,"

That's only partially true. They could still do an autopsy to figure it out. Maybe less common.

Either way, cancer rates in you people have increased 30% since the 70s. And that's considering that smoking rates have decreased during that time.

This. I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy.

Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), smoke, veggies just a small side dish, no sport at all and they still live longer, healthier lives.

The few people i know who got cancer there, were well over their 60s (and all of them eventually survived). I'm talking about the region Umbria which is pretty pristine and barely industrialized.

This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.

> This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.

Imagine you’re completely wrong about this — because it’s a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in. What’s another answer for why Belgians seem to get cancer more often than Italians?

> a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in

Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after...

Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!

It is a dangerous assumption if wrong because it prescribes that you can do most unhealthy activities and they are not major factors for your health outcomes.

Well this doesn't mean that you can smoke all day if you move to Umbria and be safe. But what I noticed is that in some places smoking is much riskier than others.

And apparently it's not just a feeling of mine. Belgium is the 6th worst place in the world (just after the USA) for age adjusted cancer rates: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/global-cancer-data-by-cou...

...eh, it's the fries, trust me ;)

That's indeed the number 1 suspect! All that reused oil everyone is ingurgitating at least once a week XD

Do you know what kinds of oil are commonly used for the frying?

Not really. It used to be a mix of seed oils and animal fat. But I don't think that many fries places do still use the animal fat part for "health reasons".

Vitamin D deficiency is probably playing a not insignificant part in what you're seeing.

I still think it's pollution. There are many other countries with low levels of D which are ranking much better than Belgium https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/global-cancer-data-by-cou...

The first country on that list is Australia.

Does anyone here think Australia is more polluted than say India?

And also all the top countries in that list are all part of the more developed world, where pollution levels in general are much less than say other parts of the world.

While pollution might still be an issue it could also be that people living in developed countries have more access to healthcare and so their detection rates are higher.

I think that Australia and NZ might be very high because of skin cancers and the infamous ozone hole. India can probably be extremely polluted in the cities but I wonder if it's the same in the country side.

And fair enough, african countries might have undetected cancers and have people die of other disease before getting old enough for cancers. But I was comparing Umbria to Belgian Flanders which are both 1st world countries.

Why is Belgium so polluted, though? This is the first time I'm learning about it.

What is with the obsession hn has with vitamin D as a cure-all?

Like clockwork, every single health and diet story here gets vitamin D comments.

It's an extremely common deficiency that has links to a ton of issues, and it's quite easy to correct, so it's an extremely low hanging fruit in terms of reducing your risk for a ton of things.

What do you think it is about Belgium (a small country but by no means homogenous) that makes it more carcinogous than Italy? In the 40 years that I've lived here I've only know one or two cases of young people getting cancer.

Some stats do seem to confirm your anecdote: Belgium gets 345.8 cases / 100K (6th highest in the world) and Italy 290.6 / 100K (24th highest).

Maybe it's the zone? I'm in WV and it feels extremely bad here. One note: my experience is in Umbria, I know that there are some other parts in Italy which are pretty polluted.

By the way I've been wondering the same thing for years now. I don't know why. My hypothesis is pollution since the biggest difference between the 2 zones is the levels of industrialization.

It might have to do with better screening. I've read in the past that Belgium is a frontrunner in the screening for certain cancers (like breast and colon afaik). If you screen more, you will find more. Italy is quite poor and probably doesn't have the resources to invest, so ends up with lower stats.

WV = West Vlaanderen? What feels bad?

The air. Extreme traffic, old people burning wood (or worse) to heat their houses and a lot of polluting industry. Depending on the type of weather most days the air is unbreathable. I'm not saying that WV is worse than the rest of Belgium. This is just the place I'm experiencing.

I expected after COVID there would be much more focus on air control/monitoring. How nice would it be to have constant air measurements in neighbourhoods and inside houses. And not only CO particles, but a wide variety. Unfortunately I see hardly any focus on it anymore.

I bought a CO2 sensor, and found that the CO2 levels rise to unhealthy levels in like half an hour in my room without opening my window. Since then I only sleep with a window slightly open, and open it periodically during the day.

I also run an air purifier all the time, but I cannot yet measure it's efficacy, because a particle counter is like 2-3× more expensive than a CO2 sensor, so I haven't invested in it yet.

If you have central heating / AC, running it in fan mode also helps a lot in reducing CO2 in a room.

Yep, I leave the fan on all the time to circulate air in the house. The levels seem to range from 450-550ppm. I was surprised at how low that is considering this is a newer house.

450-550 is great, especially since ambient levels outside are about 420. I live in an old house and with windows closed and no hvac fan running, rooms only take about 30 minutes to get up to 800ppm with one person in them. After an hour or two they get up to about 1050ppm. With two people, they get > 1000 pretty quickly.

Looking at metrics from the sensor is pretty interesting too. You can see, to the minute, when a room went from unoccupied to occupied.

A PM sensor is 2-3 times cheaper than a decent CO₂ sensor if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Look for PMS5003 (or PMS7003 which is pretty much the same beast in a different package), and any ESP32 dev board (they're dirt cheap) + ESPHome as firmware.

invest in plants.

You would need to fill at least a third of the room with plants

I remember someone who did some research. You need to have thousands of plants to make a difference.

This is the NASA study that everyone mentions but nobody reads [1].

Check out page 3 for the drawing of what their plant system looks like.

[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19930073077

I got a CO2 sensor too, cheap but not entry level (about €125). It also does TVOC, PM1.0 and PM2.5. One reason was I "balloon" sealed an unused chimney (old house) for the winter, that was the main driver of ventilation (and drafts).

If I don't crack a window, me, desk-working in a ~85m³ room pushes the reported CO2 from 400 to nearly 800 ppm by lunchtime, though the device is close to (not on) my desk which probably skews it a bit. I don't have any data to compare though, I might remove the balloon when weather improves next month to see.

There's also a gas hob(!) in the adjacent kitchen, the other VOC/PM readings are elevated for as long as 12 hours (depending on how badly my cooking went :), even with a hob extractor fan running and permanently open intake vents.

The speed of CO2 increase and persistence of the effects of cooking were both a surprise to me.

This would be nice, but I fear we can go too far down this road, particularly with children.

Hormesis is important for our health: exposure to periods of starvation to induce autophagy of senescent cells, exposure to allergens and less-than-lethal pathogens (at a young age) to train our immune systems [1,2], etc.

Obviously we want to minimize heavy metal, PFAS exposure, etc - but living in ultrapure environments risks throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Absolutely in favor of better environmental monitoring, but we need to be very selective about the specific things we don't want.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/22/health/leukemia-clean-childho...

Legally mandating remote work and adding public transit options and raising the cost of daily useless commute would go a veeeeeery long way. Because the petrol not burned by driving can be used to replace the coal plants.

> Legally mandating remote work

That's... extremely totalitarian :) ...but legally forcing employers to allow remote work X days a week for jobs where it makes sense + solid investment in public transit would make wonders.

I’m not defending totalitarianism, but capitalist democracy really does a piss poor job at controlling negative externalities, to the point that I’m not really convinced it’s a good system of governance anymore.

Tax the externalities. Capitalism is fully compatible with using the price system to express preferences on externalities.

Capitalism operates fine when you tax the externalities, it’s democracy that has an issue setting up the taxes rationally rather than based on which groups have political power.

Ok, so instead of “force companies to allow remote work” it’s “tax companies that don’t allow remote work a bajillion dollars a microsecond”. What’s the practical difference there?

There’s no intellectually defensible way to price the externalities off remote work at a bajillion dollars a microsecond. On some level you have to trust someone somewhere to do a good job. Taxes are tools to help that, not a substitute for it.

There’s also no intellectually defensible way to price quite a number of potential negative externalities. Dumping toxic waste in drinking water reservoirs, for instance, shouldn’t be allowed at any price. So I don’t think taxes are the actual answer for a lot of things, you just have to straight up ban them.

No, you can price that. The cost will be so high that people won’t do it and pay the price. That’s the point. You can set a price on emissions or pollution and if it’s a small amount the piece may be worth paying. At higher levels you figure out how to do something else that is not that. You don’t just continue what you were doing at greater scale.

um, the tax should be on the externalities. like the pollution due to commute, road wear, the generated traffic contributing to the peak. (eg. if you start work at ~11 instead of at 9 you contribute less to the peak)

Who doesn't love a benevolent dictator?

No, it's not totalitarian at all. The same as not accepting slavery, murder or cannibalism.

This is totalitarianism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

Yes. Carbon taxes (and probably some land value tax) are the preferred solution.

I think you are overestimating the amount of jobs that can be done remotely.

Things that can never be done remotely: agriculture, construction, manufacture, hospitality, a big part of health/elder care, a big part of education, anything that requires expensive equipment (research, ...), artists/shows/events, the list goes on.

A lot of these sectors were either closed or running slow during COVID, which was not sustainable (you can't maintain the purchasing power of an entire population for decades if suddenly half of it stops working - it only works for a short while if you expect to be able to repay the debt you incurred to keep non-working people afloat).

So even if every single person that can work remotely does so, still expect big cities with transportation issues.

And that's without counting all the jobs that can be done remotely but are better done in office.

Not to go into each of your counter-examples, but while some of them can't be done remotely today, surely we can get there.

Eg. how far away are we from having remote-controlled tractors and combine-harvesters? Sure, get them home into a garage when they need servicing.

Hospitality? There are places which, especially in the first pandemic year, have gone all hands-off (eg. get a token to access a property on your check-in without talking to anyone).

But rather than can we, I think the point should be should we? There's a psychological cost to working with people you've never met personally, never hanged around with... And some people will struggle to get any social activity happening in their lives without work.

I've worked remotely for 15+ years, but I don't think it's for everybody, or for anybody all the time.

You understand that agriculture didn't shut down because farmers couldn't sit on their tractors and pull equipment, but because nobody was buying the product they were producing, right?

I am talking of a technical possibility of remote work for farmers.

I am not sure what you are talking about?

People going to places is no the problem. The problem is the peak demand. (Eg. usual commute. Rush hour.)

It'd be much much better if people were spending all that fuel on traveling with friends to anywhere else. (Or just going to events/festivals.)

...

That said remote work without any IRL interaction is definitely psychologically unhealthy. But! Doing a twice monthly sprint rollover or whatever means a qualitatively different kind of transit than the daily commute.

Most US cities need a small critical mass only to kickstart good [amazing!? okay, passable] public transport.

Urbanization is still in full force, cities are growing. (Even if COVID put a dip in the graph.)

Sure, the number one problem is density, but the US is ridiculously rich enough to support enough buses doing the rounds.

Agriculture is not causing congestion. (The rare combine on the rural road leading a queue is the exception.)

Construction is also a small part of the overall traffic. (Especially with more and more prefab happening around the world.)

Manufacturing, sure, production lines need operators, engineers, etc. Yet at the same time (speaking from experience) about half of the staff could do remote.

> So even if every single person that can work remotely does so, still expect big cities with transportation issues.

No questions there, but as I said a few sentences back, the peak is the problem. The upkeep (maintenance costs) for a transit network that can serve X number of people all commuting at the same time (in the same direction) is basically double than a network for half (or ~80%) of that demand.

> a polluted industrial hellhole

Doesn't have to be industrial. Just any city full of cars will do.

Does bushfire count too? I guess so.

It's not just cars, standards matter.

Have a look here. https://waqi.info/#/c/29.217/70.608/3.8z

And that is just the things we regularly monitor, think of all the toxic crap several industrial process may be releasing.

You're right. Each car is like one mini factory spewing out its exhaust into the air.

But those mini factories have gotten much cleaner over the years, yet we still see a 30% increase in young adult cancers over 1970s levels. So while it's a potential contributor, it seems there could be more at play.

Edit: why downvote?

How much cleaner have they gotten, and how much more miles do these factories get driven? Taking a look at https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles (the first useful result I could find), highway vehicle miles have almost tripled since the 1970s (1.1 trillion miles in 1970 vs 3.2 in 2019). Have cars gotten 70% cleaner in the same timespan?

It's not about miles driven. It's about air quality in cities.

Just looking at efficiency, we see that people get 50% more miles per gallon today than in 1978. This doesn't even include impact from emmissions equipment, electric/hybrid cars, etc. Plus, most highway miles are not in cities. Pollutants can disperse and settle out (not ideal in general, but relevant to air quality it is positive). They also have lower densities of people in the area to affect, which should affect the overall population numbers less.

According to the EPA, cars (and trucks and busses) are 99% cleaner today than in the 70s.

https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...

Aside from CO2, yes, in the US. In Belgium, or India? The numbers must vary, IDK how much.

You're right, there's probably more at play. Exposure to chemicals, pesticides in food, less time outside, more sedentary lifestyle, less sun exposure, more processed food. I was just saying that one car = one engine producing exhaust from fossil fuels (EVs a little less).

I've always wondered what the calculation looks like for doing something like riding a bike to work. Are the benefits from the exercise significantly greater than the possible accidents if you have to share a road with cars and exposure to pollution from riding in a sea of exhaust?

> I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases.

Most of the people you called "nutcases" are protesting against exactly the pollutants you described.

OK, I agree I'm not that informed about ER, probably I've only heard of some of their more misguided actions, maybe even overemphasized by their enemies.

...but their name and their most used description doesn't help either: first words you read are "climate change" and "biodiversity loss". No organization can focus on everything, and if they've chosen to focus on that, then from my pov. they're not focusing on what I care about most: engineering and sustaining environments (natural or artificial or hybrid...) that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways.

that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways

Which HUMANs? Only the ones alive today, or also the ones living 100 years from now? And why focus only on economically sustainable, don't you think that ecologically sustainable, socially sustainable or even morally defensible merit equal consideration?

The point is - even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer. A good part of the cause of cancer are natural processes - errors in DNA replication, oxidative stress due to infection or hell, just plain metabolism. Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents.

You could live in a bubble of pure clean air and only eat pure, clean organic food and get cancer.

The answer is to do the best you can, then live your life.

> even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer

That's like saying "even in the absence of lead poisoning, your child could still be retarded".

> You could live in a bubble

...they point is we do live in "a bubble", it's called Earth, and we can work to make this a cleaner and less toxic bubble.

I know perfectly well that cancer is a natural component of aging. And I also know that advances in anti-aging and regenerative medicine will make it possible to live longer and for this very reason cancer will be MORE of problem in the future and for future generations. Heck if modern medicine could enable my children to reach a theoretical max age of 250 years, I don't want them to only achieve let's say 50% of that achievable lifespan-increase because we've left them a "poisoned bubble" to live in.

It's amazing how little people want to pay attention to the environment and justify this by arguments of "but wrong thing X could still happen in regardless of environment" (ignoring that its probability would be 20% lower in a different environment). And when we do, we focus on fuzzy global properties of the environment that are hard to predict and have uncertain effects (eg. "global average temperature") instead of all the toxic stuff that can be easily traced and measured and where reduction would have impacts (measurable if people would be able to spend the money and relax some "ethical" rules to properly measure them...).

Not sure what your rant is getting at but my point stands - eliminate all pollution (even naturally occurring arsenic?) and you’d reduce cancer rates by maybe 30%.

Worthwhile? Of course? Going to get rid of cancer? No.

My rant was that we're incredibly far form "doing the best we can" with out environment, 30% is an insanely high amount of things left undone that we could do. Even 10% of that, 3% is a criminal improvement not to aim for. We're unimaginably incredibly sloppy and ineffective at managing what matters most of our environment and paying insane prices for it and that's what angers me...

"Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents."

Some of those errors could be epigenetic from your parent's exposure.

Sure, there's stuff outside of our control. But with young adult cancer rates increasing 30% since the 70s, it seems there's an environmental or mass lifestyle factor involved that we should be looking to correct or mitigate.

Hydro capacity is limited from how much water is coming down from the mountains. With global warming, it is about to be much more limited. China trying to tap some of the last great untapped hydro reserves left in the world (in Tibet) could also have serious environmental consequences for India and Southeast Asia (not just wildlife, but people who need water to farm and live). Dams are not purely virtuous.

It would be nice if we did, but while this would likely lower cancer slightly, I dont think it would come anywhere close to eliminating it. I think cancer is mostly a tradeoff for auto immune diseases and adaptation speed. A immune system good enough to prevent them, would also kill most all, and prevent any deviation from its template. This is particularly likely for the kinds of cancers which hit before 40.

In general, I think both the op, and this post vastly underestimates how little people actions affect the probability of cancer. Sure you can lower them slightly, but I have never seen anything indicating you can drop the odds of cancer more than 10% by clean living and pristine environments. Highly specific issues like very high radiation does concretely increase the odd's, but its barely noticeable outside of old school radiology nurses, or nuclear accidents. Things like a heavy tobacco habit does increase the odds substantially and significantly above baseline, but most people who smoke daily for a few years are still far more likely to die of something else. We can also infer that microplastics is less carcinogenous than tobacco due to its prevalence and negligible increase in cancer. Not saying its safe, just worth remembering that most cancer is better through of as bad luck, and very unlikely to be the persons fault. Basically cancer isnt anything you can expect that healthy habits, healthy food, or pristine environments could have fixed.

In the astonishingly rich biosphere there are exceptions to everything though, impossibly improbable things which had eons to occur. Concretely, we have yet to design a single antibiotic, geneditor or new trait, instead we find them. I care very little about the downsides for humans caused by pollution and global warming, but the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible. In other words, I'm all for fixing both, but not at the expense of the biosphere. Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.

> the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible

I totally agree on this. This is why it saddens me that in the current set of overlapping information wars we're living in, "biodiversity loss" was also weaponized and used like another red herring to distract people in many fights.

Take pesticides and herbicides for example - it's 100% percent clear that they are a huge cause of biodiversity loss. But practically all the opponents of pesticides are also against artificial fertilizers and against GMOs that when used properly actually have a much lower impact on wildlife, and in many areas of the world they are absolutely necessary to prevent famine. (Also, why aren't we actively developing GMOs that work with less pesticides and herbicides instead of the current abominable idea of developing plants resistent to higher doses of these chemicals? It's like we have a tool but we're using it all wrong to screw ourselves with it... maybe we need to have more state-funded GMO research instead of having it all in private sector with skewed incentives.)

Now, when people are made to choose between "full bio agriculture" (no pesticides at all AND no artificial fertilizers) and "classical agriculture", it's obvious the odds are stacked against full-bio, and any discussion on better limiting and regulating use of pesticides is avoided. Also, nobody even raises the issue that going full-bio would mean lower yields, ergo larger swaths of lands would need to be used for agriculture, so less land for wildlife and potentially more loss of biodiversity.

And when people argue against hydro lowering biodiversity, we rarely discuss how its alternatives would also impact biodiversity probably even more.

To make it clear, I'm not against focusing on biodiversity, I'm against it's current "weaponization" and use as a red-herring together with climate-change in a "mixed eco-activist save-the-planet-from-humans + CO2 is the devil" discourse that prevents any meaningful and results oriented discussion...

> Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.

Then let's solve the political and economical problems that make it unfeasible in most places. Let's build 100% non-military nuclear programs that are safe + cost-effective.

Just going vegetarian has a much greater than 10% difference for many cancers. Not all, but colon cancer is one of them.

Nuclear is not in fact a good alternative. But solar and wind are.

It is unfortunate that the cheapest solar panels have 8g/m^2 of cadmium; one hopes that is reclaimed at EOL. But a house fire with those on would seem to create a superfund site.

> not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer

The problem with this stuff is that it's not a hard "20 years earlier", it's minor tweaks to the statistical odds, and without special training humans are just not very good at coping with lots of different low risk of death issues.

We've seen this highlighted with COVID, where people have taken the death odds to mean both extremes of "this is completely irrelevant to me so I'm not going to get vaccinated or wear a mask" and "I'm not leaving the house again".

Those then cross over with the moralising of risk. This article is "I did everything right, I'm a good person, so why did I get cancer?" to which I can only answer that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that we're all mortal and vulnerable to horrible internal surprises. Plenty of the people in the "not leaving the house again" category know that, if they were to catch COVID, people would point to their pre-existing conditions as a reason why they deserve to die, and would be blamed for taking risks.

People absolutely love to moralise about weight, as well. There was a story going around twitter the other day of "my dad lost several stone unexpectedly, couldn't get his doctor to do anything other than congratulate him, then died of undiagnosed cancer". Medical professionals being unable to look past the weight to realize that rapid weight loss is a bad sign.

You got me curious about cancer rates by country: https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/global-cancer-data-by-cou...

They list 50 countries, and relevant to your post:

- Belgium #4 with 329.9/100K

- Italy #24 with 290.6/100K

Not a huge difference tbh. Regarding the comments about vitamin D, Sweden is lower than Italy. So I think the correct conclusion is: These things are complicated.

i was looking for india and its not even on the list. cancer is quite low in india me thinks probably because of a predominantly vegetarian diet

It would be helpful to know where the lowest rates are, even though reporting accuracy is probably also lower. The bottom third of the list would still be informative, but the Institute does not seem to have that.

A 16% reduction solely on the basis of which country you’re in seems like a pretty substantial reduction to me.

We do know absolutely that some environmental pollutants cause cancer(s) and other health related.

Outside of the known pollutants I am curious to know how much of the world population living in normal polluted areas vs living in highly polluted areas have more cancers?

Also it would be interesting to get data on the tribes living in say the Amazon. If their incidence of cancers is above or below average the rest of the human population

Just checked with my cancer textbook and it cites a 1990 study from the Netherlands that indicates that curing all cancer would increase life spans by a little less than 4 years.

Most people who get cancer are quite old. This doesn’t lessen the tragedy of young people dying from cancer but it is rare.

Part of me thinks that "green energy", "saving the environment", "stopping global warming" are all partly promoted by big businesses who know that they're unattainable goals, to keep us focused on some lofty ideal rather than focusing on small-scale environmental dangers. I remember visiting San Francisco, supposedly the liberal utopia of the west, and finding that I was forced to endure choking smog in order to use any public transit. Why are California's public transit stations all built near major highways, at street level, parallel with huge trucks and busses, with no ventilation? Because no one cares about you, it's all about "being green", whatever THAT means.

This goes back to my pet theory that Humans do Not Scale: because we treat others as anonymous, the entire pork producing industry feeds waste plastics to their pork, and this is considered ordinary behavior.

https://www.dailydot.com/irl/plastic-pig-feed-tiktok/ (not the only source, this video and issue has gone viral)

This is why we can't have nice things or a nice life: everyone treats the anonymous other as disposable. That makes everyone disposable, and our society a degenerate hellhole.

>I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole.

I always heard of general phrasing like "increases likelihood of cancer", but this sentence gives me the impression that there have been multiple conclusive studies on the direct contributions of urban pollution to individual cases of cancer. Can someone here who looked through such studies comment, or at least point to them by any chance?

Came here to say this. Any lovely old chemical fabs in her little slice of Bengaluru I wonder?

I hope we look at plastics/PFAS/pththalates in 50 years as we look at smoking and asbestos now. But given how anemic our federal government has been for the past 30 years and is only working for the people less and less, I'm not hopeful.

On a population wide evaluation, you are correct. However, some people are just more susceptible. It's complex, but if you just take a simplistic view of a single gene becoming cancerous, some people are only 1 mutation away and others are hundreds.

100% correct, but...this is the type of rhetoric that some industries employ to "muddy the waters" when they want to lobby against banning certain chemicals or processes.

Start with "it's complex" and "some people are just more susceptible" and you have a great platform for arguing against eg. banning lead-additived gasoline.

Then add the shifting away of blame from industry and corporations to individuals, sprinkle some "focus on what you can do" (eg. the "ban plastic straws" type useless token-gesture) or "it's that little things" and you get exactly the kinds of stuff industry is currently gaslighting us with, distracting us from high-impact but profit-lowering big measures that could be implemented instead!

Nuanced thinking can be weaponized against you just as well as black-and-white oversimplification...

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