Almost half of cancer deaths are caused by smoking, alcohol, or obesity
nature.com
nature.com
> "In 2019, half of all male deaths from cancer, and more than one-third in women, were due to preventable risk factors including tobacco and alcohol use, unhealthy diets, unsafe sex and workplace exposure to harmful products, such as asbestos. From 2010 to 2019, global cancer deaths caused by these risk factors increased by about 20%, with excess weight accounting for the largest percentage of increase — particularly in lower-income nations."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus_infection...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120915/#:~:tex....
HPV also plays into a variety of other cancers (throat/mouth, anal, penile, vaginal). Though cervical cancer has by far the strongest link.
Throat/mouth/neck cancers are actually strongly correlated with smoking, alcohol consumption, and HPV (https://www.cancer.gov/types/head-and-neck)
Condoms are at best ~70% effective at preventing HPV transmission so the “unsafe” part doesn’t really strike me as apt. Generally everyone who is sexually active has at least one strain of HPV.
HPV vaccination seems like the optimal strategy. It’s so weird to me that initially it wasn’t even offered to boys.
Epstein Barr spreads primarily through saliva, and also causes 1-2% of cancer, the last time I checked. So that could spread from unsafe sex, but it could also come from picking up slobbery toddler's toys.
There's a whole world of virus and infectious disease that is only becoming visible because of the huge advances in nucleic acid sequencing and other massive biotech advances. We may find lots of surprises in the coming decades from this new technology.
Before you read that book, quitting smoking is perceived as a loss of something that made you feel good. The permanence of this loss -- the anticipation of living the rest of your life without this source of comfort -- leads to cravings.
What the Carr book does is install a new set of associations: smoking is disgusting and your life is going to be so much better once you free yourself from this completely unnecessary weight that's been dragging you down. Instead of viewing quitting as the loss of something good, you learn to view it as the act of freeing yourself from something bad. Now, when you think about a future without smoking, the anticipation is positive: you get to live the rest of your life without this terrible thing intefering with it! And all you have to do is just stop doing it! Sure, you might have a little bit of physical withdrawal for a little while, but isn't that worth it to be permanently free of this awful thing that's been ruining your life?
That's the basic gist, as far as I can tell. In a way, it's just about being optimistic about a life without cigarettes instead of pessimistic.
You know it's probably going to kill you, you know it costs a lot of money and you know it's anti-social. The book wastes no time trying to convince you about those things. However, it dispels in a very systematic and repetitive way all the positive myths you believe (or repeat to yourself) about cigarettes ("the brainwashing"). It does not actually relax you or bring you pleasure, it just relieves a nicotine addiction and allow you to get back to a state you already had before smoking. It does not taste good. It does not help you focus. Nicotine withdrawal is actually extremely mild. Etc.
As the parent comment explains it's a re-framing, a change of paradigm. By the end of the book I could very clearly see that quitting would not be a sacrifice or "a pleasure i would loose" but something that would make my life better. And to be honest, this has felt like magic. A few days after finishing the book I just threw my pack in the trash and it really has been easy and at times actually even pleasant to quit. Every cigarette you do not smoke brings you a feeling of pride, accomplishment and liberation.
Just stop. In five years' time, you'll wonder why you didn't stop sooner.
Not a smoker but my initial reaction to you is probably pretty close to that of a smoker, and not particularly favourable. How can you possibly think that a deeply physiological addiction is going to respond to either logical arguments or simplistic slogans? Once you fix smoking, can you please stop the opioid crisis?
> "How can you possibly think that a deeply physiological addiction is going to respond to either logical arguments"
Because many many ex-smokers have said that it happened for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715196
It's easier to step down with it, and if you fail to step down, you're still getting fewer carcinogens.
One thing I've seen work for people is making a significant investment into a smoking counter measure. Extreme example, hire a personal trainer for $75/hr and go to the sessions 3x per week.
Now you are investing $225/week into your health, and you're going to want to get maximum ROI from that investment, right? Well, smoking is diminishing that ROI. Secondly, you have someone encouraging you to do the best possible work you can do with your body every time you go to a session. You'll naturally want to avoid disappointing that person. You'll also want to see continued progress in the results they are measuring. Smoking will impede that progress, and again, minimize your ROI.
This worked for someone very close to me after everything else failed. Incidentally, that person stopped going to the trainer after a while, but only after quitting "stuck". Good luck in your journey and never quit quitting.
It's important to switch from cigarettes to e-cigarettes exclusively and abruptly though. I have friends who tried to switch slowly and just ended up smoking both.
Once I used e-cigarettes I quit entirely within months. And it felt easy.
Add chronic sun (UVA) exposure, #1 leading cause of skin cancer yet still not addressed by popular media.
The reason it's not in there is because almost no one dies of basal cell, the most common skin cancer. Malignant melanoma is another matter, but that is much more rare, and also quite treatable.
I've had several myself and know lots of other people who have, too. They're handled via outpatient surgery and there is no followup.
Smoking, yes, we seem to have broad support for that one (way beyond what the facts support, even, but that's probably for the best). But the other two? I don't think so. There's a lot of confusion out there about alcohol use. Most people still think small amounts are basically fine (maybe even good!), even though more recent studies [0] suggest that isn't true.
And we're trending the wrong way on obesity, too. [1]
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-you-be-health...
> But there was a problem with many of these studies: They compared drinkers to non-drinkers, instead of comparing only lighter drinkers to heavier drinkers. And people who don’t drink are pretty fundamentally different from drinkers in ways that are hard to control for in a study. Their lives probably look dissimilar.
> Most importantly, they may be sicker at baseline (perhaps they quit drinking because of alcoholism, or because of a health issue like cancer). And something in these differences — not their avoidance of alcohol — may have caused them to look like they were in poorer health than the moderate drinkers. (This became known as the “sick quitter” problem in the world of alcohol research.)
> Lately, researchers have been trying to overcome that problem by comparing lighter drinkers with heavier drinkers. And the benefits of modest amounts of alcohol wash away.
And that even moderate amounts of alcohol are harmful:
> Their findings were stark: Drinking more than 100 grams of alcohol — about seven standard glasses of wine or beer — per week was associated with an increased in risk of death for all causes, they concluded. In the US, the government suggests men can drink double that amount — up to two drinks per day — but advise women who are not pregnant to drink up to one drink per day.
> A person’s risk of death shot up as they drank more. The researchers used a mathematical model to estimate that people who consumed between seven and 14 drinks per week had a lower life expectancy at age 40 of about six months; people who drank between 14 and 24 drinks per week had one to two years shaved off their lives; and people who imbibed more than 24 drinks a week had a lower life expectancy of four to five years.
My sort of baseline here is that nobody would think twice about this if they weren't motivated to justify continued consumption. It's fairly obvious that it's bad for you.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/24/17242720/alcohol-health-risks-...
> the relative risks (RRs) for all leukemia were
> 0.94 0.85-1.03 "any"
> 0.90 0.80-1.01 "light"
> 0.91 0.81-1.02 "moderate to heavy"
There is no signal there.
That's already heavy drinking in my book; drinking every day of the week, or binge drinking at least once every week? Somebody drinking that much already has a clear habit and is probably developing an alcohol tolerance, a major step towards alcoholism.
To me, a light drinker is somebody who has a drink on special occasions but not otherwise. One drink a week or less, so they're going several days if not weeks between drinking. I suspect the long-term harm from that is next to immeasurable.
It’s likely that the risk of,(e.g.) one drink per month is also very low. What’s not here is the inflection point where alcohol consumption goes from a (subjective) minimal risk to an elevated risk.
I think that sort of language is basically absurd, but the message it sends is crystal clear: this thing is bad for you, even in small amounts, and you're doing harm when you use it.
I think the CDC could easily settle on the same language with respect to alcohol, if there weren't socio-cultural reasons not to.
Another aspect of this is that we discourage even light cigarette use because of the fear that users might become addicted and escalate their usage. [0] It's interesting how rarely you hear that kind of an argument against drinking alcohol, and yet, unlike with smoking, increased usage can actually be ruinous. On the day you take your first sip of alcohol you're accepting a 1 in x risk that you'll end up a problem drinker (where x is anywhere from 3 or 4 to 20, depending on what definition of "problem drinker" you're willing to accept).
[0] I remember many years ago when I was a very light smoker trying to find statistics online about moderate cigarette use and it was basically impossible, because every single statement about cigarettes was of the form, "you won't be able to only smoke a little, so don't even bother trying."
Smoking is also much more obnoxious and directly harms anyone near. This is a first order effect, not a 2nd order effect like increased risk of car accidents.
It's extremely common.
> Smoking is also much more obnoxious
I'm not sure I've ever disagreed more with a claim than I do this one. People who have consumed alcohol are practically unbearable to the sober. And that's before we get into stuff like the fact that alcohol is implicated in some staggering percentage of all violent crime. Or drunk driving. Etc, etc.
On the other hand, a person smoking 1 or 2 cigarettes near me is actively harmful to my health. If you want to find a field somewhere to smoke sure, I won’t find it obnoxious, but no one does that.
>Extremely common
sure I’ve met those people, I’ve never met one who does it anywhere near daily. Also most of the ones I’ve known drift in and out of periods of being heavy smokers.
Again I have met many people who can drink a glass of wine every night. I have never met a single person who smokes a single cigarette after dinner. To me that says there is something different about cigarettes that makes them harder to moderate.
On the other hand, there are people who smoke one cigar occasionally: cigarettes, for whatever reason, seem to be a lot more addictive than other forms of tobacco consumption.
The good thing about cigars is that they're terribly inconvenient. They're harder to acquire, harder to store properly, harder carry around, and they take nearly 10x as long to smoke. I've smoked a few cigars per year for almost 2 decades, and I can't imagine doing the same with cigarettes. Nobody really buys and smokes an entire pack of cigarettes in one night every few months (because it would be insane), but if they did, it's unlikely they'd become addicted.
Excellent observation. What is in cigarettes is not really tobacco.[1] Also, cigarettes are intentionally more addictive than natural tobacco, and far more harmful.
According to the US Surgeon General Report Smoking and Health:
No. 1103, p.112 >Death rates for current pipe smokers were little if at all higher than for non-smokers, even with men smoking 10 pipefuls per day and with men who had smoked pipes for more than 30 years.
No. 1103, page 92 >Among the pipe smokers.... The US mortality ratios are 0.8 for non-inhalers and 1.0 for inhalers.
...which means pipe smokers (smoking natural tobacco) who inhale live as long as nonsmokers, and pipe smokers that don’t inhale live longer than non-smokers.
Smoking anything is bad for you, but national brand cigarettes are deadly. There are over 300 added carcinogens in cigarettes. My personal feeling is it is the added carcinogens that is causing cancer, and not tobacco. So it isn't smoking, per se, that is killing people en masse, but smoking cigarettes made by Big Tobacco, which will be any national brand (other than Natural American Spirits, which guarantees the only ingredients are natural tobacco and water.)
Everyone smoked during the Colonial era, including nearly all the Founding Fathers. Native Americans smoked for centuries if not millennia. Ever heard of a Native American with lung cancer? Only after the Chemical Revolution did smokers begin dying en masse annually.
People feel very strongly about this, and usually the information I provide stirs a strong reaction, because everyone knows smoking kills! But the devil is in the details. Carcinogens cause cancer and kills people in droves. Smoking tobacco, actual tobacco, causes emphysema, not cancer.
“Native American with lung cancer”
A quick google search shows Native Americans are more likely to have lung cancer.
If you’re talking about pre industrial Native Americans, it’s impossible to tell, because of a relative lack of written records and no accepted standard of what to even call lung cancer.
You’re entire post is so incredibly misleading. Look at the amount of tobacco smoked per capita between 1800 and the peak in the 1960s. The invention of the mass produced cigarette is certainly the cause of the increase in lung cancer deaths, but primarily because it made smoking tobacco much cheaper and therefore drastically increased consumption.
That's good news, because it means you will have no issue citing these studies and the cancer rates of smokers of natural tobacco.
> If you’re talking about pre industrial Native Americans, it’s impossible to tell, because of a relative lack of written records and no accepted standard of what to even call lung cancer.
Lung cancer was first described medically in the mid 19th Century, a century before the Chemical Revolution in the 1950's. If smokers were dying as fast as they are today (and have been since the 1950's), someone would have noticed. But smoking only became linked to cancer in the 1950s, the very dawn of the Chemical Revolution.
> You’re entire post is so incredibly misleading. Look at the amount of tobacco smoked per capita between 1800 and the peak in the 1960s. The invention of the mass produced cigarette is certainly the cause of the increase in lung cancer deaths, but primarily because it made smoking tobacco much cheaper and therefore drastically increased consumption.
By the mid 17th Century, tobacco was so overproduced that it cost a penny for a pound of tobacco. Accounting for inflation, that penny is worth $4.29 today when a pound of loose tobacco costs about $15 and the average price of a pack of cigarettes, containing less than half an ounce of tobacco, is $8. Tobacco hasn't gotten cheaper, quite the opposite.
What dramatically increased consumption was that nicotine levels were intentionally drastically increased, and nicotine was intentionally made more addictive by chemically freeing it from its molecular base. Since the 1950's smokers of national brand cigarettes are literally freebasing nicotine. Along with the massive advertising budgets of Big Tobacco, it was a one-two-three punch that caused the peak of "tobacco" use in the 1960's. Mass production was incidental.
Again, let's not equivocate natural tobacco with what is in national brand cigarettes. I repeat, smoking anything is not healthy. But what is in cigarettes is a whole other level of lethal. The lung cancer rates of cigarette smokers is far beyond what it is for smokers of natural tobacco, and this is what the studies show.
And again, these facts disturb many as well as yourself, because Nancy Reagan and the American Lung Association did not discriminate. While a manslaughter is a bad thing, a mass murder is far worse. As we can objectively discriminate between a drunk driving fatality and Josef Stalin, so we also can scientifically discriminate between how lethal different types of smoking are.
For example there are hardly any cases of lung cancer among cannabis smokers, even if we can all agree that smoking anything is not healthy, it is far less lethal to smoke cannabis than it is to smoke, say, Marlboros.
In the same way, it is far less lethal to smoke natural tobacco than it is to smoke any mass produced national brand cigarette produced by Phillip Morris. But let me be clear to the curious: do not smoke. Smoking is very bad, and is made far worse by addiction. Once addicted to the nicotine levels in national brand cigarettes, it overwhelms the individual's agency to choose not to smoke. Nicotine addiction robs you of free will.
The only speculation I have made is why, that I believe the smoking gun for cigarettes causing lung cancer rates to skyrocket among smokers is the intentionally added 300+ known carcinogens, which started in the 1950's.
What is insidious is this all came out in the 1990's government case against Big Tobacco, the production methods and the chemical additives, all of it. Big Tobacco was fined, but they were not restricted in their production methods. They paid some of the fine, but the remainder, iirc more than half, was forgiven in the early 2000's. If the government wanted to make a dent in the cancer rates of smokers, they would have dismantled the industrial processes of producing those weird and bazaar things everyone calls cigarettes and incorrectly believe are filled with tobacco.
Tobacco has been demonized unjustly (and smokers, who are all victims, right along with it), because while tobacco has certainly killed, it's not as many as you think, while the substances that definitely have killed exponentially more continues to slip by unnoticed, the intentionally added chemicals like hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, ammonia. Hopefully we can agree that smoking hydrogen cyanide is worse for your health than smoking natural tobacco. And if we can agree on that, maybe we can also agree that it would be better for smokers, if they are unable to stop, to smoke instead just about anything other than national brand cigarettes. Maybe if we're just a little more honest about what has happened and continues to happen, we can reduce suffering and keep these poor souls around a little longer, and even if it is just a little longer.
https://econpapers.repec.org/article/agsuersja/144742.htm
>What dramatically increased consumption was that nicotine levels were intentionally drastically increased, and nicotine was intentionally made more addictive by chemically freeing it from its molecular base. Since the 1950's smokers of national brand cigarettes are literally freebasing nicotine. Along with the massive advertising budgets of Big Tobacco, it was a one-two-three punch that caused the peak of "tobacco" use in the 1960's. Mass production was incidental.
Cigarette consumption increased exponentially from 1900-1950 and then the growth dramatically slows starting around 1950. Clearly the acceleration in growth happened and then reversed well before any changes to cigarette manufacture in 1950.
>For example there are hardly any cases of lung cancer among cannabis smokers, even if we can all agree that smoking anything is not healthy, it is far less lethal to smoke cannabis than it is to smoke, say, Marlboros.
Chewing tobacco causes oral cancer, this link was made all the way back in 1903. Clearly there is something different about tobacco, natural or otherwise.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246763/
>Since the 1950's smokers of national brand cigarettes are literally freebasing nicotine.
According to this study Natural American Spirit cigarettes had far more free-base nicotine than other brands.
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
This study also finds that they have a higher nicotine content
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8075288/
There are precisely zero studies showing that natural cigarettes are less likely to cause lung cancer. The only evidence you have is that lung cancer rates increased after 1950, which is also explained by the dramatic rise in smoking tobacco between 1900 and 1950. "Natural" pre 1950 chewing tobacco was suspected to cause oral cancer in 1903.
"Natural" pre 1950 smoking tobacco was suspected by many to cause lung cancer in the 1930s. In 1939, over a decade before the "chemical revolution" of the 1950s, Franz Hermann Müller, published an epidemiological study linking smoking to lung cancer. In 1943, another larger study by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger reached the same conclusion.
Clearly smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, whether they are pre 1950 "natural" style cigarettes or not.
You are grossly exaggerating with your assertion that any link was noticed "well before the 1950's," when the earliest historical evidence points to the late 1940s. What "people" noticed a link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking in 1850? I believe you invented this out of thin air. The Industrial Revolution also easily and more thoroughly explains the graph in that paper released when? Oh, 1956. Thanks for driving my point home.
> Cigarette consumption increased exponentially from 1900-1950
A four-fold increase indicated by the graph you cited is not an exponential increase. Again, you are exaggerating intentionally and deceptively.
> Chewing tobacco causes oral cancer, this link was made all the way back in 1903. Clearly there is something different about tobacco, natural or otherwise. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246763/
Your claim is again deceptive. The association published in 1903 was between oral cancer, tobacco, and poor nutrition. Regardless, this is a straw man argument, as I've never argued that chewing tobacco causes lung cancer; my argument only concerns smoking what is in national brand cigarettes verses natural tobacco.
> This study also finds that they have a higher nicotine content https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8075288/
>>Results: Under intense smoking conditions, nicotine in smoke of NAS cigarettes averaged 3.3(±0.7) mg/cigarette, compared to 2.4(±0.4) in other brands.
Oddly, the study does not name any of these "other brands," nor defines what intense smoking conditions actually means, but it doesn't sound like average or normal smoker behavior to me. It seems obvious this study was funded by Big Tobacco in order to level the playing field with Natural American Spirits. Big Tobacco has been going after and suing independent natural tobacco producers and retailers ever since they came on the market.
> There are precisely zero studies showing that natural cigarettes are less likely to cause lung cancer.
If true, do you even realize what this means?? Absolutely nothing. But your claim here is, in fact, false. I have already cited the Surgeon General's report, Smoking and Health, which thoroughly proves otherwise.
> The only evidence you have is that lung cancer rates increased after 1950, which is also explained by the dramatic rise in smoking tobacco between 1900 and 1950.
You are deeply confused about the meaning of rates, because your claim makes no sense. Tobacco lung cancer rates prior to 1950 are what they are. Regardless of how many people were smoking, the rates would remain flat had nothing changed. Increasing the number of smokers does not increase tobacco lung cancer rates among smokers. After the 1950s, the tobacco cancer rate itself increased dramatically among smokers. That strongly suggest something changed with the product in the 1950s. Again, more people smoking doesn't increase the possibility of lung cancer in any of them. The chances were what they were, but the odds of a smoker getting lung cancer notably increased in the 1950s.
> "Natural" pre 1950 chewing tobacco was suspected to cause oral cancer in 1903.
I have no idea why you are going on about chewing tobacco other than to advance your straw man arguments.
> "Natural" pre 1950 smoking tobacco was suspected by many to cause lung cancer in the 1930s. In 1939, over a decade before the "chemical revolution" of the 1950s, Franz Hermann Müller, published an epidemiological study linking smoking to lung cancer. In 1943, another larger study by Eberhard Schairer and Eric Schöniger reached the same conclusion.
Again, you are inventing. Every study I have seen spotlights the 1950's, more accurately the period between 1949 and 1956, as when the first valid scientific studies regarding this correlation appear. And who really can tell when Big Tobacco companies began treating their product with deadly chemicals? The 1950's Chemical Revolution was driven by DuPont and pharmaceutical companies, is somewhat specific to the increase in use of prescriptions and plastics. The Chemical Revolution proper has its origins in the 18th Century. Also, not for nothing, that famous Müller study has been debunked.[1]
> Clearly smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, whether they are pre 1950 "natural" style cigarettes or not.
Not according to the US Surgeon General's report, Smoking and Health, that I have already cited.
Your argument seems to be that smoking natural tobacco is precisely as lethal as smoking a partial tobacco product that has been infused with over 300 known carcinogens, when my argument is the precisely the opposite. My argument boils down to this: more lethal products are more lethal. I am astounded that you can not accept this.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3640840/pdf/nih...
This would be impossible to verify and strains credulity. People have gotten a little too comfortable making outlandish claims about the effects of secondhand smoke.
The EPA and the CDC have outlined the risks of 2nd hand smoke pretty clearly and convincingly, with a plethora of citations, if you care to google it.
I think you have a strange way of placing responsibility, because I am nearly certain what is actively harmful to your health is choosing to remain in the proximity of someone that smoked not only one cigarette but more than one. We know why they're smoking: they're addicted to nicotine, and it's unlikely they chose to become addicted. Why would you linger near them? Is it peer pressure?
If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit?
Talk about victim blaming.
If the smoke doesn't alter your desire to be there, then it is still your choice to be there.
> If someone walks around swinging a chain, so that everyone who doesn’t want to be hit has to run away from them, would you say that’s is my fault when I get hit?
This is both the weak analogy and straw man fallacies in one.
> Talk about victim blaming.
One can believe you were offended, briefly, when they initially lit up, but once you stayed after they continued to smoke near you and completed their smoking, and then smoked a second cigarette, unless you were being restrained and prevented from leaving, then you were not being victimized. Once you chose to remain, you are stubbornly victimizing yourself. It is your choice to be offended when it is easy enough to walk away. Smoking is legal, and there are no stand your ground laws concerning it. If you were legitimately being victimized and you had the ability to move away, if you were rational, that is exactly what you would do. It would be similarly absurd for the smoker to be offended that you stayed within their secondhand smoke. You are in charge of you and not of them.
It also doesn’t change the fact that I am annoyed that I have to leave the area I otherwise desired to be in when someone else decides to smoke.
In most of the US smoking near the entrance to a public building is in fact illegal.
If I am waiting under an awning for an Uber in the rain and you decide to light up, you are an obnoxious, asshole, scofflaw who is actively harming me. Despite the fact that I choose to accept that harm rather than stand in the damn rain.
Generally speaking, (here) smoking is forbidden in most indoor-ish spaces - which is the only reason smoking is anywhere close to the same level of nuisance as drunk people. Note that the same people that would enforce "no smoking" can also do something about the "practically unbearable" drunk person. And in outdoor-ish spaces, you can often avoid being affected - except in e.g. restaurants, where someone chain-smoking on the neighbor table can ruin the evening.
In college, for a year or so, I smoked one cigarette a day. Eventually, I decided any number was too much, and stopped entirely.
So yeah, it's a population that probably either graduates to a big habit, or gives it up completely. Fortunately I'm in the latter group.
Many cancer societies are now recommending zero alcohol, for example in New Zealand (where I have some reasons to trust the organisation): https://www.cancer.org.nz/cancer/reducing-your-cancer-risk/a...
Sure, a drink or a cigarette a day is not so harmful. I do know people that only have an occasional puff when out socialising and don’t even have one cigarette a day,p.
You chose an unrealistic starting condition for your comparison. I agree one drink a day is surely less harmful than second hand smoking from a pack a day. But choosing those starting conditions makes for an unfair comparison, so I pick different starting conditions, in part because I live in a country where alcoholism is rife and binge drinking is normal. Excessive alcohol consumption directly harms the drinker (accidents, cancer, disease, mental health) and directly harms the family, friends and children of the drinker (alcohol has different harms from second hand smoke, and the secondary impact of an alcoholic person is sometimes more acute than chronic).
Disclaimer: yeah, anecdotal, but across a wide variety of my acquaintances.
A single drink is unlikely to hurt anyone, as long as it stays a single drink.
There are a lot of people who can do a good job of not having that first drink, but have a really hard time stopping once they've had it.
And beer is the beverage of choice of a surprising number of alcoholics.
So yeah, for a lot of people, drinking a beer makes them want more.
There are a lot of binge drinkers that beg to differ.
For example, no one has ever, in the history of humans, had a single beer which has impaired them enough to get into a fatal crash? Even a single such accident would raise the impact of alcohol above the baseline by some tiny amount.
Perhaps the impact is minimal but it certainly exists.
We may like it or not, but since prehistory, alcohol helped groups, friendships and couples to spawn from nothing.
It is reasonable to ask if being sober and lonely at home is healthier than making social connections that alcohol helps to create and maintain.
You are fine and that’s nice. But my thinking was about people who struggles to socialize and suffer from it.
From a health perspective, are those people better alone at home or should they profit from the alcohol properties, even at moderate doses to create better connections ?
The question is important because socialization is important for your health. It greatly reduces stress and anxiety, it improves self confidence, and more generally, it gives you more luck in life. COVID lockdowns impacts on mental health are real, for example.
You seem to don’t drink alcohol (which, again, is perfect) so maybe you don’t know that its social lubricant effects (making shy people talk without anxiety, if you want) are effective at really low dose, way before being drunk.
Struggling with socializing is a matter of being inexperienced at it, like you would struggle to play guitar or to swim if you've never done it long enough to be at least proficient at them. Luckily socializing is one of the few things we've been doing since we were born so we got a degree of experience there.
If the struggle comes from having underlying issues that undermine your ability to socialize, say, lack of self esteem, depression or any other mental health issues, those need to be addressed as well and drinking is not going to solve them.
Actually those conditions will most likely improve by socializing without alcohol. Alcohol is just a false friend.
As a moderate outgoing and sober person, alcohol actually makes me shy, it numbs me down and takes away the edge I've been sharpening all my life. In other words it prevents me from actually be myself.
Looking back however, there were really zero added benefits to the relationships that were "lubricated" by alcohol that we couldn't have gotten had we put more effort into doing something creative or actively community building - rather than going out to drink and flirt. All of my best relationships were formed this way.
In fact if I think of times I was aware of or involved in when bad things happened (luckily I never had any problems personally) - alcohol was almost always involved.
At this point I will always prefer figuring out something interesting to do instead of contributing to "drinking culture."
Legalize safer alternatives now!
IIRC the argument about obesity is simply more cells = more chances for something to go wrong that turns into cancer.
It might be true, but real world impact of that higher probability of some cancer seem to be negligeable.
So what you are left with is trying to tease causation out of relatively loose correlation, which is and always will be so problematic as to be near useless. The results will always just support the researchers' pre-conceived notions.
Smoking is only so obvious because the rates of lung cancer there are an order of magnitude more. 80-90% of lung cancer is in smokers, while only 12% of Americans smoke. No other health issue is so clear, people who are moderate drinkers only have very slightly elevated risks of almost everything, so it could be confounded.
It’s better with alcohol and that is already not an ideal drug in that regard
Is one cigarette a day better or worse for you that one standard drink?
But it’s really hard to find actual estimates, most web searches just turn up the same ‘all drinking is bad’ message. I suspect the effect is small enough to be difficult to quantify.
Whereas some research puts the risk increase for getting lung cancer from heavy smoking at 2000%, or more. Twenty times the rate of non-smokers.
It's absolutely creepy how there's a constituency of people who are upset by any scientific possibility that fat people could be relatively healthy, or be made relatively healthy, without losing weight. The desire for fat people to conform or be punished, damn the science, is fetishistic. That's the only motivation I can think of for being upset by the exploration of the precise effects that being fat has on health.
I'm nowhere near fat right now, but if there were an injection that saved fat people from insulin resistance and inflammation, the farthest thing from my mind would be to get upset about it. If you believe that gluttony is a mortal sin, no need to be upset if the only ways fat people are punished on earth are cardiovascularly, through their knees, and through the aggression of bullies; your deity can punish them after death for not eating as moderately as you would have preferred.
There should be a reasonable medium where fat people aren't outright shamed for being towards one end of the bell curve but red flags for unhealth aren't ignored for the sake of other's feelings. America and now many parts of the west are facing various health crises to such an extent that I don't think obesity should be brushed off as perhipheral to other problems. Being fat has many comorbidities, and just focusing on losing fat is usually the best way to address those issues.
> I'm nowhere near fat right now, but if there were an injection that saved fat people from insulin resistance and inflammation, the farthest thing from my mind would be to get upset about it.
I agree, and there kinda sorta are medications currently available that would tremendously help. Off the top of my head, I don't know what it's called, but I know some people who've been on next-generation medications for obesity that target the ghrelin-leptin balance, basically correcting one's sense of hunger and satiety. Having seen the results myself, it works insanely well.
On the other hand, solving obesity with a pill still has some moral issues. If everyone could just consume anything they want in massive amounts and not get fat, I don't think that's really good for a person's psychology in a similar sense that giving someone a bunch of money often doesn't end well. It's not a scientific argument, but a philosophical one; I know. Such drugs may also give someone the idea that they can just eat whatever they want because they don't gain weight, but just because you don't get fat doesn't mean there aren't other consequences to eating lots of sugar, carbs, odixated oils, etc.
The question should be why we are so fat now. But that would mean believing that experts can be compromised and that a century of nutrition policy has been a failure, which many people aren't ready for. Just my opinion.
If someone quits chain-smoking they'll feel healthier, lose their cough, improve their aerobic capacity etc. If they go back to smoking they'll go back to feeling how they were. It's the same with obesity - doing short stints of dieting is like quitting smoking for a couple of months and then starting up again.
Not so much. The whole body positive movement has swung the pendulum too far to where obese people are “healthy” now.
edit: Does anyone know if psychologists or sociologists have a formula for quantifying happiness? Something like mechanical advantage. It seems intuitive that certain behaviors can act like a fulcrum by increasing happiness now at the expense of sadness later, either born by you or those close to you. I'm sure we've all had smokers joke that you can keep the last 20 years of life, maybe they're on to something.
Instead of coping with alcohol, I read math textbooks and do problems.
This has improved my life dramatically. I feel good. I feel proud. And despite optimizing for happiness as opposed to wealth, this coping strategy has made me loads of money.
I should mention my cancer occurred in my childhood, so it's not as though my drinking was a cause.
Considering that about 40 million adult Americans are on anti-depressants (smoking and drinking aside), it seems like more of an issue then just failing physical health of the elderly.
Still, smokers not wanting the last 20 do themselves a disservice by disabling themselves and their hopes of redemption. They often do not die sudden deaths that bring them respite, instead many spend years struggling for breath hooked to oxygen tanks. I think these initially rebellious smokers see themselves as going out in a blaze of glory, but COPD is anything but.
Hate to be that guy, but two of the 3 above are easily handled by simply not starting at all. People who don't start do not get the urge to go to these when under stress.
Addressing stress is a lot more difficult than simply not starting. In the US, the rate of tobacco use continues to drop, and it is an outcome of a fairly significant campaign. Put all those resources into reducing stress and you simply won't move the needle.
Meanwhile, population studies like the one this article is based on[10] are horseshit because they are subject to unknown degrees of sampling bias, rely on enormous assumptions (such as linear relationships which may not hold at all being applied over many orders of magnitude), and cannot in any case establish causality.
[1] https://www.pocus.org/ [2] https://www.butterflynetwork.com/ [3] https://www.exo.inc/ [4] https://vavehealth.com/
[5] https://ezra.com/ [6] https://www.halodx.com/ [7] https://www.prenuvo.com/ [8] https://www.simonone.com/ [9] https://www.lifeimagingfla.com/
* Compare the experience of getting an x-ray from a dentist to getting one from a doctor. Or getting an ultrasound from an OB to getting one from any other doctor.
Subjecting a population to unnecessary routine full body scans, especially with radiation, will cause harm statistically. There are also countless examples of people undergoing unnecessary operation and suffering complications, like losing a perfectly fine healthy heart and requiring transplant.
It seems like you’re promoting a self fulfilling prophecy. Doctors aren’t good at reading scans, so scans will cause false positives.
But doctors are capable of learning and improving their skills. They will surely rapidly learn to screen a lot of false positives, thereby saving lives.
"More frequent scans per patient" != "More scans seen per clinician". You would just end up having to hire more clinicians.
(Yes, your family doctor might end up seeing more scans in this scheme, but it is implausible that they would be better at evaluating them than a trained radiologist, which is who this would almost surely be deferred to anyway.)
Relatedly, for many types of brain tumors, you simply don't know what exact kind of tumor it is until you actually do a biopsy (= you undergo surgery). This can be important information ("how aggressive is it?"), so in some hospitals it is common practice to send a tissue sample for identification and get back the result while the surgery is still going on.
Mammography is a really good candidate for random screening and it's still debated because of false positives and the impacts of misdiagnosis.
It's a dream scenario, but maybe some day it will be like that. Or it will be like that and be dystopia. :)
In other words, you'll need an entire day off to do this if it is even possible for you to lay there for so long in one event, even if you get breaks. And for some folks it is going to be hours of torture.
More MRI machines won't solve the issue.
We would need more machines, but even now the prices aren't too exorbitant for something done annually (or- even every few years)
If it were $50-100, maybe then.
I also wouldn't bat an eye at spending $1k on preventative care each year. Many Americans are paying that annually for premium TV shows.
MRI's don't seem that great for an annual preventative check, since they are usually checking a pretty small area (or at least mine were). Like those were 4 different MRI's to check me from head to one of my calves. Getting 4+ of those a year would add up quick. And that's not even taking into account any of a myriad of other tests that could be done every year. I'm sure I could probably take a different test every week of the year, but I'd be bankrupt quick.
It would be an enormous benefit to do one MRI a year, rotating between areas of interest, at a relatively negligible cost ($500-1k or so per year - about what it costs for an annual physical).
It's extremely cheap compared to your Dr's hourly billable rate and would get cheaper at scale.
However, there is also a chance to save a lot of money by recognizing illnesses early. Sometimes it's possible to prevent a life-long need to take expensive medicamentation or it allows to detect cancer and allow for easy surgery in an early stage allowing for complete cure instead of requiring expensive chemotherapy AND surgery for a long time with a worse outcome. It might also very well prevent people from being unable to work due to illnesses if they are detected early enough.
And that all isn't even considering the changes in quality of life of course.
And 80% have. The needs of the 80% are not determined by the behavior of the bottom 20%
Rich people get better everything, including better medical care. The upper 30% or so can afford better diagnostics and they should be getting those better diagnostics.
Many of us in the software industry could afford a few extra thousand a year for preventative care -- but it is very difficult to obtain care commensurate with one's ability to pay. This is a real problem.
MRIs vary widely in cost and that cost will continue to fall. We'll get monthly scans within our lifetimes.
Ultrasound is not radiation (as in photons). To the best of our understanding (from a physics/engg perspective) ultrasound imaging capped by appropriate energy/etc limits is expected to be perfectly safe. Likewise with MRI. If we want more pointed study to be sure of this, that's fair, but let's be clear & specific about it and commit to figuring it out one way or another so we don't repeat the same discussion a couple of decades down the line. (We have to think of moving the state of the art forward, instead of festering in unresolved disagreements)
Further, if you're concerned about under-studied possible side-effects of radiation from occasional diagnostic testing, what do you plan to do about being blanketed by mm waves once 5G gets deployed more ubiquitously?
> There are also countless examples of people undergoing unnecessary operation and suffering complications
This sounds far more serious (and fixable) compared to the physics/biology interaction of diagnostic testing. Why do we continue to bury our heads in the sand collectively, instead of trying to fix this with better decision-making tools?
MRI isn't radiation, but is sometimes used with contrast dye. People can be allergic to the dye. For one person this is a small risk. Across a population we'd be causing harm. We'd balance the risks of harm against the benefits, and so far no-one can find a benefit to routine whole body MRI scans. And if the benefit was there the MRI machine companies probably would have found it by now because it'd massively increase the numbers of machines they could sell.
It isn't radiation.
https://www.insideradiology.com.au/gadolinium-contrast-mediu...
Hopefully in the long term future we will have extremely cheap & frequent MRI and blood testing so you can assemble a high resolution digital history of your body. Doctors are generally not very innovative people though and they will probably resist it to the end.
Apply this to more invasive exploratory surgeries, and you see people dying from internal surgery complications for benign cysts and lumps.
In science, you don't call one datapoint "data." You call it an anecdote. Outside of emergency medicine/urgent care, medical practice should be the same.
We — the medical profession in general — are aware of the proven effectiveness of time-series analysis of regular mammograms as a screening technique. However, we have failed utterly to spread this "obvious" knowledge out from the specialty that understands it and has proven its effectiveness, to literally anywhere else. We've been doing regular mammograms for decades now, but that hasn't sparked (wide) adoption of regular scans + time-series-based screening for any other cancer.
There is a certain moral culpability in that. A certain negligence of duty / not seeing the forest for the trees in what it means to be saving lives. (I hypothesize that doctors in at least some specialties, could save more lives over the course of their career by dropping their practice and instead turning into advocates for wide adoption of periodic-scans + time-series-analysis-based screens. Somewhat like would have been true of a doctor in the 1800s quitting doctoring to instead become an advocate for hand-washing before surgery.)
And as the GP post cites, the scans themselves can cause health problems down the road. Performing them on massive scale will increase the occurrences of those side effects.
Further, they are costly, and often times insurance does not reimburse or cover it. They can cost anywhere from $500-1000.
Unless you find a way to make this viable for the general population and lower the radiation exposure, this will never become viable for use.
I'd imagine that if there was consistent, good information available, we'd figure out how and when to act on it. The real issue is the massive cost of performing any given scanning procedure to everyone alive.
I totally understand and agree with trusting that medical professionals "know better", but I also would not conflate current practices with absolute perfection. It's clearly not a perfect profession or practice.
Once a scan exists, doctors are essentially forced to act on it. If an algorithm for deciding which scan results to pay attention to were so solid that it would hold up in court, that might make more scanning reasonable on the margin? I dunno though.
Yes, you are. This has a name - over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment. It's a significant cause of harm in healthcare.
https://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j4070
https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/31/1/54
https://www.choosingwisely.org/patient-resources/whole-body-...
There simply isn't good evidence that "all solid tumors caught early are curable." Some cancers, like localized breast cancers and certain renal cancers, are highly curable when caught early. Some other non-solid cancers like certain pediatric leukemias are also extremely responsive to therapy and highly curable. Conversely, some solid tumors, even when caught early, have dismal prognosis due to micrometastasis and the underlying biology of the tumor. I would recommend "The Hallmarks of Cancer" for a high level overview of the current understanding of what drives cancer: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2011.02.013
Do you actively read medical journals? Developments in biochemistry? Even amongst the best read physicians and researchers, I would bet my life that we're doing a lot of things suboptimally or have improper understanding of many diseases.
I'm not trying to belittle your understanding or your credentials, which I understand to be far better than untrained laymen.
The current state of medical care leaves a lot to be desired. We have a long way to go to detect and cure every disease state.
If more money is spent on developing better tooling, assays, imaging, etc. we will undoubtedly improve patient outcomes.
I’m far more inclined to trust a trained physician than a random HN commenter whose first four citations are just random ultrasound device manufacturer websites. The parent comment makes bold claims and tries to overwhelm the reader with non sequitur citations, but it’s clear they don’t actually understand the subject matter.
We don't know, but it doesn't matter. We can go to websites like the BMJ and see trained physicians and researchers saying the same thing across a range of different articles.
We can go to research organisations like NICE, or Cochrane, or the UK National Screening Committee to see doctors and researchers saying the same thing. For mass screening, the harm often outweighs the benefits.
Hell, we could improve patient outcomes enormously by paying for everyone to receive basic dental care, today.
Especially at older age, many things killing slowly are just too slow and other items will surpass them in achieving that kill, ie prostate cancer in basically all men (according to a close friend who is swiss urology surgeon its only question of time we all males get it, but most of the time you dont know about it and it progresses super slowly).
There are many things like this. That doesnt mean there isnt a room for improvement. I have some bad experiences too, but my wife is a doctor and medicine is HARD, every case properly unique. IT and stuff google et al do is trivial and deterministic by comparison.
We all would like this idea that medicine can cure it all, but we are far, far from it. But some folks apparently just love reading "10 things THEY don't want you to know about XYZ" articles and actually believe them.
Ultrasound has limited penetration for deeper tissues so you aren't going to see lung cancer with it (especially behind ribs), and overweight patients don't image as well, again because of limitations in imaging depth. Regardless of uptake it's not going to solve all our diagnostic challenges.
It also takes skill to know what you are seeing and to know how to find what you're looking for. Anyone could learn, but it's a time investment and physicians have limited time as is.
Still, it is becoming more popular and soon it won't be uncommon for your primary care doc to pull out the probe and see if your gallbladder is inflammed or if that abscess is going to be amenable to in office drainage.
Fantastic. I take it from those links this would be detectable with a full body MRI? I already wanted an excuse to start getting those regularly.
> Compare the experience of getting an x-ray from a dentist to getting one from a doctor. Or getting an ultrasound from an OB to getting one from any other doctor.
Can you expand on this? It sounds like you're implying something (I might agree with), but am not sure.
There is a lot of research on the topic but it doesn’t agree with the OP’s thesis. Full body scans can be purchased if you have the funds, but you are far more likely to get false positives than to actually catch a cancer this way. The ensuing medical costs and possibly even unnecessary surgeries are statistically likely to cause you more detriment than any benefit you might receive. This is counterintuitive to many, but the truth is that it’s not actually easy to spot nascent pre-symptomatic cancers from full body scans without incurring a massive number of false positives along the way. Something like 1 in 8 people will end up getting flagged for “warning signs of potential cancer” during these scans that turns out to be nothing upon further investigation. Few people continue to get the tests for this reason.
Psychotherapy can help with hypochondria.
It's also the case that a pregnancy is a hugely obvious invisible but major health situation, and teeth are expected to rot frequently.
Full-body scans have been marketed for years by companies looking to drum up business for their machines, but they mostly lead to false positives. Notice how your fifth link clearly says it has helped people find “warning signs of potential cancer” instead of that it helps people find cancer? These machines are basically false positive generators in most cases. If someone had effectively infinite time and money to dedicate to routine cancer screenings from these machines, they are more likely to end up harmed by unnecessary procedures stemming from false positive results than they are to catch and remove a specific cancer occurring randomly in their bodies.
Contrary to your claims, we do actually screen for certain cancers in cases where a clear net positive benefit can be demonstrated. Mammograms for breast cancer are one common example.
Doctors definitely aren’t just burying their heads in sand. These are common research topics and the tradeoffs of false positives are constantly being investigated. Full-body screenings aren’t necessarily a net benefit.
[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.35.2.119
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3209800/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4189562/
[4] https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-...
Not really; mammograms for breast cancer are commonly seen as an example of overscreening.
In cancer prevention, lifestyle matters.
I'm a physician that uses ultrasound every shift, and I'm pretty darn good at it. I've even used one of the specific devices you linked to.
Virtually every physician I know is foaming at the mouth to learn more ultrasound and to apply it to new indications and with new approaches. Inappropriate use of ultrasound for harebrained indications (for which we have far superior alternatives) is on of my pet peeves.
I am not a cancer doc, but I am drawing a blank as to what solid tumors you could possibly be referring to for which ultrasound is the preferred screening or diagnostic technique, or what kind of conspiracy you're vaguely implying that prevents its use. IME, virtually everyone is (over?) eager to use ultrasound for every condition under the sun, and I am sincerely perplexed as to what experiences have led you to form your opinion on this matter.
My fortunate paternal grandfather just had a heart-related incident and died quickly at a much younger ager than his wife.
I follow a good lifestyle to the degree that I do only because I want a good quality of life in my middle years and a bit beyond that. I am not interested in subsisting on carrots, cauliflower and exercise bands so that I can become a fit 75 year old with dementia.
Hopefully I’ll be lucky and die in early old age or I’ll get cancer. Dementia can fuck off.
Dementia shouldn't be preferable, you'll make life of your relatives painful
I'm so thankful even just for the last couple of years she got to spend with us. She was my neighbor, so we got to spend a lot of time together, and we had always been close.
There was in fact a bit of pain seeing her at the end, but I don't remember her that way, and I wouldn't change any of it.
It's definitely preferable to RISK dementia. It's not like it's a guarantee at some certain age.
A lot of the joy in my life would have been diminished if she hadn't lived so long.
Bankruptcy only has temporary repercussions, and is objectively preferable to death, which is permanent.
Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. Things like cancer can easily result in 7 digit bills, even WITH insurance.
Stress, and being in the mode of taking care of someone with advanced illness, might have her feeling down, and approaching and thinking about this differently than she would normally.
What about going into debt to get healthy and just flipping her debtors the bird? Or bankruptcy? Or waiting for hyperinflation to render her debts moot? Or moving to another country where those debts are effectively meaningless?
What's annoying me is the survivor bias. How do you know that people wouldn't have died earlier if they didn't do what supposedly caused the death over decades? Let alone that you cannot actually pinpoint what caused the cancer (but guess of course).
I think you shouldn't smoke and you probably should avoid alcohol or only consume in considerate amounts and don't eat like it's your last meal over and over, but you can't just say don't drink, smoke and overeat (or even don't eat this, but that) and pretend that it is better.
It's not simply a matter of 'avoiding cancer' but more 'avoiding a slow, painful death due to cancer'. It's not even a matter of "you have to die of something!" Most forms of cancer are not a nice way to die. If you can avoid getting it so that you die of something else, especially something really nasty like lung cancer, you definitely want to give that a go.
I'm old enough to have seen friends and relatives die of cancer and I really don't want to go that way. Seeing the affect on those people, and even more on their families who had to watch them fade away, was $^&%ing horrible.
Okay then, nothing you can do I guess. You're hereby absolved from behaving responsibly towards your own body. Is that better?
>> I think you shouldn't smoke and you probably should avoid alcohol or only consume in considerate amounts and don't eat like it's your last meal over and over, but you can't just say don't drink, smoke and overeat (or even don't eat this, but that) and pretend that it is better.
I addressed it already, but let me add this: Just be sensible and do what is best for you (in terms of health). There is no single way for everyone to do it right.
The truth of the matter is that all we can do is try to stack the deck in our favor. A major part of life is deciding which trade-offs matter to you.
Which is, what I said. And the trade-off can even be smoking or drinking alcohol, even if this does not seem right (to you or me). Paracelsus applies.
We know that processed red meat definitely causes cancer. We also know that it doesn't cause very much cancer. Our message isn't "stop eating processed red meat", it's "if you have a family history of colon cancer; if you know you have a genetic predisposition to colon cancer; if colon cancer is something you're worried about, then you may wish to reduce the amount of processed red meat that you eat".
I know no amount of alcohol is "safe", and a lot of alc is very bad, but in between, what does it look like? Is it a cliff after more than 2 drinks a week? 10? Does it matter if it's beer or whiskey?
> Those drinking 14 to 25 drinks per week could expect a shorter life expectancy by one to two years
> Those drinking more than 25 drinks per week could expect a shorter life expectancy by four to five years
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/sorting-out-the-health-e...
I don't drink or smoke but would love to avoid cancers. Wife was working at a great one but it basically shutdown cause clinical trials are so expensive.
That's what we as Computer Scientists can do... if we could have a sufficiently good virtual representation of the human body (at least enough parts of it)the cost and time of human trials would be reduced so much... it would be revolutionary.
I’m aware that all of those things are bad. If they get me in the end, I’m fine with that.
I’m not going to change my lifestyle just because it’s going to increase my life expectancy by a couple of years.
When a death is prevented, that can be at any stage, from avoiding the lifestyle choice like smoking and drinking, to the doctors spotting the cancer early and intervening in time.
So if we are talking about cancer deaths preventable through lifestyle changes, that is just mixing in too many variable. Some incidences of cancer attributed to lifestyle may have been prevented from becoming deaths due to medical intervention, which clouds the numbers.
50% is a lot.
There are, as any doctor will tell you, large numbers of people who will see their doc for any questionable data and demand treatment. Preferably a pill they can take once a day. They are not willing to be reassured and will happily go to a different doctor who gives them what they want.
> Among healthy individuals, there is a continuum of risk for alcohol-related harms whereby the risk is: > • Negligible to low for individuals who consume two standard drinks or less per week; > • Moderate for those who consume between three and six standard drinks per week; and > • Increasingly high for those who consume more than six standard drinks per week.
standard drink is the equivalent of a bottle of beer (12 oz., 341 ml, 5% alcohol) read more on the old report [2]
I know I will watch my beer intake more closely now.
[1] https://ccsa.ca/update-canadas-low-risk-alcohol-drinking-gui... [2] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/substance-us...
How does unsafe sex cause cancer? What is unsafe sex in this context?
You can just stick with adult Gen Z people now
Finally a good excuse to not hook up with older people
Does this mean that the predominantly muslim states have far less cancer cases?
We definitely have some that don't drink, or only a couple times per year. They come in and play pool, etc.
But I would guess 95% of our customers drink close to 5 drinks per DAY, averaged. (It's a local regulars bar, so we see the same faces every day).
You all know it...we all grew up learning the same tech..your just scared shitless by the implications of it!!..
Covid should have woken you all up...instead your playing with the devil for a last round---god speed!
> Data show that smoking, drinking alcohol and obesity are the biggest contributors to cancer worldwide.
> Nearly 50% of cancer deaths worldwide are caused by preventable risk factors, such as smoking and drinking alcohol, according to the largest study of the link between cancer burden and risk factors
Interested to see what your response is to the article once you finish reading it :-)
The human body can take enormous amounts of environmental abuse, but there’s clearly room for improvement.
Many lives will experience cancer, but not the majority. So it seems to be more complex that immune inadequacy (unless 60% of immune systems are working really well, which would be noteworthy). It seems like a reasonable hypothesis that environment is playing a larger role than individual genetic variations. So encouraging people (or even scaring them) to not smoke, not drink, eat better and exercise more seems like a reasonable approach - it won't cure cancer, but it could reduce rates?
1: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics
I know a few anecdotal cases where entire families of smokers died from lung cancer, while their partners, also smokers, had no problem, but I don't put much weight on that. Also I heard that smoking can cause other cancers like colon cancer in specific genetic conditions, but I don't know more details.
That approach works for me, anyway.
Some cancers are more likely to occur based on gender and more predictable gene expressions, but these aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be more likely to get cancer without doing anything special while still vulnerable to an increased risk of cancer through exposure to carcinogens (like alcohol, smoke, processed meats, etc).
Fitter, happier, more productive
Comfortable (Not drinking too much)
Regular exercise at the gym (Three days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well (No more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient, better driver
A safer car (Baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well (No bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals (Never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends (Enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (Moral) bank (hole in wall)Whats that?
A flavor tolerance develops, similar to drug tolerance.
Yeah, although I doubt it was as delicious before modern farming. Or even if it was, we didn't have most of it.
But an animal roasted over a fire is equally as delicious; just ask an Alone contestant. One woman ate the gut contents of a rabbit and said it was one of the best things she'd ever eaten.
Hunger is the best condiment, as the saying goes.
It is just one of the ways that human material conditions has quickly changed way faster than the human animal has managed to evolve for it, and so it is unsuited for such environments. I think we might eventually have a technological solution (everyone on appetite suppressants)
The truth is less exciting: avoid too much sugar or fat. Some is fine. Your "fine" and your "too much" may be different from someone elses.
With that in mind, there's no such thing as a minimum required daily intake of carbohydrates.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...
What stops people from just eating more of those healthier foods is that they make you feel full more quickly and longer with the same amount of calories.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for having higher food standards and healthier foods, I just don't think it'll help with obesity as much as you'd think.
Frankly, it seems like low satiating, high dense foods are the only foods up to the task of making someone obese. e.g. The ease of drinking a liter of Coke vs eating that same amount of calories in beans.
I would be interested to see the food diary of someone who claims to overeat healthy food. I think it would illuminate our mass confusion about "healthy food". The healthy foods I think of are the kinds you can eat ad libitum without much consequence.
Our deep genetic firmware hasn't been programmed to deal with this kind of extremely unnatural corner case, and we're collectively breaking because of it.
Eating one/two meals a day is something that nobody talks about as much as this other food conscious movements like gluten, carbs, now keto. All of this seems driven at pushing demand towards certain sector.
Really we just need to evolve so that these high energy density foods aren’t such a problem.
Why not up regulate our energy usage and boost our bodies self-healing mechanisms, etc?
of course big pharma does not like "free" medicine
Nature Magazine has soiled itself irrevocably with its political stances. Now when you read anything like this, you have to ask, "was this written because of some new scientific information, or was it just in furtherance of their agenda?"