Fuck cancer.
All the best to you and your wife.
All the best to you and your wife.
As a society, we have the option of greatly reducing cancer deaths whenever we so choose. Let’s do that rather than raging against something that feels nothing.
It has been over 15 years since the Last Lecture and we still have done little for pancreatic cancer, for example.
According to Craig Venter, early detection is what we need to eliminate cancer: https://youtu.be/iUqgTYbkHP8?t=15m37s
No one is saying it’s going to be easy but we’re going to make a lot of progress over the next 25 years. Let’s decide to do more sooner.
Certainly, I agree that we can be doing more.
I wish people would use "You are not alone" or "We also have suffered due to cancer. It is awful. You have our empathy and we offer our condolences." or something else instead of the shorthand "Fuck cancer". But I'll accept "Fuck cancer" too.
I learned two things over the years : 1. everyone “knows something” about cancer. 2. I can’t control culture and language.
To be honest though, many years later… I still haven’t found a single phrase anyone can say that doesn’t make me think, “I wish we could just not be having this conversation.” I remind myself that there are no words but people are still trying.
Yet we really aren't doing an awful lot about those things.
Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund. Sure it would be unpopular, but obesity would very quickly be solved, and cancer rates would plummet.
Imagine for example if we taxed the shareholders of CocaCola instead, they're the ones who got wealthy from obesity. And before you say "it was the consumer's choice", what was CocaCola's $4b/year advertising spend for, then?
That gives the companies an incentive to do the research ahead of time to minimize damages.
If raising the price of Coke is the goal, I believe there are already proposals for a sugar tax in various jurisdictions.
Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food.
It’s very tricky since taxes like that will hurt low income households the most.
Another option: ban advertising of heavily processed food, and while we’re at it let’s also ban advertising prescription drugs (as is the case already in Canada)
Isn't processed food already more expensive than "healthy"? E.g. precut fries vs potatoes. Etc.
What is cheaper to buy processed?
But walking into a typical US grocery store feels like a place where cheap, quick, processed foods are the focus with healthy food being secondary (perhaps because they’re optimizing their store layouts in response to consumer demand for sh*t food). Rarely is healthy food promoted on isle endcaps.
I do 100% of my day to day shopping at a (very expensive) health food store for this sole reason. At the health food store, they don’t stock soda, chips, etc (or if they do it’s locally made, organic, etc… “healthy” junk food). You can’t buy things like Oreos or Coke because they simply don’t carry it.
For me, removing unhealthy options when grocery shopping led to 40+ lbs of weight loss - with no other lifestyle changes and no additional exercise over 2 years.
When I make the occasional visit to a normal grocery store, I’m always in awe at how much real estate “bad” food gets. It’s the majority of the store.
All of this is to say, another place to look at are grocery stores themselves and the food they decide to carry and promote in their stores, including the layout of the stores, % real estate given to crap food vs. healthy food, etc.
Processing is a chance to use seconds - damaged or ugly potatoes that nobody would buy, and it packs more product into less space and with an easier storage mechanism (freeze) than properly packing to keep it fresh. Employees can throw boxes of frozen food onto a belt where they have to gently place boxes of fresh food.
Even with a well run shipping company and no problems you'll have a fair bit of spoilage and it means that every box is at risk of full rot (a bad apple...) and needs a human to sort through and pull it out. There are buyers of last resort at every stage of the journey who will take freshly damaged produce for immediate usage but they're often soup kitchens who can barely afford to pay.
No one is to blame for getting cancer.
The same for cancer's from nitrous oxides from car exhausts. The same for particulate pollution. Same for microplastics. The same for all the kinds of pollution we don't yet know about or measure.
A similar example is with early detection. The data show that at population scale a lot of early detection efforts cause more harm than good. The problem is that any arbitrary person might have their life saved by said early detection. It's impossible to know who those arbitrary people will be.
15 years ago Randy Pausch was also fit a year before he died.
So, instead of blaming people for poor choices imagine if 16 years ago, when the US National Debt was a mere $9 trillion, if enough people were inspired that on our way to $31 trillion in debt, we spent a few trillion of that on cancer research.
Most of the obese people are like that not because they choose, but because they cannot do better.
People were cooking with lard for 1000s of years until the US decided fat is bad and people started substituting fat with sugar because when you remove fat, you remove flavour.
There is a great deal wrong with very high fat diets, the issue is there’s also a lot wrong with very high carb diets.
Funnily enough not from obesity or heart disease.
They died from violence, starvation, infections, plagues, travel, etc.
Fats were not a cause.
The history of coronary syndromes and sudden death, and apoplexy or stroke, goes back to antiquity and has been thoroughly treated by historians and experts from many disciplines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, a heart attack with myocardial infarction was well known to cause death, but comprehension of it as a syndrome that one might survive was much delayed.
…
Part of the historical delay and confusion in recognizing heart attacks apparently lay in the Greek word, kardialgia, which could mean either abdominal or precordial pain. Biblical and Talmudic references abound, however, about chest pain of a life-threatening nature, and Hippocrates mentions sudden death related to an episode of chest distress (Leibowitz 1970).
Leibowitz points out that the great Italian anatomist Morgagni failed to tie it all together, but nevertheless clearly described in 1761 the late pathology found in survivors of myocardial infarction in his well-known dictum: “The force of the heart decreases so much more in proportion as the greater number of its parts becomes tendonous instead of being fleshy” (ibid., 4). http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/essay/history-of-heart-attack-...
Saying it was or wasn’t a leading cause of death overall is quite arbitrary, though it was at a minimum a common cause of death back then.
Not sure where the comment I’m replying to, and onwards, ever mentions cancer.
Lol
Given a large enough population you would still see very very rare cases of extreme age but you are something like 1,000 times more likely to live to 115 today than you where back in 1,000 AD. Combined with a smaller population and it’s likely nobody live to 115 until quite recently.
Anecdotally, I know people with the same wealth as me or even wealthier who eat copious amounts of sweets in all forms and are also obese. Some people just don't have control.
But yes, proper education regarding nutrition is something that is sorely needed as most people are unaware of the dangers of eating sugar rich and calorie rich foods in large amounts.
When we cure cancer, I'll back down. Until then, in memory of the folks I have lost and with empathy to those experiencing it or watching loved ones experience it, fuck cancer.
The issue with current early detection methods is that they tend to cause more harm than good at population scale. Between getting dosed with radiation in the process, false positives causing at best psychological trauma if not unnecessary treatment, and it's hard to tell if you just detected a cancer you'll die with instead of dying of - and thus another form of unnecessary treatment.
The blood tests remove some, but not all of that. Yes, for any arbitrary person it might be lifesaving, just like current methods. But at population scale it's not a panacea.
https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/01/novel-genetic-experiment...