Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review (2013)

For a truly cancer neutral food then, here are your ingredients. Hickory smoked ginger-molasses Macaroons seems like a start.

Anything that doesn't control for the amount of contamination that the ingredients has is meaningless. Are the participants eating meat? Red meat? Processed meat? Cured meat? We already know there's a connection with colon cancer and sodium nitrate, does the study account for that? Or just lumps everything into red meat category? What about heavy metals like lead and cadmium that we keep finding in cocoa and coffee? What about glyphosate that is found in more than 80% of the urine samples drawn from US, children included? Then we go outside US, and enter the realm of antibiotics... the list is effectively endless.

Using epidemiology to find correlation is absolutely meaningless if you cannot control for contaminants/adulteration. At best, the result is mildly harmless. At worst, it is drawing the wrong conclusion that we actually know a damn thing about what we eat -- we don't.

- If you don't have cancer and stop eating, you'll likely die of starvation before you get cancer.

- California made a law that says you have to label products if they contain stuff that might cause cancer. As a result, every product that might ever get sold in California has a label that says "This thing might cause cancer". It's safer to have the label just in case. Otherwise you'd have to check every cancer claim anyone publishes anywhere against all the inputs everywhere along your supply chain, recursively all the way back to farms and mines. Can you say with confidence that if some guy at the University of Boondocks publishes an article in the Timbuktu Journal of Basket-Weaving saying X might cause cancer, you'll see it? Can you say with confidence that even if you do, you'll always know if your supplier's supplier's supplier is using X? Easier to just say "We can't be bothered, just slap a cancer warning on everything we make so our liability goes away" and be done with it.

For those reasons, I would say the claim "Everything we eat is associated with cancer" is true, but not useful.

Causing or promoting cancer may be among that damage. Thus a varied diet is good because:

a) It limits the damage any 1 foodstuff can do, and b) It 'trains' the body to counteract that damage using the widest variety of inputs.

You'd have less damage by eating less, but of course there's a point where the negatives (feeling weak / thirsty, vitamin shortages etc) outweigh the benefits.

Optimum depends on a wiiiiide variety of interacting factors like genetics, environment, activity level, source & processing of foods, cooking methods, gut microbiome, just to name a few.

TLDR; we know 'nothing' about what exactly food does in the body. Food science is not an exact science.

Don't believe me? Go read some food-related scientific studies. The more you dive into the details, the more things become fuzzy. Not to mention in-vitro vs. in-vivo, the difficulty of establishing control groups, and more. In essence it's mostly statistics + theories + lab tests + educated guesswork. And meta-studies. :-)

Nothing wrong with that, btw - as long as those elements are well done, you can still come up with useful findings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN58tZ6dspA

Sugar is good for you, sugar is bad for you.

This will likely be the same science flip-flopping you'll see until you die.