However, having already committed the unspeakable sin and egregious faux pas, I will suggest that if cancer is a thing you fret about, you can do something to reduce your risk starting today.
There is no truth to your statement that is it not socially acceptable to suggest diet and lifestyle changes to improve quality of life. Those suggestions are made all the time and people who suggest them in general suffer little to no negative consequences. I am not sure how you go about making those suggestions, but perhaps your approach is less optimal. There are situations where suggestions will be made and go unheeded. Many alcoholics know that drinking is bad for them and many smokers know that smoking is not having a positive effect on their health. They choose to ignore the advice.
My wife, who passed away almost two years ago, received CAR-T therapy for triple-hit large B-cell lymphoma. I can assure you that her diet and lifestyle choices were most likely not the cause. CAR-T therapy is not made available to any and all and her case was most likely caused by exposure to specific toxic chemicals. I only wish she would have survived the extremely toxic and negative side-effects of the therapy so she could be here to reply to your comment.
And yet DoreenMichele is voted down, and you angrily argued that her statement is no more scientifically valid than a religion.
It sure looks like it's not socially acceptable to you, at least.
My mother, sister, brother, father, multiple aunts and grandmother have had it one or more times.
I've had it zero times.
Thus diet and exercise are also not reasonable substitutes for researching better treatments for those who do get cancer.
I'm trying to step away from this discussion. It is kind of off topic and I don't think it's productive.
This is too simple of an statement for such a complex disease, so is therefore, misleading.
If we want more substantial studies, we turn to the UK, because they have a unified health system and have a massive collection of data on the general population. Timothy Key, et. al., Oxford, wrote a great summary of attributable factors (albeit a secondary data analysis). Outside of obvious factors such as smoking, alcohol, and obesity, what you put into your body becomes less and less a probability of being a cancer factor compared to age and genetics.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190379/
>> Early case-control studies indicated that higher intakes of fruit and vegetables were associated with a lower risk of several types of cancer. But subsequent prospective studies, which are not affected by recall or selection bias, produced much weaker findings. In the 2018 World Cancer Research Fund report neither fruits nor vegetables were considered to be convincingly or probably associated with the risk of any cancer. There was suggestive evidence for protection of some cancers, and risk might increase at very low intakes. Specific components of certain fruits and vegetables might have a protective action.
>> Vegetarians eat no meat or fish and usually eat more fruit and vegetables than comparable non-vegetarians. The risk of all cancer sites combined might be slightly lower in vegetarians and vegans than in non-vegetarians, but findings for individual cancers are inconclusive.
Rephrased, if you exclude all the obvious ways in which DoreenMichele's statement is true, then you're left with the ways it's not true alongside the ways it's true but not obviously so.
This is an argument anyone will grant, but it's a tautology that doesn't tell us much of use.
1) The best diet studies where people were asked to follow Mediterranean diet only managed to lower CVD and/or mortality by 10s of % points. This is a very poor outcome. At best adds a few years to someone's lifespan. At best. The average Mediterranean dieter fares a lot worse. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26528631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368053 Don't get me started about Keto, Vegan etc. Those have even less convincing evidence regarding hard outcomes (e.g. MACE, Cancer etc) though our opinion might change if they ever get tested in large scale.
2) Exercise is even worse. It has virtually zero effect on CVD outcomes, mortality outcomes in trials where participants were asked to change their behaviors. "Exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality and incident CVD in older adults or in people with chronic conditions, based on RCTs comprising ∼50,000 participants" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189...
It's a myth that diet and exercise will save you from Cancer or CVD. There's virtually zero evidence for that, when you look at things from intervention point of view -- intervention evidence is the only evidence acceptable in science. The rest is pseudo-science or proto-science.
Btw, I believe weight loss is the best thing you can do to live longer (that is if you're overweight or obese). But diets still universally fail. E.g. bariatric surgery probably works, maybe drugs will be shown to work (Tirzepatide/Semaglutide I'm looking at you). A publication on how 90% of obese dieters fail after 1-2 yrs on the same diet: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/
This is simply not true and you jump through some curious hoops to make it look credible. The paragraph you cite basically says "if you start after 60 it's too late". Is then proceeds to add that a few weeks of exercise are not enough, and a few months of follow-up don't catch measurable differences.
But if you actually read the full study that you cite and check the papers it reviews, you'll see that multi-year interventions at middle age with multi-year follow-ups are extremely effective.
Here's one of the reviewed papers, with 6-year intervention and 30-year follow-up: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
> During the 30-year follow-up, compared with control, the combined intervention group had a median delay in diabetes onset of 3·96 years (95% CI 1·25 to 6·67; p=0·0042), fewer cardiovascular disease events (hazard ratio 0·74, 95% CI 0·59–0·92; p=0·0060), a lower incidence of microvascular complications (0·65, 0·45–0·95; p=0·025), fewer cardiovascular disease deaths (0·67, 0·48–0·94; p=0·022), fewer all-cause deaths (0·74, 0·61–0·89; p=0·0015), and an average increase in life expectancy of 1·44 years (95% CI 0·20–2·68; p=0·023).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkO44tzkXyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFBBjynBpSw
tl;dw -- the relative risk reduction can be as high as 50%, and depending on risk factors, the absolute risk reduction can be 5%.
One study with 500 people doesn't prove a point.
Of the top of my head I know at least one other study where mid-life lifestyle intervention didn't reduce mortality (it slightly increased it in a statistically non-significant manner). 21 yrs follow up. ~3000 people. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...
That's like saying, "Exhortations to developers not to write bugs don't fail, programmers fail to follow exhortations." Guess what? Even the most skilled and well-intentioned programmers will write bugs, despite their best efforts; and lots of programmers simply won't put out their best efforts. If your goal is simply to find someone to blame, then sure, blame the developers. But if your goal is better software, exhortations not to write bugs are simply an ineffective intervention. You need to introduce other measures, like type systems, linters, static checkers, code reviews, and testing.
Similarly, if people consistently fail to follow diets, then the current crop of diets are an ineffective intervention. If your goal is to assign blame, then sure, you can stop there and feel good that you've found someone to blame. But if your goal is to actually make the situation better, then you need to find something else.
It’s not even the littlest bit like that. Nobody knows how to write software without bugs. Everybody knows how to lose weight. Just do some exercise and eat less calories than you burn. You don’t even have to do the exercise part, but you should do at least a little bit if you’re trying to be healthy. The only problem is that most people don’t want to commit the effort or make the sacrifices required to do that. If anybody’s trying to find something to blame, it’s the legions of obese people desperately in search of any reason for their obesity other than their own lifestyle choices. It’s a lifestyle problem, and it’s unlikely that there will ever be a pharmaceutical intervention for it that doesn’t have pretty bad side effects. But if bad side effects are acceptable for you, then magic drugs already exist for obesity. Anabolic steroids. They’ll do exactly what you’re looking for.
This is not evidence that diets universally fail.
It doesn't matter. You can't have a meaty discussion about this in relation to actually trying in earnest to avoid or delay cancer.
For the record, this was posted as a PSA without replying to any of the comments that made me think people could use a reminder because a direct reply gets interpreted as a personal attack.
If I'm eating PFAS, I'd like to know.