Cancer Is Striking More Young People, and Doctors Are Alarmed and Baffled
wsj.com
wsj.com
This is a relatively small increase over ~25 years. How much of it is due to cases like the highlighted one (which is tragic, but clearly driven by symptoms), vs increased screening?
The US "standard" age for colonoscopy, for example, was recently dropped from 50 to 45...without really good evidence (essentially, just "updated models") [1]. This inevitably leads to higher rates of false positives in younger people. Over-treatment is a real risk in places like the US, where there are financial incentives to treat.
[1] old guidelines: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme...
new guidelines: https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recomme...
Note that this may vary, depending on your insurance...
The cost of the FIT tests is negligible compared to the cost of the colonoscopy, so it makes sense that you do these on your own outside the insurance system.
The age was dropped in 2021, in part because of the very numbers from 2019 you quoted. It's also weird to link to the page with evidence and give an unsubstantiated "without really good evidence" summary.
> essentially, just "updated models"
is literally how science is done?
Note also that not all screening is going in this direction, again based on evidence. Prostate cancer screening has been significantly reduced; many men in the US today will likely never get a prostate cancer screening.
I gave those links to show that there are no "numbers". They based the change on modeling results. The modeling results are based on assumptions. The assumptions may or may not be valid.
> > essentially, just "updated models"
> is literally how science is done?
My PhD is in statistical modeling of biological systems. To answer your question: no. Modeling, on it's own, is not "science". I would never suggest to anyone that a statistical model is the same thing as evidence. It's a model, which is based on evidence (maybe), after a thick layer of human meddling.
Modeling can be an input to a scientific process, but it isn't "how science is done". If you want to make a big change to all of health care like this, you need to do the damned experiment -- randomize people, and see what the effect of screening at 45 (vs 50) is on a hard endpoint like overall survival.
My partner discovered her cancer as a result of an unrelated condition: kidney stone MRIs showed a spot on her liver. We’ve been disappointed by every western medicine outcome for the last two years.
The Mayo Clinic was an incredibly disappointing experience. Our last interaction there, after giving some shitty news, our oncologist asked if we ate corn, like in tortillas. She had a theory it might be to blame. I pointed out corn is everything and bitterly wished her luck.
Hopefully, my partner will see her kid graduate high school in three years.
It isn't common for anyone under 70 which is why they don't spend a lot of effort on diagnosis and treatment of it. Friend of mine died from it when he was like 33 though. I hope you beat it.
Generally supports the view that early screening and detection are largely responsible
> Archie Bleyer, a clinical research professor at the Knight Cancer Institute of the Oregon Health & Science University, says the surge in cases of thyroid cancer, as well as kidney cancer, is at least partly a result of “overdiagnosis” due to increased screenings, both for cancer and for other health concerns. The screenings have detected tumors and masses in those organs that “look like cancer, so they’ve got to call it carcinoma,” he explains. But they “would never have been a problem if they were never picked up,” because they typically wouldn’t spread or progress.
I think this is rapidly becoming the consensus view, but the subject is complicated. In the long term, these early detections might lead us to the point where they can become more accurate, and we are better able to distinguish between tumors and masses that would progress and those that would not, but I'm not personally very optimistic; there are two many variables -- the same imaging between multiple facets of environment/genetics/diet/metabolism/chance might have wildly different outcomes.
[1] https://thehill.com/curing-cancer/4041032-cancer-rates-are-c...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00672-8
[3] https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/41620/the-dark-sid...
What is not a debate is that increased screening inevitably leads to false-positives. It's a mathematical certainty. But yes, you hope that you find more rabbits than turtles.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-chemical-found-i...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10937404.2023.2...
Article about Sucralose:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/goings-on/sweet-nothings
"Over the next year, Hough and Phadnis worked with the British sugar company Tate & Lyle to make more than a hundred chlorinated sugars, finally settling on one that had three chlorine atoms and was about six hundred times as sweet as sugar. “It isn’t of any use as an insecticide,” Hough told me recently. “That was tested.” But it has proved useful as a food. In its pure form, it is known as sucralose. When mixed with fillers and sold in bright-yellow sachets, it’s known as Splenda, the best-selling artificial sweetener in America."
However between the mass microplastics and a lot of recent food additive additions, and mass sugar, im sure there's something interesting going on.
ALSO could be literally resiedue from pesticides used during farming.
So lots of weirdness, tl;dr we need to invest a fuckton of money into research to find out the actual answer.
2,3,7,8-TCDD is one of the most toxic dioxins known.
https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/harmful-compounds-might-be-fo...
Is a microscopic bit of harmful chemical going to do anything? We are exposed to lots of harmful chemicals all the time. Even our cleaning products are harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
Admittedly I'm not going to go around boiling sucralose and drinking it but I'm also not going to give this much more thought either.
Dioxins are generally a class of chemical where the answer is yes. Even trace amounts are horrifically carcinogenic.
In one instance, six truckloads of 2,3,7,8-TCDD-contaminated waste (not pure TCDD) mixed into used motor oil and spread over the roads of a ~420 acre town as dust control resulted in the entire town having to be permanently evacuated and disincorporated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Beach,_Missouri
Also, more generally, letting catchphrase-driven handwaves from industry about how their dumping is actually ok really isn't a great way to be. Things like dumping of low-level waste (ie not actual uranium or fission products, just ordinary furniture/materials from facilities that are mildly activated) off the coast of california have increasingly been realized to be a mistake. Even "diluted into a whole ocean" (it never is), it turns out it doesn't just go away, and the plumes are in fact both detectable and potentially harmful.
You know what actually is the solution? The complete opposite, concentration and incineration (for dioxins) or permanent containment (high-level nuclear waste).
"Further, the team discovered that gut cells exposed to sucralose-6-acetate had increased activity in genes related to oxidative stress, inflammation and carcinogenicity. ‘It’s time to revisit the safety and regulatory status of sucralose, because the evidence is mounting that it carries significant risks,’ warned Susan Schiffman, the study’s corresponding author."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9261319/
I could easily believe that lack of sunlight (vitamin D) and exercise accounts for almost all of the observed increase.
Screen-associated pastimes strike again!
Might be actually too much if the increase is caused by skin cancers.
I'm curious what the odds are for an 80 year old light or never smoker. Is it 24%? 2.4%? .0024%? Do you know?
Also curious how long you have to live as a non smoker to get to that equivalent 25%. I'm under the impression that everyone gets cancer if you live long enough.
Your second question is also interesting. For a nonsmoker to get to 25% lung cancer risk, I guess he/she would have to live past 80, which few people do.
Your statement that we all probably get cancer eventually is mostly true - as we age there is an accumulation of mutations which eventually should cause cancer. Some super-elderly people in their 90s and 100s may have more senescent cells than others, and paradoxically lower their risk of new cancer later in life.
Breeding sounds horrible, and I first needed to google dysgenic, which really makes that term even worse.. but still I wondered not only once:
We as civilization with our medical advances (about that I am totally happy) remove or at least change selection pressure, so isn't it inevitable that we partly also "downgrade"?
Further, given an illness that kills with lets say 50%, and that is influenced also by genetics: If we can now cure that, so make more people survive and reproduce with this, while factors and genetics stay: isn't it expected we may see this illness raise in the population?
Really seriously interested about answers.. there must be a way to properly discuss this? What's the right terms for this?
(Besides personally, my gut reaction would also be that change of environment and our lifestyle here is likely most significant factor).
I can't really say that scans as a plausible major causal contribution to various digestive tract cancers going from 5 per 100,000 to 6 per 100,000 before age 50 from 1990 to 2019. The proposition that any meaningful environmental pressure selected against genes that might cause you to die at 45 instead of 55 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. That is well beyond peak breeding age. These people's ancestors were always susceptible to cancer, but they either didn't live long enough to get it or environmental contaminants that actually trigger the susceptibility were not present. Now they are.
On the other hand, if there's significant overlap between all the historical causes of infant/small child mortality that we've eliminated over centuries, and susceptibility to early cancer, that would be much harder to identify.
Lots of things in the environment have changed in the last 25 years, though, correlated with any number of things (e.g. obesity.) It will take a while to establish the cause. All the glib hot-takes on HN about "chemicals" and "plastics" might turn out to be a part of the cause, but we will see.
Illness that doesn't kill before reproduction is irrelevant. Evolution is about spamming copies of yourself more than other strains of organism, and getting cancer at 45-55 is moot if you have 3 kids and a retirement plan mostly completed before then.
plus genetically we're still basically cavemen, even if you can find pressures for things like dairy or alcohol tolerance in certain populations.
Historically, someone like me would have probably died prior to, say, marriage age. Now, if I wanted to reproduce, I have to ask the big question: do I want to risk saddling my child with what I have? Grandkids?
Assuming we don't edit the genes out of embryos and we're not doing something like issuing reproductive injunctions, people with genetic illnesses who aren't particularly conscientious would be adding propensities for whatever to the gene pool.
Nobody wants to discuss this because some German people were making noise about the idea eighty years ago and we can't have anything associated with that, to a point of senseless contrarity.
But let's talk about the things that are controversial, but really shouldn't be. Pesticides are carcinogenic. Landmark cases are making headlines but quickly sinking below the radar. Meat and diary consumption, despite the drum beat of evidence and recommendations, is accelerating at a rate that even experts find alarming. These foods are known carcinogens.
I went to a trendy bar recently and their bloody mary has skewers of smoked sausage and bacon. Sure, on one hand, yummm, bacon. On the other hand, there are whole continents of data proving without a doubt these foods cause cancer.
- We shouldn't eat chemical non-food
(whatever that means)
- We shouldn't eat meat and diary
So then how do you get a balanced diet? "Chemical" non-food supplements? Expensive (both ecological, and for my personal wallet) vegan options such as nuts?
Rice, beans, potatoes, lentils, other cereal grains are cheap and have a low ecological footprint compared to other foods.
Other vegetables, fruits, nuts, eggs can round out a diet and provide nutrients, flavors, textures, etc.
Basically, eat like every human on earth throughout history other than Western-diet in the past 40 years.
Also, when I think of American diets 40 years ago I think of a lot of meat. I think that figure needs to go further back.
Yep! Trade them with uncontacted tribes in New Guinea!
Seriously though I think we can be upset about unhealthy food without need to offer up a solution to the problem of corporate accountability.
If meat and dairy were so carcinogenic, we'd see high cancer rates in e.g. Mongolians with traditional lifestyles and diets.
"adding that liver, gastric, esophageal and cervical cancers accounted for the majority of all registered cases."
I wonder if people will ever stop rationalizing their red meat addiction, despite the decades of clear evidence of the impact it has on the GI tract in particular. Our ancestors didn't gulp down so much of it because they were so healthy, but because getting calories and dying of cancer after reproduction was a better deal than starving.
> getting calories
It's not the calories. It's the fats, trace nutrients, amino acids, cholesterol, etc. Otherwise we'd all have no trouble being vegetarian.
In any case, it's easy to agree that microplastics and pesticides are probably bad. Even if meat eating does cause cancer, it's harder to characterize it as an "addiction" and more as a biological tradeoff that our bodies made millennia ago.
I daily eat beef that has been cooked by sous-vide at 155F for 48 hours and then crisp up in an air fryer at 400F for 20 minutes. Is this over doing it with regards to carcinogen production?
That doesn't sound like well balanced protein sources and it's certainly not what our ancestors would have had access to. i.e. some days there'd be little to no food available, some days might only be grains/fruit/legumes/veg and then the occasional feast of meat which might last days or weeks after a hunt.
I think that the ease of digestion and my health improvements are evidence that this is an eating pattern that we're well adapted to.
Some pesticides are very likely carcinogenic.
For others, the mechanism of action is acetylcholine esterase inhibition, essentially insect-sized nerve gas dosing, metabolized by things bigger than insects, and then there are nicotine analogues for more neurotoxic action.
But for this particular issue, the problem is a recent significant change in cancer rates. That means that the cause is likely a recent significant change. The items you listed don't strike me as having changed significantly in decades.
Off hand, I can think of dozens of environmental factors that have changed: increase in acceptance of mental health leading to more Rx for same; vaping; marijuana use; a different mix of recreational drug use; less socializing leading to less physical activity; less air pollution; less physical activity as children due to attitude changes about their safety on their own in public; and a dozen more I didn't think of.
I wish good luck to the medical professionals who need to untangle this and find the source causes.
It's surprising that the rates increased in Western Europe that also have more stringent standards on food additives. This could mean something wide spread like microplastics rather than food dyes.
I wonder what the rates of dietary fiber consumption look like over the last few decades.
https://www.ewg.org/research/ewgs-guide-safer-cell-phone-use
It is hard to measure how cancerous a substance is.
Standards seem to be quite porous for a variety of reasons. For example existing allowed substances that get withdrawn indicate that the standards are imprecise.
> U.S. lets corporations poison the population for profit.
Europe is also quite well known for regulatory capture in the food industry.
Industry and academic rankings for food safety put high income countries on both sides of the pond at the top of the rankings.
Most of "food safety" is ensuring that foods don't have contaminants and a regulatory system that effectively ensures that.
But somehow, lots of horse ended up in European beef.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/feb/15/horsemeat-scandal...
Americans are being poisoned by the food we eat, how it's produced, packaged, distributed.
The only people baffled by it are those old enough that they were raised on actual food and don't understand what has happened the last few decades.
I don't buy the "we're just better at detecting it" argument entirely. No millenial is getting routine colonoscopies. I don't know what the solutions are, but I hope they come pretty fucking quick.
"Cancer is hitting more young people in the U.S. and around the globe, baffling doctors. Diagnosis rates in the U.S. rose in 2019 to 107.8 cases per 100,000 people under 50, up 12.8% from 95.6 in 2000, federal data show."
Rate of change was already climbing through the 80's along with the other age groups, then dipped in the early 90's for about 10 years and then started climbing again for the age range 15-39 while the older age ranges decreased.
That would lead me to believe any environmental cause has been around for a while and it's likely that all the focus has been on screening 40+ and not enough screening for those under 40.
Wonder if this older spike follows the period when the industry started bottling softdrinks in plastic instead of glass.
Anyone trying to eat a perfect Whole Foods diet may also still consume the occasional garbage food. I feel like fasting is a missing tool in the toolbox we don’t hear about enough.
Doing periods of 2 to 5 day fasts just seems to kind of reset things. Give organs a break that would otherwise never have a break. Many benefits to speak of..
But excited to see what the science shows in the coming decades.
There just seems to be something inherently natural feeling about feast and fast. Human ancestors were probably not eating 3 good size meals every single day forever without EVER giving there systems a break. The body seems to benefit from having a break from the constant toxin ingestion.
Do organs benefit from having a break?
https://www.alliedacademies.org/articles/fasting-can-heal-th...
The national library of medicine isn’t quite as extreme as the suggest that certain cancers are prevented, but does indicate support of fasting having positive outcomes for human systems:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK534877/#:~:text=Most%2....
A comment below states some cancers risks have a great increase from obesity, so the claim of intermittent fasting reducing cancer risk may to have some credence.
I did five days one time, and broke the fast by eating watermelon. A few minutes later I vomited just pure watermelon pulp. It wasn't even gross, it was like there was no digestive liquids in my stomach to do anything to it. I had to teach my body to eat again. You do this regularly?
If it "works for you" thats fine but I hope someone will always put it out there that fasting is dangerous, unsupported by evidence and more dangerous than you can know.
Fasting gives you a dopamine dump to give you the energy to find food. Not because it is in anyway good for you. Fasting makes people feel good after ending the fast because your body is relieved to no longer be starving. These dynamics are well understood in the context of eating disorders where "health fasting" is a well known symptom and excuse.
It's crucial to note that most studies on intermittent fasting have been short-term and conducted on animals, focusing on immediate changes like glucose levels rather than long-term health outcomes. This lack of extensive scientific data calls for caution in adopting intermittent fasting, especially for individuals with specific health conditions or vulnerabilities.
Which is not the same as modern peer-reviewed medical study, no. But it's not "no evidence" either.
I take the stance that health fasting is vastly different in effects from fasting as a religious observance. For instance the frequency and duration of so called "Health fasting" among other factors including the fact that "health fasting" seems to self select for people already at risk of disordered eating.
The hunger-hormone ghrelin actually has substantial and broad benefits to health, including an evolutionary sharpening of cognitive functions [1], albeit possibly at the cost of a narrowing of focus to food-related topics.
The fast/feast cycle was recently found to recapitulate in humans the improvements in health biomarkers typically observed with caloric restriction, with less detrimental effects on the immune system and bone density [2].
Anyway the line between dietary restriction that improves health and an eating disorder is a fine and dangerous one. The difference is made by meticulously monitoring your micronutrient requirements to avoid any deficiencies. Assuming otherwise optimal nutrition, caloric + protein restriction is consistently associated with improvement in health biomarkers. But long-term human trials with hard endpoints like longevity and suitable controls don’t exist and are impractical.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27993602/
[2] https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)...
Mental deficits are associated with fasting across a review of a variety of studies
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34595721/
Fasting can also cause other mental issues: "Additionally, fasting was found to be associated with alterations in mood, including worsened mood, heightened irritability, difficulties concentrating, and increased fatigue, as well as an increase in depressive score in mentally healthy humans"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-11639-1
All in all it remains highly suspect that fasting has anything but long term and short term negative effects. As I said in another comment it makes sense to me that so called "health fasting" tends to be more common among people who are already vulnerable and at risk for disordered eating. I will continue to spread awareness about the link between "health fasting" (as well as other health and diet based fads) and actual life threatening eating disorders.
There is a huge lack of research into eating disorders generally and even less research into the interaction of health fads and eating disorders. I encourage everyone to advocate and support any and all research in this area to combat misinformation spread by "health" gurus and companies looking to make a quick buck.
It’s likely that the downsides are a necessary trade off for a longer lifespan. The body reduces its metabolism in order to conserve resources and survive long enough until access to sustenance returns. The most dramatic change is the loss in libido; maintaining an active reproductive system has significant metabolic demands, so they are deprioritised. It’s possible that what we consider “healthy baseline” in the contemporary age of caloric abundance is actually a hyper-active state that accumulates rapid damage and dietary restriction brings metabolism down to a frugal and entropy-conserving state.
Edit: those two fantastic papers should provide you with all the help you will ever need in your efforts:
While its undeniable that some of the strains of mice and fruit flies did live longer, extrapolating that to humans and associating that with "health fasting" is questionable at best. If this becomes a viable technique for human health and life extension it ought to be undertaken in a supervised and managed way with the assistance of health professionals. Not sold as a magic treat-yourself cure for all ailments on the internet.
All in all CRL outside of an academic and scientific setting is almost certainly just going to spread dangerous misconceptions about health and our bodies.
> "Well fasting is hardly a consumerist conspiracy, as that would be a contradiction."
No fasting clearly isnt but most of these "health fasting" diet types also shill other dangerous "health" advice from juice "detoxes" to radioactive "aura cleansers"
About that "CALERIE" trial: "many of them had BMIs that fall in the overweight category at the start of the trial. This means that any health benefits observed cannot be fully decoupled from the weight loss most participants experienced on their restricted diets. It is already well-known that going from being overweight to a healthy weight has a positive impact on the body; however, the trial results do not clearly answer the question of whether metabolic changes due to calorie reduction beyond a normal diet can improve health. Moreover, the trial was too short to determine the long-term effects, good or bad. "
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/can-calorie-restrict...
So like I said above portraying this as somehow proven to be healthy in humans is a vast oversimplification of a complicated field and really isnt related to "health fasting" at all
I already brought up osteopenia and the effect on the immune system two posts ago. Furthermore, they are discussed at length in 2 of the sources I linked. Yet you repeated this point as if it was something completely new. It contributed nothing to adding further context and moving this particular conversation forward. I also never brought up the CALERIE trial (which btw had an average BMI of 25 and excluded anyone abouve 28); however, I did post a source to a different trial in healthy (normal weight) people, which you didn't engage with. You actually didn't engage directly with a single point of mine.
All in all, it seems I'm just wasting my time expecting a nuanced conversation that I can learn something new from. You're just eager to repeat a memorised script.
This is partly a knee-jerk reaction as I have had subjective experiences with vulnerable and at risk loved ones and acquaintances falling for faddy scam health advice and triggering underlying EDs and other health problems. It is way more common than you think.
While I dont have any sources or other good information to provide I can say that I think we really need more research into EDs hereditary nature, long term health effects, psychological effects among other factors before this technique begins to be widely used.
Like you said earlier "the line between dietary restriction that improves health and an eating disorder is a fine and dangerous one." I really think this is very true. Specifcally I worry about people who dont know they are genetically predisposed to EDs and attempt to do health based dietary restriction. This could be catastrophic for those individuals.
The job is impossible with our current sciencey abilities and our current systems.
I'm in the future already: where's my freaking flying car!
Meaning no offense but this seems like such a silly claim to make. I'm sure it's appealing to feel like you've found a way to hack the system but... color me skeptical. Our bodies evolved over millions of years to operate continuously and generally do so quite successfully for 60-80 years with no special effort required.
That said, I do look forward to seeing Tiktok videos touting the benefits of intentionally induced cardiac arrest to give your heart a break. Or holding your breath for long periods to give your lungs a break.
Maybe evicting him won't solve all the issues but, given past outcomes, we may be surprised just how many it does?
…and maybe, we're getting tired of occupying a position where we need to exhaustively refute Dibbler every time he makes a claim about the crap he's selling?
I want to just get one of those every year like clockwork, the same way I have to do my taxes or regenerate my human skin, just so I don't get blindsided by some late stage diagnoses a few years down the road.
Sedentism is likely another cause. Seems kids are more sedentary these days. Sitting still and consuming phone/video entertainment.
But another, perhaps even more serious suspect: stress & depression.
It's unbelievable just how physically damaging emotional stress can be.
I think that people want to stay baffled and stay blaming material exogenous causes, rather than look at themselves, their culture, and what they're doing (and not doing) to their youth.
Increasing surveillance & "safety" culture. Talk of rights, but not responsbilities, not purpose. Abandonment of religion and the deep traditional values, purpose. The massive increase in population and competition. Pressure to work hard and earn. But no matter how much you do, how hard you work, you'll still never be able to afford that house. You're just living to support the elderly, the lucker generations. Feels just like being born into servitude. No dreams to follow, no passions, even simple ones, like just wanting a place to live and a family. Can't even have that. We see our futures, and it's grim. We're resigned to the grim darkness, and our bodies resigns with us.
Where do you get this "no doubt" from. Can you point to a paper showing microplastics are relevant to cancer?
microplastics is just a boogyman word - a placeholder for modern-day fear - no different from 5G. The word du-jour changes over the decades (think back to whatever was feared when you were younger).
These two effects are widely known and the transitive property is clear. The first google result of a NIH study has ~4-8% of all cancers being directly attributed to obesity which is a lot and could well be an underestimate given the difficulty of attribution. Many cancers that have a clear genetic trigger may have been prevented or at least delayed by an immune system that wasn't impaired by obesity.
I agree with you, though. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the people dumping chemicals everywhere are investing in oncology pharmaceuticals while they wait for the class actions. They know what they're causing.
https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/bodyburden.html
> "...samples of Bill Moyers' blood and urine were analyzed. Eighty-four distinct chemicals were found. His test results – much like a chemical fingerprint – revealed evidence of hazardous chemicals in common use – as well as compounds banned for more than a quarter century – and others so obscure that almost no public information is available to identify what products might have resulted in Moyers' exposure."
As far as why such an obvious program isn't being carried out, it's because politicians wouldn't fund it due to lobbying pressure by the guilty parties. I don't think even the East Palestine victims of the train bomb that was set off there are getting regular body burden screens right now, for example.
Occam's razor: perhaps simply because the idea can't work.
"Eighty-four distinct chemicals" - so what? There is already an uncountable number of man-made chemicals yet we are not all dieing of cancer at grossly accelerated rates beyond what's natural. Weak signals are hard to find in noisy data.
BBQed food is carcinogenic - does that mean we should ban the uncountable number of chemicals caused by a BBQ?
It's a pretty straightforward approach, and while testing labs cost money, at scale it would be a relatively minor cost.