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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

It is a strange chart. It for example shows that Belarus has pretty much the same rate all those 30 years. Cancer takes bunch of years to develop, and Belarus has had significant cancer numbers increase starting 10-20 years after Chernobyl. You can look up the articles on doubling rate of say breast cancer there which even without Chernobyl like events presents like 20% chances - now calculate what doubling of those chances means.

When it comes to US that chart looks a lot like the obesity rate chart, and obesity is a partial gateway to cancer, though they may just correlate too stemming from the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

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Very strange chart. The US has more relaxed regulations on food additives, pesticides, hormones used in livestock farming, and environmental pollution compared to the European Union. But that still does not explain the differences with, for example, Australia or Asia. Obesity may play a role, but obesity has also been on the rise in the EU for a few decades.

The problem with pointing obesity as the culprit is that ourworldindata has the same chart for obesity, where almost all countries are increasing at the same rate as US. But just US has this stark high cancer rate.

US is a standout in obesity - only Arab countries and Native Pacific are close to it where obesity has different character than in US. And may be the obesity and cancer has the same cause - high processed sugar diet for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...

"The United States (U.S.) is the leading country in ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption, accounting for 60% of caloric intake, compared to a range of 14 to 44% in Europe. "

It doesn't pass the smell test.

In 1990, US was 18.7% obese with a cancer incidence of 1,760, UK and Australia at 780.

Most recent is 2016 showing Australia and UK at 30% obesity, yet their cancer incidence is lower than ever at 750 and 682, respectively.

Everyone but the US (and Poland) are increasing their obesity while their cancer incidence is flat or decreasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...

Something fishy with the data there as here

https://www.wcrf.org/cancer-trends/global-cancer-data-by-cou....

age standartized rate:

USA - 367 UK - 307 Australia - 462

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