I'm open to other ideas, but I have to imagine some of this is due to changes in our environment and food supply. plastics everywhere, pesticides in our food, pollution in the air.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/colon-rectal-cancer/dete...
At least in the US, I've found that if you're paying cash up-front, you can shop around for what you want, without referrals, and without this kind of hesitation.
My personal opinion is mandated flame retardants in foams, mattresses and cushions and other plastics. Smokers die less from fire but everybody else breath poison.
That said, the pop media (of which Scientific American is part) routinely conflates rates of diagnosis with rates of late-stage cancer, even though they're very different, and there's a discrepancy between them. I don't know about colon cancer in particular, but I know that it's been a long-term trend in many different cancers -- for example (iirc) skin cancer -- that people are getting diagnosed far more often, but death rates due to the illness are essentially constant.
This tells you either that we're getting worse at treating what we diagnose, or more plausibly, that we're not detecting things that would lead to death.
Why not microplastics, fine particle pollution, noise (urban living around lots of cars and/or heavy industry), mental stress, lack of sleep, lack of healthy connections, lack of time outdoors and healthy exercise, and similar things?
Seems weird to me to pick one arbitrary class of chemicals when all of the things I listed have been worsening.
[..] pesticides, GMOs, the flood of chemicals approved for everyday use, ranging from "soaps" to perfumes, to indoor "purifiers" etc, ultra-processed foods, and the list goes on.
I have a very rare type of cancer and this particular type of cancer has increased in numbers for young men.
[1] https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/morrissey/departments/biol...
I think the ultimate lesson will be "we're one with the environment, not, in fact, a separate entity from it".
Nature could, before, take time to heal and "absorb" everything we threw it's way. Time was the ultimate healer.
We no longer have that option and we simply must stop the third world from progressing. If you all thought it was bad with the small 1st world population damaging the env, you can't even fathom the scale and sheer trash the third world billions will generate in the coming decades whilst they "come out of poverty and industrialization".
How much of the quality of life in first world countries depend on third world countries?
What makes us sure that modernity as it is now is that much better? I'm not entirely convinced that is the case, and there are many problems that result from problems inherent to modernity.
For example, this happens, a lot: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
Given the mental health crises in the first world from our youth, I think the first world is far, far from figuring everything out, including problems with suffering.
As far as debt, isn't that a first world problem saddled onto the third world?
Finally, as a thought experiment, if an alien species from outer space came down here and wanted to uplift America, would Americans want it? I bet you, people would not take it well. There's a presumption of cultural and technological superiority that will chafe everyone. I've seen memes comparing Star Trek as an ideal of where we can go as a civilization, and yet, Star Trek also talks about the Prime Directive, not uplifting ... unless violating it generate enough drama to have an interesting plot.
Nearly the entire condiments aisle is now filled with soybean oil where it nearly didn't exist before. And it was a really big deal when McDonald's went away from using animal fat to cook fries in. Now pretty much nothing is cooked in oil from animal fat. This is certainly a change from pretty much the entire history of human food.
Various researchers are pointing out that glyphosate covers nearly the entire surface of the Earth and is found in nearly everything, including clothing and linens. It was not nearly as widespread in the '70s and '80s.
Exposure to various radio and now microwave (5G) frequencies was practically zero compared to what we began being exposed to in the '90s and is now pretty much everywhere.
Personally, I draw the major distinctions in video game technologies with the PlayStation and another later with Xbox Live! (the latter was really most popular with the Xbox 360). Previous technologies we would fairly quickly hit a point where it just got boring so we would go outside and play, most especially pre-NES. While more of a behavior factor, it is very important on pretty much every level except diet that we engaged in physical activity, social interaction, and sunlight.
As a side note, when I've tried to research it I've found that Gen X is experiencing a higher mortality rate than previous generations in pretty much every category. This correlates with my lived experience.
Glyphosate is perfectly safe, we just don’t have a scientifically literate population. The nasty stuff in Roundup are the surfactants.
Yet, here we are, with each generation following the Baby Boomers seeing higher mortality (and many other negative medical condition) rates than the previous generations. I guess it's just something else that we can't detect.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What? We’re fat, stressed, eating terribly and not able to afford our doctors enough.
FTFA: “Nearly half of newly diagnosed cancers in the U.S.—42 percent, according to ACS researchers—are avoidable with a combination of prevention measures, such as eating a healthy diet and maintaining a healthy body weight.”
It’s unfortunately more acceptable to let a family member ramble in the corner about glyphosphate than to tell them to get on a treadmill and/or take Ozempic. (Which may be the right answer. Perhaps the damage, physically and educationally, is already done. I don’t know.)
> with each generation following the Baby Boomers seeing higher mortality
Not true among the educated [1]. (An effect that persists even after adjusting for income.)
The entire decline you cite is among people who don’t have a college degree.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/17/educated...
Note there aren't any studies specifically about triathletes, only that with proper training, diet, and prevention as most higher level athletes get (uni, olympian, etc), there's no serious risk of DNA damage. Also short course triathletes face more risks generally speaking, at least for cardiac and gastrointestinal issues (not all being chronic, so there's no direct link to cancer here either).
Sleep issues are another area usually ignored since people believe they can't do anything about their sleep issues. I doubt most people are even getting good sleep, in the current ecosystem of always being available.
Additionally, due to the general availability of office work, more people are suffering from gastrointestinal issues than before. This causes us to be sedentary for long periods of time, but we believe ourselves to be "active" because we go for a run on the treadmill. I wouldn't say this really applies to you as a lifelong athlete, only that these extremes (sitting for hours, then rapid exercise, then back to sitting for hours) likely has unintended consequences.
Just some ideas.