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Comment by rauljordan2020 | Hacker News Reader

rauljordan2020

So many folks that have it say things like "I was super healthy! Did exercise, young, don't drink, etc." Then you dig deeper and realize the last vegetable meal they ate was a soggy brussel sprout their mom made them when they were 17 years old, and also eat cold cut turkey sandwiches every lunch because they're "healthy", and maybe have a tiny shred of lettuce in the sandwich. For breakfast, they eat pancakes or sugary foods, and dinner is just a piece of steak

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You can quickly find historical availability & consumption data and I don't think it supports any trivially obvious hypotheses like these. You'll find headlines saying things like that we're at a low point in vegetable consumption going back to 1988, but I'm reading an NIH paper charting '70-'2010 and the patterns look stable, except for increases in total calories, in dairy, and in added dairy fats and oils.

Whatever's going on, it's probably going to end up being complicated and multifactorial.

(I do love me a crucifer, though).

To add to your point, not only will you find that the patterns of consumption look somewhat stable, but that this cancer did like all other cancers in the last 50 years and plummeted in incidence.

The correlation to any of that stuff and cancer is basically meaningless in the scale of one persons life

It's not at all. Red meat is carcinogenic, processed red meats more so. Processed meats are, too.

If you want to reduce your risk of cancer, your best bets are quitting smoking, stopping drinking, eating less meat, and exercising more.

Drinking, like, diet cola is nothing next to those. We know, without a doubt, tobacco, alcohol, and processed meats cause cancer.

There is nothing wrong with red meat, it certainly isn't carcinogenic.

"Guys, it's not the chemicals present in every packaged food you ever set your eyes on, or the pesticides every vegetable is grown in, it's just that you don't eat vegetables."

I can’t take hyperbolic appeals to the authority of chemical names = bad seriously. Let’s at least get specific and name a molecule with a known mechanism of action.

You don't have to take it seriously. If you think "mold inhibiting agent" on shredded cheese is good for you, keep eating it. It's probably been tested as safe and your body can't tell the difference.

I think the people that dismiss this concern are just as bad and unscientific. It's a pretty decent Bayesian prior to assume that regular exposure to synthetic organic compounds in quantities or concentrations that hominids didn't receive exposure to in our evolution are likely to be potentially problematic. This is especially true when they don't occur naturally in any organisms biochemical processes and yet are active enough to interact with many of these things. This is OBVIOUSLY true for things used as pesticides / herbicides. We have evolved a natural aversion to areas where all the plants and animals are dead and rotting. There are good reasons for this to be a really good heuristic.

I'll go so far as to say that almost any pesticide or herbicide is likely to be bad for vertebrates and invertebrates alike. This is really likely the case for perservatives as well, for what should be obvious reasons.

It's really not that crazy to assume they're probably not good as a default assumption.

Go into a hardware store and almost every chemical, solvent, paint, etc. that you encounter is not good for you. Eat a salmon and enjoy billions of plastic particles. Open almost any prepackaged food and you'll be ingesting all manner of dyes, perservatives, anti-caking agents, etc. etc. etc. that simply weren't around in your food environment during our evolution. It's a surprisingly good baseline assumption that these things aren't likely to be good for you.

If you think about the study design and epidemiologic studies, it should be clear that it's going to be very difficult to prove harm in a lot of cases for things that are only a little harmful, or only harmful in combination, or harmful only after 20 years have passed since exposure, etc. ...except that the science is VERY clear: something (or lots of things) associated with "processed food" is really bad for you.

Sometimes I don't even want to reply to the crazy 'science or it didn't happen' people, but I do it just in case someone less terrible is reading and is on the fence. It's amazing that we even have to write what you just did..

This just in, chemicals = bad

Correct, red meat and processed meats are known carcinogens, whereas high fiber foods like fruits and vegetables are known to reduce your risk of colon cancer.

Are you serious? Do you really think thats the reason that this is happening -- that people don't just eat their veggies? Fiber is important but, um, that's a pretty hot take.

I suspect there are other factors at play.

The diet of most people in the US is pretty horrific. Absurd amounts of sugar, little to no vegetables, little fiber, lots of heavily processed foods.

That certainly does not help the situation. Whether it's correlational or causal I'd leave up to people more knowledgeable in the subject.

Right but as I understand the problem of colon cancer its impacting people across the board in good health - not strictly this "core" US consistuency of high fat, high sugar, low fiber, high processed food.

It is also across normal BMI, "healthy" diet and regular exercising population. Thats what's concerning about the uptick.

No health issue is so easily reducible, but the impact of eating a diet of "actual food" and moving around even a little bit daily cannot be overstated.

The odds ratios for nearly all diseases and all-cause mortality shift so far from those two interventions it's almost unbelievable.

We really don't know the reasons well. Food... some kind of bacteria or virus... 5 random things stuck together... it's silly to guess.

Victim blaming cancer patients as cope so you can convince yourself "it won't happen to me" is a disgusting trend

https://realfood.gov/

Let's keep in mind that this is the recommendation from the same government that recently declined to regulate dangerous pesticides [1] and relaxed regulations on additives [2].

The current US administration is not at all interesting in addressing America's unhealthy food.

[1] https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/glyphosate-roundu...

[2] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-take...

It's better than the "Food Pyramid" and "MyPlate" which were the gov standards when I was growing up.

Those standards put processed carbs like bread/pasta as the largest part of a "healthy diet". Whoops.

> It's better than the "Food Pyramid" and "MyPlate" which were the gov standards when I was growing up.

Correct. The root of the problem is that corporate interests influence government regulation. [1] That hasn't changed. What has changed is which industry is offering the largest bribes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Humans have relied on bread, pasta, rice, and tubers for most of their calories since time immemorial. Japanese people eat plenty of rice even today and they are very healthy.

"Food pyramid dumb, eat meat" is a very reductive take.

Only the last hundred to twenty thousand years or so. Evolutionarily speaking, that's not our typical diet. Maybe excepting tubers.

Explain Japan.

I never said eating rice was bad for you, but fruits, nuts, meats are also human staples. The big thing domesticated cereal brought us was rapid population growth and the state.

Folks had to do the harvest and milling work themselves until recently, it’s not the same. Nor are the quantities.

That's what I mean by reductive. Lifestyle changes, processed food filled with sugar and marketed by corporations...they all played a part.

I love when the Food Pyramid and MyPlate are brought up as arguments on why Americans are unhealthy these days.

National estimates suggest only 8%-14% of Americans ever followed MyPlate. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40752889/

Also, MyPlate only used "grains" as a category, with a note to make half from whole grains...not just processed carbs. Big difference. And, vegetables are the biggest category.

Adding on to that, if you workout in ANY capacity, you need simple carbs.

Real Food, Truth Social.

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