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Comment by nativeit | Hacker News Reader

As a Multiple Sclerosis patient since I was a teenager, let me just say: all you “healthy diet” zealots aren’t helping. Your advice on which blended kale and gogi berry smoothie I should try is cringe and annoying. Normally, the person is right in front of me, and well-intentioned, so I typically smile and politely thank them with a non-committal gesture towards trying it someday.

But since this is all one-party and relatively anonymous, I’d like to take the opportunity to tell everyone that unless you have a PhD or MD in a relevant field, your thoughts about fiber are irrelevant and unwelcome to anyone actually suffering from the disease(s) in question.

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I think this is probably due to people suffering from the just-world fallacy. Most folks like to believe that if you do the right things and consume the right stuff you'll have a long and healthy life when the fact of the matter is that luck/randomness plays a much larger role in your health than most people would like to admit.

One hundred percent. I work in film, and recently had an argument with a friend around this point. He's incredibly healthy, and frequently works a large number of unsociable hours. I was pointing out that filmmaking hours make no concession for family or age. He'd convinced himself that he'll have no more difficulty doing 80 hour weeks in his forties and fifties than he does in his mid thirties, because he 'takes care of himself'. The implication being that everyone could work those hours if they just ate better and held multiple martial arts belts as he does. It was no use pointing out that he'd confused cause and effect.

Certainly people work their way up and fade into a less strenuous role. Surely they don't just kick people to the curb. That would suck.

For set related jobs, the hours are the shoot. If the shoot runs long, everybody's on set. It's an exploitative - and in my view, completely unnecessary - culture. The marriages, parental relationships and health costs cannot be justified by the supposed necessity of dollar savings. But currently - especially in the US, film sets all to often work sweatshop hours. More enlightened practices, like 'French hours' (a ten hour day), are also possible. The films created under these conditions don't seem any worse, and the people involved are inarguably happier and healthier.

(Laughs in post 50 year old software developer)

You can control your luck a bit though. Granted you could be in perfect health but roll a 1 five times in a row and get a heart attack when you are 40. Or you could be crushing junk food and alcohol but you just keep rolling 6s and make it to 80.

If you look at the sequence of events that happen to trigger a heart attack, it becomes really clear how big a role luck is, but still you can mitigate each step. Studying this stuff also makes your body seem like a walking time bomb.

That plus not realizing that dealing with your chronic illness can be as much or more than a full time job, and the people with them tend to know MOUNTAINS more than you do about it.

Yes, these are true, doing the right thing, eating well and taking caring of yourself is not a magical bullet.

However it's irrefutable that exercising, sleeping and nutrition improves your health.

Will it prevent you from ever getting cancer? no, but it sure helps.

My mother passed away from cancer, she always exercised and took care of herself, it made the quality of her life much better. Looking back, she would have suffered much more had she not done that.

I dont think this is right... most people I know care more about not doing the "wrong" thing than feeling entitled for doing the "right" thing.

The issue often manifests in victim blaming. They assume that because something bad has happened to someone then the someone must be guilty of some transgression. Its often done on an unconscious level and we have to check ourselves that we're not doing it.

You’re probably right but it’s also true that that is a very (probably unintended) cruel worldview that thought to the end claims all those suffering had it coming, and as such deserves to be called out and those having it should reconsider.

One should acknowledge the role genes/luck play in disease, while also admitting that there are a few foods about which there is more or less consensus they are very bad for your health. So you can roll your eyes if someone suggests eating kale sprouts will cure all your problems but don't just keep eating junk food as if the opposite of their take must be good.

This. I'm as exhausted as anyone about the latest macro/micro nutrient diet. But also, when I binge on a bag of potato chips, I assume (correctly) that I'll feel like shit later. Calorie dense food that's easily procured and eaten to excess was not part of our evolutionary path up to now. Every individual person is a cornucopia of variables though too, and one persons perfect diet would kill someone else. So advice is hard to give out, but there are clearly some broad guidelines to eating and health that help you mitigate bad dice rolls.

> one persons perfect diet would kill someone else Besides allergies, that's not literally true, is it? Or would you say that allergies or severe intolerances are common enough that such dramatic diet fitness differences exist?

I think we're only beginning to appreciate just how sensitive our guts are to the abuse modern high-calorie food can dish out.

Honestly, given the extent to which many people's diets consist primarily of bleached and re-enriched wheat separated from the germ or simply refined corn, I think there are many more people who are slowly poisoned by their diet than realize it.

Yet there's plenty of hyperbole in my statement too. I don't think you could murder someone by making them eat your diet, unless it consisted of bags of broken glass.

You're on a discussion forum where the topic is colon cancer. Surely you understand that people are going to discuss it?

It's a bit hard to tell from your post what you're saying. Certainly I can imagine being annoyed by constantly being given health advice from layman. But this is... a forum.

There's a bazillion ways to discuss a topic that don't involve giving advice with unearned confidence. Even just saying "My experience is that doing X helped" instead of "You should do X" is a massive massive difference.

One thing I've noticed is that Americans typically use the latter while conversing.

(Nearly) everybody does, it's not an American thing. It takes a bit of personal discipline to avoid it.

As someone who has worked in three different countries in a variety of positions, Americans conversed in that way in proportions far larger than other countries.

Now this may be due to sampling on my end, but I did find the difference extraordinary when asking the same questions to different people.

That's fine. It's just unclear to me if the parent poster is being critical exclusively of people "irl" giving unsolicited advice or if they're speaking to the forum of users who come here explicitly to discuss topics like these.

If it's the former, I'm ambivalent. I don't give advice as a general rule. If it's the latter, I find that totally silly.

> As a Multiple Sclerosis patient since I was a teenager, let me just say: all you “healthy diet” zealots aren’t helping.

I don't understand the relevance to the article. Does Multiple Sclerosis come with a higher risk of colon cancer?

It's not about the article, its' about the flotilla of comments in this thread with unfounded layman "theories" about dietary changes that are the root cause rising colon cancer rates.

I'll echo this by saying that, as someone who has their MD, there is much we simply do not know. We're always updating our priors and have much to base our decisions off of, but we simply do not understand many things. Medicine is out here winging it with the best of intentions, but there are no "experts" in the grand scheme of things.

But have you tried Kaleidoscopic Perennial Kale?? Not saying it will help at all but it sure looks cool! https://cicadaseeds.ca/products/perennial-kale-seeds-homeste...

Lol your PhD got you this far, keep appealing to your PhD gods

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