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Comment by noIdeaTheSecond | Hacker News Reader

My wild guess before reading the article: unhealthy food. A big part of which is herbicides and pesticides.

I will now read the article.

It's mostly obesity, which the article sort of mentions ("known links to obesity") but kind of obscures by saying "obesity does not fully account for the rise" and "a clear answer remained elusive." The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that. We know obesity is really bad for you, including causing higher rates of cancer. We know over what time periods young people became more obese.

Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades? I'm not sure that's the case. We used herbicides and pesticides 20 years ago too, of course. It's becoming increasingly clear that fiber intake is linked to cancer rates, but again I'm not sure diets 20 years ago had higher fiber on average.

Obesity indeed is a massive elephant in the room in public health discussions. And even in TFA "ultra-processed foods" are put first, which is a) just a silly category, and b) effects from poor quality nutrition are mainly via obesity.

The obesity epidemic is by far the most important public health problem in the developed world, but discussing this publicly, and thus effectively addressing it, is very difficult.

> The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that.

I can't help but think about the same thing with "co-sleeping". It's been discouraged altogether on the basis that it increases the incidence of sudden death syndrome in newborns, which sounds like a sensible policy until you notice that co-sleeping actually only increases risk of SDS with obese and/or smoking parents. But you have to actually read the research for that, and it's never communicated like this.

Went down this rabbit hole about "back is best" recommendation for babies. Turns out back is only best for the vanishingly tiny subset of infants prone to SIDS. And appreciably worse for everyone else. "Public health" means something different to bureaucrats.

Where can I read more about this? I've been pilled on the co-sleeping thing, but hadn't heard this about "back is best"

Maybe, or maybe it's the bottomless pockets of the sugar industry lobby.

> Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades?

Diet is only one of the factors on obesity and it's health consequences, you also have stress, sleep deprivation, lack of exercises, loneliness and isolation.

Diet and exercise (to lesser extent) are the mechanism of obesity. The other factors may affect diet and exercise. A massive other factor for the latter is driving.

I don't think the medical establishment is covering it up; if they could sell Ozempic as preventing cancer they'd jump at the idea.

The medical establishment isn't covering it up; they're just embarrassed to say it out loud, directly. Instead they talk around it. GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic may well get to a point where they can be marketed as cancer preventing.

My personal bugbear is the lack of sleep & entirely tied to the phone for that.

I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.

Now, I can't sleep, there's an endless stream of things to keep me awake.

The jokes about "5G gives you cancer" is probably not as funny, if you think about the sleep you miss while you doom scroll.

> I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.

Back when I was young in the 90s, this was exactly how I spent the last 5-6 hours of my days, reading books in my bed until the sun came up in the morning and I actually started getting tired.

Now, I sleep much better, the bed and bedroom is limited to just two activities, sleeping and funtime with partner, otherwise I never just chill in the bed or have anything else interesting in there. And if I can't sleep, I go up again and do something else until I'm tired enough to actually lay down in the bed. Probably helps a ton, as even with the phone on the nightstand next to me, I do fall asleep relatively quick.

Lack of sleep, not because of phones but because of more demanding lives due to modern education and workplace demands. Phones might contribute too, but consider how normal it is today to work till late hours compared to previous generations.

>The jokes about "5G gives you cancer" is probably not as funny, if you think about the sleep you miss while you doom scroll.

802.11g was good enough for that, no need for 5G.

As you know this, why don't you fix it?

What is forcing you to doom scroll rather than putting the phone in a different room before going do bed?

What's forcing people to keep eating terrible diets and getting fat? What's forcing <bad habit> that results in <bad outcome>. The answer is usually human weakness or someone seeking to make a profit by encouraging the bad habit, or a combination of the two.

As individuals, there's nothing we can do other than exert willpower, and we should. But as a society we should also be asking questions about the supply side of these bad habits.

As a society we should be asking those questions yes

As an individual, pretending you have free will and can opt to not do things you know are bad for you is probably better than doing those things while complaining that society isn't stopping you from hurting yourself

I believe that county specific studies seem to support your thesis. For instance, countries that eat less processed food (eg Italy) and have stricter rules about pesticides didn't see an increase in stuff like colorectal cancer [1]. Some cancers incidence did grow, but others decreased keeping incidence more or less the same.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03008916241297078

What a shame that "no definitive culprit yet" somehow becomes "nothing specific to worry about yet, carry on" instead of "we can't answer because there are too many horrifying trends all at once".

Plastics, the increase in background radiation, pesticides, and or a side effect of extra calories are all possibilities. Daily allergy medicines might also be a factor as those reduce immune response slightly.

There is no increase in background radiation.

This suggests otherwise, https://radwatch.berkeley.edu/background-radiation/ Another exposure increase is from increased home insulation likely increases radon exposure.

That link suggests nothing of the sort. That aside, I’ve been tracking background radiation for years with my own sensors (for other reasons). I can’t replicate this claim there either, as expected.

That doesn't talk about an increase in radiation. If there was an issue, we would see it in flight crew. There is also a difference with altitude and soil composition, and that would show up in the data.

Besides all the other factors mentioned, which I think are all valid, there's also indoor air pollution from things like aerosol sprays, cleaning products, fragrance, creams, soaps, other products.

It's an easy guess because either human genetics either radical changed or the environment did

"Silent Spring" came out over sixty years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring

got massive coverage including a worldwide CBS News broadcast back then

Government and industry were never held to account and instead deregulated everything

We still allow leaded gas to be sprayed all around airports where everyone is exposed during travel and neighborhoods nearby

Golf Course neighborhoods are some of the highest cancer rates in the country

We've learned nothing and now the environment is so saturated with toxins that the immune system is under attack from birth

Why would you leave that comment?

An uninformed comment before you read the article isn't helping anyone.

I appreciate that comment ironically, as a concrete example of exactly how this type of conversation goes. Opinions come first, facts come later if at all, and never change the opinion.

Most people will have a pre-conceived opinion about this, just like they would have an opinion about politics. Put "Trump" or "DEI" or some other word in the title, and the exact same thing happens.

If anything, food supply in the past 20 years uses a lot less pesticides and herbicides: look at the rise of organic sections in any supermarket.

Since 2000 organic food went from niche to mainstream.

Organic farming still uses pesticides.

See https://www.epa.gov/agriculture/organic-farming - "Pesticides derived from natural sources (such as biological pesticides) may be used in producing organically grown food"

Almost all the pesticides you eat are naturally produced by plants, so I dispute your assertion. Plant extracts light up the Ames test for mutagens.

Your guess is not wild at all, and the article implies that (at least until the payment popup shows up)

My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.

Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.

As a kid I used to do that with my family: Grow our own everything.

I'm currently trying to get back to it, until then I try to eat ecological and as much as I can cooked by myself. It is hard though, not everybody can aford a plot of land (ideally next to some decent sized town)

Upon reading: A bit unclear but yes it seems like unhealthy food + new microbe mutations + obesity

They talk about obesity as a separate cause than ultra processed food, I thought it was quite related, something I need to look into

I’m not obese or overweight and while my main meals (breakfast and dinner) are generally very healthy - I can still eat a lot of trash (ultra processed)food as snacks.

I’m sure that could have an effect.

Don't people eat more healthy than they did 50 years ago? Weren't microwave dinners a big thing in the 70s?

“TV” dinners were, packaged in aluminum foil. Microwaves didn’t become prevalent until perhaps the mid 80s.

ah, interesting. Ok, so TV dinners != microwave dinners, and maybe they're more healthy than microwaved dinners or food that comes in plastic.

I wouldn't exactly call TV dinners "healthy". In many ways it was much more heavily processed fatty carbs than what passes for microwave food today. It was loaded with salt and sugar.

The main difference is that TV dinners were designed to be heated in an oven rather than a microwave, back when microwaves were less common.

I remember Swanson Salsbury steak etc, maybe Turkey and cranberry? Then the “Hungry Man” line came out a bit later.

My impression (as someone who was alive back then) is that the early TV dinners often weren't that different from something you'd cook yourself, but the industry has spend half a century optimising them into cheap chemical slop engineered for palatability.

Also, not all ready meals are crap. You can buy premium frozen meals from restaurant suppliers but they aren't cheap.

One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.

One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.

We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.

We are exposed to more more types of chemicals in our every day than ever before. Some offenders to me, besides herbicides and pesticides are:

[1]: ubiquitous flame retardants, which in America they put in every couch, carpet, and mattress

[2]: ubiquitous microplastics pollution,

[3]: joint effect of Obesity and Ultra-Processed Foods

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2022&q=flame+retar... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo... [3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...

Wasn't microplastics just debunked as not a thing?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...

First, I would not say "debunked" is the most appropriate term. The studies were not shown to be false, but the article highlighted that come doubts have been cast due to potential contamination confounds. The letter (Challenges in studying microplastics in human brain https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3) will get integrated into methods research. See here for current citations: (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=2005...). Sciencing is actually harder than it looks from the outside, and therefore research fields goes through iterations of refinement. As the article you linked to included this quote: (Prof Lamoree “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples tissues, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.”).

Second, I do not think anyone is claiming that microplastic pollution is not ubiquitous, because that is obvious. That microplastics get consumed is also probably not that controversial. The extent to which microplastics get consumed but do not exit the other end of the pipe is an empirical question that has methodological challenges.

Third: I think there are some subtleties here involving the size of plastic particles. Microplastics is a catch-all term these days, but a more formal definition puts microplastics at plastic particles that range from 5 mm to 1 μm (micrometer), while nanoplasticsare 1 μm down to 1 nm (nanometer). micro- and nano- plastics can require different techniques to detect.

Well since we're speculating randomly I vote for

* too much rage bait videos raising rage hormones

* too much performing for social media

* suppressing expression for fear of cancellation

* exposure to too many varieties of food/cuisine

* video games

* anime

Yes, these are all tongue-in-cheek but come on, the random speculation here is all ridiculous

* Inadequate exposure to UV leading to depressed vitamin D levels.

My guess is unchecked capitalism.

I won't bother to read the article.

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