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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Your comment suffers from the affliction that "if it doesn't completely eradicate -foo-, then there's no point at all". If there was a magic food that cut your chance of getting any sort of cancer by a factor of 1000, your statement of 'you could still get heart attack/cancer in your 50s' would still be true.

The main article does this a little as well; there's something of a tone that says 'healthy food has all these other benefits, but since it doesn't stop cancer, it's probably not worth it'. It's weird, because I've never heard of anyone specifically choosing foods because of their reduction in cancer rates - people tend to choose foods that affect their current wellbeing, not future 'maybes'.

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I'd go so far as to say that any claims of cereus types of foods being "healthier" are specious as well. As long as you're getting the required sustanence and not dying of anaphylaxis or whatever, you're good.

Everyone, even doctors, find a new food to demonize every few years, then flip and say it's the bet thing ever a decade later. Anyone remember when eggs were killing you? Or when the fad diet was low carbohydrate? Now eggs cure cancer and gluten is "literally Hitler."

Health nuts, as a rule, have no clue what they're talking about. They're just desperately looking for something to blame for their (or others') problems and using pseudoscience to justify it. (As for weight loss/gain, it's just simple thermodynamics. Caloric intake minus expenditure equals "duh.")

"Everyone, even doctors, find a new food to demonize every few years, then flip and say it's the bet thing ever a decade later."

Uh ya. New evidence comes to light, people change their minds. That's not necessarily a fault of the methodology.

This is true, so far as it goes. But obesity is unhealthy, and some food types are much more likely to make people obese than others. Specifically, "foods" (in quotes because often the worst offenders are drinks) with high caloric density and low satiability mean people take on huge amounts of calories without feeling full.

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