Always a good read, most cancers are environmental, and most of these are caused by obesity, bad diet and smoking/drinking, fix these four things in your life and you reduce your chances of getting cancer by 50%+
What's interesting is how low alcohol ranks compared to obesity and diet. It makes the recent moral panic following loose interpretations of the Lancet study seem hypocritical, if not misguided. If anything deserves a "may cause cancer" sticker, it's nitrate-ridden processed meat.
Recent demographic shifts have given rise to a vocally anti-alcohol contingent in large parts of the Western world. There's substantial motivated reasoning.
In the US, there is a large demographic shift on alcohol drinking. What I've seen is not an explicitly vocal anti-alcohol stance. But younger generations just aren't as interested in it. At the very least what they consume is different.
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
What I'm talking about is slightly different than that.
This is more like alcohol apathy - not drinking, but also not explicitly anti-alcohol. That the more generational shift in Gen Z that I've seen. But, those sentiments can certainly change over time.
1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits
2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.
A common consequence of taking GLP-1 receptor agonists is losing interest in alcohol.
Now, I agree that’s not the only factor — there’s something else going on reducing alcohol consumption even in people who’ve never taken GLP-1RAs — but when you have >10% of the population taking them, that’s another significant factor contributing to falling drinking rates.
People are broke. They can't afford the bottle or the place you go to to drink a glass. Or the Uber back/costs associated with a DUI. There's no reason to waste any of that money when you can just stay home and goon.
Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.
That's my theory too. When I was in college (late 1980s) the bars had dime beers. It was bottom-end lager and served in an 8 oz cup but still, going to the bars for a night could be done cheaply. Now a drink is $10 and you pay a cover charge even if there isn't a band performing.
Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it (unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?):
I like to drink. With that being said, there are a lot of downsides to alcohol other than an increased risk of cancer. Also, alcohol can lead to obesity and a bad diet. Is it ever healthy to drink? I do not know. I am going to do it anyway though.
There's downsides to heavy or frequent drinking, sure. But since the cancer risk is minimal, what's the downside of a glass of wine or beer a couple of times a week?
I'm less convinced of the negatives of this than I used to be. Humans are quite well adapted to alcohol.
If it's something you enjoy, I'd say go for it, in moderation. It's probably less unhealthy than e.g. living in a city, eating processed meat, or working an office job.
Its all fun and games until you get cancer. I had cancer (and a few drinks) myself, it sucked. Can you ever be certain it was caused by an unhealthy lifestyle? No. Probability and causality is weird tbh.
No. But drinking every now and then makes so little difference it's not a huge concern. Drinking a lot, though -- that's more problematic.
Like most of my friends around my age, I've cut out almost all alcohol in the last few years. None of us miss it. But it's still nice to drink occasionally, and I'm not going to stop entirely.
Is there really a moral panic? Apart from a few viral Twitter posts, I don't see a major sobriety push by my colleagues.
Profits of main alcohol suppliers has certainly taken a hit over the last 5 years but this is arguably far more because of rise of remote working, inflation (drinking at pubs have become much more costly than before) and people in general just addicted to their phone rather than going out (similar to the impact on almost all social activities no just going to pubs)
I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
The things you mention here make it happen sooner, but no amount of healthy living lowers your risk to zero and I think that's important to note when you say things like "cancer is caused by".
Cancer is caused by math. This stuff just steepens the slope.
> I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
“Most people just don’t live that long” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
> If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
Well, 100% likelihood is a bit silly, but the point of the person you were responding to is true -- we will all eventually die of something, and if it's not heart disease or dementia, it will almost certainly be cancer.
The question shouldn't be "will I get cancer?"; it should be, "how long do I want to live a happy, healthy, active, independent lifestyle for?" If you exercise, eat a healthy diet, don't become overweight and keep your blood pressure low, you'll maximise your changes for living well, for as long as possible.
It's also important to note that getting a random cancer at 80+ sucks orders of magnitude less than going out at 45 from colon or throat cancer in every measurable metrics you can come up.
I would heavily disagree with this - it depends entirely on the cancer you get. If it's something slow growing that would take a decade plus to kill you, sure - just trying to treat it would be worse than letting it ride.
But my father died of cancer nearing age 80, (most likely mesothelioma, though we didn't do heavy tests as it was discovered late), and it was incredibly painful and miserable for him. He had fast growing tumors in his ribs, forcing bone to spike out and hit his lungs, the tumors that grew in his lungs caused constant pneumonia and kept leaving him unable to get enough oxygen to his brain to communicate for hours at a time.
Unfortunately a lot of us will die in comparable ways if we are lucky enough to get that old. My grandmother was healthy & mentally with it until stroking out in her garden one day at the age of 90. That is the best any of us can hope for and the reality will almost certainly be far more painful and prolonged.
It depends on mechanism, but many cancer patients do deal with a great deal of pain, especially near the end of the disease process. I am sorry for your experience. It is not uncommon.
It is unfortunately a complicated situation that often doesn't have a perfect solution. Without trying to cover every possibl nuance, I'll just say that many end-stage patients have pain so refractory that sufficient doses of pain medication are effectively lethal. This is usually offered, but obviously not everyone accepts.
The truly sad cases are those in which the patient no longer has decision-making capacity and it falls on a family member to make such decisions. When you aren't the one experiencing the pain, it's much harder to weigh that decision rationally. This is why so many providers push patients to establish legal documentation of their end-of-life wishes.
I think the original point was that cancer 80+ is better than cancer at 45, so you should still try to avoid habits that make it more likely earlier, even if the chances remain 100% at sufficient time scales
> it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live. Most people just don't live that long.
Hmm, that actually parses for me as "it is not important to note" since the 100% assertion doesn't apply to most of us as we won't live that long.
What applies to most of us is that certain behaviors can dramatically increase your chances of getting cancer.
I hear you, but I also think it is this kind of attitude that leads a lot of otherwise intelligent people to not even try. I've talked to people who listened to the Maintenance Phase episode on the complexities of calories in/calories out take the information as an excuse for not even attempting to try to improve their weight problem.
Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?
A person drunk driving at twice the speed limit in moderate traffic on a dark and rainy night without their lights on in an old vehicle with shoddy breaks and no traction control while not wearing a seatbelt and texting their ex probably has a near zero chance of developing a cancer given their near 100% chance of dieing in the next few moments.
When we talk about factors that reduce cancer rates we normally talk about like-for-like, adjusted for age.
Discussing lifetime risk of cancer without accounting for years lived is not useful.
I don't think it's helpful to point out that everyone gets cancer on a long enough timeframe, because that wasn't what the conversation was ever about.
I always get a kick out of YouTube and other social media people proclaiming what is "healthy" or not, when we all pretty much know. Eat fruits and vegetables and not too much junk food. Eating too much consistently isn't good for you. Drinking and smoking are bad for you. We've mostly known smoking is bad as a society for a good while now and outside of the old myth that a glass of wine with dinner was good, we know drinking isn't a positive for your health.
And you don't even have to be hard and fast with any of that. Drink on occasion and eat stuff that isn't good for you on occasion and you're probably still getting 95% of the benefits. Not sure about smoking though.
It's very simple at the end of the day. Simple != easy to do. Drinking is fun. People enjoy smoking. Junk food is appealing because it's relatively cheap and tastes good.
The best biohack is to eat like your doctor recommends while we all nod along and silently ignore. Just eat what is widely accepted as good for you and you'll have a good chance at living a happy, healthy life.
That paper links a random blog post as source for these statistics (reference 9). That's a huge red flag for me and not what I'd expect in a scientific paper. I find the numbers wildly implausible in any case since they only have two categories: hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.
Unless you can demonstrate supernatural causes these are the only two broad categories you need. It's either coming from inside (genes) or outside (diet, random neutrino bit flipping your shit, smoking, x-rays, etc.).
And gentics. Some people/families are just more prone to cancer than others.
A long while ago i read about this and a link to wealth. Of those families with know genetic problems, the poor ones seems to have actively dealt with the issue internally after realizing the problem. They adopt, have fewer children, or use surrogacy. They cannot afford sickly kids. But wealthy families did not, the best examples being those royal families with known problems.
Personally, my cancer risks went way up when my heavy-smoker uncle died of throat cancer. Going from zero cancer in related family to "some" moved me up the charts.
There is an easy line to draw between the two. "Family history", which includes eating/smoking/drinking habits, follows habitation. Genetics follows blood. So differences between bloodlines easily stand apart from family trends.
Really no, not that many, 5-10% estimated. And I'd not be surprised if a lot of the "everyone in the family get cancers" aren't environmental either (factory next door, working in a field using chemicals, etc.)
No. This is 5-10% are from inherited genetic issues, not environment. And that is the canadian cancer society saying so, not a random website or drug company. 5-10% is a monumental number of cancers. If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
On sleep I'm not actually sure if they've parsed out whether it's little sleep itself that affects you or if it's little sleep making you not exercise or eat well
I'm wayyyy less likely to exercise if I've only slept 5 hours
Chronic low-grade inflammation is the link between obesity and cancer incidence, so yes, those are not good. Better to be fat and chill (and active) than thin and stressed-out.
It's interesting that up until the 1970s, viral infections were the predominant theory for the cause of cancer (this is before my time so apologies if I'm exaggerating). This was due to discoveries like src, ras, EBV, etc, so a lot of these carcinogenic pathogens were well known and studied. It wasn't until several discoveries in the 70s and 80s that we started focusing more scientifically on genetic drivers. But it's not like these infectious drivers went away, even if they are no longer as strongly associated with the disease in the public conscious.
Is it 100% clear cut that the infection causes the cancer, or can there be a common problem (like immune system degradation) that causes both the infection to develop (or develop easier) and the cancer the grow (which always involves failure of the immune system to kill it, if I'm not mistaken)?
Many viri are present in many human beings, but they don't develop cancer after all.
so it's not surprising that infections can lead to downstream, systemic problems in the human body which then allows for things like cancer to arise (especially given that we just lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic that is still ongoing)
Has there been a clear epidemiological signal post-COVID in elevations of any cancers? There are obviously stories about elevated rates of e.g. colon cancer in younger people, but those long predate COVID.
No, but we get so much natural gas as a side effect of the fracking that we literally can't distribute it all, it's effectively free. Which is why natural gas plants have been displacing coal plants for the last 20 years.
You... really need to read more before forming your opinions
No, really, when the fracking boom hit, it was so much cheaper than coal that it made a large dent in the coal industry for energy production. Solar and wind expansion have been far slower to roll out nationwide, but fracking was an almost overnight expansion of gas power production at that time.
Solar and wind subsidies have been illegally halted, and are the subject of ongoing litigation.
Solar and wind are commercially viable and provide about 30% of the electrical energy in Texas. Around 50% of California's daytime electrical energy is provided by solar and wind power. New projects are typically hamstrung by transmission permitting constraints.
While subsidies would help substantially, they aren't a necessary condition for continued adoption of renewable energy sources. Storage is probably the next big hurdle to displace fossil fuels once there's sufficient progress with transmission.
You can. It's not because fracking has displaced coal that it's overall a net benefit (I know it is somewhat true for climate change, I don't have an informed opinion concerning environmental pollution) and it's what should have happenned.
For example either renewables + batteries or nuclear could have displaced coal. Just because there wasn't enough money/political support for it doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about both fracking and coal usage consequences.
Yeah, on a long enough timeline we should be moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but in the meantime fracking has allowed us to substantially lower carbon emissions without massive societal upheaval. It's like equating hybrid cars with traditional ICE vehicles. Sure they both have problems, but one has a lot fewer.
And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.
You seem stressed. I think there are incredible things happening in energy (solar is really the dominant story by far right now, this other stuff is noise) but in cancer: better detection than ever (Grail), better treatments (stem cell, CAR-T, immunotherapy). Most likely you will see stage IV cancer rates down 50% in 10 years, and cancer deaths (age adjusted) down about 70%. We will have an early permanent moon base, the first step in getting space stations with the equivalent landmass as a billion earths.
It’s really a golden age for cancer treatments and energy.
The striking part is that many infection-linked cancers already have prevention or treatment options,but access and uptake are uneven. That makes this partly a delivery problem: vaccines, screening,and treatment only reduce cancer burden when people can actually get them. i’d be interested to see the estimates broken down by how much could be prevented with tools we already have versus infections where theres still no effective intervention.
FYI the prev comment is also clanker stuff, it's just purposefully prompted to inject grammatical errors. It's obvious from the word choice and the sentence structure, it's very stilted in an inhuman way. The wrong commas aren't a common error (unless you're 70+ yo) but LLMs keep doing "word ,another" and "word,another" to appear quirky
esp when all the caps are missing but all the punctuation are perfectly present
> HPV vaccine hesitancy in Europe: side effects, uncertainty, and mistrust
> When individuals mistrust those communicating about vaccines, perceiving, for instance, that they are not being fully transparent about the potential side effects of the vaccine, it can affect their confidence in the HPV vaccine even if they have received information confirming that the vaccine is safe and effective
> This was seen with the rapid spread of You-Tube videos of young girls believing to have been affected by HPV vaccination in Denmark, Japan, Colombia, Ireland and the UK.
Governments around the world are losing citizens trust. And that has terrible consequences. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
We may know how to reduce the risk of cancer. We may have vaccines for that infections. But if governments care more about power than serving citizens all that knowledge is for nothing.
About ten years ago I was at a party and an Australian coworker and I were talking. I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens. He declared, “I’m not going to turn my daughter into a whore.”
You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.
Which brings to mind a horrifying and inappropriate counterarguement to such twisted puritianical logic - who says she is consenting if she gets infected? Is it worth adding cancer to a rape victim?
what kind of demographics? I don't think HPV vaccine is a subject I've ever heard about in the social circles I've been in (whatever the opinion on the vaccine).
> And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
I'm old enough to remember when Trump was recommending the Covid vaccine and democrats were fear mongering about it. Trump was even booed at his own rallies for promoting the vaccine.
This gets things exactly backwards. The trust was eroding well before the re-emergence of "far-right contrarian governments" and that is what enabled them to emerge. It has eroded because of greater access to information: people see things that they disapprove of but otherwise could have ignored because it doesn't affect them personally.
https://www.oatext.com/which-environment-makes-cancer.php
Always a good read, most cancers are environmental, and most of these are caused by obesity, bad diet and smoking/drinking, fix these four things in your life and you reduce your chances of getting cancer by 50%+
What's interesting is how low alcohol ranks compared to obesity and diet. It makes the recent moral panic following loose interpretations of the Lancet study seem hypocritical, if not misguided. If anything deserves a "may cause cancer" sticker, it's nitrate-ridden processed meat.
Recent demographic shifts have given rise to a vocally anti-alcohol contingent in large parts of the Western world. There's substantial motivated reasoning.
Its not demographics, its American cultural influence.
In the US, there is a large demographic shift on alcohol drinking. What I've seen is not an explicitly vocal anti-alcohol stance. But younger generations just aren't as interested in it. At the very least what they consume is different.
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
I do not know the US well enough to comment, but the US has always been a lot more anti-alcohol than (almost anywhere in) Europe.
What I'm talking about is slightly different than that.
This is more like alcohol apathy - not drinking, but also not explicitly anti-alcohol. That the more generational shift in Gen Z that I've seen. But, those sentiments can certainly change over time.
What I have noticed in the UK is:
1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits 2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.
A common consequence of taking GLP-1 receptor agonists is losing interest in alcohol.
Now, I agree that’s not the only factor — there’s something else going on reducing alcohol consumption even in people who’ve never taken GLP-1RAs — but when you have >10% of the population taking them, that’s another significant factor contributing to falling drinking rates.
People are broke. They can't afford the bottle or the place you go to to drink a glass. Or the Uber back/costs associated with a DUI. There's no reason to waste any of that money when you can just stay home and goon.
Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.
That's my theory too. When I was in college (late 1980s) the bars had dime beers. It was bottom-end lager and served in an 8 oz cup but still, going to the bars for a night could be done cheaply. Now a drink is $10 and you pay a cover charge even if there isn't a band performing.
Which recent demographic shifts?
Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it (unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?):
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/diet_alcohol/re...
https://publications.iarc.who.int/Book-And-Report-Series/Iar...
> Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it
Not in any country I've ever been in. Do you mean in the US?
> unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?
What else could it possibly mean?
I thought they meant it figuratively I guess.. I don’t know in hindsight maybe that’s dumb?
I guess I see how you could read it like that, but no I'm pretty sure this was meant literally.
correct, and I mentioned it because cancer warnings are explicitly now on the table for policymakers in the West related to alcohol, iirc
I like to drink. With that being said, there are a lot of downsides to alcohol other than an increased risk of cancer. Also, alcohol can lead to obesity and a bad diet. Is it ever healthy to drink? I do not know. I am going to do it anyway though.
There's downsides to heavy or frequent drinking, sure. But since the cancer risk is minimal, what's the downside of a glass of wine or beer a couple of times a week?
I'm less convinced of the negatives of this than I used to be. Humans are quite well adapted to alcohol.
If it's something you enjoy, I'd say go for it, in moderation. It's probably less unhealthy than e.g. living in a city, eating processed meat, or working an office job.
Its all fun and games until you get cancer. I had cancer (and a few drinks) myself, it sucked. Can you ever be certain it was caused by an unhealthy lifestyle? No. Probability and causality is weird tbh.
> Is it ever healthy to drink?
No. But drinking every now and then makes so little difference it's not a huge concern. Drinking a lot, though -- that's more problematic.
Like most of my friends around my age, I've cut out almost all alcohol in the last few years. None of us miss it. But it's still nice to drink occasionally, and I'm not going to stop entirely.
Of course. It's just that cancer as a key risk factor has grown in salience.
Is there really a moral panic? Apart from a few viral Twitter posts, I don't see a major sobriety push by my colleagues.
Profits of main alcohol suppliers has certainly taken a hit over the last 5 years but this is arguably far more because of rise of remote working, inflation (drinking at pubs have become much more costly than before) and people in general just addicted to their phone rather than going out (similar to the impact on almost all social activities no just going to pubs)
It's been covered everywhere in social media, including HN. Try the search function
I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
The things you mention here make it happen sooner, but no amount of healthy living lowers your risk to zero and I think that's important to note when you say things like "cancer is caused by".
Cancer is caused by math. This stuff just steepens the slope.
Cool, let's make that timeline a step function with the risk of cancer being effectively zero until 200 years of life and cure cancer.
> I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
“Most people just don’t live that long” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
> If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
This kind of comment lowers the level of discourse dramatically.
> If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
Well, 100% likelihood is a bit silly, but the point of the person you were responding to is true -- we will all eventually die of something, and if it's not heart disease or dementia, it will almost certainly be cancer.
The question shouldn't be "will I get cancer?"; it should be, "how long do I want to live a happy, healthy, active, independent lifestyle for?" If you exercise, eat a healthy diet, don't become overweight and keep your blood pressure low, you'll maximise your changes for living well, for as long as possible.
The risk is compounding, so no, centuries is not on the table without fully swapping bodies.
It's also important to note that getting a random cancer at 80+ sucks orders of magnitude less than going out at 45 from colon or throat cancer in every measurable metrics you can come up.
I would heavily disagree with this - it depends entirely on the cancer you get. If it's something slow growing that would take a decade plus to kill you, sure - just trying to treat it would be worse than letting it ride.
But my father died of cancer nearing age 80, (most likely mesothelioma, though we didn't do heavy tests as it was discovered late), and it was incredibly painful and miserable for him. He had fast growing tumors in his ribs, forcing bone to spike out and hit his lungs, the tumors that grew in his lungs caused constant pneumonia and kept leaving him unable to get enough oxygen to his brain to communicate for hours at a time.
Would he have had a better time at 45 not seing you growing and missing 35 years of life?
I'm not saying it's good to get cancer when you're old, I'm just saying if you had the choice no one would chose to get it earlier.
Sure, but like - no one wants to die like that. It's horrible. He was begging us to let him die at the end.
Unfortunately a lot of us will die in comparable ways if we are lucky enough to get that old. My grandmother was healthy & mentally with it until stroking out in her garden one day at the age of 90. That is the best any of us can hope for and the reality will almost certainly be far more painful and prolonged.
No, I don't think most people die in excruciating pain.
It depends on mechanism, but many cancer patients do deal with a great deal of pain, especially near the end of the disease process. I am sorry for your experience. It is not uncommon.
It is inhumane that we don't offer every possible option to those who are suffering.
It is unfortunately a complicated situation that often doesn't have a perfect solution. Without trying to cover every possibl nuance, I'll just say that many end-stage patients have pain so refractory that sufficient doses of pain medication are effectively lethal. This is usually offered, but obviously not everyone accepts.
The truly sad cases are those in which the patient no longer has decision-making capacity and it falls on a family member to make such decisions. When you aren't the one experiencing the pain, it's much harder to weigh that decision rationally. This is why so many providers push patients to establish legal documentation of their end-of-life wishes.
That sounds far better than dying at 45 unless you have an extraordinarily unpleasant life in the interim
I don't think I want to die in excruciating pain and confusion at any age, personally.
I think the original point was that cancer 80+ is better than cancer at 45, so you should still try to avoid habits that make it more likely earlier, even if the chances remain 100% at sufficient time scales
> it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live. Most people just don't live that long.
Hmm, that actually parses for me as "it is not important to note" since the 100% assertion doesn't apply to most of us as we won't live that long.
What applies to most of us is that certain behaviors can dramatically increase your chances of getting cancer.
This is guaranteed for men. You'll either die from or with prostate cancer if you make it that far.
I hear you, but I also think it is this kind of attitude that leads a lot of otherwise intelligent people to not even try. I've talked to people who listened to the Maintenance Phase episode on the complexities of calories in/calories out take the information as an excuse for not even attempting to try to improve their weight problem.
Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?
A person drunk driving at twice the speed limit in moderate traffic on a dark and rainy night without their lights on in an old vehicle with shoddy breaks and no traction control while not wearing a seatbelt and texting their ex probably has a near zero chance of developing a cancer given their near 100% chance of dieing in the next few moments.
When we talk about factors that reduce cancer rates we normally talk about like-for-like, adjusted for age.
Discussing lifetime risk of cancer without accounting for years lived is not useful.
I don't think it's helpful to point out that everyone gets cancer on a long enough timeframe, because that wasn't what the conversation was ever about.
And not just cancer. Top risk factors for dementia and heart disease are also diet, obesity, blood pressure, and lack of exercise.
Basically, live healthily, and you'll have a (much!) happier and longer life.
and you'll have (probably) a (much!) happier and longer life.
Throwing in blood pressure in the mix is interesting? That's not really something you can control isn't it?
Well thats caused by obesity , lack of exercise, bad diet. You can also take pills to fix it.
There are no guarantees.
for anybody else wondering: the environmental factors mentioned in the article (https://www.oatext.com/img/ORR-1-115-g001.gif) are:
diet, tobacco, infections, obesity, alcohol, others
I always get a kick out of YouTube and other social media people proclaiming what is "healthy" or not, when we all pretty much know. Eat fruits and vegetables and not too much junk food. Eating too much consistently isn't good for you. Drinking and smoking are bad for you. We've mostly known smoking is bad as a society for a good while now and outside of the old myth that a glass of wine with dinner was good, we know drinking isn't a positive for your health.
And you don't even have to be hard and fast with any of that. Drink on occasion and eat stuff that isn't good for you on occasion and you're probably still getting 95% of the benefits. Not sure about smoking though.
It's very simple at the end of the day. Simple != easy to do. Drinking is fun. People enjoy smoking. Junk food is appealing because it's relatively cheap and tastes good.
The best biohack is to eat like your doctor recommends while we all nod along and silently ignore. Just eat what is widely accepted as good for you and you'll have a good chance at living a happy, healthy life.
That paper links a random blog post as source for these statistics (reference 9). That's a huge red flag for me and not what I'd expect in a scientific paper. I find the numbers wildly implausible in any case since they only have two categories: hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.
Yeah that's the "other" part in "environmental".
> hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Unless you can demonstrate supernatural causes these are the only two broad categories you need. It's either coming from inside (genes) or outside (diet, random neutrino bit flipping your shit, smoking, x-rays, etc.).
But a significant part of that is not something we can influence. Getting cancer is a side-effect of living. Our own metabolism causes DNA damage.
There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.
A significant part of the insignificant part yes, just don't be fat, don't drink and eat clean, that plays a much larger role than luck
And gentics. Some people/families are just more prone to cancer than others.
A long while ago i read about this and a link to wealth. Of those families with know genetic problems, the poor ones seems to have actively dealt with the issue internally after realizing the problem. They adopt, have fewer children, or use surrogacy. They cannot afford sickly kids. But wealthy families did not, the best examples being those royal families with known problems.
Personally, my cancer risks went way up when my heavy-smoker uncle died of throat cancer. Going from zero cancer in related family to "some" moved me up the charts.
Generics is always claimed to be a reason, but nutrition also runs in families.
It's like saying BRCA1 causes breast cancer, but 90% of cases don't involve the gene, and many people with the gene don't get cancer.
I'm not saying it can't be a reason, but it looks like it's a common and maybe convenient excuse.
There is an easy line to draw between the two. "Family history", which includes eating/smoking/drinking habits, follows habitation. Genetics follows blood. So differences between bloodlines easily stand apart from family trends.
> And gentics.
Really no, not that many, 5-10% estimated. And I'd not be surprised if a lot of the "everyone in the family get cancers" aren't environmental either (factory next door, working in a field using chemicals, etc.)
"Only about 5% to 10% of all cancer cases are hereditary, meaning they are caused by an inherited gene mutation."
https://cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/reduce-your-risk/che...
No. This is 5-10% are from inherited genetic issues, not environment. And that is the canadian cancer society saying so, not a random website or drug company. 5-10% is a monumental number of cancers. If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
We're saying the same thing yes... and both websites too
> If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
I have one, stop drinking, where is my nobel?
Assuming you have those under control, what about sustained stress? Little sleep, etc...
On sleep I'm not actually sure if they've parsed out whether it's little sleep itself that affects you or if it's little sleep making you not exercise or eat well
I'm wayyyy less likely to exercise if I've only slept 5 hours
Chronic low-grade inflammation is the link between obesity and cancer incidence, so yes, those are not good. Better to be fat and chill (and active) than thin and stressed-out.
It's interesting that up until the 1970s, viral infections were the predominant theory for the cause of cancer (this is before my time so apologies if I'm exaggerating). This was due to discoveries like src, ras, EBV, etc, so a lot of these carcinogenic pathogens were well known and studied. It wasn't until several discoveries in the 70s and 80s that we started focusing more scientifically on genetic drivers. But it's not like these infectious drivers went away, even if they are no longer as strongly associated with the disease in the public conscious.
Is it 100% clear cut that the infection causes the cancer, or can there be a common problem (like immune system degradation) that causes both the infection to develop (or develop easier) and the cancer the grow (which always involves failure of the immune system to kill it, if I'm not mistaken)?
Many viri are present in many human beings, but they don't develop cancer after all.
depends on the infection. COVID, for eg, is well-studied as something that chronically weakens the immune system and may cause autoimmune disorders
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744845/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12185401/
so it's not surprising that infections can lead to downstream, systemic problems in the human body which then allows for things like cancer to arise (especially given that we just lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic that is still ongoing)
Has there been a clear epidemiological signal post-COVID in elevations of any cancers? There are obviously stories about elevated rates of e.g. colon cancer in younger people, but those long predate COVID.
If you haven't gotten your HPV vaccine yet—go get it. One of the easiest interventions you can take to reduce your cancer risk.
well they are finding forever-chemical and micro-plastics in all freshwater in the USA now and even in ALL mother's milk
so safe bet that cancer rates are never going to be lower than they are today
remember US also just deregulated all pollution from power plants, funded re-starting coal plants and dropped car engine efficiency requirements
oh they are also trying to double oil-fracking output which toxifies groundwater and air for miles around it with offgassing
every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere
so next decade should end well for cancer rates
You can't be worried about fracking and coal at the same time in the US. The former is the reason for the latter's demise
wow that's the most repeat fallacy, I even see in political commercials now
we don't use domestic oil, we sell it overseas
and oil until pop-up "ai" datacenters was not used for power production
you are thinking about solar and wind power for coal's demise
which now they are also defunding, even worse reusing the funds for coal investment
No, but we get so much natural gas as a side effect of the fracking that we literally can't distribute it all, it's effectively free. Which is why natural gas plants have been displacing coal plants for the last 20 years.
You... really need to read more before forming your opinions
No, really, when the fracking boom hit, it was so much cheaper than coal that it made a large dent in the coal industry for energy production. Solar and wind expansion have been far slower to roll out nationwide, but fracking was an almost overnight expansion of gas power production at that time.
Solar and wind subsidies have been illegally halted, and are the subject of ongoing litigation.
Solar and wind are commercially viable and provide about 30% of the electrical energy in Texas. Around 50% of California's daytime electrical energy is provided by solar and wind power. New projects are typically hamstrung by transmission permitting constraints.
While subsidies would help substantially, they aren't a necessary condition for continued adoption of renewable energy sources. Storage is probably the next big hurdle to displace fossil fuels once there's sufficient progress with transmission.
You can. It's not because fracking has displaced coal that it's overall a net benefit (I know it is somewhat true for climate change, I don't have an informed opinion concerning environmental pollution) and it's what should have happenned.
For example either renewables + batteries or nuclear could have displaced coal. Just because there wasn't enough money/political support for it doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about both fracking and coal usage consequences.
Yeah, on a long enough timeline we should be moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but in the meantime fracking has allowed us to substantially lower carbon emissions without massive societal upheaval. It's like equating hybrid cars with traditional ICE vehicles. Sure they both have problems, but one has a lot fewer.
And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.
Why shouldn’t one be able to worry about 2 bad things at the same time?
You seem stressed. I think there are incredible things happening in energy (solar is really the dominant story by far right now, this other stuff is noise) but in cancer: better detection than ever (Grail), better treatments (stem cell, CAR-T, immunotherapy). Most likely you will see stage IV cancer rates down 50% in 10 years, and cancer deaths (age adjusted) down about 70%. We will have an early permanent moon base, the first step in getting space stations with the equivalent landmass as a billion earths.
It’s really a golden age for cancer treatments and energy.
The striking part is that many infection-linked cancers already have prevention or treatment options,but access and uptake are uneven. That makes this partly a delivery problem: vaccines, screening,and treatment only reduce cancer burden when people can actually get them. i’d be interested to see the estimates broken down by how much could be prevented with tools we already have versus infections where theres still no effective intervention.
Almost all your comments are flagged. Get yer clanker off HN buddy.
FYI the prev comment is also clanker stuff, it's just purposefully prompted to inject grammatical errors. It's obvious from the word choice and the sentence structure, it's very stilted in an inhuman way. The wrong commas aren't a common error (unless you're 70+ yo) but LLMs keep doing "word ,another" and "word,another" to appear quirky
esp when all the caps are missing but all the punctuation are perfectly present
> HPV vaccine hesitancy in Europe: side effects, uncertainty, and mistrust > When individuals mistrust those communicating about vaccines, perceiving, for instance, that they are not being fully transparent about the potential side effects of the vaccine, it can affect their confidence in the HPV vaccine even if they have received information confirming that the vaccine is safe and effective > This was seen with the rapid spread of You-Tube videos of young girls believing to have been affected by HPV vaccination in Denmark, Japan, Colombia, Ireland and the UK.
Governments around the world are losing citizens trust. And that has terrible consequences. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
We may know how to reduce the risk of cancer. We may have vaccines for that infections. But if governments care more about power than serving citizens all that knowledge is for nothing.
- https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/hpv-vaccine-hesitancy-in-e...
Suspect this is caused by demographic shift, don't know any people who have even the remotest HPV vaccine hesitation over the past twenty plus years.
Know that it is common among certain demographics though.
About ten years ago I was at a party and an Australian coworker and I were talking. I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens. He declared, “I’m not going to turn my daughter into a whore.”
You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.
Which brings to mind a horrifying and inappropriate counterarguement to such twisted puritianical logic - who says she is consenting if she gets infected? Is it worth adding cancer to a rape victim?
what kind of demographics? I don't think HPV vaccine is a subject I've ever heard about in the social circles I've been in (whatever the opinion on the vaccine).
> And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
I'm old enough to remember when Trump was recommending the Covid vaccine and democrats were fear mongering about it. Trump was even booed at his own rallies for promoting the vaccine.
This gets things exactly backwards. The trust was eroding well before the re-emergence of "far-right contrarian governments" and that is what enabled them to emerge. It has eroded because of greater access to information: people see things that they disapprove of but otherwise could have ignored because it doesn't affect them personally.