If I had to bet, it would be on HPV causing a majority of the rise in colorectal cancer. It is a major cause of throat cancer in men[0] and causes almost 100% of cervical cancer in women[1]. We have had a significant increase in anal sex over the past 10+ years[2] and are now seeing an increase in colorectal cancer.
"Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it."
Still needs to be studied more as there don't seem to be any large studies yet.
"We found that colorectal tissues from 28 (51%) of 55 patients with colorectal cancer were positive for HPV DNA." [3]
HPV may be associated with a subset of colorectal cancers. Future large-scale multicenter case–control studies with data on risk factors such as lifestyle and sexual behaviour are needed."
Is this the disagreement? How does it disagree with a study showing there might be a link, but that it needs more research - "HPV infection may play a role in colorectal carcinogenesis"?
I'm honestly really confused here. Because the study you linked _agrees_ with the one I linked.
Did you also notice that your link is from 2014 and looked at data from 22 March, 2013(!!) or earlier? Or does the age not matter in this instance, but does matter in the link I provided?
In 2019 (since dates are really important, I guess), the KFF directly stated that the vaccine is targeted to the "...9 strains of HPV associated with most cervical cancer, anal cancer, and throat cancer".
Kinda surprised at the idea that HPV is the cause; at least in the US, there was a fairly large push about 15 years ago to get more people (particularly teenage girls and young women) vaccinated against HPV. Would we not see a corresponding dip in deaths related to HPV-associated cancers by now?
1. The original guidance did not call for boys to get the vaccine. It does now.
2. We're talking about two different age groups. The article talks about those under 50. The group who got the HPV vaccine as part of their normal schedule are now just hitting their early 20s.
There's also still a huge number of people in the US who have HPV. It's really, really common.
"Approximately 42.5 million Americans are infected with HPV and there are at least 13 million new infections annually" [0]
Interestingly, the article calls out HPV directly as a cause of an increase in anal cancers.
"While HPV-related cervical and vaginal cancer rates have decreased since 1999, rates for oropharyngeal and anal HPV-related cancers have increased."
Any idea what the percentage of teenagers who are getting the HPV vaccine is? I'm going to guess it's fairly low at this point given that there tend to be religious objections and also given the growing antivaxx sentiments.
True, but “normal schedule” is hiding a bit of subtlety there: the hpv vaccine was recommended for women up to 26 at the time, so the oldest women who got it then would be pushing 50 now.
Not sure if there's something more recent than this, but it was about 15.5% of adults aged 27-45.
It also notes this:
"Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the leading sexually transmitted infection in the United States, and 85% of sexually active individuals will be infected at some point in their lifetime"
So, if you're not vaccinated and have had multiple sexual partners, it is rather likely you have or have had HPV.
1. As others have mentioned, males were excluded from vaccination until relatively recently. This seems like such a stupid decision in hindsight. When I (male) got my vaccines, I was told that it wasn't routinely done in boys "because of availability issues", which I took to mean "because it's expensive".
2. Initial vaccines offered protection against 4 strains of HPV, newer vaccines protect against 9. People who got the older vaccines remain susceptible to the other 5 strains.
3. It can take years for an HPV infection to become dangerous or cancerous.
4. This last one is speculative, but I assume that when a woman tests positive for HPV or cervical cancer, their partner is also looked at. With the rates of symptoms and cancers going down in woman, their partners might fall through the gaps: there are no routine tests for males.
The test for males used to be putting acetic acid on the genitalia and looking for spots under a blacklight, right? So what is it now? Blood test for the DNA?
And... sometimes stats and population level studies take a very long time or (more often) are never done at all and so if we only rely on this to tell us what to do, we'll miss a lot.
There are common sense ways to reduce cancer risk that have been obvious to and practiced by many people for a long time, before the studies showed that they were right. For example, all of the many new synthetic materials and chemicals that have been found to be carcinogens. I just assume any novel chemistry exposure is a risk, to eat it, drink it, touch it, breathe it. I can't and don't avoid all of it, but I can avoid a lot of it in terms of dose, compared to people who don't think about this at all.
The need to tap a bunch of discredited UK "scientists" to get the anti-mRNA perspective on the testimonies, should perhaps be an indicator that this viewpoint is not really credible (they couldn't find enough reputable doctors inside of the US willing to testify the same thing).
Incidentally here's a really nicely written counter to many of the claims Malhotra has made:
> Equally, evidence that mRNA vaccines cause cancer is simply untrue. This sentence, for example “The millions of molecules of mRNA entering the cell is creating biochemical havoc, is disrupting protein metabolism, is interfering with tumour suppressor genes” is meaningless pseudoscience. There is no credible evidence that these vaccines disrupt tumour suppressors or drive any kind of process (biochemical or otherwise) that results in cancer. It is particularly crass to try to link this pseudoscience to the unfortunate incidents of cancer in the royal family and is reminiscent of the ‘died suddenly’ trope which attempted (and ultimately failed) to link the death of any young person to their vaccination status. This kind of outlandish conspiracy theory only serves to undermine the credibility of those spreading it.
I think you meant mRNA gene therapy. And despite the many issues with mRNA technology, the linked page specifically mentions covid-19 mRNA injections, which contains instructions for spike protein which causes inflammation which causes or is implicated in many diseases including cancers. Yeah won’t find many doctors stocking their necks out and funding for those type of studies don’t get well funded by the pharmaceutical companies/industry that make those products.
Environment, diet, unhealthy lifestyles, etc. Things are becoming more digitized. We're moving less for more comfort/efficiency/convenience. Not to mention the better diets/foods are more expensive nowadays.
I wonder how much of that is because if you hear fiber is good for you and then you start doing fiber supplements or eating foods with more fiber, you immediately get gassy for like four days and it hurts. So one just goes, I'll just keep eating hamburgers then...
The air we breathe is one of the most overlooked things IMO. There's so many toxins especially in cities. If your apartment is unventilated or the ventilation has no filters get a high airflow air purifier now.
No till farming is probably helping. I learned this year what that really means by seeing farms where they spray herbicide to kill the plants,then they plant new seed while the old dead is still standing around. They then use herbicide as a desiccant to kill the plant at harvest. They probably use pesticides too. The cycle then repeats. I was so disgusted as seeing new crops sprouting amongst the dead vegetation. It must be engineered for that. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the farmers are poisoning everyone rather than have to offer real jobs to native born laborers.
Buckets of *cide, herb and insect, through the cycle. Those no till fields full of crops are some of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. That soil will have applications and applications of *cide soaked in it top to bottom. Like eating plants from a toxic waste dump.
Disgusting. That's the critical national need for glycosphate. Feeding us all engineered stuff from toxic waste dumps so farmers can not need workers or mowing and tilling equipment.
I don’t doubt what you’ve seen, and how some farmers are doing no-till.
However, there are better ways to do no-till that don’t require large herbicide input. No-till is really good for reducing the amount of water needed to farm and preserving soil structure, which is beneficial for all kinds of reasons. It’s not inherently a bad thing.
That’s how they do lentils in Canada. They use planes to spray roundup to kill the plant (because it doesn’t die naturally like it does in Europe, because of the climate), then harvest it, then sell it in Europe (without even rinsing them).
For European lentil growers it’s illegal to use roundup. But if the roundup has been applied outside of the EU it’s not toxic nor forbidden anymore and it can be eaten by humans.
That’s one of many many many examples. We live in an insane society.
You're conflating no-till with spraying chemicals. They're not inherently tied.
No-till is a soil management technique, not crop management. It doesn't require any chemicals, and the goal is to increase soil life, not kill everything.
What I find interesting is the concept of dead food versus live food. This is just something I wonder about. For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now. Long shelf life - is the crucial change in our eating that I can see. When was the last time you had a fresh apple? Does the food industry want us to consider the health benefits of a dead apple versus a living apple?
Let think twinkies! You can open a package of twinkies and let it sit out for a long time. A long time. A long, long time. They you can eat it. Long shelf life means it does not succumb to digestion by random microbes etc in the environment. Does the twinkie then succumb to the random microbes in your gut? I think not, but what do I know.
Then there is living food. You can take milk, put a culture in it and let it grow for 10 hours. Instant pot, heating pad, whatever. Then you eat it. It is now filled with living cultures. It tastes better to me than any store bought yogurt, costs exactly the same as the same quantity of milk. With a chopped apple, cinnamon and a tiny bit of sugar it tastes better to me that most of the faux ice cream you get these days.
What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
> For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now.
It has always been normal for certain fruits and vegetables, such as apples, pears, potatoes, etc. to be stored for months in a cellar. In the old days, you simple could not get a fresh apple outside harvest time.
Your concept of "dead food vs live food" seems rather questionable.
Seconded. Every culture discovers ways to preserve food beyond their natural life. You ain't eating no fresh veggies in the winter of 1790. Everything you had was pickled. And you didn't get cancer because something will kill you before cancer did.
If anything the modern cold chain and globalized food supply and just the abundance of food in general means we have more access to fresh food than our ancestors even though they farmed and we mostly don't.
Mainly because the distinction you are making doesn't actually exist.
An apple doesn't "lose" anything by being stored. There are no preservatives, just refrigeration. The apple will proceed to go bad just as quickly once taken out of storage, and it will be just as nutritious as if you had eaten that same apple fresh off the tree.
You can also take that same apple that's been in storage for a year, press the juice out of it, put a culture in it, and it too will grow and be filled with living cultures. The year-stored apple is no less "living" than the milk that you also had to inoculate to turn to yogurt.
In fact, the list of edible things that will not be filled with living cultures, hours after you add a culture to them and then keep them warm for 10 hours, is very short.
This is simply not true. A calorie is a calorie might be true, and its hard to know which is healthier for any single fresh vs storage example but plenty of chemical processes are going on. It could certainly be the case that a small number of storage examples where particular changes occur cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer.
"It's not at absolute zero, therefore there's some chemical process going on, therefore we don't know if it's causing significant portions of cancer"?
The number of things you can say that about is frankly infinite. You have zero reason to believe that any of the "chemical processes" that happen to an apple (or any food) in long term storage have anything to do with cancer.
This is a great example of correlation not equaling causation. You might as well say that writing years starting with a "2" could cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer because of the different motions of our hand affecting our lymphatic system etc etc.
Irresponsible fearmongering with no foundation whatsoever.
Science is building hypothesis and testing them. It is not saying it seems unlikely so I don't care. You can look up the changes to green beans depending if they are fresh, shipped a huge distance without bring frozen or frozen. Some nutrients change, these changes could affect satiety which could affect obesity, but you just don't care?
> Science is building hypothesis and testing them.
Bad science is building hypothesis and promulgating it publicly alongside zero evidence whatsoever.
The discussion is about stored apples specifically causing increased cancer rates, paired with an arbitrary woo categorization of "living" vs "dead" food. OP wondered why this did not occupy a larger portion of public discourse. Again, this hypothesis exists alongside humans writing more years whose first digit is "2", as evidence-supported cancer progenitors.
> Some nutrients change, these changes could affect satiety which could affect obesity
Yes, if you walk back the "living vs dead" woo concept and expand the scope to more varieties of foods than just apples and more processing methods than passively storing otherwise intact fruit, then you exit the zero evidence crackpot zone.
Lots of crackpot woo theories are similarly half a step away from real evidence-supported theories. Another example would be biodynamic agriculture, which looks a lot like organic and integrated farming practices right up until you get to the part about burying ground quartz stuffed into the horn of a cow so you can harvest cosmic forces in the soil.
Passively storing (whole) fruit changes fruit, I'm sorry if that aligns with crackpot theories but you shouldn't just dismiss things as not happening to try to take them away from fad theories that have a story that propels them above a lack of evidence. This makes it all the more popular to hold theories as faith and argue that everyone does.
Don't be sorry! Instead of apologizing, all I ask is that you notice, read, and internalize the part where the objection is to "and therefore that's why cancer rates are increasing".
This seems like a poor tool to keep in your logical toolbox. If some line of logic would lead to some sacred cow getting slaughtered, then that logic must be false?
In terms of the crackpot theory I'd suspect more people ate longer stored food in 1980 than today. In terms of changes that could explain a rise in a very infrequent thing I'd suspect a lot more people eat a measurable amount of transcontinental "fresh" which probably has a lot more nutritional loss than frozen for example.
I think the yogurt may be a bad example. Most store yogurts don't have any weird preservatives, it's just milk, live cultures and sugar. I would recommend doing your own to save money though.
For the apple, why call it living vs dead? why not old vs new?
Milk is also probably the best example of dead vs. live except you have it backwards. The milk sold in stores deliberately kills off the good bacteria to greatly extend shelf life and prevent food borne illness (pasteurization). Your point is more consistent with raw milk.
Sounds like nonsense to me. The reason we can eat year old apples is because they keep really well at the right temperature. A lot of root vegetables also keep well.
> What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
Hate to say it, but it's because it comes across as unscientific woo
We can measure the differences between an apple freshly picked and one preserved for a season. We can objectively see how the sugars and carbs and calories change, if they do.
Maybe there's some yet-to-be-discovered process in our bodies that deals with preserved food differently than fresh food, but if that is the case it's more likely because of the preservatives than the food being "dead"
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts are getting classified that way.
You obviously have good points to make and are welcome here! but if you'd please write text by hand which you plan to post to HN itself, we'd appreciate it. The community feels strongly about this right now.
(This is not a criticism of LLMs - we rely on them heavily ourselves - just not for text that ends up getting posted to HN)
I believe the single common caiae of increase for all types of cancer is immunosuppression. Immune system might clear a cancer cell that would otherwise evolve to fulminant disease, every few days. A slight immunosuppression might explain a astonishing increase. All the environmental factors referred are candidates for that but the most important is chronic psychological stress, which is rampant in modern adults and not measured, so not studied, in research.
I've heard people speculate about the opposite actually: psychological stress causing the an overactive immune system, resulting in chronic inflammation and a prevalence of auto-immune disease.
I'm a layman though, would like for someone to clarify.
You probably refer to the psycho-immunology, a different aspect. I refer to onco-immunology which is even less explored. In the past many proposed a connection between stress and cancer but without evidence and ground. I think it's time to approach it with enough scientific rigor.
for millions of years we were constantly fasting, then we hunted and killed animals, eating their protein and fat, no carbs, we were constantly in ketosis
We recently begun eating carbs, And very very recently started eating tons of processed carbs (because now we got the tech)
We are rarely in ketosis, and because of high carbs/sugar consumption, we start developing insulin resistance. (the idea is simple, we create resistance for most drugs/substances we take, be it anti depressants, caffeine, nicotine and so on.. the same happens with insulin. each time you eat too much sugar, your pancreas needs to issue insulin, so your cells can absorb more sugar. they start being resistant to it, so your pancreas need to work stronger and issue more and more insulin)
insulin is oxidative and inflammatory. we simply weren't built to regulate our blood sugar levels down (we are only equipped with insulin to do so), we are more well equipped to spike glucose levels up (gluconeogenesis, glucagon, cortisol and so on...)
because we are rarely in ketosis, we rarely get into the autophagy state (which is the auto-recycling cell system). so our cells multiply and the most error prone structure is the mitochondria.
mitochondria can make energy either from glucose or fat(keto bodies). it will always prefer glucose, only fallback to keto bodies (fat) when there is no glucose available. the synthesis of ATP (energy) from keto bodies will need oxygen as input, and will yield water as output. if we have inflammation, there is no oxygen (that's why severe chronic inflammation can lead to cancer), also that's why we usually use ice when we hurt ourselves, that place is inflamed, and by putting ice on it, it will change temperature (which changes pressure) and boosts blood circulation, blood carries oxygen, oxygen helps with inflammation.
a cancer cell, with a problematic mitochondria, will not be able to metabolize fat(keto bodies), because it has a problematic carburetor. fact is that the PET scans look for high glucose metabolism places in your body, because the cancer cells are starving for glucose.
the cell DNA is like ECC memory, it has self correction, but the mitochondria lacks the self correction, so it's way simpler to have it gone bad.
every single day we are having tons of cancer cells in our bodies, which self destruct or are detected and destroyed by our immune system.
the Middle East is the region in the world with the least cancer rate in the globe, yet they are one of the top consumers of sugar. but in islam they do the ramadan, in which for one month they make intermittent fasting basically, which boosts autophagy.
anyway... do healthy keto, boost autophagy, avoid ultra processed foods.
actually, I will extend this a little bit more... if you want to enter in keto...
go to the grocery store and buy this:
- meat (ground meat is fine and easy to prepare)
- eggs (the most fresh ones if possible)
- broccoli
- butter or extra virgin olive oil
the portions will depend on your body type and so on.. but you would make meat and eggs on either butter and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and steamed broccoli. in my case it was 250g of ground meat, 4-5 eggs and one whole broccoli.
you must eat the broccoli first (it's fiber, you can't actually use it, the bacteria in your stomach does, it will make them very happy). if you eat meat+eggs first, you will feel full and will not be able to eat the broccoli, if you eat broccoli first, you will not feel full at all. use salt and pepper and olive oil.
eat the whole broccoli, that's like an ETF of micronutrients, it's very diversified!
then eat eggs+meat no problem...
you gonna feel very very full... do not eat any sugar/carbs.. it can take up to 3 days for entering in ketosis..
you can eat 2 to 3 times a day, eat only when you are genuinely hungry (your hunger will change drastically on how it's built over time)
then slowly entering in ketosis..
the rationale is that you need to cut off the garbage.. meat has high quality protein and fat, so does eggs (an egg has everything needed to begin a freaking life, fun fact: no carbs/sugar in it...)
and the broccoli has micronutrients and make your gut bacteria happy.
the quality of those 3 foods will depend on some things..
for the broccoli, it's the soil... is it contaminated or not? where did it grow?
for the eggs, is the chicken healthy? did she get sun? did she eat insects, worms, or just genetic modified ration?
same for the cattle...
but you are limiting a lot the potential contaminations sources..
"for millions of years we were constantly fasting, then we hunted and killed animals, eating their protein and fat, no carbs, we were constantly in ketosis"
Those hunter-gatherers of the past certainly did eat whatever carbs they could find - wild roots, tubers etc. Gathering plant-based food was easier than hunting. Most Westerners today eat way too much meat, so I wouldn't recommend replacing carbs with that.
I agree with a lot here and practice keto throughout the year and occasionally break to eat burritos, rice, pasta and drink beer because I enjoy them. But our ancestors were not in constant ketosis. They ate substantial carbohydrates in the food they consumed seasonally, though not as much as we consume today because of our tech. Also, doesn’t ice reduce blood flow? Lastly Ramadan and cancer rates are not supported. This discounts age distribution, smoking, genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
yeah, I've done keto very strictly for about a year, it solved a major problem in my respiratory system that I had for like.. all of my life
Today I have introduced many carbs back, like sweet potato, cassava, white rice, and fruits etc.. even some orange/grape juice. I just try to stay away from ultra processed foods and occasionally do some fasting.
About our ancestors, I mean... I think it would depend on where in world they were, what was available, and so on... But the majority of fruits didn't existed, and we didn't dominated agriculture and so on... I am not coming from the angle of "we need to go back to eating like our ancestors", but more like in "yeah, they didn't had food all the time, so they kind of were forced into ketosis and autophagy because of fasting"...
I mean, if you do a fast, you know that in like the 24-48 hours window you get a powerful focus, my guess is that the human would focus on hunting. but as you said, we didn't eat too much carbs as today, and the carbs were different as well.. take for example our wheat, it's mainly genetically modified, and so on...
it's not as easy to say "oh it's ramadan and that's it", but you can clearly see that the Middle East region and africa, which have tons of muslims, have lower cancer rates. intermittent fasting is done in ramadan. it will help with autophagy and health (if done properly).. but I agree that there are tons of other factors as you stated.
and because you cited smoking, I wanna share something. I've recently changed my mind about smoking.
I mean.. those cuban old folks that just chew tobacco all day... they die old.
also we never hear about "smoking weed will give you lung cancer"...
that's because smoking tobacco... kind of doesn't give you cancer right away.. I mean, tobacco, specially when cured, will develop carcinogens, sure. but it will be like cooking food in a scratched teflon pan...
it's a plant, like marijuana, but it has been industrialized!
I've said to some people I know that smokes cigarettes: "Go to the tobacconist and buy rolling papers, filters, and shredded natural tobacco."... when they smoke they feel much more of a taste of the tobacco itself, feel it way stronger, and feel an absence of other taste which is only in the industrial cigarette.
idk how to explain cause I don't smoke. but I can only guess that those 9999999 chemicals are just gone... they might be added in the industrial process to further addict people idk..
Without engaging with the rest of your content, I have to point out that Wikipedia's "list of countries by cancer rates" is not actually a useful metric for the true rates of cancer in those countries. Poorer countries tend to have worse medical surveillance and likely undercount. People also die earlier of "other" things than cancer as well.
I understand the desire to make a coherent narrative that fits your beliefs but please recognize the limits in our ability to make causal statements about the causes of cancer.
Of course you can make the case that we did consumed some carbs, that eggs actually have a tiny trace of carbs, and get technical on some points...
But the thing is... just restrict potential contaminated food sources.
One example, vegetable oils... God had NO participation in the creation of those.. think about it..
How do you make extra virgem olive oil? you take the olive, then press it.. boom. olive oil..
How do you make avocado oil? Same thing! How do you make cocoa butter? same thing..
Butter is just raw milk shaken, you shake shake shake and you get butter!
These are natural fats.
Now just make a quick google/YouTube search on how is canola/soybean/sunflower/cotton oils made... it's a very complex, multi machinery step, that uses hexane (from crude oil) and other chemicals...
the majority of carbs today are made by processing food. the word (processing) means subtraction, removing things of the food.. they take like a genetically modified corn, process it and then can make some kind of "food", focusing on texture.
because our minds get addicted not only for the taste, but on the texture.. that's what the patents are for...
This is a vibes-based argument, there is no science behind it.
Many traditional foods from around the world have relied on nasty, toxic chemical processes since before chemistry was a real science. If anything, modern understanding of chemistry has made the removal of nasty chemicals much more complete and precise.
dude our soil is contaminated. our food grow from the soil. cattle eat grass that grows from the contaminated soil. be it heavy metals, microplastic, pesticides or other chemicals
for example... corn.. we got genetically modified corn, that grows in contaminated soil... eating corn that is genetically modified is bad, eating corn that is not genetically modified but has grown in contaminated soil is bad, now eating gmo corn that has grown in contaminated soil is super bad.. + pesticides and whatever...
all of this is getting into your body....
if you take animals like cattle and chicken, they are eating grass or insects (actually chickens will eat ration from gmo but ok..)
eating meat from cattle is going to yield less contamination, because it has been filtered by nature (grass) + cattle (liver) and so on... there is a chain of filtering..
if the chicken doesn't get sunlight (vitamin d), the eggs will be depleted of vitamin d, and so on...
I mean, even in fish. it's way safer to eat sardines than big fishes (for mercury buildup for example)
in the 1900s one chicken would took 4-5 months to be ready to be killed.. today it's ready within 5-7 weeks... you can ask old folks how the taste of chicken has changed from when they were young to today...
Wrong about olive oil that never need hexane extraction.
Hexane is used to do a second extraction of the residues from the first extraction, to increase the yield. Of course it is somewhat poisonous. It is done for most cheap olive oil ! When buying olive oil, you have to make sure it is extracted mechanically and not chemically, in France at least it is written as such.
also like obese young children... how is this even possible? this is very recent... so yeah.. they did sabotage our food.
if you think about the human being a black box, and food (macro nutrients, fiber, carbs, protein and fat) being inputs, you could test it and find how to break the system, make it weak, obedient and addicted...
that makes total sense! it can get in a state where the body really need to freaking store the fat somewhere else and/or even the toxins because it is unable to get rid of it...
"in the United States, the incidence of advanced colorectal cancer has increased by about 3% each year since around 2010 in people between the ages of 20 and 49. In 2023, colorectal cancer became the leading cause of cancer death in this age group."
Also in TFA:
"Uterine cancer and liver cancer diagnoses and deaths are rising in young women"
The increases in colorectal and liver cancers seem to point to unhealthy food, probably combined with other factors that reduce the resistance of the body to unhealthy food, like pollution, lack of physical exercise and of good sleep.
The comments in this thread are amusing because everyone is confident they know the cause of this (complex and multifaceted) issue and of course each of their explanations is different.
These are all examples where commenters have confidently said that this specific thing is the cause (independent of any data). It is a little odd on a story about how the actual experts are working hard to understand the (likely multifaceted) causes of this trend that there are oodles of people just declaring "oh it is obviously this."
The number of different reasons that people come up with (and with conviction in many cases) is insane IMO, not any single reply or commenter (I hope).
I know of two women under the age of 30 who got cancer, they were spouses/girlfriends of friends of mine. I didn't know them well personally, and only met them a handful of times at outings.
Because they weren't married yet I'm sure it's just compounding their financial struggles.
I was shocked when I heard they had cancer, I almost didn't believe it. Under 30 is such a young age to be diagnosed.
This would be a great thing for all of the AI companies to devote some energy towards. Especially with their reputations in decline. Surely there must be some patterns the AIs could find if we had enough data about the people who died from cancer.
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.
> 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
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 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Chronic inflammation is almost certainly part of this and lots of things about our modern ways of living cause higher levels of inflammation.
- Obesity and sugary drinks/food
- Various chemicals we use in agriculture, food products, cleaning, etc
- Lack of sleep
- Lack of exercise
- Stress
- Pharmaceuticals. And to be clear because I know this will be more controversial, I'm not anti-pharma, but lots of people today are being prescribed daily medication at ever young ages. We know many of these pharmaceuticals can marginally increase certain cancer risks.
- Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
- Vaccines? Probably not, but I dunno... Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but if you're on your 5th Covid shot I feel like you might be putting your body at some marginally increased inflammatory risk there. Vaccines are quite literally deigned to induce inflammation to boost immune response after all.
- More radiation emitting devices – not sure about this one because I haven't done any research, but when I was younger people used to talk about this quite seriously and now it feels like something only conspiracy theorists say. I suspect there is some amount of truth to it even if 5G isn't going to literally give you cancer.
I think it would be more surprising if we didn't see an increase in cancer rates to be honest.
> - Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
> - More radiation emitting devices
Yeah you should absolutely not be going out in the sun for your vitamin D if you believe the latter to be a cause because the sun emits many orders of magnitude more radiation than human made devices in daily use.
I admitted my ignorance. But what are you saying here? That base radiation exposure isn't likely to be higher today than it was in the past or that it's likely an insignificant increase for most people?
My mod reply was superficial because there was so little information in the GP comment. It sounds like you're alluding to some of the background to your actual view, but we readers don't have any access to that from a comment like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48448450. You have that state in your head; we don't have access to it!
If you would want instead to post a thoughtful, substantive expression of your actual view, that would of course be welcome.
My actual view is that A) I don't know what's causing it, but B) neither does anyone else, yet certain hypothesis are going to be [flagged] no matter what, because they trip over certain biases inherit in our political climate.
This just isn't going to be a scientifically important forum anymore where competing ideas can be thoughtfully debated if this keeps happening, that's all my original view was expressing. I'm not even defending any particular post here, this is a more general trend, if the site were to stop brigading and instantly [flagging] wrong-think I strongly believe we'd see a resurgence of thoughtful debate even among hot-button issues, like it used to be back during the Snowden-era for instance.
PS I don't envy your task of moderating a site like this, but those are my 2c...
> Current "safe" dosage on coffeine is like 8 shots a day. No side effects!
Still is, since none of the side effects of caffeine could be considered "dangerous". (Unless you're taking absurdly large amounts, of course, just like anything else.)
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operation to survive, which aren't sustainable, so epidemic changes kick in, eventually creating a breeding ground for tumors.
Forever chemicals like PFAS are a runner-up. The fluorocarbon tail mimics lipids, so the body tries to use them, which damages/kills cells. They circulate around the body endlessly like allergens. Cancer happens after cells have split too many hundreds of times trying to heal damage. So accelerating damage accelerates cancer.
Since cancer is a multifactorial disease, we can only assign weights for each cause. And since healthcare (at least in the US) has been hijacked by regulatory capture to prop up big agribusiness and pharma, we can't do anything in the short term to limit our exposure to dangerous substances.
Meaning that we're left with diet and exercise as the main preventatives. I don't buy that drinking/smoking/drugs or other lifestyle choices are the main causes of cancer (although they certainly contribute) since they've been around for hundreds of years and we have solid data on those risk factors. I look at it more as, a body functioning healthily can recover from abuse better than a body on the brink of failure. Yet we have created a way of life around chronically elevated cortisol and mental health drugs to combat systemic burnout, then wonder why we're all dying. It's so weird.
Like with most problems today, I blame the rich and powerful for abdicating their spiritual duty to help others since they have the means to do it. Instead, they pull up the ladder behind them, or even participate in malfeasance since it profits them and their cronies. Imagine what a few billion dollars put towards mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and pure research would do for cancer. Yet our titans of industry have their sights set on space or bunkers or whatever, actively working to cut government spending on research. It's so weird..
A way forward is maintaining the body so we're ready for anything on a personal level, while working towards systems change on the public level. Otherwise, what are we good for?
tl; dr the first 4 sentences:
Ultra-processed foods, obesity, microbial toxins and agricultural chemicals were all considered. But a clear answer remained elusive.
Could it be the plastics, or maybe the pollution in the air, or maybe the pfas in the water, or maybe the pesticides in the food, or maybe the vaping, or maybe the sedentary lifestyle, or maybe the hundreds of nuclear weapons exploded all over the earth, or maybe it’s the degradation of the ozone layer due to chemicals used in manufacturing.
Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).
I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.
Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).
The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.
I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.
That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.
Many of the research went under my radar when I was researching it ~15 years ago then. Specifically sucralose was what I was researching, because it's what I drank, and there seemed to be no real evidence of harm that I could come up with or that anybody arguing with me about it could point to. And everyone defending it (including me) always had the line about how extensively studied it was at the time.
But research kept coming in. In 2013 CSPI changed their sucralose recommendation from "safe" to "caution". Then in 2016 it changed it again to "avoid". [1] Insulin sensitivity was more of a concern as of 2018 [2]. Sucralose + carbs causing further insulin problems was added in 2020 [3].
There's several more but I'm not going to make an exhaustive list. The point is the more research done the more the sweeteners go from almost completely benign (which you could easily say about sucralose ~2010) to problematic. So saying "the science is in, these sweeteners don't cause cancer" seems off-putting to me after going through the journey of so much of the science being wrong. It reminds me that we didn't classify processed meat as carcinogenic until 2015. And we only classified nitrates as "probably carcinogenic" in 2010.
The problem here is looking at a substance in isolation, instead of comparatively.
The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...
If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.
Nah, technology advancement is full of free lunches.
It breaks our ape brain intuition that anything good must also be bad. But consider all the food tech you take for granted while singling out zero-cal sweeteners.
"Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it."
Still needs to be studied more as there don't seem to be any large studies yet.
"We found that colorectal tissues from 28 (51%) of 55 patients with colorectal cancer were positive for HPV DNA." [3]
[0] https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2025/04/hpv-related-oropharyn...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7062568/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/11/rise-in-popu...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1479314/
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