Conclusions: Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients. Many single studies highlight implausibly large effects, even though evidence is weak. Effect sizes shrink in meta-analyses.
> in contrast, the 10 ingredients for which a relevant cancer risk study was not identified were generally more obscure: bay leaf, cloves, thyme, vanilla, hickory, molasses, almonds, baking soda, ginger, and terrapin.
For a truly cancer neutral food then, here are your ingredients. Hickory smoked ginger-molasses Macaroons seems like a start.
That'd be the vegan option. If you use it as a marinade for the terrapin it's a meat eater friendly meal and wouldn't trigger alpha-gal mammalian meat intolerance.
This is my thought. I hope these studies consider how food is grown, transported, preserved, or prepared. Plastics from storage, quality of water for washing, quality of feed for animals, chemicals for insecticides, etc.
Anything that doesn't control for the amount of contamination that the ingredients has is meaningless. Are the participants eating meat? Red meat? Processed meat? Cured meat? We already know there's a connection with colon cancer and sodium nitrate, does the study account for that? Or just lumps everything into red meat category? What about heavy metals like lead and cadmium that we keep finding in cocoa and coffee? What about glyphosate that is found in more than 80% of the urine samples drawn from US, children included? Then we go outside US, and enter the realm of antibiotics... the list is effectively endless.
Using epidemiology to find correlation is absolutely meaningless if you cannot control for contaminants/adulteration. At best, the result is mildly harmless. At worst, it is drawing the wrong conclusion that we actually know a damn thing about what we eat -- we don't.
> Anything that doesn't control for the amount of contamination that the ingredients has is meaningless
At that level of detail I'm starting to think anything other than forcing 2000 identical twins in a closed and sterile environment to experiment with total control is mostly bs.
You just cannot control for all the variables otherwise
A more practical view is that food is both needed by the body, and at the same time does 'damage' to it.
Causing or promoting cancer may be among that damage. Thus a varied diet is good because:
a) It limits the damage any 1 foodstuff can do, and b) It 'trains' the body to counteract that damage using the widest variety of inputs.
You'd have less damage by eating less, but of course there's a point where the negatives (feeling weak / thirsty, vitamin shortages etc) outweigh the benefits.
Optimum depends on a wiiiiide variety of interacting factors like genetics, environment, activity level, source & processing of foods, cooking methods, gut microbiome, just to name a few.
TLDR; we know 'nothing' about what exactly food does in the body. Food science is not an exact science.
Don't believe me? Go read some food-related scientific studies. The more you dive into the details, the more things become fuzzy. Not to mention in-vitro vs. in-vivo, the difficulty of establishing control groups, and more. In essence it's mostly statistics + theories + lab tests + educated guesswork. And meta-studies. :-)
Nothing wrong with that, btw - as long as those elements are well done, you can still come up with useful findings.
- If you don't have cancer and stop eating, you'll likely die of starvation before you get cancer.
- California made a law that says you have to label products if they contain stuff that might cause cancer. As a result, every product that might ever get sold in California has a label that says "This thing might cause cancer". It's safer to have the label just in case. Otherwise you'd have to check every cancer claim anyone publishes anywhere against all the inputs everywhere along your supply chain, recursively all the way back to farms and mines. Can you say with confidence that if some guy at the University of Boondocks publishes an article in the Timbuktu Journal of Basket-Weaving saying X might cause cancer, you'll see it? Can you say with confidence that even if you do, you'll always know if your supplier's supplier's supplier is using X? Easier to just say "We can't be bothered, just slap a cancer warning on everything we make so our liability goes away" and be done with it.
For those reasons, I would say the claim "Everything we eat is associated with cancer" is true, but not useful.
23 comments
[ 185 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadFor a truly cancer neutral food then, here are your ingredients. Hickory smoked ginger-molasses Macaroons seems like a start.
(Or is the Mock Turtle extinct by now?)
If you aren't doing science in this field, probably not much.
Like most of us, honestly.
Anything that doesn't control for the amount of contamination that the ingredients has is meaningless. Are the participants eating meat? Red meat? Processed meat? Cured meat? We already know there's a connection with colon cancer and sodium nitrate, does the study account for that? Or just lumps everything into red meat category? What about heavy metals like lead and cadmium that we keep finding in cocoa and coffee? What about glyphosate that is found in more than 80% of the urine samples drawn from US, children included? Then we go outside US, and enter the realm of antibiotics... the list is effectively endless.
Using epidemiology to find correlation is absolutely meaningless if you cannot control for contaminants/adulteration. At best, the result is mildly harmless. At worst, it is drawing the wrong conclusion that we actually know a damn thing about what we eat -- we don't.
At that level of detail I'm starting to think anything other than forcing 2000 identical twins in a closed and sterile environment to experiment with total control is mostly bs.
You just cannot control for all the variables otherwise
Causing or promoting cancer may be among that damage. Thus a varied diet is good because:
a) It limits the damage any 1 foodstuff can do, and b) It 'trains' the body to counteract that damage using the widest variety of inputs.
You'd have less damage by eating less, but of course there's a point where the negatives (feeling weak / thirsty, vitamin shortages etc) outweigh the benefits.
Optimum depends on a wiiiiide variety of interacting factors like genetics, environment, activity level, source & processing of foods, cooking methods, gut microbiome, just to name a few.
TLDR; we know 'nothing' about what exactly food does in the body. Food science is not an exact science.
Don't believe me? Go read some food-related scientific studies. The more you dive into the details, the more things become fuzzy. Not to mention in-vitro vs. in-vivo, the difficulty of establishing control groups, and more. In essence it's mostly statistics + theories + lab tests + educated guesswork. And meta-studies. :-)
Nothing wrong with that, btw - as long as those elements are well done, you can still come up with useful findings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN58tZ6dspA
- If you don't have cancer and stop eating, you'll likely die of starvation before you get cancer.
- California made a law that says you have to label products if they contain stuff that might cause cancer. As a result, every product that might ever get sold in California has a label that says "This thing might cause cancer". It's safer to have the label just in case. Otherwise you'd have to check every cancer claim anyone publishes anywhere against all the inputs everywhere along your supply chain, recursively all the way back to farms and mines. Can you say with confidence that if some guy at the University of Boondocks publishes an article in the Timbuktu Journal of Basket-Weaving saying X might cause cancer, you'll see it? Can you say with confidence that even if you do, you'll always know if your supplier's supplier's supplier is using X? Easier to just say "We can't be bothered, just slap a cancer warning on everything we make so our liability goes away" and be done with it.
For those reasons, I would say the claim "Everything we eat is associated with cancer" is true, but not useful.
Sugar is good for you, sugar is bad for you.
This will likely be the same science flip-flopping you'll see until you die.