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.
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.
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)
How sure we are that something causes cancer and how often it causes cancer are not the same. Those WHO classifications are about the former. Usually the two are pretty much entwined, because you can more easily find larger effects. The effect of meats is a counterexample though: because it causes specific types of cancers that are otherwise rare you can be pretty sure it causes cancer even though the effect is not as big as e.g. smoking.
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
What an absolutely obnoxious way to respond to someone who was willing to share his experience about a subject as personal and painful as losing his father to cancer.
I don't think it's obnoxious at all to point out that forgoing nearly half your lifespan in order to avoid a painful death implies that you don't value your life much
I don't understand what you think this conversation is about. It's not "die quick and painless at 45 or excruciatingly painfully at 80" it's just 45 or 80. Nobody said anything about excruciating pain except you.
Do you think your dad would prefer to die exactly the same way at 45 instead? No? Great, conversation over.
Maybe it’s that I have young kids, but even knowing my death at 80 would be horrible, I’d choose that over a painless death at 45 in a heartbeat. I’d beg and pray for that outcome.
> 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.
I think this is one of those areas where the translation from research to the public ends up too precise on the details, beyond the cognitive load most people are willing to commit to it day to day.
In the same spirit of upāya from Buddhism, I like to compress this type of topic into a simpler model, even if imperfect.
Here's how I model cancer, and how I judge whether something is likely to give me cancer, without trying (and failing) to memorize a million risk factors individually:
You are a collective of cooperating cells. When cells rebel, the order that holds your body together collapses, and you get cancer. Cells generally don't want to rebel. They're content as long as they get their energy, their paycheck.
But what about activities that cause frequent cell death? A sunburn, smoke in your lungs, alcohol in your bloodstream, radiation (essentially atomic shrapnel flying through your tissue). Anything that causes inflammation, especially chronically. When cells die before their expiration date, the survivors have to keep dividing to replace them, and they start to get pretty mad about it. Maybe even rebellious.
With every round of division, they are in essence "evolving" away from their cooperative nature to cope with a hostile environment. A cell doesn't care whether the collective lives or dies, and it doesn't have the capacity to reason about that in the first place.
So the question becomes: are you keeping your cells safe? Are your activities hurting them? If they're not happy, they'll rebel, and you'll die.
This is where the model earns its keep. Take obesity. It's on every risk list, but excess fat isn't what makes cells rebel. The real culprits are the conditions obesity creates: chronic inflammation, more cells that need to be maintained and replaced, a body that is generally harder to live in.
Weight loss is on the list because it's the easiest way to fix those conditions, not because thinness is protective in itself. Once you see that, you don't need the list. Anything that makes your cells' lives harder, day after day, is raising your odds, whether or not anyone has published a paper on it yet.
The math is real, but a model like this tells you which variables you actually control.
> 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?
Are you sure that people should try? Will they live longer, or happier lives if they do?
From 1900 to 1950 the average US life expectancy went from about 47 to roughly 68. Penicillin and sanitation did most of that.
From 1950 through present day we added another 10 years. What most folks don't realize is that:
- 70% of those gains, or 7 out of the 10 extra years, came from cardiovascular health. Mostly because we got better at surviving heart attacks, and people smoked less.
- 19% came from infant mortaility gains (2 of the remaining 3 years of gain).
- 11% came from EVERYTHING ELSE that people did to become "healthier." So 1 year.
The US spends $5.3 trillion per year on healthcare, give or take. That's about $15.5k per capita every year. It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States. That's 2 out of every 10 productive dollars going towards healthcare.
In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.
In exchange for constantly worrying, exercising, staying up to date, eating right, etc you buy yourself one year more of life, and it's not even going to be a GOOD year. It's going to be one more year of being 80+ years old with everything hurting and constant medical needs.
Is it really worth 20% of the money you make every year for you entire life to live one extra, shitty, year?
I just don't think people have done the math on this one.
Not only is this utilitarian nonsense, the "math" here is full logical nonsense.
It shocks me how anyone could string this pile words together and think they sound like anything at all.
> "2 out of every 10 productive dollars"
As if those dollars have anything to do with the time people work, or that they would get those dollars and time back by not caring about health.
As if the tiny portion of those dollars that actually gets spent on patient healthcare isn't dominated by end of life care.
The US healthcare system spend is so far divorced from whatever idea of "productive dollars" anyone has when it's 60-80% admin cost.
The US should not even be mentioned in any conversation about the ROI of health spend.
> The US should not even be mentioned in any conversation about the ROI of health spend.
I would agree with at least this part, if I didn't live here. I'm reminded of the MRI post from a few days back. I think the stat was that Boston had more MRI's than all of Canada combined.
How much healthier are people the United States than Canada - for all that extra spend? I'm fairly certain the number is negative.
EDIT - I googled it. The Canadian life span is four years higher than the average American and they're healthier than the average American when they get there. So, yes, the number is negative.
> Canada has a total of 432 MRI machines according to the latest official national survey.
> Per capita: An average of 10.8 units per million people, which is well below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 19.4.
And Massachusetts (specifically Boston and Cambridge) has an insanely high concentration due to multiple medical schools and several very large hospital systems.
Real question and no trolling to Canada: How does Canada have such good healthcare, but so few MRIs? My point: Canada is certainly rich enough to buy and operate more. Do they not need them? Does the US just have way too many? (That is my guess.)
This I can get behind. Quality of life is worth something. Is it worth 20% of the GDP? No, but it's not where we spend those healthcare dollars anyhow. We spend them on trying to extend the lifespan by one miserable year via end of life care, mostly.
There are a lot of medical problems that can make life miserable that won't kill you that are excluded from your simple objective of "how many years am I breathing."
1) Worrying about your health is mostly useless and probably won't move the needle much unless you have obvious problems.
2) The United States spends 20% of it's GDP to accomplish nothing. That 1 year of life expectancy gain is probably within the margin of error. Certainly modern healthcare can help at the individual level, but the society is so sick that any gains are washed away by the noise and we spend a truly enormous amount of money to get nowhere.
Our worry costs us a fortune, and generally just doesn't accomplish anything worthwhile.
"unless you have obvious problems" is doing a _ton_ of work. Most people _do_ have _obvious_ problems. Their weight, their cholesterol, their alcohol use, and on and on.
Saying "if you're healthy you shouldn't worry about your health" is a meaningless thing to say. The point is that most people _do_ have obvious room for some kind of health improvement, and as other commenters have pointed out, if it's not in the clear "this will help me live an additional N years" way, then very likely it is in the "this will make my life suck less as I age" way. Eg; Being able to walk up a flight of stairs without getting deeply winded.
You can see my reply to a sibling, but: no, of course not.
However, would I regret not being fit enough to go for a hike in my 60s? That's another story, and it is one which many do have the ability to intervene on.
Treadmill time as an enabler of other experiences may well be worth keeping, even if the time spent on it doesn't satisfy some imagined "will I think of it on my deathbed as time well spent?" bar. I imagine there are a great many things I won't think about on my deathbed which on their own are unremarkable or even gasp not very fun, but that is of course not a reliable measure of whether something is worth doing.
> It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States.
As of 2025, it is more like 18%. For other highly developed nations, the average is about 12.5%. I think a lot of that difference can be explained by the very high salaries paid to medical workers compared to those other highly developed nations.
> In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.
This isn't a very apt comparison. Think about it a different way: How much can I keep if I give up that single year of life?
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.
Stress can spike BP due to the higher cortisol level that narrows arteries.
But baseline BP is all about diet, exercise, good sleep routine and avoiding smoking.
Some foods like licorice can elevate BP; the glycyrrhizic acid inhibits an enzyme that deactivates cortisol.
I personally drink hibiscus tea a few times a week which is an ACE inhibitor and is shown to reduce systolic blood pressure by 5-7mmHg. Also the occasional beetroot juice (+ apple and carrot) or magnesium bisglycinate for a 2-5mmHh systolic reduction due to the nitric oxide.
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.)
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.
> Additionally, all these environmental factors such as X-rays, gamma rays, the radiation emitted from radioactive materials, aniline type dyes, cigarette, free radicals, asbestos, silica dust, air pollution, food additives, various drugs, some of the chemicals used in perfumes, oncogenic viruses and bacteria are playing an important role in cancer formation and contribute the increase of incidence of cancer.
Do the four you cited really cover 50% ?
E.g. moving to a place with less air pollution or better building materials could have a lot more effect than fixing your diet if you're in the average.
I deeply dislike that answer. Its religous tainted by that utopian pseudo-religion ("Glutony punishes the sinners with infinite growth") and a template for the "soft authoritarianism" that is prevalent in the european union. As in: "We know better then you, we will reduce the size of the dice and nudge you to be better with acrylamids in baked and roasted goods- everywhere except coffee "
Synthetic rational religion even replicated hypocrisy in its own way. Cancer is just life going wrong. Its not avoided by being dead while alive.
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?
Even without that, the position implies they haven't understood that she's an individual and so her future is her own to determine, at least to a much greater extent than this acknowledges.
What ever happened to parents who just wanted their children to be happy? Maybe she wants to be a whore. The more figuratively you're happy to deploy that term the more likely her choices overlap.
That sort of thinking isn't recent, it's a mindset still kicking around from the days of old. If one were to guess why there's been no serious attempt to make vaccines for common STDs - any idea was killed off. It's a wonder that HPV vaccine escaped this odd mindset.
I last noted this backwards thinking when an early vaccine for covid at the University of Queensland was developed using a protein portion of HIV ... did this old cabal flex its power. Quite sad, despite the reasons given not to use the developed vaccine, didn't pass the pub test.
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).
Two in particular, those with a distrust of or ignorance to authority, and those with a paternal expectation of abstinence (with extreme punitive consequences for defiance) and therefore no need for such a vaccine.
The former of course is (uncomfortably) why we have seen a resurgence in smallpox, measles, and scabies.
> 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.
Was it the dems who booed Trump at his own rally ?
The 2020 Democratic skepticism was about possible political pressure to approve a vaccine before the election, it wasn't about vaccines themselves.
Harris explicitly said she'd take it if Fauci and public health experts endorsed it
Once the vaccines approved, Dems went all in on vaccination and Trump didn't promote them (still took credit for it when he could)
OTOH he spent a looot of time dissing health officials
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.
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.
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.
My best friend died in July, and his cancer came from both things: immune system degradation that let a throat infection become a bad cancer. Primary cause of said immune system degradation were environmental and lifestyle, i.e. weekly/biweekly infections brought home by the kid (I've never seen anything like that), powerful allergens in his housing unit, decades of alcohol abuse (one last multi-day incident started the illness and the subsequent process), and tons of stress. Possibly also genetic factors. Miss him everyday a world, and I'm sure it is orders of magnitude worse for the family he left behind.
As noted, it helps prevent mouth and throat cancers. Also, it helps contribute to herd immunity. The more men get it, the less of the disease will be floating around.
The upsides are significant and the downsides are nil. It's a no-brainer.
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.
>For many people, sun exposure, smoking and family history are the first thoughts that come to mind regarding cancer risk factors. While infections are rarely high on the list, new research shows one in eight cancers worldwide are actually caused by them.
To be fair... Smoking increases your chance of infection significantly.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] threadAlways 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%+
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
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.
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.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/diet_alcohol/re...
https://publications.iarc.who.int/Book-And-Report-Series/Iar...
What else could it possibly mean?
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.
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)
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.
“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.
This kind of comment lowers the level of discourse dramatically.
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.
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.
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 78 and fine is better than 45 and 80 in pain.
But in this country we are so adverse to giving someone agency over how their life ends.
Because it’s not good Business.
Do you think your dad would prefer to die exactly the same way at 45 instead? No? Great, conversation over.
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.
In the same spirit of upāya from Buddhism, I like to compress this type of topic into a simpler model, even if imperfect.
Here's how I model cancer, and how I judge whether something is likely to give me cancer, without trying (and failing) to memorize a million risk factors individually:
You are a collective of cooperating cells. When cells rebel, the order that holds your body together collapses, and you get cancer. Cells generally don't want to rebel. They're content as long as they get their energy, their paycheck.
But what about activities that cause frequent cell death? A sunburn, smoke in your lungs, alcohol in your bloodstream, radiation (essentially atomic shrapnel flying through your tissue). Anything that causes inflammation, especially chronically. When cells die before their expiration date, the survivors have to keep dividing to replace them, and they start to get pretty mad about it. Maybe even rebellious.
With every round of division, they are in essence "evolving" away from their cooperative nature to cope with a hostile environment. A cell doesn't care whether the collective lives or dies, and it doesn't have the capacity to reason about that in the first place.
So the question becomes: are you keeping your cells safe? Are your activities hurting them? If they're not happy, they'll rebel, and you'll die.
This is where the model earns its keep. Take obesity. It's on every risk list, but excess fat isn't what makes cells rebel. The real culprits are the conditions obesity creates: chronic inflammation, more cells that need to be maintained and replaced, a body that is generally harder to live in.
Weight loss is on the list because it's the easiest way to fix those conditions, not because thinness is protective in itself. Once you see that, you don't need the list. Anything that makes your cells' lives harder, day after day, is raising your odds, whether or not anyone has published a paper on it yet.
The math is real, but a model like this tells you which variables you actually control.
Are you sure that people should try? Will they live longer, or happier lives if they do?
From 1900 to 1950 the average US life expectancy went from about 47 to roughly 68. Penicillin and sanitation did most of that.
From 1950 through present day we added another 10 years. What most folks don't realize is that:
- 70% of those gains, or 7 out of the 10 extra years, came from cardiovascular health. Mostly because we got better at surviving heart attacks, and people smoked less.
- 19% came from infant mortaility gains (2 of the remaining 3 years of gain).
- 11% came from EVERYTHING ELSE that people did to become "healthier." So 1 year.
The US spends $5.3 trillion per year on healthcare, give or take. That's about $15.5k per capita every year. It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States. That's 2 out of every 10 productive dollars going towards healthcare.
In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.
In exchange for constantly worrying, exercising, staying up to date, eating right, etc you buy yourself one year more of life, and it's not even going to be a GOOD year. It's going to be one more year of being 80+ years old with everything hurting and constant medical needs.
Is it really worth 20% of the money you make every year for you entire life to live one extra, shitty, year?
I just don't think people have done the math on this one.
It shocks me how anyone could string this pile words together and think they sound like anything at all.
> "2 out of every 10 productive dollars"
As if those dollars have anything to do with the time people work, or that they would get those dollars and time back by not caring about health.
As if the tiny portion of those dollars that actually gets spent on patient healthcare isn't dominated by end of life care.
The US healthcare system spend is so far divorced from whatever idea of "productive dollars" anyone has when it's 60-80% admin cost. The US should not even be mentioned in any conversation about the ROI of health spend.
I would agree with at least this part, if I didn't live here. I'm reminded of the MRI post from a few days back. I think the stat was that Boston had more MRI's than all of Canada combined.
How much healthier are people the United States than Canada - for all that extra spend? I'm fairly certain the number is negative.
EDIT - I googled it. The Canadian life span is four years higher than the average American and they're healthier than the average American when they get there. So, yes, the number is negative.
Real question and no trolling to Canada: How does Canada have such good healthcare, but so few MRIs? My point: Canada is certainly rich enough to buy and operate more. Do they not need them? Does the US just have way too many? (That is my guess.)
What are you even talking about?
1) Worrying about your health is mostly useless and probably won't move the needle much unless you have obvious problems.
2) The United States spends 20% of it's GDP to accomplish nothing. That 1 year of life expectancy gain is probably within the margin of error. Certainly modern healthcare can help at the individual level, but the society is so sick that any gains are washed away by the noise and we spend a truly enormous amount of money to get nowhere.
Our worry costs us a fortune, and generally just doesn't accomplish anything worthwhile.
Saying "if you're healthy you shouldn't worry about your health" is a meaningless thing to say. The point is that most people _do_ have obvious room for some kind of health improvement, and as other commenters have pointed out, if it's not in the clear "this will help me live an additional N years" way, then very likely it is in the "this will make my life suck less as I age" way. Eg; Being able to walk up a flight of stairs without getting deeply winded.
However, would I regret not being fit enough to go for a hike in my 60s? That's another story, and it is one which many do have the ability to intervene on.
Treadmill time as an enabler of other experiences may well be worth keeping, even if the time spent on it doesn't satisfy some imagined "will I think of it on my deathbed as time well spent?" bar. I imagine there are a great many things I won't think about on my deathbed which on their own are unremarkable or even gasp not very fun, but that is of course not a reliable measure of whether something is worth doing.
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.
Suicide is at once the worst and most effective cure for cancer.
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.
Basically, live healthily, and you'll have a (much!) happier and longer life.
But baseline BP is all about diet, exercise, good sleep routine and avoiding smoking.
Some foods like licorice can elevate BP; the glycyrrhizic acid inhibits an enzyme that deactivates cortisol.
I personally drink hibiscus tea a few times a week which is an ACE inhibitor and is shown to reduce systolic blood pressure by 5-7mmHg. Also the occasional beetroot juice (+ apple and carrot) or magnesium bisglycinate for a 2-5mmHh systolic reduction due to the nitric oxide.
All of the following affect it, and many other things do too:
- sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium intake
- exercise
- obesity
- many drugs (including ibuprofen and stimulants)
- alcohol
- smoking
- prescriptions for lowering BP
diet, tobacco, infections, obesity, alcohol, others
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.
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.
> 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.).
There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.
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.
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.
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.)
I'm wayyyy less likely to exercise if I've only slept 5 hours
/s for the trust fund kids reading
> Additionally, all these environmental factors such as X-rays, gamma rays, the radiation emitted from radioactive materials, aniline type dyes, cigarette, free radicals, asbestos, silica dust, air pollution, food additives, various drugs, some of the chemicals used in perfumes, oncogenic viruses and bacteria are playing an important role in cancer formation and contribute the increase of incidence of cancer.
Do the four you cited really cover 50% ?
E.g. moving to a place with less air pollution or better building materials could have a lot more effect than fixing your diet if you're in the average.
Synthetic rational religion even replicated hypocrisy in its own way. Cancer is just life going wrong. Its not avoided by being dead while alive.
esp when all the caps are missing but all the punctuation are perfectly present
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...
Know that it is common among certain demographics though.
You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.
What ever happened to parents who just wanted their children to be happy? Maybe she wants to be a whore. The more figuratively you're happy to deploy that term the more likely her choices overlap.
I last noted this backwards thinking when an early vaccine for covid at the University of Queensland was developed using a protein portion of HIV ... did this old cabal flex its power. Quite sad, despite the reasons given not to use the developed vaccine, didn't pass the pub test.
>"I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens."
Is a little weird to do, and seems like it might be downplaying some provocative or nosy behavior.
The former of course is (uncomfortably) why we have seen a resurgence in smallpox, measles, and scabies.
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.
The 2020 Democratic skepticism was about possible political pressure to approve a vaccine before the election, it wasn't about vaccines themselves.
Harris explicitly said she'd take it if Fauci and public health experts endorsed it
Once the vaccines approved, Dems went all in on vaccination and Trump didn't promote them (still took credit for it when he could) OTOH he spent a looot of time dissing health officials
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
It’s really a golden age for cancer treatments and energy.
Bringing up Starship launches in the same discussion with car emissions is like bringing up skateboards when talking about traffic jams.
One big help for car emissions would be to make them electric.
Many viri are present in many human beings, but they don't develop cancer after all.
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)
Viri is the latin plural for men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
The upsides are significant and the downsides are nil. It's a no-brainer.
To be fair... Smoking increases your chance of infection significantly.