I recently wrote an article discussing how increased fruits and vegetables can prevent mortality from <i>cardiovascular diseases</i>, yet not cancer.[1]<p>My conclusion was that cancer is best prevented by <i>removing</i> negatives from life, not necessarily adding positives. ie avoid anything from stress to pollution to sunburn to obviously smoking. Interestingly, organic food doesn't seem to matter in the cancer equation, given the data we have.<p>Yet there's one thing you can ADD to reduce cancer: exercise. Preferably moderately hard to strenuous.<p>[1] <a href="https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables" rel="nofollow">https://blog.priceplow.com/vegetables</a>
>A bigger concern to me is that people might interpret these findings as assigning fault to people who get cancer. You don’t want to get into situations where you feel as if people don’t deserve help because they didn’t try hard enough to stay healthy. Much of cancer is still out of people’s control.<p>Although only one paragraph, I'm glad the author addressed this.<p>All of these tips and lifestyle changes are great but this doesn't make those of us with loved ones with cancer feel any better. By all accounts she has done everything to qualify as "low risk," but still got cancer.<p>It's still an odds game. Better odds don't guarantee anything. It's unfair, frustrating, and infuriating.
I'd like to see a statistic that accounts for the fact that we all eventually die from _something_.<p>If we measure success only by how many people eventually die from a particular disease, then increasing life expectancy doesn't count as success at all.<p>Dying from cancer at the age of 90 should not be counted the same as dying of cancer at the age of 45.<p>So the statistic I want to see would count cancer free years.
It's amazing just how badly this study was distorted by generalized clickbaitism. It chafed me sufficiently enough to put out a video on the subject at the time[1]. The hype really wasn't even necessary... the underlying findings were plenty interesting enough already: that there is an association between stem cell division rate of specific tissues and overall cancer risk. This, however, in no way implies that cancer is <i>only</i> due to bad luck.<p>Science ended up printing a follow-up actually clarify things, perhaps feeling themselves that the interpretation by the public at large got out of hand a little bit[2].<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiH4m7NvV98</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-science-reporter-s-reflections-controversial-story" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/bad-luck-and-cancer-s...</a>
> Over all, though, about 25 percent of cancer in women and 33 percent in men was potentially preventable.<p>This article is a rather optimistic spin on these numbers. I'd have said "a large majority of cancer cases--75% in women and 67% in men--were not preventable"
This is great, and I think it should be fairly easy for everyone to follow in small measure at the very least. I'm not minimizing the struggles of those who can't control their weight or eating habits. I simply believe that people often pick something like a "diet" as their primary focus and then skip the workouts or continue to indulge in alcohol. I find it much easier to succeed when I attack the problem from more angles and try to make changes in all of these aspects to my routine. If one fails, I can still reap the benefits from the other changes I've made.
Interesting article. I don't know that I'd take too much to heart given some of the obvious caveats the author has been nice enough to make explicit, but it sounds like I'd be hard pressed to argue the suggestions contained within.<p>For the tl;dr crowd:<p>- written by a physician<p>- people often think that heart disease is controllable by our actions whereas they feel that cancer is not<p>- > people can’t change many risk factors of heart disease like age, race and family genetics<p>- > A more recent study published in Nature argues that there is a lot we can do. [about cancer]<p>- > Using sophisticated modeling techniques, the researchers argued that less than 30 percent of the lifetime risk of getting cancer was because of intrinsic risk factors, or the “bad luck.”<p>- > [another study] identified four domains that are often noted to be related to disease prevention: smoking, drinking, obesity and exercise<p>- if you limit that stuff, and not meaning 0 smoking, but "having quit within the last 5 years", no more than 1 drink a day (women) or 2 drinks a day (men), your BMI is >= 18.5 and <= 27.5 (BMI is such a shit and antiquated metric, IMO, incidentally), and perform 150mins/wk moderate intensity excercise or 75mins/wk vigorous intensity exercise, then you're in the low risk group. so the barrier to entry is not super high.<p>HOWever:<p>> No study is perfect, and this is no exception. These cohorts are overwhelmingly white and consist of health professionals, who are not necessarily like the population at large. But the checks against the national data showed that if anything, these results might be underestimating how much cancer is preventable by healthy behaviors.<p>[...]<p>Optimistic conclusion, for a skeptical cheapskate like myself,<p>> As we talk about cancer “moonshots” that will most likely cost billions of dollars and might not achieve results, it’s worth considering that — as in many cases — prevention is not only the cheapest course, but also the most effective.<p>Hard to fault this article. I'm glad you posted it, thank you.
95 per cent of the targeted cancer cells die within two hours with new treatment that involves injecting a chemical compound, nitrobenzaldehyde, into the tumour and allowing it to diffuse into the tissue;
<a href="http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/84095-new-method-can-wipe-out-cancerous-tumours-in-two-hours.html" rel="nofollow">http://sakshipost.com/index.php/lifestyle/editor-s-picks/840...</a>
At least in my section of this world people don't feel out of control about cancer. Trying to avoid things that "give you cancer" seem to be normal, even in lesser educated groups. Can't imagine it's so different in the US.
Here's what it would take to really prove the causative effects claimed in the article: pick a bunch of random people and then force them to either drink or not, exercise or not, smoke or not.. etc. There's no way anyone is ever going to do this experiment, and I just find the claims made in the article somewhat dubious as a result. On the other hand, they are likely to be right (yes?) and probably it's better to make such claims than not to. But hey, if you are a sedentary type, if you smoke, if you drink, what is causing those behaviours? Just forcing some exercise doesn't change those deeper causes (what ever bio/emoto/chemico causes), and may very well make the person absolutely miserable or worse.
Obviously the easy way to prevent cancer is to just stop aging. We just need to unlock the means to micro-manage the cellular mitosis of all the trillions of cells in our bodies. Easy.~
BMI is so bad.<p>I'm 6'0 and the last time I was under BMI 25 I was a triathlete. The only way I could be <25 would be to exercise 3 hours a day and eat 1200 calories. F-off and die<p>I did quit smoking though:<p>- Really wanted to
- Picked a good mental argument against it ($100k CAD over 20 years)
- Picked a quit date
- Patch + zyban + nicotene lozenges<p>If you live in British Columbia, the government will pay for your patches or lozenges (hint: ask a friend)
If peak cancer years are two or more decades in your future, I'd argue that the best thing you can do today is donate to research programs that are likely to change the economic landscape of cancer research. You should also not get fat, not smoke, and all the other things that require no money, but research is much more transformative. You want the future to be no cancer, not less cancer.<p>Why economic transformation in cancer research? The cancer research community suffers from a high level strategy problem: the majority of treatments are only applicable to a small number of cancer types, out of the hundreds of known types, and the majority of new technology platforms under development will be just as expensive to adapt to a different type of cancer as to build in the first place. A much more efficient approach is needed, as there are only so many researchers and only so much funding in the world.<p>This is much on my mind because I'm helping to raise funds for one such project right now. It involves taking on the less well-supported but still necessary part of building a universal cancer treatment platform, one that can target all cancers. This could be built for about the same cost as one of today's highly specific single-cancer treatments. Obviously that is an immensely better path forward.<p>The approach is to block telomere lengthening: all cancers must lengthen their telomeres in order to grow, and abuse a small number of target mechanisms in order to do so. These mechanisms, telomerase and alternative lengthening of telomeres (ALT), are very fundamental to cellular biochemistry. If they are turned off, it is expected that there is no way for a cancer to evolve around that dead end. Many of today's cancer therapies, in addition to being very specific, also leave room for a cancer cells to evolve a different way of conducting business that renders them immune.<p>A number of research groups are working on sabotage of telomerase, but next to no-one is working on ALT. It is known that telomerase cancers can turn into ALT cancers, so it is probably the case that both doors have to be slammed shut to have a truly effective universal cancer therapy. So I'm helping a fundraiser to use an ALT assay to scan the standard drug candidate library for compounds that act to suppress ALT, something that should greatly advance that part of the field, both by identifying more lines of investigation, and by finding potential therapies for ALT cancers. Since ALT doesn't happen in normal cells, completely suppressing ALT should be a pretty safe treatment if an approach with limited side-effects can be identified. The telomerase blocking will need more work on compensating or targeting for other effects, since stem cells require it. But that is still a lot less work than producing one therapy per cancer type.
A lot of cancer is self-inflicted such as smoking cigarettes. Even though they know smoking is bad for them and they've had relatives that have died from tobacco, teens continue to use it and become addicted to smoking.<p>In NYC, cigarettes cost $12-$14 per pack it is against the law to buy cigarettes until age 21. Countries that have universal healthcare such as Canada, UK, France all have tobacco taxes that exceed $5 per pack. Our US Federal tax is about $1.<p>The high cost of tobacco and the increase age for buying tobacco (now the same as drinking alcohol which is also 21) helps to prevent teens from becoming using and becoming addicted to tobacco.
lol
vegans have FAR LESS cancer (<a href="http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html" rel="nofollow">http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2250052.html</a>)
but nooo, I won't go vegan - those peoplz ares crazies!!!11