6 ms·

Cancer is not just 'bad luck' but down to environment, study suggests

92 points by Perados 11y ago

miseg 11y ago
From my understanding, the article means the "environment in which your body finds itself in" rather than "you're living in an environment and that's all the matters". What I mean is that much of your "environment" is what you, your body, puts in itself and does to itself. (In other words, eat well and exercise to give your body a good "environment".)
- akerro 11y ago
  >"environment in which your body finds itself in Yes, you are what you eat. If you eat cancerous substances once per week, you put yourself in risk zone. It's what you eat, drink and breath with build your body cells, you give them weak building material and treat them poorly, they are weak and can be attacked easier. Already decades ago some scientists said that cancer is environmental and you decided whether you got it or not. Eat healthy, not processed meat, fresh vegetables (not frozen), drink clean water. The same rule applies to other illnesses like alzheimer, it's something "new". First alzheimer was described in modern history, while thousands of others illnesses were described and diagnosed even 3000 years ago by Egiptians.
  - danielschonfeld 11y ago
    I think both of you have over simplified a much more complex eco system. It's not a winners vs losers. Yes, sure, eat shit die faster but that's not what an environmental vs bad gene pool comes to teach us. If cancer was an absolute case of being born to the bad gene pool we'd have to tackle the problem in how do we advance our genes to be more error resistive. Being that it's more of an environmental, the problem suddenly change to how do we as a whole bring up our environment several levels up to a more healthier region. You can et the healthiest stuff there is, it still won't help you when the can lining is full of BPA. You can excursive every day and it won't help you if the weights contain materials you breathe which disrupt cellular functions. You can eat the most nutritious fish and vegetables and you're still going to be hit by the cancerous materials they've been brought up in. Adopting the attitude you do, does nothing to better everybody. Only creates yet another us vs them partition in an already well divided society.
    - miseg 11y ago
      Great point. For me it means there are separate implications: 1. What you can do to help your body day to day (and longer term about where you live, for example) 2. What society and policy makers can do to improve the environment as a whole
      - miseg 11y ago
        I would like to know why there are down-votes :)
    - tkyjonathan 11y ago
      I do not fully agree with your point, because it is not black or white, it is a spectrum. So, short of living next to a leaking power station or contaminated waters, the food you eat is the most intimate way you make contact with your environment. Do not forget that your body fights free radicals and oxidative stress. If you give it the proper nutrition it needs to repair itself and eliminate waste then you are statistically in a very good position. Also, about Genes: you may have genes that are more sensitive to certain chronic diseases, but it is your environment that activates those genes. Example, if you are at risk of diabetes, but eat very well, you may never get diabetes.
  - noondip 11y ago
    Sorry to nit-pick, but can you tell me why you perceive frozen vegetables to be cancer-promoting, whereas (unprocessed) meat not to be? Edit: Actually, you may be right about the former, at least w.r.t. frozen cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, and some inert enzymes. This is pretty interesting: > Frozen broccoli can provide a cheaper product, with a longer shelf life and less preparation time than fresh broccoli. We previously showed that several commercially available frozen broccoli products do not retain the ability to generate the cancer-preventative agent sulforaphane. We hypothesized that this was because the necessary hydrolyzing enzyme myrosinase was destroyed during blanching, as part of the processing that frozen broccoli undergoes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915112 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915112 Good news, though, at least if you like radishes: > Daikon radish root supported some sulforaphane formation even when heated at 125 °C for 10 min, a time and temperature comparable to or greater than microwave cooking. Daikon radish (0.25%) added to frozen broccoli that was then allowed to thaw supported sulforaphane formation without any visual alteration to that of untreated broccoli. What's more: > Sulforaphane has been shown to provide cancer prevention through a number of mechanisms including the upregulation of detoxification enzymes and epigenetic changes. Optimal temperature and pH for sulforaphane formation from broccoli was determined. Sulforaphane formation was measured in three commercially frozen broccoli samples pre- and post-cooking. The results show that in these products, there was very little potential to form sulforaphane prior to cooking and essentially none after the recommended cooking method was performed. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464613000510 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464613... Looks like sprinkling some radishes, horseradish, and even wasabi revitalizes the sulforaphane production, though. Not such good news for kale though - looks like we're better off eating it fresh than frozen, indeed (in vitro, cancer cells were suppressed ~10x more with fresh Brassica) > Brassica vegetables contain a diverse range of phytochemicals with biological properties such as antioxidant and anticancer activity. However, knowledge about how biological activities are affected by processing is lacking. A green cultivar and a red cultivar of curly kale were evaluated for water/methanol-soluble phytochemicals before and after processing involving blanching, freeze storage, and boil-in-bag heat treatment. In both kale cultivars, processing resulted in a significant decrease of total phenolics, antioxidant capacity, and content and distribution of flavonols, anthocyanins, hydroxycinnamic acids, glucosinolates, and vitamin C. Interestingly, the red curly kale cultivar had a higher capacity to withstand thermal loss of phytochemicals. The extracts of both green and red curly kale inhibited the cell proliferation of three human colon cancer cell lines (Caco-2, HT-29, and HCT 116). However, extracts from fresh plant material had a significantly stronger antiproliferative effect than extracts from processed plant material. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf300875f http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf300875f
KhalilK 11y ago
Yes it is down to the environment but right now we don't know what these environmental exposures are. I've always considered "chance" and "luck" in science to simply be a placeholder for the unknown.
- dmichulke 11y ago
  I fully agree, random today means one of the following very different things: - we know with certainty that it follows a <xy> distribution and there is no way we could know more - we don't know enough so it appears random to us. If I were forced to bet on one of these, I'd say it's always the latter except in the case of Heisenberg uncertainty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
Udo 11y ago
Every student entering a bio field who learns what cancer is and how it works already knows that this is a disease shaped by many factors. Fundamentally, the problem of fighting cancer is the problem of fighting a set of evolutionary mechanisms that are trying to kill you. The popular press always insists on boiling everything down to one easy-to-understand factor, that's how we get those ridiculous and recurring exclamations about cancer that have to be thrown out next week. There is no single thing you can do as an individual that gets you off the hook for cancer. You can try reducing your probabilities based on the results of studies, but in most respects that's a way more complicated endeavor than what the media portrays it as. Even regular prophylactic screening is not as good a tool as it instinctively seems. Many studies don't give you the complete picture at all, so it rarely makes sense to change your life based on the latest breathlessly exaggerated finding blared at you by the press.
- williamjennings 11y ago
  I read the headline and wondered: "Since when is 'Bad Luck' anything other than a euphemism for the physiological stress which is symptomatic of poverty?" Clever science journalists note that nearly everything outside of the organism can be generically labeled as the environment. __As a reply to DanBC:__ >normal random mutation This phrase does not mean anything in terms of molecular biology or genetics. It is equivalent to "Bad Luck", or "mutation triggered by something". The phrase is inappropriate because it equates point mutations, insertion mutations and deletion mutations. As a rule, when thou wants to say the modifier "normal random"; thou should instead say "normally distributed", and then make sure that is worth mentioning in that field of science.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
    - williamjennings 11y ago
      The appeal to ego is an important part of clickbait. Sociological approaches are the most effective measure in societies where the incidence of cancer is low. Ironically, people who find out that cancer is their personal problem are those who are most able to receive treatment. Many if not all modern problems must be solved through massive collaboration; that which we can be conditioned to eschew or enjoy. The negative conditioning is thusly a Bayesian impedance to human advancement.
DanBC 11y ago
Some people are misunderstanding what this report means by "bad luck", which isn't surprising because this BBC report is lousy, and it follows on from a different paper that said something different and that was also poorly reported. This older report suggested that two thirds of cancer was because of random mutation, rather than genetic predisposition or lifestyle. Here's an example of the confusing way that older study was reported: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/02/two-thirds-adult-cancers-bad-luck http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/02/two-thirds-ad... > Two-thirds of adult cancers, say the researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in the United States, are caused by random mutation in the tissue cells during the ordinary process of stem cell division. In the other third, our genetic inheritance and lifestyles are the main factors. > The scientists have created a mathematical model which, they say, shows it is wrong to assume that there are such things as “good genes” that may prevent us getting cancer even though we smoke, drink heavily and carry excessive weight. This new study disputes that, and says that normal random mutation only accounts for 10% to 30% of cancer, and the rest is because of lifestyle or genetic predisposition. From a public health point of view that's pretty important. Stop smoking, and control how much alcohol you drink, continue to be important public health messages to reduce the incidence of cancer.
- williamjennings 11y ago
  When you translate "Bad Luck" or 'Unlucky" into Confucian-era Chinese, the term is respectively equivocal to poverty or impoverished. "Random mutation" is vaguely technical enough to have the same connotation in the public lexicon. The term does not have specific meaning in molecular biology, so it might as well be superstition. The risk factors are there because we do not do enough to care for each other as individuals in society. The statistics are the tool used for trading liabilities in the applied oncological epidemiology colloquially referred to as health insurance risk modeling.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    Cite? It's not "Confucian-era Chinese", but google translate gives : 倒霉 which per wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉) I don't see anything relating to poverty or impoverishment.
jug5 11y ago
If you didn't know this already you're dumber than dirt.
dominotw 11y ago
As a kid growing up in India I always thought of cancer as some western disease. I only knew one person who had cancer. Now I know tons of people who have died from cancer or are battling it. Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" .
- norea-armozel 11y ago
  It depends really. How much industrialization has your part of the country experienced? I'm pretty sure you'll see some underlying pattern with that since many cancer causing chemicals are linked to several common manufactured products such as plastics.
- Udo 11y ago
  > Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" . Scientifically, this does not hold water, because cancer is such a fundamental disease group that is inherent in the machinery of cells. There are two main factors at play in the apparent rise of cases. One is, as you said, cancers were generally not diagnosed before modern medicine arrived on the scene. The second is: people have to die of something, so when life expectancy goes up cancer rates skyrocket. People who would have died of infection ten years ago will now die of cancer in ten years from now.
- run4yourlives2 11y ago
  For values of "westernization" that equate to "living longer" and "better, more accurate health care". Your anecdote is likely true because of those reasons, similar to the "rise" in autism.
ramanamit1234 11y ago
I've reduced my alchohol consumption. I did not drink as much as the NHS(UK) article warned. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/preventing-cancer/Pages/diet-and-cancer.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/preventing-cancer/Pages/diet-and-... My family does not drink much or smoke. Most of us are in a good weight category, except for me. My challenge is to reduce the weight.

92 points by Perados 11y ago

miseg 11y ago

From my understanding, the article means the "environment in which your body finds itself in" rather than "you're living in an environment and that's all the matters". What I mean is that much of your "environment" is what you, your body, puts in itself and does to itself. (In other words, eat well and exercise to give your body a good "environment".)

akerro 11y ago
>"environment in which your body finds itself in Yes, you are what you eat. If you eat cancerous substances once per week, you put yourself in risk zone. It's what you eat, drink and breath with build your body cells, you give them weak building material and treat them poorly, they are weak and can be attacked easier. Already decades ago some scientists said that cancer is environmental and you decided whether you got it or not. Eat healthy, not processed meat, fresh vegetables (not frozen), drink clean water. The same rule applies to other illnesses like alzheimer, it's something "new". First alzheimer was described in modern history, while thousands of others illnesses were described and diagnosed even 3000 years ago by Egiptians.
- danielschonfeld 11y ago
  I think both of you have over simplified a much more complex eco system. It's not a winners vs losers. Yes, sure, eat shit die faster but that's not what an environmental vs bad gene pool comes to teach us. If cancer was an absolute case of being born to the bad gene pool we'd have to tackle the problem in how do we advance our genes to be more error resistive. Being that it's more of an environmental, the problem suddenly change to how do we as a whole bring up our environment several levels up to a more healthier region. You can et the healthiest stuff there is, it still won't help you when the can lining is full of BPA. You can excursive every day and it won't help you if the weights contain materials you breathe which disrupt cellular functions. You can eat the most nutritious fish and vegetables and you're still going to be hit by the cancerous materials they've been brought up in. Adopting the attitude you do, does nothing to better everybody. Only creates yet another us vs them partition in an already well divided society.
  - miseg 11y ago
    Great point. For me it means there are separate implications: 1. What you can do to help your body day to day (and longer term about where you live, for example) 2. What society and policy makers can do to improve the environment as a whole
    - miseg 11y ago
      I would like to know why there are down-votes :)
  - tkyjonathan 11y ago
    I do not fully agree with your point, because it is not black or white, it is a spectrum. So, short of living next to a leaking power station or contaminated waters, the food you eat is the most intimate way you make contact with your environment. Do not forget that your body fights free radicals and oxidative stress. If you give it the proper nutrition it needs to repair itself and eliminate waste then you are statistically in a very good position. Also, about Genes: you may have genes that are more sensitive to certain chronic diseases, but it is your environment that activates those genes. Example, if you are at risk of diabetes, but eat very well, you may never get diabetes.
- noondip 11y ago
  Sorry to nit-pick, but can you tell me why you perceive frozen vegetables to be cancer-promoting, whereas (unprocessed) meat not to be? Edit: Actually, you may be right about the former, at least w.r.t. frozen cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, and some inert enzymes. This is pretty interesting: > Frozen broccoli can provide a cheaper product, with a longer shelf life and less preparation time than fresh broccoli. We previously showed that several commercially available frozen broccoli products do not retain the ability to generate the cancer-preventative agent sulforaphane. We hypothesized that this was because the necessary hydrolyzing enzyme myrosinase was destroyed during blanching, as part of the processing that frozen broccoli undergoes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915112 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915112 Good news, though, at least if you like radishes: > Daikon radish root supported some sulforaphane formation even when heated at 125 °C for 10 min, a time and temperature comparable to or greater than microwave cooking. Daikon radish (0.25%) added to frozen broccoli that was then allowed to thaw supported sulforaphane formation without any visual alteration to that of untreated broccoli. What's more: > Sulforaphane has been shown to provide cancer prevention through a number of mechanisms including the upregulation of detoxification enzymes and epigenetic changes. Optimal temperature and pH for sulforaphane formation from broccoli was determined. Sulforaphane formation was measured in three commercially frozen broccoli samples pre- and post-cooking. The results show that in these products, there was very little potential to form sulforaphane prior to cooking and essentially none after the recommended cooking method was performed. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464613000510 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464613... Looks like sprinkling some radishes, horseradish, and even wasabi revitalizes the sulforaphane production, though. Not such good news for kale though - looks like we're better off eating it fresh than frozen, indeed (in vitro, cancer cells were suppressed ~10x more with fresh Brassica) > Brassica vegetables contain a diverse range of phytochemicals with biological properties such as antioxidant and anticancer activity. However, knowledge about how biological activities are affected by processing is lacking. A green cultivar and a red cultivar of curly kale were evaluated for water/methanol-soluble phytochemicals before and after processing involving blanching, freeze storage, and boil-in-bag heat treatment. In both kale cultivars, processing resulted in a significant decrease of total phenolics, antioxidant capacity, and content and distribution of flavonols, anthocyanins, hydroxycinnamic acids, glucosinolates, and vitamin C. Interestingly, the red curly kale cultivar had a higher capacity to withstand thermal loss of phytochemicals. The extracts of both green and red curly kale inhibited the cell proliferation of three human colon cancer cell lines (Caco-2, HT-29, and HCT 116). However, extracts from fresh plant material had a significantly stronger antiproliferative effect than extracts from processed plant material. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf300875f http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf300875f

KhalilK 11y ago

Yes it is down to the environment but right now we don't know what these environmental exposures are. I've always considered "chance" and "luck" in science to simply be a placeholder for the unknown.

dmichulke 11y ago
I fully agree, random today means one of the following very different things: - we know with certainty that it follows a <xy> distribution and there is no way we could know more - we don't know enough so it appears random to us. If I were forced to bet on one of these, I'd say it's always the latter except in the case of Heisenberg uncertainty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

Udo 11y ago

Every student entering a bio field who learns what cancer is and how it works already knows that this is a disease shaped by many factors. Fundamentally, the problem of fighting cancer is the problem of fighting a set of evolutionary mechanisms that are trying to kill you. The popular press always insists on boiling everything down to one easy-to-understand factor, that's how we get those ridiculous and recurring exclamations about cancer that have to be thrown out next week. There is no single thing you can do as an individual that gets you off the hook for cancer. You can try reducing your probabilities based on the results of studies, but in most respects that's a way more complicated endeavor than what the media portrays it as. Even regular prophylactic screening is not as good a tool as it instinctively seems. Many studies don't give you the complete picture at all, so it rarely makes sense to change your life based on the latest breathlessly exaggerated finding blared at you by the press.

williamjennings 11y ago
I read the headline and wondered: "Since when is 'Bad Luck' anything other than a euphemism for the physiological stress which is symptomatic of poverty?" Clever science journalists note that nearly everything outside of the organism can be generically labeled as the environment. __As a reply to DanBC:__ >normal random mutation This phrase does not mean anything in terms of molecular biology or genetics. It is equivalent to "Bad Luck", or "mutation triggered by something". The phrase is inappropriate because it equates point mutations, insertion mutations and deletion mutations. As a rule, when thou wants to say the modifier "normal random"; thou should instead say "normally distributed", and then make sure that is worth mentioning in that field of science.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  - williamjennings 11y ago
    The appeal to ego is an important part of clickbait. Sociological approaches are the most effective measure in societies where the incidence of cancer is low. Ironically, people who find out that cancer is their personal problem are those who are most able to receive treatment. Many if not all modern problems must be solved through massive collaboration; that which we can be conditioned to eschew or enjoy. The negative conditioning is thusly a Bayesian impedance to human advancement.

DanBC 11y ago

Some people are misunderstanding what this report means by "bad luck", which isn't surprising because this BBC report is lousy, and it follows on from a different paper that said something different and that was also poorly reported. This older report suggested that two thirds of cancer was because of random mutation, rather than genetic predisposition or lifestyle. Here's an example of the confusing way that older study was reported: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/02/two-thirds-adult-cancers-bad-luck http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/02/two-thirds-ad... > Two-thirds of adult cancers, say the researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in the United States, are caused by random mutation in the tissue cells during the ordinary process of stem cell division. In the other third, our genetic inheritance and lifestyles are the main factors. > The scientists have created a mathematical model which, they say, shows it is wrong to assume that there are such things as “good genes” that may prevent us getting cancer even though we smoke, drink heavily and carry excessive weight. This new study disputes that, and says that normal random mutation only accounts for 10% to 30% of cancer, and the rest is because of lifestyle or genetic predisposition. From a public health point of view that's pretty important. Stop smoking, and control how much alcohol you drink, continue to be important public health messages to reduce the incidence of cancer.

williamjennings 11y ago
When you translate "Bad Luck" or 'Unlucky" into Confucian-era Chinese, the term is respectively equivocal to poverty or impoverished. "Random mutation" is vaguely technical enough to have the same connotation in the public lexicon. The term does not have specific meaning in molecular biology, so it might as well be superstition. The risk factors are there because we do not do enough to care for each other as individuals in society. The statistics are the tool used for trading liabilities in the applied oncological epidemiology colloquially referred to as health insurance risk modeling.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Cite? It's not "Confucian-era Chinese", but google translate gives : 倒霉 which per wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉) I don't see anything relating to poverty or impoverishment.

jug5 11y ago

If you didn't know this already you're dumber than dirt.

dominotw 11y ago

As a kid growing up in India I always thought of cancer as some western disease. I only knew one person who had cancer. Now I know tons of people who have died from cancer or are battling it. Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" .

norea-armozel 11y ago
It depends really. How much industrialization has your part of the country experienced? I'm pretty sure you'll see some underlying pattern with that since many cancer causing chemicals are linked to several common manufactured products such as plastics.
Udo 11y ago
> Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" . Scientifically, this does not hold water, because cancer is such a fundamental disease group that is inherent in the machinery of cells. There are two main factors at play in the apparent rise of cases. One is, as you said, cancers were generally not diagnosed before modern medicine arrived on the scene. The second is: people have to die of something, so when life expectancy goes up cancer rates skyrocket. People who would have died of infection ten years ago will now die of cancer in ten years from now.
run4yourlives2 11y ago
For values of "westernization" that equate to "living longer" and "better, more accurate health care". Your anecdote is likely true because of those reasons, similar to the "rise" in autism.

ramanamit1234 11y ago

I've reduced my alchohol consumption. I did not drink as much as the NHS(UK) article warned. http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/preventing-cancer/Pages/diet-and-cancer.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/preventing-cancer/Pages/diet-and-... My family does not drink much or smoke. Most of us are in a good weight category, except for me. My challenge is to reduce the weight.