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A few things: Cancer is basically the most likely thing to kill you besides heart disease. A physically active population will have less death by heart disease
by dave_sullivan 10y ago
A few things:
Cancer is basically the most likely thing to kill you besides heart disease. A physically active population will have less death by heart disease and thus more by cancer (because something has to kill you). So perhaps there's just less heart disease in SF.
They say things like "rates are soaring" without saying how much and if it's different than national averages.
This article has very little substance and is basically stating the fact that a lot of people get cancer. IIRC, any given person today has a 25% chance of getting cancer in their lifetime.
So don't worry: if you exercise and eat right, cancer will eventually get you wherever you live.
(I should acknowledge the obvious of some environments are literally carcinogenic, so if you live in a coal mine, 19th century London, or modern Beijing, there's more cause for concern)
For anyone looking to learn more about cancer and its history, the book The Emperor of All Maladies is very good.
- taneq 10y ago> Cancer is basically the most likely thing to kill you besides heart disease. A physically active population will have less death by heart disease and thus more by cancer (because something has to kill you). So perhaps there's just less heart disease in SF. True, and I'd take it a step further: Cancer is one of the two fundamental failure modes of the human body. (The other one being death by senescence, where cells self-terminate as they reach the Hayflick limit - which they do in order to reduce the chances of a cancerous mutation.)
- Gibbon1 10y agoCounter wisdom though the incidence of some types of cancer peeks and then falls with age. Testicular cancer is very pronounced the vast majority of victims are young men.
- sean_patel 10y agoThank you so much. I feel much better now :)