16 ms·

Briefing: Cancer is not a disease of the modern world

72 points by swombat 16y ago

_delirium 16y ago
The article seems slightly different from its title. What the body seems to conclude is: 1) the available evidence of ancient cancers is too sparse to conclude anything, given that even "common" cancers would be fairly uncommon in a population of only a few hundred mummies and few thousand skeletons, most of whom died before age 50; and 2) if there is an increase in cancers, it's probably due to preventable lifestyle things like smoking, rather than pollution or other background causes more generally. In particular, the second part seems to cut against their original point: they first say cancer isn't a disease of the modern world, and then they say well, maybe it is more common, but if so it's mostly because of lifestyle factors. Both those points do seem likely to be correct, though.
- cperciva 16y ago
  Headlines oversimplify. A better synopsis would be "Cancer is not a disease of the modern environment; it's a disease of the modern lifestyle and lifespan".
  - carbocation 16y ago
    Biologists generally consider lifestyle to be a component of the environment. Perhaps use "ambient environment"? Anyways, your point is clear enough.
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    All headline simplify but this one seemed completely disingenuous. 99% of people would parse "cancer is a disease of the modern" as "cancer is a disease of modern lifestyles" Certainly lifespan is less popularly understood. But every point someone might raise here is merely refining the fairly well understood point that cancer is a disease of the modern world. My summary of the article would "we'll make three or four fine, hair-splitting distinctions to keep an unpleasant truth at bay"
    - hugh3 16y ago
      Wait, what's the unpleasant truth here? If it turned out that cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us, was almost entirely due [pollution/eating crabs/wearing shoes/fluoridation of water sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids] then that would be an unpleasant truth. That's what the original "research" on mummies seemed to be claiming. If in fact it turns out that cancer is unavoidable if you live long enough, that's a much less unpleasant truth.
      - brudgers 16y ago
        "cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us" According to the WHO, cancer is responsible for about 2:17 of all disease related deaths worldwide. http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720 http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720 In the US, deaths from cancer lag behind those from CVD. Though they are closer. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
        hugh3 16y ago
        Right, the worldwide cancer death rate is a lot lower than it is for those of us in rich countries because poor people are too busy dying of other things like malaria and malnutrition. My "almost half" was an exaggeration, yes (and a totally unnecessary one, nobody needs to be convinced that cancer is bad) though if you also take into account the fact that heart disease disproportionately kills the overweight, if you're not overweight and in a rich country your chances of dying of cancer might well be approaching 50%.
        brudgers 16y ago
        In 2005 cancer deaths were about 23% of all US deaths. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mortality.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mo...
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  I was face-palming pretty hard at the beginning of the article, because my first thought was that, statistically, cancer is an old person's disease. Then, halfway down the article: Almost all the mummies and skeletons were of people who died before the age of 50. "Ageing is one of the major causes of cancer," says Schüz. He dismissed as "weak" the authors' argument that they could find evidence for other diseases of ageing, such as arthritis and hardening of the arteries, and that cancer should therefore have shown up too. "In men today, 90 per cent of cancers occur after 50," he says. "So if you examined the bodies of 1000 modern men who died before 50, you wouldn't find many cancers either." -- We already know that individual cancers have different causes and different pathologies; breast cancer doesn't behave like pancreatic cancer, for instance. So, it's incorrect to say that cancer is a modern disease; it may be that some cancers are, and others are not. However, cancer is certainly a greater risk for older persons, and large numbers of people reaching 70, 80, and 90 years is a relatively recent phenomenon. Along with that rise in median ages, you would expect to see a rise of occurrences of certain diseases, like cancer.
- fnl 16y ago
  I do not agree: Cancer is a common "disease" (and I disagree that cancer is a disease, as it is quite different from any other concept we call a "disease") of the modern world because of lifespan. The longer you live, the more likely you accumulate the necessary mutations (i.e., organic state changes). To my best knowledge, there is no lifestyle factor involved (However, I admit that you could argue that environmental pollution has increased and ultimately trace that back to lifestyle factors).
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I don't have statistics handy, but I believe there's been a large increase in lung cancer incidence since the early 20th century, especially since the 1930s, even controlling for age, mostly due to lifestyle factors (smoking). And lung cancers are a big enough proportion of total cancers that it actually makes a noticeable impact on the overall numbers, so the 20th century had a higher cancer incidence than the 19th century even for people of a given age. I think lung cancer is unusual in that respect, though.
    - fnl 16y ago
      That is partly assumable - especially since more people are smokers than ever before. However, our average lifespans have also dramatically increased in the mid 20th century mostly due to increased hygiene and antibiotics: 18th & 19th c. around 35 y, early 20th c. up to 45 y, late 20 th c. going up to 65 y. (worldwide). And lung cancer regularly shows rather late (beyond 45 y, definitely).
      - hugh3 16y ago
        For what it's worth, a huge portion of the increase in lifespan has been at the child-mortality end. If an average lifespan of 35 sounds low it's because a substantial proportion of children died before the age of five.
  - brudgers 16y ago
    there is no lifestyle factor involved" There is a well established link between cancer and tobacco. http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/dcpcglobalatlas/PopupImage.aspx?image=Risk_Factors_Major_Factors.gif http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/dcpcglobalatlas/PopupImage.aspx?ima... http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2004/index.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2004/index.ht...
cancersucks 16y ago
As someone currently battling cancer (stage IV nodular melanoma) i've been reading a lot about it all lately, and i've seen multiple sources saying that it was the Egyptians themselves who actually first documented cancer. Eg: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//3001854.htm http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//30018...
Alex3917 16y ago
"Smoking is the most significant of these, causing around a quarter of all cancers globally." Except for that the research shows that smoking doesn't cause cancer, except maybe for tobacco. And even the surgeon general now apparently admits that most cancers that tobacco users suffer from probably aren't from tobacco.[1] [1] http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml
- j_baker 16y ago
  Bear in mind that I say this in the most respectful manner possible: Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    No, of course not, I only cited the UMASS pamphlet because it's the most well written summary of the information. But every other source from the NY Times to Wikipedia says basically the same thing, e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html
    - cromulent 16y ago
      I read that NYT link and it seems to say the opposite - that smoking does cause cancer. "What few experts will dispute is the magnitude of the hazard: the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people will be dying annually from cigarettes by the year 2020 — a third of these in China. Cigarettes, which claimed about 100 million lives in the 20th century, could claim close to a billion in the present century."
      - Alex3917 16y ago
        Only a third of the people who die from smoking die from cancer. And again, it doesn't seem to be the tobacco but rather the radioactive material and the additives. Cigarette smokers in other countries have vastly lower rates of cancer.
fnl 16y ago
Sorry guys, whatever you are saying: cancer is a product of the cellular replication system and the faint, yet existing possibilities of errors in that system. To our best knowledge, the are mostly associated to DNA mutations and certain other physio-chemical states (e.g., epigenetics) associated to it. However, the longer you live, the more likely you will beceome prone to incur these genetic state changes. This state change is mostly related to the fact that we live longer than before. Obviously, there is hereditary cancer and all its implications and we can trace that, but the increased occurrence of these genetic issues leading to our cells to behave in discord in modern society is undoubtedly linked to the greatly increased lifespans. No scientific study has come up with other evidence - and if it would have, I can assure you it would be on the headlines of Science, Nature, and other scientific journals.
- Evgeny 16y ago
  How would you explain that there are (or were) cultures completely or almost completely free of cancer - with it becoming more common when they adopted the western lifestyle? In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches never turned up cancer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites." In Cancer, its Nature, Cause and Cure (1957), Dr. Alexander Berglas describes the search for cancer among natives in Brazil and Ecuador by Dr. Eugene Payne. He examined approximately 60,000 people over 25 years and found no evidence of cancer. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-other-non-industrialized.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-othe...
  - nickpp 16y ago
    Those cultures simply did not have the life expectancy necessary to reach cancers. They died from other diseases before that.
    - Evgeny 16y ago
j_baker 16y ago
It seems to me that without modern medicine, it only makes sense that fewer people died of cancer. It's not that it's become more dangerous. It's that there were simply more things to die of.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  What's more, without modern medicine (and sanitation and nutrition) people with cancer would tend to die earlier, or perhaps of secondary factors. If you're some occasionally malnourished farm hand (read: the vast majority of all individuals who lived in pre-industrial times) and you get, say, leukemia you are going to die of whatever the fuck disease happens to be going around, and it's going to happen quick. The result is that there may be less evidence of cancer in, say, ancient bones but not due to decreased incidence of cancer per se.
  - fluidcruft 16y ago
    There is a line of reasoning (and evidence in mice) that the body seems to be designed to operate in starvation mode (e.g. calorie restriction). One line of thought behind this is that food abundance results in signalling along certain metabolic pathways that have not experienced heavy evolutionary pressure.
eps 16y ago
I happen to know a guy who's father was a prominent biologist and a cancer researcher. He used to make a point that cancer is a result of a random process that is present in all living things, and if humans managed to cure all other deseases everyone would still get cancer sooner or later. Point being, not many mummies had cancer probably because they simply lived much shorter lives than modern humans. We have pills and defibrilators, they did not.
- alecco 16y ago
  That's too simplistic. Yes, there are many "random" processes affecting DNA, including transposons and viruses. But there are also tumor suppression mechanisms (genes), too. What the article talks about is the case when a cancerous outbreak goes unchecked in the human body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer (Sorry for the RTFWP)
gjm11 16y ago
There is a delicious irony in New Scientist, of all publications, complaining about sloppy and sensationalized science reporting in the media. Sloppy and sensationalized science reporting seems to be pretty much New Scientist's reason for existing.
robchez 16y ago
Full disclosure. I am one of those "crazy people" who think grains and complex carbohydrates are killing us, and that a high fat diet, moderate protein, low carbohydrate is ideal. I really believe cancer IS a modern world disease, however my definition of modern world goes beyond the Egyptians and back to the first people who ever started eating wheat and grains. I would be surprised if the Egyptians DIDN'T have a host of cancers due to there consumption of wheat and grain grown in the Nile. Cancer is a product of the small failures in the cellular replication system, however, we are accelerating the amount of replication by putting ourselves into modes of chronic hyper-insulinism through all the carbohydrate rich diets we are eating. Add to the chronic inflammation we have put our bodies into, causing our white bloodcells to attack healthy cells, then forcing again even more cell replication, we are essentially giving cancer a better odd at occurring. (This is a gross over-simplification as I am getting ready to sleep, but I could go on about Insulin Like Growth Factors etc.) Also, in regards to everyone discussing that we live a lot longer than our ancestors. Again this is true to our ancestors going back to the agricultural revolution, but there are studies shown[1] that our hunter-gatherer brethren had lifespans not unlike hours. [1] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...
- cristoperb 16y ago
  > our hunter-gatherer brethren had lifespans not unlike hours Sounds like a fairly short lifespan to me ;)
- hugh3 16y ago
  Have you actually read that 46-page paper you posted? Because I'm only up to page six, but it appears to directly contradict you: "Among traditional hunter-gatherers, the average life expectancy at birth varies from 21 to 37 years; the proportion surviving to age 45 varies between 26 percent and 43 percent" Reading onwards, this should give pause to anyone who wants to go on about the awesomeness of hunter-gatherer diets: Gastrointestinal illnesses account for 5-18 percent of deaths... Diarrhea coupled with malnutrition remains one of the most significant causes of infant and early child deaths among foragers and peasant populations...

72 points by swombat 16y ago

The article seems slightly different from its title. What the body seems to conclude is: 1) the available evidence of ancient cancers is too sparse to conclude anything, given that even "common" cancers would be fairly uncommon in a population of only a few hundred mummies and few thousand skeletons, most of whom died before age 50; and 2) if there is an increase in cancers, it's probably due to preventable lifestyle things like smoking, rather than pollution or other background causes more generally. In particular, the second part seems to cut against their original point: they first say cancer isn't a disease of the modern world, and then they say well, maybe it is more common, but if so it's mostly because of lifestyle factors. Both those points do seem likely to be correct, though.

cperciva 16y ago
Headlines oversimplify. A better synopsis would be "Cancer is not a disease of the modern environment; it's a disease of the modern lifestyle and lifespan".
- carbocation 16y ago
  Biologists generally consider lifestyle to be a component of the environment. Perhaps use "ambient environment"? Anyways, your point is clear enough.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  All headline simplify but this one seemed completely disingenuous. 99% of people would parse "cancer is a disease of the modern" as "cancer is a disease of modern lifestyles" Certainly lifespan is less popularly understood. But every point someone might raise here is merely refining the fairly well understood point that cancer is a disease of the modern world. My summary of the article would "we'll make three or four fine, hair-splitting distinctions to keep an unpleasant truth at bay"
  - hugh3 16y ago
    Wait, what's the unpleasant truth here? If it turned out that cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us, was almost entirely due [pollution/eating crabs/wearing shoes/fluoridation of water sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids] then that would be an unpleasant truth. That's what the original "research" on mummies seemed to be claiming. If in fact it turns out that cancer is unavoidable if you live long enough, that's a much less unpleasant truth.
    - brudgers 16y ago
      "cancer, that horrible disease that kills nearly half of us" According to the WHO, cancer is responsible for about 2:17 of all disease related deaths worldwide. http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720 http://apps.who.int/ghodata/?vid=720 In the US, deaths from cancer lag behind those from CVD. Though they are closer. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm
      - hugh3 16y ago
        Right, the worldwide cancer death rate is a lot lower than it is for those of us in rich countries because poor people are too busy dying of other things like malaria and malnutrition. My "almost half" was an exaggeration, yes (and a totally unnecessary one, nobody needs to be convinced that cancer is bad) though if you also take into account the fact that heart disease disproportionately kills the overweight, if you're not overweight and in a rich country your chances of dying of cancer might well be approaching 50%.
        brudgers 16y ago
        In 2005 cancer deaths were about 23% of all US deaths. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mortality.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mo...
thaumaturgy 16y ago
I was face-palming pretty hard at the beginning of the article, because my first thought was that, statistically, cancer is an old person's disease. Then, halfway down the article: Almost all the mummies and skeletons were of people who died before the age of 50. "Ageing is one of the major causes of cancer," says Schüz. He dismissed as "weak" the authors' argument that they could find evidence for other diseases of ageing, such as arthritis and hardening of the arteries, and that cancer should therefore have shown up too. "In men today, 90 per cent of cancers occur after 50," he says. "So if you examined the bodies of 1000 modern men who died before 50, you wouldn't find many cancers either." -- We already know that individual cancers have different causes and different pathologies; breast cancer doesn't behave like pancreatic cancer, for instance. So, it's incorrect to say that cancer is a modern disease; it may be that some cancers are, and others are not. However, cancer is certainly a greater risk for older persons, and large numbers of people reaching 70, 80, and 90 years is a relatively recent phenomenon. Along with that rise in median ages, you would expect to see a rise of occurrences of certain diseases, like cancer.
fnl 16y ago
I do not agree: Cancer is a common "disease" (and I disagree that cancer is a disease, as it is quite different from any other concept we call a "disease") of the modern world because of lifespan. The longer you live, the more likely you accumulate the necessary mutations (i.e., organic state changes). To my best knowledge, there is no lifestyle factor involved (However, I admit that you could argue that environmental pollution has increased and ultimately trace that back to lifestyle factors).
- _delirium 16y ago
  I don't have statistics handy, but I believe there's been a large increase in lung cancer incidence since the early 20th century, especially since the 1930s, even controlling for age, mostly due to lifestyle factors (smoking). And lung cancers are a big enough proportion of total cancers that it actually makes a noticeable impact on the overall numbers, so the 20th century had a higher cancer incidence than the 19th century even for people of a given age. I think lung cancer is unusual in that respect, though.
  - fnl 16y ago
    That is partly assumable - especially since more people are smokers than ever before. However, our average lifespans have also dramatically increased in the mid 20th century mostly due to increased hygiene and antibiotics: 18th & 19th c. around 35 y, early 20th c. up to 45 y, late 20 th c. going up to 65 y. (worldwide). And lung cancer regularly shows rather late (beyond 45 y, definitely).
    - hugh3 16y ago
      For what it's worth, a huge portion of the increase in lifespan has been at the child-mortality end. If an average lifespan of 35 sounds low it's because a substantial proportion of children died before the age of five.
- brudgers 16y ago
  there is no lifestyle factor involved" There is a well established link between cancer and tobacco. http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/dcpcglobalatlas/PopupImage.aspx?image=Risk_Factors_Major_Factors.gif http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/dcpcglobalatlas/PopupImage.aspx?ima... http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2004/index.htm http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2004/index.ht...

cancersucks 16y ago

As someone currently battling cancer (stage IV nodular melanoma) i've been reading a lot about it all lately, and i've seen multiple sources saying that it was the Egyptians themselves who actually first documented cancer. Eg: http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//3001854.htm http://www.abc.net.au/environment/articles/2010/09/03//30018...

Alex3917 16y ago

"Smoking is the most significant of these, causing around a quarter of all cancers globally." Except for that the research shows that smoking doesn't cause cancer, except maybe for tobacco. And even the surgeon general now apparently admits that most cancers that tobacco users suffer from probably aren't from tobacco.[1] [1] http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml http://www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_health2.shtml

j_baker 16y ago
Bear in mind that I say this in the most respectful manner possible: Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?
- Alex3917 16y ago
  No, of course not, I only cited the UMASS pamphlet because it's the most well written summary of the information. But every other source from the NY Times to Wikipedia says basically the same thing, e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/opinion/01proctor.html
  - cromulent 16y ago
    I read that NYT link and it seems to say the opposite - that smoking does cause cancer. "What few experts will dispute is the magnitude of the hazard: the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people will be dying annually from cigarettes by the year 2020 — a third of these in China. Cigarettes, which claimed about 100 million lives in the 20th century, could claim close to a billion in the present century."
    - Alex3917 16y ago
      Only a third of the people who die from smoking die from cancer. And again, it doesn't seem to be the tobacco but rather the radioactive material and the additives. Cigarette smokers in other countries have vastly lower rates of cancer.

fnl 16y ago

Sorry guys, whatever you are saying: cancer is a product of the cellular replication system and the faint, yet existing possibilities of errors in that system. To our best knowledge, the are mostly associated to DNA mutations and certain other physio-chemical states (e.g., epigenetics) associated to it. However, the longer you live, the more likely you will beceome prone to incur these genetic state changes. This state change is mostly related to the fact that we live longer than before. Obviously, there is hereditary cancer and all its implications and we can trace that, but the increased occurrence of these genetic issues leading to our cells to behave in discord in modern society is undoubtedly linked to the greatly increased lifespans. No scientific study has come up with other evidence - and if it would have, I can assure you it would be on the headlines of Science, Nature, and other scientific journals.

Evgeny 16y ago
How would you explain that there are (or were) cultures completely or almost completely free of cancer - with it becoming more common when they adopted the western lifestyle? In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches never turned up cancer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites." In Cancer, its Nature, Cause and Cure (1957), Dr. Alexander Berglas describes the search for cancer among natives in Brazil and Ecuador by Dr. Eugene Payne. He examined approximately 60,000 people over 25 years and found no evidence of cancer. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-other-non-industrialized.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-othe...
- nickpp 16y ago
  Those cultures simply did not have the life expectancy necessary to reach cancers. They died from other diseases before that.
  - Evgeny 16y ago

j_baker 16y ago

It seems to me that without modern medicine, it only makes sense that fewer people died of cancer. It's not that it's become more dangerous. It's that there were simply more things to die of.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
What's more, without modern medicine (and sanitation and nutrition) people with cancer would tend to die earlier, or perhaps of secondary factors. If you're some occasionally malnourished farm hand (read: the vast majority of all individuals who lived in pre-industrial times) and you get, say, leukemia you are going to die of whatever the fuck disease happens to be going around, and it's going to happen quick. The result is that there may be less evidence of cancer in, say, ancient bones but not due to decreased incidence of cancer per se.
- fluidcruft 16y ago
  There is a line of reasoning (and evidence in mice) that the body seems to be designed to operate in starvation mode (e.g. calorie restriction). One line of thought behind this is that food abundance results in signalling along certain metabolic pathways that have not experienced heavy evolutionary pressure.

eps 16y ago

I happen to know a guy who's father was a prominent biologist and a cancer researcher. He used to make a point that cancer is a result of a random process that is present in all living things, and if humans managed to cure all other deseases everyone would still get cancer sooner or later. Point being, not many mummies had cancer probably because they simply lived much shorter lives than modern humans. We have pills and defibrilators, they did not.

alecco 16y ago
That's too simplistic. Yes, there are many "random" processes affecting DNA, including transposons and viruses. But there are also tumor suppression mechanisms (genes), too. What the article talks about is the case when a cancerous outbreak goes unchecked in the human body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer (Sorry for the RTFWP)

gjm11 16y ago

There is a delicious irony in New Scientist, of all publications, complaining about sloppy and sensationalized science reporting in the media. Sloppy and sensationalized science reporting seems to be pretty much New Scientist's reason for existing.

robchez 16y ago

Full disclosure. I am one of those "crazy people" who think grains and complex carbohydrates are killing us, and that a high fat diet, moderate protein, low carbohydrate is ideal. I really believe cancer IS a modern world disease, however my definition of modern world goes beyond the Egyptians and back to the first people who ever started eating wheat and grains. I would be surprised if the Egyptians DIDN'T have a host of cancers due to there consumption of wheat and grain grown in the Nile. Cancer is a product of the small failures in the cellular replication system, however, we are accelerating the amount of replication by putting ourselves into modes of chronic hyper-insulinism through all the carbohydrate rich diets we are eating. Add to the chronic inflammation we have put our bodies into, causing our white bloodcells to attack healthy cells, then forcing again even more cell replication, we are essentially giving cancer a better odd at occurring. (This is a gross over-simplification as I am getting ready to sleep, but I could go on about Insulin Like Growth Factors etc.) Also, in regards to everyone discussing that we live a lot longer than our ancestors. Again this is true to our ancestors going back to the agricultural revolution, but there are studies shown[1] that our hunter-gatherer brethren had lifespans not unlike hours. [1] http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...

cristoperb 16y ago
> our hunter-gatherer brethren had lifespans not unlike hours Sounds like a fairly short lifespan to me ;)
hugh3 16y ago
Have you actually read that 46-page paper you posted? Because I'm only up to page six, but it appears to directly contradict you: "Among traditional hunter-gatherers, the average life expectancy at birth varies from 21 to 37 years; the proportion surviving to age 45 varies between 26 percent and 43 percent" Reading onwards, this should give pause to anyone who wants to go on about the awesomeness of hunter-gatherer diets: Gastrointestinal illnesses account for 5-18 percent of deaths... Diarrhea coupled with malnutrition remains one of the most significant causes of infant and early child deaths among foragers and peasant populations...