7 ms·

Study after study after study says diet and lifestyle are major factors in every deadly disease. But it's not socially acceptable to suggest that as an approach

Study after study after study says diet and lifestyle are major factors in every deadly disease. But it's not socially acceptable to suggest that as an approach. However, having already committed the unspeakable sin and egregious faux pas, I will suggest that if cancer is a thing you fret about, you can do something to reduce your risk starting today.

gropo 3y ago
ill never eat PFAS again
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Good for you. Want to share any good websites you have for how to support your goal here? If I'm eating PFAS, I'd like to know.
  - klipt 3y ago
    PFAS (aka "forever chemicals") are present in everything including drinking water and breast milk so yes, you are eating PFAS.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Diet and exercise are near-universally accepted as reasonable health advice and is basically ubiquitous.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm aware of that. It doesn't matter. You can't have a meaty discussion about this in relation to actually trying in earnest to avoid or delay cancer. For the record, this was posted as a PSA without replying to any of the comments that made me think people could use a reminder because a direct reply gets interpreted as a personal attack.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    What “this” are you talking about?
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    [flagged]
stephen_g 3y ago
I mean, I do, and people should but there’s no denying there’s still a huge element of chance though. Plenty of people have fantastic diet and exercise a lot and still get cancer… And environmental effects that may be outside people’s control. Anyone might have already been exposed with absolutely no knowledge to, say, asbestos fibres that will give them mesothelioma in another 20 years. And there’s no way (currently known) to stop it even if they did know they’d been exposed.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of variables. So no point in even trying. Amirite?
GiorgioG 3y ago
Plenty of “healthy” people die of cancer. My sister in law passed away at 49. She had no family history of cancer, ate healthy, ran daily, was not overweight for her entire life.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I do have a family history of cancer. My mother, sister, brother, father, multiple aunts and grandmother have had it one or more times. I've had it zero times.
  - aplummer 3y ago
    That’s called luck. Babies don’t get leukemia because they lack diet and exercise.
  - klipt 3y ago
    Good diet and exercise can lower your risk. They cannot eliminate risk. You can do everything right and still get cancer. Thus diet and exercise are also not reasonable substitutes for researching better treatments for those who do get cancer.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      I don't think diet and exercise are the full story. My initial comment says diet and lifestyle, not diet and exercise. I'm trying to step away from this discussion. It is kind of off topic and I don't think it's productive.
gretyuph 3y ago
[dead]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
diskzero 3y ago
This is an obnoxious response that has no bearing on the content of the article. You may as well state that cancer is caused by not praying to the god of your choice or by not following some specific 12-step program that you have deemed vital. There is no truth to your statement that is it not socially acceptable to suggest diet and lifestyle changes to improve quality of life. Those suggestions are made all the time and people who suggest them in general suffer little to no negative consequences. I am not sure how you go about making those suggestions, but perhaps your approach is less optimal. There are situations where suggestions will be made and go unheeded. Many alcoholics know that drinking is bad for them and many smokers know that smoking is not having a positive effect on their health. They choose to ignore the advice. My wife, who passed away almost two years ago, received CAR-T therapy for triple-hit large B-cell lymphoma. I can assure you that her diet and lifestyle choices were most likely not the cause. CAR-T therapy is not made available to any and all and her case was most likely caused by exposure to specific toxic chemicals. I only wish she would have survived the extremely toxic and negative side-effects of the therapy so she could be here to reply to your comment.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I'm very sorry for the passing of your wife.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  > There is no truth to your statement that is it not socially acceptable to suggest diet and lifestyle changes to improve quality of life. And yet DoreenMichele is voted down, and you angrily argued that her statement is no more scientifically valid than a religion. It sure looks like it's not socially acceptable to you, at least.
starchild_3001 3y ago
Diet and exercise are universally failed interventions to stop major diseases (CVD, cancer...). People who have a vested interest in them promote them (e.g. exercise specialists, keto experts, vegan gurus, your favorite TV Dr, harvard nutrition dept whose livelihood depends on the effectiveness of "optimal diet" etc), but the results in intervention trials have been extremely disappointing. 1) The best diet studies where people were asked to follow Mediterranean diet only managed to lower CVD and/or mortality by 10s of % points. This is a very poor outcome. At best adds a few years to someone's lifespan. At best. The average Mediterranean dieter fares a lot worse. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26528631/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26528631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368053 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368053 Don't get me started about Keto, Vegan etc. Those have even less convincing evidence regarding hard outcomes (e.g. MACE, Cancer etc) though our opinion might change if they ever get tested in large scale. 2) Exercise is even worse. It has virtually zero effect on CVD outcomes, mortality outcomes in trials where participants were asked to change their behaviors. "Exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality and incident CVD in older adults or in people with chronic conditions, based on RCTs comprising ∼50,000 participants" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189982&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189... It's a myth that diet and exercise will save you from Cancer or CVD. There's virtually zero evidence for that, when you look at things from intervention point of view -- intervention evidence is the only evidence acceptable in science. The rest is pseudo-science or proto-science. Btw, I believe weight loss is the best thing you can do to live longer (that is if you're overweight or obese). But diets still universally fail. E.g. bariatric surgery probably works, maybe drugs will be shown to work (Tirzepatide/Semaglutide I'm looking at you). A publication on how 90% of obese dieters fail after 1-2 yrs on the same diet: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  Diets don’t fail, people fail to follow diets. Which is probably fine in the long run, because they’re always there for people who want them. There’s probably never going to be a wonder drug for obesity though. But Anavar or Trenbolone would work better than Semaglutide, and the side effects likely aren’t that much worse (all of those options are still bad ideas).
adamredwoods 3y ago
>> Study after study after study says diet and lifestyle are major factors in every deadly disease. But it's not socially acceptable to suggest that as an approach. This is too simple of an statement for such a complex disease, so is therefore, misleading. If we want more substantial studies, we turn to the UK, because they have a unified health system and have a massive collection of data on the general population. Timothy Key, et. al., Oxford, wrote a great summary of attributable factors (albeit a secondary data analysis). Outside of obvious factors such as smoking, alcohol, and obesity, what you put into your body becomes less and less a probability of being a cancer factor compared to age and genetics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190379/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190379/ >> Early case-control studies indicated that higher intakes of fruit and vegetables were associated with a lower risk of several types of cancer. But subsequent prospective studies, which are not affected by recall or selection bias, produced much weaker findings. In the 2018 World Cancer Research Fund report neither fruits nor vegetables were considered to be convincingly or probably associated with the risk of any cancer. There was suggestive evidence for protection of some cancers, and risk might increase at very low intakes. Specific components of certain fruits and vegetables might have a protective action. >> Vegetarians eat no meat or fish and usually eat more fruit and vegetables than comparable non-vegetarians. The risk of all cancer sites combined might be slightly lower in vegetarians and vegans than in non-vegetarians, but findings for individual cancers are inconclusive.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  > Outside of obvious factors Rephrased, if you exclude all the obvious ways in which DoreenMichele's statement is true, then you're left with the ways it's not true alongside the ways it's true but not obviously so. This is an argument anyone will grant, but it's a tautology that doesn't tell us much of use.

gropo 3y ago

ill never eat PFAS again

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Good for you. Want to share any good websites you have for how to support your goal here? If I'm eating PFAS, I'd like to know.
- klipt 3y ago
  PFAS (aka "forever chemicals") are present in everything including drinking water and breast milk so yes, you are eating PFAS.

jncfhnb 3y ago

Diet and exercise are near-universally accepted as reasonable health advice and is basically ubiquitous.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I'm aware of that. It doesn't matter. You can't have a meaty discussion about this in relation to actually trying in earnest to avoid or delay cancer. For the record, this was posted as a PSA without replying to any of the comments that made me think people could use a reminder because a direct reply gets interpreted as a personal attack.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  What “this” are you talking about?
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  [flagged]

stephen_g 3y ago

I mean, I do, and people should but there’s no denying there’s still a huge element of chance though. Plenty of people have fantastic diet and exercise a lot and still get cancer… And environmental effects that may be outside people’s control. Anyone might have already been exposed with absolutely no knowledge to, say, asbestos fibres that will give them mesothelioma in another 20 years. And there’s no way (currently known) to stop it even if they did know they’d been exposed.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of variables. So no point in even trying. Amirite?

GiorgioG 3y ago

Plenty of “healthy” people die of cancer. My sister in law passed away at 49. She had no family history of cancer, ate healthy, ran daily, was not overweight for her entire life.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I do have a family history of cancer. My mother, sister, brother, father, multiple aunts and grandmother have had it one or more times. I've had it zero times.
- aplummer 3y ago
  That’s called luck. Babies don’t get leukemia because they lack diet and exercise.
- klipt 3y ago
  Good diet and exercise can lower your risk. They cannot eliminate risk. You can do everything right and still get cancer. Thus diet and exercise are also not reasonable substitutes for researching better treatments for those who do get cancer.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I don't think diet and exercise are the full story. My initial comment says diet and lifestyle, not diet and exercise. I'm trying to step away from this discussion. It is kind of off topic and I don't think it's productive.

gretyuph 3y ago

[dead]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

diskzero 3y ago

This is an obnoxious response that has no bearing on the content of the article. You may as well state that cancer is caused by not praying to the god of your choice or by not following some specific 12-step program that you have deemed vital. There is no truth to your statement that is it not socially acceptable to suggest diet and lifestyle changes to improve quality of life. Those suggestions are made all the time and people who suggest them in general suffer little to no negative consequences. I am not sure how you go about making those suggestions, but perhaps your approach is less optimal. There are situations where suggestions will be made and go unheeded. Many alcoholics know that drinking is bad for them and many smokers know that smoking is not having a positive effect on their health. They choose to ignore the advice. My wife, who passed away almost two years ago, received CAR-T therapy for triple-hit large B-cell lymphoma. I can assure you that her diet and lifestyle choices were most likely not the cause. CAR-T therapy is not made available to any and all and her case was most likely caused by exposure to specific toxic chemicals. I only wish she would have survived the extremely toxic and negative side-effects of the therapy so she could be here to reply to your comment.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I'm very sorry for the passing of your wife.
nvm0n2 3y ago
> There is no truth to your statement that is it not socially acceptable to suggest diet and lifestyle changes to improve quality of life. And yet DoreenMichele is voted down, and you angrily argued that her statement is no more scientifically valid than a religion. It sure looks like it's not socially acceptable to you, at least.

starchild_3001 3y ago

Diet and exercise are universally failed interventions to stop major diseases (CVD, cancer...). People who have a vested interest in them promote them (e.g. exercise specialists, keto experts, vegan gurus, your favorite TV Dr, harvard nutrition dept whose livelihood depends on the effectiveness of "optimal diet" etc), but the results in intervention trials have been extremely disappointing. 1) The best diet studies where people were asked to follow Mediterranean diet only managed to lower CVD and/or mortality by 10s of % points. This is a very poor outcome. At best adds a few years to someone's lifespan. At best. The average Mediterranean dieter fares a lot worse. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26528631/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26528631/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368053 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368053 Don't get me started about Keto, Vegan etc. Those have even less convincing evidence regarding hard outcomes (e.g. MACE, Cancer etc) though our opinion might change if they ever get tested in large scale. 2) Exercise is even worse. It has virtually zero effect on CVD outcomes, mortality outcomes in trials where participants were asked to change their behaviors. "Exercise did not reduce all-cause mortality and incident CVD in older adults or in people with chronic conditions, based on RCTs comprising ∼50,000 participants" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189982&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=10512580439138189... It's a myth that diet and exercise will save you from Cancer or CVD. There's virtually zero evidence for that, when you look at things from intervention point of view -- intervention evidence is the only evidence acceptable in science. The rest is pseudo-science or proto-science. Btw, I believe weight loss is the best thing you can do to live longer (that is if you're overweight or obese). But diets still universally fail. E.g. bariatric surgery probably works, maybe drugs will be shown to work (Tirzepatide/Semaglutide I'm looking at you). A publication on how 90% of obese dieters fail after 1-2 yrs on the same diet: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/

AmericanChopper 3y ago
Diets don’t fail, people fail to follow diets. Which is probably fine in the long run, because they’re always there for people who want them. There’s probably never going to be a wonder drug for obesity though. But Anavar or Trenbolone would work better than Semaglutide, and the side effects likely aren’t that much worse (all of those options are still bad ideas).

adamredwoods 3y ago

>> Study after study after study says diet and lifestyle are major factors in every deadly disease. But it's not socially acceptable to suggest that as an approach. This is too simple of an statement for such a complex disease, so is therefore, misleading. If we want more substantial studies, we turn to the UK, because they have a unified health system and have a massive collection of data on the general population. Timothy Key, et. al., Oxford, wrote a great summary of attributable factors (albeit a secondary data analysis). Outside of obvious factors such as smoking, alcohol, and obesity, what you put into your body becomes less and less a probability of being a cancer factor compared to age and genetics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190379/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7190379/ >> Early case-control studies indicated that higher intakes of fruit and vegetables were associated with a lower risk of several types of cancer. But subsequent prospective studies, which are not affected by recall or selection bias, produced much weaker findings. In the 2018 World Cancer Research Fund report neither fruits nor vegetables were considered to be convincingly or probably associated with the risk of any cancer. There was suggestive evidence for protection of some cancers, and risk might increase at very low intakes. Specific components of certain fruits and vegetables might have a protective action. >> Vegetarians eat no meat or fish and usually eat more fruit and vegetables than comparable non-vegetarians. The risk of all cancer sites combined might be slightly lower in vegetarians and vegans than in non-vegetarians, but findings for individual cancers are inconclusive.

nvm0n2 3y ago
> Outside of obvious factors Rephrased, if you exclude all the obvious ways in which DoreenMichele's statement is true, then you're left with the ways it's not true alongside the ways it's true but not obviously so. This is an argument anyone will grant, but it's a tautology that doesn't tell us much of use.