5 ms·

It's entirely possible that antioxidants make it less likely for you to get cancer but more likely to make cancer worse once you have it. Depending on how the

by jcl 17y ago

It's entirely possible that antioxidants make it less likely for you to get cancer but more likely to make cancer worse once you have it. Depending on how the two effects interact, the correlation could go either way. Interesting random blog page describing research that shows a fruit- and vegetable-rich diet may actually be bad for you: http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/phytochemical-fallacies.html http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/08/phytochemical-fallacie...

TrevorJ 17y ago
Ah, that is a good point. I hadn't thought of that. It should be possible to test for that with present data though, so you would think that somebody would have uncovered it before now since antioxidants are apparently given to cancer patients as a form of treatment. If it increased mortality rates in cancer patients looking at the data should be able to uncover that.
- jcl 17y ago
  After a little more Googling around, it looks like there are some studies showing increased cancer rates when people are given antioxidants: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/antioxidants#2 http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/anti... (And some going the other way, too.)
noodle 17y ago
two notes from that blog posting: > Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead. some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world. >After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants. and this couldn't have anything to do with anything else? environment? lifestyle? genetics? affluence? etc.? there's more than one way to get cancer, diet alone will not save you.
- jcl 17y ago
  some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds... Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later: Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.
  - noodle 17y ago
    indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.
    - randallsquared 17y ago
      It does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...
      - tokenadult 17y ago
        The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs. The evolutionary history of cooking http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
pyre 17y ago
What I got from that blog post was 'there are lots of bad things in fruits and vegetables along with the good things'. Isn't that the truth for anything? Unless we start making foods that are homogeneous mixtures, every natural food that we eat will have good and bad things in it. I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to take a look at cancer rates in Ireland (pre-potato famine). Most of the farmers/serfs there had a diet of mostly potatoes as I understand it. Did they have higher or lower cancer rates?
- bedris 17y ago
  The sheer number of environmental, dietary, and lifestyle factors that would have to be adjusted for in a comparison of present-day cancer rates and those that took place ~160 years ago in Ireland would likely make any conclusions that you could draw conjectural, at best.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  The problem with cancer rates from 200 years ago is that life-expectancy was so different and that they might not have have been able to identify the cause of death back then.

by jcl 17y ago

TrevorJ 17y ago

Ah, that is a good point. I hadn't thought of that. It should be possible to test for that with present data though, so you would think that somebody would have uncovered it before now since antioxidants are apparently given to cancer patients as a form of treatment. If it increased mortality rates in cancer patients looking at the data should be able to uncover that.

jcl 17y ago
After a little more Googling around, it looks like there are some studies showing increased cancer rates when people are given antioxidants: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/antioxidants#2 http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/prevention/anti... (And some going the other way, too.)

noodle 17y ago

two notes from that blog posting: > Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead. some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world. >After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants. and this couldn't have anything to do with anything else? environment? lifestyle? genetics? affluence? etc.? there's more than one way to get cancer, diet alone will not save you.

jcl 17y ago
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds... Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later: Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.
- noodle 17y ago
  indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    It does? I think the vast majority of plants that most people (at least, where I live) eat are non-fruit. Potatoes, beans, rice and other grains...
    - tokenadult 17y ago
      The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs. The evolutionary history of cooking http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.

pyre 17y ago

What I got from that blog post was 'there are lots of bad things in fruits and vegetables along with the good things'. Isn't that the truth for anything? Unless we start making foods that are homogeneous mixtures, every natural food that we eat will have good and bad things in it. I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to take a look at cancer rates in Ireland (pre-potato famine). Most of the farmers/serfs there had a diet of mostly potatoes as I understand it. Did they have higher or lower cancer rates?

bedris 17y ago
The sheer number of environmental, dietary, and lifestyle factors that would have to be adjusted for in a comparison of present-day cancer rates and those that took place ~160 years ago in Ireland would likely make any conclusions that you could draw conjectural, at best.
fauigerzigerk 17y ago
The problem with cancer rates from 200 years ago is that life-expectancy was so different and that they might not have have been able to identify the cause of death back then.