First of all, I'm sorry to learn the author got cancer; I wish her all the best and continued strength.
Many contributors have already made good suggestions how to reduce the risk of getting cancer, or how to deal with it; but I found most posts quite _technical_.
Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold. The human body sooner or later is bound to decay, which pretty much starts once one is fully grown, and mutations get less often corrected by the wonderful repair processes our bodies are equipped with. Occasionally, mutations lead to uncontrolled growth of malign tissue, some incidents of which are bound to lead to death, others not.
And while it is absolutely a good idea to life healthily and to take care of one's physical and emotional well-being, one should also never deny that we are all mortals, and cancer as well as traditional diseases can and eventually will wipe any individual out. I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
Because it is a statistical process, we can forecast how many are affected, but not which individual, and everyone can try to minimize one's chances to be affected, but this does not mean they will live forever. And it's not just cancer, there are many ways one may pick the unlucky straw: it is not widely known, but the number of people who die from a heath attack in their 20s is significant. Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
> Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
The thought may be freeing to you, but many others become paralysed by it, obsessing about “the right choices” at every moment.
An alternate view: it is because we only have one limited life that our choices don’t matter. We and everyone our choices touch will die, and nothing will have mattered. Depending on your situation, that thought can fill you with dread or be profoundly calming.
> Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
That is both impossible and (I’d argue) unhealthy. I wouldn’t waste my last minute cooking a meal, yet I need to spend an hour doing it now to survive another day. “The right choice” and living every moment as if it were the last seldom overlap.
> The thought may be freeing to you, but many others become paralysed by it, obsessing about “the right choices” at every moment.
I had been struggling with the same issue. The opposite (“our choices don’t matter”) is depressing.
However, two things help me:
The first is “Optimistic Nihilism” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14) - a view very close to Zen/stoicism. The second is that ALL choices matter, but their impact is finite and subject to randomness. I used to think that all of my choices were forever and set in stone. While technically correct, it misses that the future changes only a bit. We might be tempted to think that “the grass is greener”, or “I should have bought Bitcoins”, but it is like “I miss I didn’t join my friends when they went to a cassino”. Moreover, it is FAIR that a finite effort results in a finite result.
Some things you do are for survival, of course you wouldn't do those in your final hour because survival isn't a concern anymore.
If on your last day, you want to spend it with loved ones, and say, in nature or with music, then that's how you should be trying spend your life in general.
> Some things you do are for survival, of course you wouldn't do those in your final hour because survival isn't a concern anymore.
And some things you do are not for survival, yet they continue to be the right choice if you’re not living your final day. Like mending your favourite t-shirt. Cooking a meal was an example which just happens to overlap with survival. The point stands.
> If on your last day, you want to spend it with loved ones, and say, in nature or with music, then that's how you should be trying spend your life in general.
> It's a heuristic, no a literal instruction book.
What’s the point in saying it, then? If it amounts to “in general, you should try to spend your life the way you want”, don’t (effectively?) all living creatures do that by default without being told?
If it’s literal, it’s impossible to follow. If it’s figurative, it’s meaningless. I used “platitude” deliberatedly:
> a remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful
Survival was also just an example of a type of need. I'll be honest, I don't know how to answer this without rambling about virtue vs consequential ethics. It's not about what you are doing, it's about why you are doing it. It seems like you feel like you life a life where you are happy with the choices you make. Not everyone gets this.
I try to live my life so that when my last day comes, I won't want to suddenly have been doing everything different, and try to correct at the end. That's what it means. Some people have a harder time finding that path, and need to remember to check in with themselves more often.
> I'll be honest, I don't know how to answer this without rambling about virtue vs consequential ethics.
That’s OK. This is just a discussion on the web we’re both likely to eventually forget. Were we speaking in person, I’d find it valuable to discuss it further, ramblings and all.
Worth noting that of the two points I expressed in my original comment, I find the other one to be the more interesting of the two.
> It seems like you feel like you life a life where you are happy with the choices you make. Not everyone gets this.
I feel confident in saying the answer to the first sentence has no bearing on my opinion on the matter. By that same token, I also agree with the second sentence.
> Some people have a harder time finding that path, and need to remember to check in with themselves more often.
Fair enough. Someone said “it’s never your successful friends posting the inspirational quotes”, though (assuming it’s true) that could just very well be because those are precisely the friends who don’t need external reinforcement.
I feel that given more time and a better setting to discuss, one or both of us might begin to tweak our view. I would have enjoyed that. Thank you for a constructive (though brief) conversation.
I agree. Living by a greedy algorithm (living each moment like it is your last) might leave one with no retirement funds in case one doesn't die early.
I see it differently, I am under the impression that when people say to live every moment as if it were your last they mean you should do whatever it is you are doing with focus and dedication, as if it is the last thing you will do, and judgement or the void awaits you afterwards. So although you are cooking a meal for future sustenance, you should have the mentality that even if you die before the meal can be eaten, it will be a damn good meal. Also to take risks in general.
Sure, eventually. It's one thing if people are getting cancer or having heart attacks later in life. It's a little concerning when a fairly large number of younger people are afflicted. The rate of cancer has risen about 30% for young people since the seventies. So it seems that there's something wrong in our environment or lifestyles that could be increasing risk. That's very concerning in my opinion.
And on the subject of dying from a heart attack in one's 20s. That's "significant", but 1 in 100,000 is pretty rare. Some could be congenital or obesity related, but the majority in that age group is due to substance abuse. That's a factor people can control, and thus not as scary to most people.
Yes, and what is contributing to obesity? Are there environmental factors affecting androgenic functions? Is it all just people being sedentary over eaters? Or something else?
- micro plastic everywhere, water, food, ground. Majority of American women breastfeed their children with their own milk containing plastic
- cancerous substances from cars exhaustion, cigarettes and such going inside people every day of their lives
- toxic and cancerous chemicals used for processing foods and drinks
we are breathing, drinking, eating and staying in contact with cancerous substances 24/h day. I'm surprised the human body is so resilient and we don't have 80% of under 40s with cancer tbh
the fix is to:
- stop burning fossil fuels
- stop producing and releasing in the environment plastic and toxic waste
- switch to a sustainable diet and ditch intensive farms using chemicals to boost production
the technology is here but it would require the innovation of many industries, and without governments pushing for it a profit driven industry obviously wouldn't never change
Then you have to add the mental and physical health that is going down the drain. Lonely and depressed people stuck in bad jobs that can't have a decent life. Suburban sprawl, car-centric urbanism, alienation and isolation of communities and such
Yeah. I remember seeing WHO estimates that the world can support 8-12 billion with an expected peak around 11 billion. These figures use conventional agriculture and even assumes some advances. That's why I was wondering how many people we can sustainably support. I don't think I've ever heard of a report that looks at it that way.
New information is coming out that seems to imply that the content of the fats we eat have effects on the body. Unsaturated fats seem to be obesogenic and interfere with the body's satiation mechanism, increasing the amount of white fat and decreasing the amount of brown fat (which is more metabolically active and may be the kind of fat that is lost first when people start dieting, which would explain part of the yo-yo dieting lose a lot of weight and then get stuck and gain more back system that plagues the obese), and the American food purity aesthetic has been pushing for the elimination of saturated fats from the diet as they typically come from animal sources.
Once the body hits a tipping point with excess white body fat, the fat becomes a sort of parasite which gets preferential treatment in consuming calories and nutritional resources out of the bloodstream, starving the organs while the body is bathing in an abundance of calories and nutrition.
If this turns out to be the whole story it is really quite insidious!
I don't know of a single-prong approach to solving this issue. Maybe wegovy will come down in price and help people break the cycle, maybe keto is the way to go, intermittent fasting may be helpful, finding saturated fats or supplementing with stearic acids and eliminating antioxidants to help promote fat oxidization... The list goes on for potential cures and we still haven't even begun work on solidifying the direct cause of the disease.
And yes, obesity is a disease. It's not just lazy people shoveling doritos in their faces and reaping their just rewards. The foods that we are provided are not balanced nutritionally and they have been designed by food scientists to not trigger the satiation mechanism so that we will consume more of them.
So yeah, when you eat processed foods your brain is tricked into thinking one more bite will satisfy, but the satisfaction never comes. Then you overindulge, getting lots of fast carbs and unsaturated fats, your body produces insulin, the calories get converted into white fat, the white fat grows, eventually becoming a parasite that eats your food first while you still haven't dealt with the initial issue, you become obese and since your white fat gets to eat first every time you eat you become more fat before your organs and muscles get the leftovers.
That's positively devilish, and right now the solution seems to be to intermittent fast so that your other organs get moved ahead in the nutritional priority list, to eat keto so that your body begins rapidly oxidizing fat, to limit vitamin C and other antioxidants until you get closer to your goal weight to limit your body fat's resistance to oxidization, and to supplement your diet with chemicals that help your body bypass the labyrinth of obesity you've found yourself in.
And despite all of that, we still don't know the full story.
> Once the body hits a tipping point with excess white body fat, the fat becomes a sort of parasite which gets preferential treatment in consuming calories and nutritional resources out of the bloodstream, starving the organs while the body is bathing in an abundance of calories and nutrition.
Also read that fat cells don't really get destroyed, just get deflated. It really does act like a parasite.
Simultaneously, full body liposuction doesn't seem to decrease the likelihood that formerly obese people will put the weight back on, either, but that may be due to not solving for the fundamental nutritional or dietary issue that caused the obesity in the first place.
I know some of that may be due to the idea that you 'beat' obesity and so you get lax with yourself. At the same time, something is blatantly, horribly wrong with the food that is available when it causes obese people have to satiate their fat before their own organs are allowed to eat.
Not only that but our diets can cause someone who has literally cut pounds of deflated body fat cells out of their bodies to grow it back in a matter of years. That's insane, that's the kind of stuff that makes me think of Famine in Good Omens. In the book, Famine ran a food company that fed millions of people but the food had no nutritional quality, indistinguishable from "real" food but surgically designed to be entirely made of empty calories and grease and salt so that his victims could eat until their stomachs burst, grow fat and miserable and hate their own bodies and ultimately starve to death if their hearts didn't give out first.
This blog spent a bunch of time trying to answer that question, and specifically to figure out which environmental factors might be causing the effect. They looked at lithium, PFAS, antibiotic contamination and a few other candidates.
This is definitely not peer-reviewed research so please don't take it too seriously, but I came away convinced that there is more going on here than "people suddenly started eating too much and being lazy in the 1970s": http://achemicalhunger.com/
We already know the key contributor: we eat enormously more sugar now than our parents did, and enormously less saturated fat.
Now that we know, with certainty, what a disastrous choice this was, it will take time to switch back. Most people are still convinced saturated fat is the bugaboo it has been painted as, and that sugar is A-OK, and government policy is still overwhelmingly directed that way.
What can be done with half the US maize crop (of what is left over after 1/3 has been diverted to make into alcohol to add to gasoline, enriching Archer Daniels Midland at taxpayer expense) when it is no longer enzymatically converted to sugar is an open question. Does the world want that much maize?
The main point the blog makes is that there's a huge discontinuity in the 1970s that doesn't seem to be explained by diet. And it occurs in other countries as well, though often with a delay.
My personal guess is that there are multiple causes. Different people are affected differently by the same thing. If we have pervasive exposure to numerous things that have (unproven) theories behind them, it would be hard to identify any given one due to the noise and long duration (epigenetic especially) that might be required to manifest rhetoric end result.
There's so much we've learned over the past century, and yet it feels like know almost nothing when we try to dig into complicated life science topics.
> The rate of cancer has risen about 30% for young people since the seventies. So it seems that there's something wrong in our environment or lifestyles that could be increasing risk. One would do well to read the research (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...) from which that widely quoted 30% figure comes. It does not suggest any simple conclusion as to what is causing the increase. Rather, it paints a very complex picture, with likely very different causes for increases in different cancers, and also documents significant decreases in certain cancers. Among the three categories of causes for increases listed, increased detection is prominent.
Note also that the study is a retrospective study, and comes with all the statistical cautions that are inherent in that methodology.
"It does not suggest any simple conclusion as to what is causing the increase."
Nor did I. Environmental and lifestyle factors are a huge domain covering vastly complex interconnected systems, many of which we know almost nothing about. We're just now starting to look at epigenetic effects now. How many substances are we exposed to that can cause issues in the next generation when a large number of things we're exposed to have only been tested for short or medium term exposure, or simply not tested at all.
Although, anecdotally, it feels like the bulk of changes out side of tobacco is focused on cure research and not as much on preventing environmental factors. Perhaps that's mostly that cures make for good news and restrictions on using certain products or chemicals are viewed as draconian (especially with things widely loved or used like alcohol).
Yeah, but I would be more interested in the other two stated causes - environmental and lifestyle factors. These would contribute to a net increase and/or earlier onset.
The more likely explanation for rising cancer rates for young people are: better detection, and other diseases/causes of death being dealt with. Not lifestyle or environment. A better example for lifestyle/environment would be the fates of Japanese people who switch from Japanese diets when moving to America. Significant distributional shift in types of cancers.
When all other causes of death are removed, only cancers will remain.
for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
No. Living longer means we have to live with our decisions. People who live short lives don't have to live with decisions that fucked the later generation years after they're long dead. The population limit on this planet isn't natural resources, but pollution, followed by heat dissipation because humans are all 100 watts space heaters.
Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
How about we just live our life as best as we can? Trust me, it's miserable living without hope or wallowing in self pity.
> Living longer means we have to live with our decisions.
People already have to live with their decisions - and humanity as a collective sucks at looking towards the future at the cost of the now. Living longer won't magically change that.
People talk about 'natural resources' and about how we're overpopulated all the time, but don't often want to go into real specifics. My guess is the repressed desire for death and depopulation came first, and the narrative later.
English-speaking culture is steeped in Christianity (even modern 'wokeism' is just another, more radical iteration of calvinism), and Christianity is a doomsday cult; we're fascinated by doomsday narratives, the end of the world, mass death- we're in love with these stories; look at zombie movies etc. The overpopulation meme is certainly going to be partially fed by how appealing 'the end of days' is to the western mind.
(Right wingers have a doomsday narrative, too, it's just a biosocial one rather than an ecological/geographic one; modern technology and the resulting societal shifts lead to selection against intelligence, and societal decay propagates irreversibly, leading to a future of stupid, lazy, and most importantly small-souled bugmen.)
That doesn't jive with most of my experiences. The Christian narrative I see is be fruitful and multiply, nature will provide.
The people that I do see promoting this sort of population limit theory are new age hippies, vegans and the like. Recently seems very popular with more college educated folk. 'How can you think about having kids when you know how bad it is for the environment'
Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold.
you don't say
I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life
This suggests a Malthusian, zero-sum world in which no new net value can be created. Someone could have said that 200 years ago, yet living standards are higher than ever in spite of more people than ever. Poverty rates worldwide continue to fall.
And it's not just cancer, there are many ways one may pick the unlucky straw: it is not widely known, but the number of people who die from a heath attack in their 20s is significant. Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
This doesn't mean we need to accept death when it can be prevented. The promise and hope of technology is to expand human potential and not have to settle for fate. Someone again could have said this 200 years ago about any other medical condition that is now treatable or curable today,
This is the sort of defeatist logic that is popular online these days, but we won't have to settle for just giving up.
It's definitely a form of fatalism; people who hold views like this are viewing it from a certain state of consciousness, and so they see the world through a lens that reflects the negative (Not that there aren't plenty of negative things going on in the world and the environment, but there is much more to be optimistic about).
From my point of view if you look at the state of humanity objectively, it's pretty obvious that most of us are living our best lives compared to any time in history. Even the fact that we understand some of the damage we might be doing to the planet is a huge leap forward, since understanding the problem is the first step to finding a solution. And we have more tools and solutions than ever before in history: earth observation/space travel, genetic engineering, renewable energy, powerful, cheap and abundant computing, rapid prototyping etc, etc.
I spend my days shitposting here and on Reddit. This is what my world is, not traveling or doing something “wonderful” and “meaningful.” If I keel over right now, would I be discontented or upset about how things ended? Not at all.
This is my life. Why would I be surprised that it ended how I lived it?
> This is my life. Why would I be surprised that it ended how I lived it?
Can't judge, I've spent a lot of time shitposting on Reddit myself, I just got tired of what I was doing and what it was causing on me about last week, let's see what I do now.
But I don't want to warp my perspective on life so that "finding my lost pet", "finding love (and love again)", "first day of a new life in a different country", "that mushroom trip that was actually useful", etc. to weigh not too much more on the scale of things than "slacking off in Hacker News", all so I can be more comfortable with mortality. There's more ways to be comfortable with mortality anyway, heck, forgetting about it until death is imminent is probably better, works for a lot of people for sure.
But it may just be a matter of delivery, you relax the wording a bit, and try to live every week as if it were the last one, or every month, it lets you cherish things that are more meaningful or actually enjoyable.
> for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
Fertility rates are declining globally, even in Sub-Saharan Africa:
Unless lifespans radically expand, we will eventually start to run out of people. If this were 4chan, I would tell you outright what I really think of you, but since it isn't, I won't.
If I knew this was my last day alive, I wouldn't be here sitting at work. Living every minute as if it was your last is actually pretty difficult to do. Or perhaps it means coming up with the understanding that it's not worth your time to stress about work. Just do the work and focus on what makes you happy. Maybe even quit and live a simpler life with less income? But you usually have houses to pay, kids to raise... it can become a prison of its own kind. There's always some magical reward waiting just around the corner, be it retirement, kids moving out, when you can finally focus on yourself again. How does one truly live every moment like it was their last?
> I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die).
Thank you for this wonderful thought! I always struggle with mortality and my place in the world. You offered me a window into the grander scheme of things, that doesn't fall back on God or you are just a small speck in the grander scheme of things.
We are all here to keep our species going and hand over the marathon stick to the next generation and then step aside.
I think more people are alive now than have ever lived.
I also think that means the next generation or two will have so many people on the planet that literally everyone who ever lived could still be alive and it would be the same.
Scarcity is not the problem. Death is so far inevitable, but it is not necessary.
The best way to reduce your chances of cancer is to either not be born or kill yourself. I did cancer research for many years, so, it's a very valid advice.
> Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.
I’m against this advice because aside from the usual objections like practicality, it’s fundamentally based on fear of missing out and not having lived a good life. It’s a kind of striving and all striving leads to suffering.
If you want to spend your afternoon navel gazing or looking at fish in the pond, that’s the true thing you should do. Free and easy wandering.
> will wipe any individual out. I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
For the individual, not the species as a whole. Or for the planet as a whole.
Sure, we might not lose some existing fantastic thinkers and doers, but what happens to the new thinkers and doers? If Sir Isaac Newton was still alive, would Einstein have gotten the attention he did, having to fight against a well established hierarchy of scientists built over the millennia? Would governmental seats ever change? Would slavery have ever gone away in a world where human rights would have no need to progress?
Spun another way, in poker, although you're dealt an unplayable hand most of the time, the key to success is (a) patiently not playing bad hands and (b) recognizing the good hands and capitalizing on them correctly.
That said, no matter how well you play, the game does end eventually. I like to think that, like poker, despite the variance, you have some degree of influence on how well the game ends.
It's more complicated than that though: life is more like a variant of poker where no one even agrees on the rules or what the goals of the players are.
I don't like death and I would be in line just as quick as most people if I could be immortal and reasonably healthy.
But is death loosing?
I don't view death as the antithesis of life, more appropriately I think it mirrors conception/birth.
I think of death more as a finale, the conclusion to your story be it grand or mundane. I also wonder if not for death would we cherish the events in life as greatly as we do? Think of the thinks that gave you pleasure as a child that you no longer care for as they have become stale and boring. Perhaps it would be so with living had we not death.
This is one of the things where it matters more how healthy/unpolluted your environment is.
I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole.
I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases.
...like in, I'd rather have a petrol/gas plant to replace a local COAL power plant FAST, than a nuclear alternative that would take 20 years to get funding and have the delayed-as-usual building process finalized. And I'd rather have all the hydro and windpower we can built asap, and we can figure out later if we really care about the western-golden-lyre-bird or whatever going extinct because of dams or windmills. In the end, tbh, I've come to terms with a +5/7 C deg global warming (100y timeframe) happening, but not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer because of chemical and particulate air pollution or god-knows-what from the latest untested and unidentified pan or sportswear coating!
The effect sizes of carcinogenic (or potentially carcinogenic) environmental risk factors are small compared to the very high baseline risk of getting cancer over the long lifetimes we are blessed with. Some cancers, like prostate cancer, don't have any proven environmental or lifestyle risk factors.
Consider smoking - the exposure of the lungs to cigarette smoke is very high and very consistent compared to almost all other environmental exposures which are also generally less carcinogenic.
The key question is - are cancers getting more common without a good explanation [1], and if so which ones? The answer is that upper gastrointestinal cancers do some to be getting more common. These are plausibly due to dietary changes and/or obesity. Personally, I think ingesting huge amounts of added sugar, particularly fructose, is the potential unifying culprit.
[1] Many cancers are increasing in incidence because of better screening and detection. Breast cancer is a good example. Other cancers like leukaemia or pancreatic cancer couldn't even be reliably diagnosed 100 years ago, so obviously they are more common today.
Conclusions: This meta-analysis provides evidence of a higher rate of prostate cancer in men with a history of an exposure to gonorrhea, HPV, or any STD.
This evidence is preliminary and the odds ratios are small. Also, consider the very high prevalence of prostate cancer - it is implausible that STDs are a major or important cause.
HPV is extremely common, usually asymptomatic, and already known to contribute to other reproductive cancers. Why is it "implausible"? It seems this study at least shows it is plausible.
The effect is weak. The ubiquity of HPV infection should show a stronger association if it were important. It could contribute to a subset of prostate cancers, but this has not been proven beyond correlation. There are other issues - HPV related cancers like cervical cancer or head and neck cancer show an age related peak and decline, whereas prostate cancer incidence continues to rise with age.
But the HPV vaccine is certainly worth having for males that have not engaged in any sexual activity.
The effect will necessarily appear weak when incidence of HPV is over 80%. At 95% it would appear weaker yet. That any signal shows up under the circumstances means the effect is huge.
With respect, this isn’t an accurate interpretation of an odds ratio. If you look at other cancers with a clear viral cause (EBV and nasopharyngeal carcinoma, HPV and cervical cancer), you will see that nearly 100% of tumours show evidence of viral infection and the odds ratios are very high, even though the viruses are ubiquitous.
The data for HPV and prostate cancer suggest, at best, an indirect effect such as inflammation rather than direct viral oncogenesis.
In any case, how do you modify this potential risk factor? Celibacy or vaccination. As I said, I would encourage any teenage male to get the HPV vaccine. It is worth paying for, if you can.
For cancer categories that are caused only by HPV, the signal would be clear even at 95%. But many categories have multiple possible causes. A cancer that could be caused by HPV or something else is still sufficient reason to get vaccinated.
Everybody not already exposed to HPV should get vaccinated against it. All insurance companies should be obliged to pay for such vaccinations.
True, it's interesting that it doesn't peak. Is that initial onset, or simply occurance?
I ask that because prostate cancer has a very positive long term survival rate but also recurs in almost a third of cases. I wonder if the peak in other cancers is because long term survival is lower, or lomg term survival is also high but recurrence is lower.
That is incidence, ie first diagnosis for the patient.
Other HPV related cancers like head and neck cancers tend to have a good prognosis.
HPV almost certainly doesn’t cause direct viral oncogenesis in prostate ca. It may cause chronic inflammation which promotes prostate cancer. It may also infect/accelerate already malignant cells - this is the likely mechanism in nasopharyngeal carcinoma and EBV.
This.
I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy.
Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), smoke, veggies just a small side dish, no sport at all and they still live longer, healthier lives.
The few people i know who got cancer there, were well over their 60s (and all of them eventually survived).
I'm talking about the region Umbria which is pretty pristine and barely industrialized.
This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.
What do you think it is about Belgium (a small country but by no means homogenous) that makes it more carcinogous than Italy? In the 40 years that I've lived here I've only know one or two cases of young people getting cancer.
Some stats do seem to confirm your anecdote: Belgium gets 345.8 cases / 100K (6th highest in the world) and Italy 290.6 / 100K (24th highest).
Maybe it's the zone? I'm in WV and it feels extremely bad here. One note: my experience is in Umbria, I know that there are some other parts in Italy which are pretty polluted.
By the way I've been wondering the same thing for years now. I don't know why. My hypothesis is pollution since the biggest difference between the 2 zones is the levels of industrialization.
It might have to do with better screening. I've read in the past that Belgium is a frontrunner in the screening for certain cancers (like breast and colon afaik).
If you screen more, you will find more.
Italy is quite poor and probably doesn't have the resources to invest, so ends up with lower stats.
The air. Extreme traffic, old people burning wood (or worse) to heat their houses and a lot of polluting industry. Depending on the type of weather most days the air is unbreathable. I'm not saying that WV is worse than the rest of Belgium. This is just the place I'm experiencing.
> This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.
Imagine you’re completely wrong about this — because it’s a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in. What’s another answer for why Belgians seem to get cancer more often than Italians?
> a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in
Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after...
Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!
It is a dangerous assumption if wrong because it prescribes that you can do most unhealthy activities and they are not major factors for your health outcomes.
Well this doesn't mean that you can smoke all day if you move to Umbria and be safe. But what I noticed is that in some places smoking is much riskier than others.
Does anyone here think Australia is more polluted than say India?
And also all the top countries in that list are all part of the more developed world, where pollution levels in general are much less than say other parts of the world.
While pollution might still be an issue it could also be that people living in developed countries have more access to healthcare and so their detection rates are higher.
I think that Australia and NZ might be very high because of skin cancers and the infamous ozone hole.
India can probably be extremely polluted in the cities but I wonder if it's the same in the country side.
And fair enough, african countries might have undetected cancers and have people die of other disease before getting old enough for cancers. But I was comparing Umbria to Belgian Flanders which are both 1st world countries.
It's an extremely common deficiency that has links to a ton of issues, and it's quite easy to correct, so it's an extremely low hanging fruit in terms of reducing your risk for a ton of things.
Not really. It used to be a mix of seed oils and animal fat. But I don't think that many fries places do still use the animal fat part for "health reasons".
I expected after COVID there would be much more focus on air control/monitoring. How nice would it be to have constant air measurements in neighbourhoods and inside houses. And not only CO particles, but a wide variety.
Unfortunately I see hardly any focus on it anymore.
I got a CO2 sensor too, cheap but not entry level (about €125). It also does TVOC, PM1.0 and PM2.5.
One reason was I "balloon" sealed an unused chimney (old house) for the winter, that was the main driver of ventilation (and drafts).
If I don't crack a window, me, desk-working in a ~85m³ room pushes the reported CO2 from 400 to nearly 800 ppm by lunchtime, though the device is close to (not on) my desk which probably skews it a bit. I don't have any data to compare though, I might remove the balloon when weather improves next month to see.
There's also a gas hob(!) in the adjacent kitchen, the other VOC/PM readings are elevated for as long as 12 hours (depending on how badly my cooking went :),
even with a hob extractor fan running and permanently open intake vents.
The speed of CO2 increase and persistence of the effects of cooking were both a surprise to me.
I bought a CO2 sensor, and found that the CO2 levels rise to unhealthy levels in like half an hour in my room without opening my window. Since then I only sleep with a window slightly open, and open it periodically during the day.
I also run an air purifier all the time, but I cannot yet measure it's efficacy, because a particle counter is like 2-3× more expensive than a CO2 sensor, so I haven't invested in it yet.
A PM sensor is 2-3 times cheaper than a decent CO₂ sensor if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Look for PMS5003 (or PMS7003 which is pretty much the same beast in a different package), and any ESP32 dev board (they're dirt cheap) + ESPHome as firmware.
Yep, I leave the fan on all the time to circulate air in the house. The levels seem to range from 450-550ppm. I was surprised at how low that is considering this is a newer house.
450-550 is great, especially since ambient levels outside are about 420. I live in an old house and with windows closed and no hvac fan running, rooms only take about 30 minutes to get up to 800ppm with one person in them. After an hour or two they get up to about 1050ppm. With two people, they get > 1000 pretty quickly.
Looking at metrics from the sensor is pretty interesting too. You can see, to the minute, when a room went from unoccupied to occupied.
This would be nice, but I fear we can go too far down this road, particularly with children.
Hormesis is important for our health: exposure to periods of starvation to induce autophagy of senescent cells, exposure to allergens and less-than-lethal pathogens (at a young age) to train our immune systems [1,2], etc.
Obviously we want to minimize heavy metal, PFAS exposure, etc - but living in ultrapure environments risks throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Absolutely in favor of better environmental monitoring, but we need to be very selective about the specific things we don't want.
Legally mandating remote work and adding public transit options and raising the cost of daily useless commute would go a veeeeeery long way. Because the petrol not burned by driving can be used to replace the coal plants.
I think you are overestimating the amount of jobs that can be done remotely.
Things that can never be done remotely: agriculture, construction, manufacture, hospitality, a big part of health/elder care, a big part of education, anything that requires expensive equipment (research, ...), artists/shows/events, the list goes on.
A lot of these sectors were either closed or running slow during COVID, which was not sustainable (you can't maintain the purchasing power of an entire population for decades if suddenly half of it stops working - it only works for a short while if you expect to be able to repay the debt you incurred to keep non-working people afloat).
So even if every single person that can work remotely does so, still expect big cities with transportation issues.
And that's without counting all the jobs that can be done remotely but are better done in office.
Most US cities need a small critical mass only to kickstart good [amazing!? okay, passable] public transport.
Urbanization is still in full force, cities are growing. (Even if COVID put a dip in the graph.)
Sure, the number one problem is density, but the US is ridiculously rich enough to support enough buses doing the rounds.
Agriculture is not causing congestion. (The rare combine on the rural road leading a queue is the exception.)
Construction is also a small part of the overall traffic. (Especially with more and more prefab happening around the world.)
Manufacturing, sure, production lines need operators, engineers, etc. Yet at the same time (speaking from experience) about half of the staff could do remote.
> So even if every single person that can work remotely does so, still expect big cities with transportation issues.
No questions there, but as I said a few sentences back, the peak is the problem. The upkeep (maintenance costs) for a transit network that can serve X number of people all commuting at the same time (in the same direction) is basically double than a network for half (or ~80%) of that demand.
Not to go into each of your counter-examples, but while some of them can't be done remotely today, surely we can get there.
Eg. how far away are we from having remote-controlled tractors and combine-harvesters? Sure, get them home into a garage when they need servicing.
Hospitality? There are places which, especially in the first pandemic year, have gone all hands-off (eg. get a token to access a property on your check-in without talking to anyone).
But rather than can we, I think the point should be should we? There's a psychological cost to working with people you've never met personally, never hanged around with... And some people will struggle to get any social activity happening in their lives without work.
I've worked remotely for 15+ years, but I don't think it's for everybody, or for anybody all the time.
People going to places is no the problem. The problem is the peak demand. (Eg. usual commute. Rush hour.)
It'd be much much better if people were spending all that fuel on traveling with friends to anywhere else. (Or just going to events/festivals.)
...
That said remote work without any IRL interaction is definitely psychologically unhealthy. But! Doing a twice monthly sprint rollover or whatever means a qualitatively different kind of transit than the daily commute.
You understand that agriculture didn't shut down because farmers couldn't sit on their tractors and pull equipment, but because nobody was buying the product they were producing, right?
That's... extremely totalitarian :) ...but legally forcing employers to allow remote work X days a week for jobs where it makes sense + solid investment in public transit would make wonders.
I’m not defending totalitarianism, but capitalist democracy really does a piss poor job at controlling negative externalities, to the point that I’m not really convinced it’s a good system of governance anymore.
Ok, so instead of “force companies to allow remote work” it’s “tax companies that don’t allow remote work a bajillion dollars a microsecond”. What’s the practical difference there?
There’s no intellectually defensible way to price the externalities off remote work at a bajillion dollars a microsecond. On some level you have to trust someone somewhere to do a good job. Taxes are tools to help that, not a substitute for it.
There’s also no intellectually defensible way to price quite a number of potential negative externalities. Dumping toxic waste in drinking water reservoirs, for instance, shouldn’t be allowed at any price. So I don’t think taxes are the actual answer for a lot of things, you just have to straight up ban them.
No, you can price that. The cost will be so high that people won’t do it and pay the price. That’s the point. You can set a price on emissions or pollution and if it’s a small amount the piece may be worth paying. At higher levels you figure out how to do something else that is not that. You don’t just continue what you were doing at greater scale.
um, the tax should be on the externalities. like the pollution due to commute, road wear, the generated traffic contributing to the peak. (eg. if you start work at ~11 instead of at 9 you contribute less to the peak)
Capitalism operates fine when you tax the externalities, it’s democracy that has an issue setting up the taxes rationally rather than based on which groups have political power.
I've always wondered what the calculation looks like for doing something like riding a bike to work. Are the benefits from the exercise significantly greater than the possible accidents if you have to share a road with cars and exposure to pollution from riding in a sea of exhaust?
But those mini factories have gotten much cleaner over the years, yet we still see a 30% increase in young adult cancers over 1970s levels. So while it's a potential contributor, it seems there could be more at play.
How much cleaner have they gotten, and how much more miles do these factories get driven? Taking a look at https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles (the first useful result I could find), highway vehicle miles have almost tripled since the 1970s (1.1 trillion miles in 1970 vs 3.2 in 2019). Have cars gotten 70% cleaner in the same timespan?
It's not about miles driven. It's about air quality in cities.
Just looking at efficiency, we see that people get 50% more miles per gallon today than in 1978. This doesn't even include impact from emmissions equipment, electric/hybrid cars, etc. Plus, most highway miles are not in cities. Pollutants can disperse and settle out (not ideal in general, but relevant to air quality it is positive). They also have lower densities of people in the area to affect, which should affect the overall population numbers less.
According to the EPA, cars (and trucks and busses) are 99% cleaner today than in the 70s.
You're right, there's probably more at play. Exposure to chemicals, pesticides in food, less time outside, more sedentary lifestyle, less sun exposure, more processed food. I was just saying that one car = one engine producing exhaust from fossil fuels (EVs a little less).
> I'd wish we lived in a world where we could actually address chemical, air-particulate +/- microplastics pollution seriously, and stuff like PFOAs that are still used round, without having it be totally overshadowed and drowned in noise by the "fight climate change" crowd or the "extinction rebellion" nutcases.
Most of the people you called "nutcases" are protesting against exactly the pollutants you described.
OK, I agree I'm not that informed about ER, probably I've only heard of some of their more misguided actions, maybe even overemphasized by their enemies.
...but their name and their most used description doesn't help either: first words you read are "climate change" and "biodiversity loss". No organization can focus on everything, and if they've chosen to focus on that, then from my pov. they're not focusing on what I care about most: engineering and sustaining environments (natural or artificial or hybrid...) that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways.
that maximize HUMAN health & lifespan in economically sustainable ways
Which HUMANs? Only the ones alive today, or also the ones living 100 years from now? And why focus only on economically sustainable, don't you think that ecologically sustainable, socially sustainable or even morally defensible merit equal consideration?
The point is - even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer. A good part of the cause of cancer are natural processes - errors in DNA replication, oxidative stress due to infection or hell, just plain metabolism. Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents.
You could live in a bubble of pure clean air and only eat pure, clean organic food and get cancer.
The answer is to do the best you can, then live your life.
> even in the absence of external factors, you may get cancer
That's like saying "even in the absence of lead poisoning, your child could still be retarded".
> You could live in a bubble
...they point is we do live in "a bubble", it's called Earth, and we can work to make this a cleaner and less toxic bubble.
I know perfectly well that cancer is a natural component of aging. And I also know that advances in anti-aging and regenerative medicine will make it possible to live longer and for this very reason cancer will be MORE of problem in the future and for future generations. Heck if modern medicine could enable my children to reach a theoretical max age of 250 years, I don't want them to only achieve let's say 50% of that achievable lifespan-increase because we've left them a "poisoned bubble" to live in.
It's amazing how little people want to pay attention to the environment and justify this by arguments of "but wrong thing X could still happen in regardless of environment" (ignoring that its probability would be 20% lower in a different environment). And when we do, we focus on fuzzy global properties of the environment that are hard to predict and have uncertain effects (eg. "global average temperature") instead of all the toxic stuff that can be easily traced and measured and where reduction would have impacts (measurable if people would be able to spend the money and relax some "ethical" rules to properly measure them...).
Not sure what your rant is getting at but my point stands - eliminate all pollution (even naturally occurring arsenic?) and you’d reduce cancer rates by maybe 30%.
Worthwhile? Of course? Going to get rid of cancer? No.
My rant was that we're incredibly far form "doing the best we can" with out environment, 30% is an insanely high amount of things left undone that we could do. Even 10% of that, 3% is a criminal improvement not to aim for. We're unimaginably incredibly sloppy and ineffective at managing what matters most of our environment and paying insane prices for it and that's what angers me...
"Then add on top all the genetic errors you inherited from your parents."
Some of those errors could be epigenetic from your parent's exposure.
Sure, there's stuff outside of our control. But with young adult cancer rates increasing 30% since the 70s, it seems there's an environmental or mass lifestyle factor involved that we should be looking to correct or mitigate.
Hydro capacity is limited from how much water is coming down from the mountains. With global warming, it is about to be much more limited. China trying to tap some of the last great untapped hydro reserves left in the world (in Tibet) could also have serious environmental consequences for India and Southeast Asia (not just wildlife, but people who need water to farm and live). Dams are not purely virtuous.
It would be nice if we did, but while this would likely lower cancer slightly, I dont think it would come anywhere close to eliminating it. I think cancer is mostly a tradeoff for auto immune diseases and adaptation speed. A immune system good enough to prevent them, would also kill most all, and prevent any deviation from its template. This is particularly likely for the kinds of cancers which hit before 40.
In general, I think both the op, and this post vastly underestimates how little people actions affect the probability of cancer. Sure you can lower them slightly, but I have never seen anything indicating you can drop the odds of cancer more than 10% by clean living and pristine environments. Highly specific issues like very high radiation does concretely increase the odd's, but its barely noticeable outside of old school radiology nurses, or nuclear accidents. Things like a heavy tobacco habit does increase the odds substantially and significantly above baseline, but most people who smoke daily for a few years are still far more likely to die of something else. We can also infer that microplastics is less carcinogenous than tobacco due to its prevalence and negligible increase in cancer. Not saying its safe, just worth remembering that most cancer is better through of as bad luck, and very unlikely to be the persons fault. Basically cancer isnt anything you can expect that healthy habits, healthy food, or pristine environments could have fixed.
In the astonishingly rich biosphere there are exceptions to everything though, impossibly improbable things which had eons to occur. Concretely, we have yet to design a single antibiotic, geneditor or new trait, instead we find them. I care very little about the downsides for humans caused by pollution and global warming, but the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible. In other words, I'm all for fixing both, but not at the expense of the biosphere. Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.
> the loss of information which comes with damaging the biosphere is incomprehensible
I totally agree on this. This is why it saddens me that in the current set of overlapping information wars we're living in, "biodiversity loss" was also weaponized and used like another red herring to distract people in many fights.
Take pesticides and herbicides for example - it's 100% percent clear that they are a huge cause of biodiversity loss. But practically all the opponents of pesticides are also against artificial fertilizers and against GMOs that when used properly actually have a much lower impact on wildlife, and in many areas of the world they are absolutely necessary to prevent famine. (Also, why aren't we actively developing GMOs that work with less pesticides and herbicides instead of the current abominable idea of developing plants resistent to higher doses of these chemicals? It's like we have a tool but we're using it all wrong to screw ourselves with it... maybe we need to have more state-funded GMO research instead of having it all in private sector with skewed incentives.)
Now, when people are made to choose between "full bio agriculture" (no pesticides at all AND no artificial fertilizers) and "classical agriculture", it's obvious the odds are stacked against full-bio, and any discussion on better limiting and regulating use of pesticides is avoided. Also, nobody even raises the issue that going full-bio would mean lower yields, ergo larger swaths of lands would need to be used for agriculture, so less land for wildlife and potentially more loss of biodiversity.
And when people argue against hydro lowering biodiversity, we rarely discuss how its alternatives would also impact biodiversity probably even more.
To make it clear, I'm not against focusing on biodiversity, I'm against it's current "weaponization" and use as a red-herring together with climate-change in a "mixed eco-activist save-the-planet-from-humans + CO2 is the devil" discourse that prevents any meaningful and results oriented discussion...
> Fortunately, nuclear is a perfectly good alternative.
Then let's solve the political and economical problems that make it unfeasible in most places. Let's build 100% non-military nuclear programs that are safe + cost-effective.
Just going vegetarian has a much greater than 10% difference for many cancers. Not all, but colon cancer is one of them.
Nuclear is not in fact a good alternative. But solar and wind are.
It is unfortunate that the cheapest solar panels have 8g/m^2 of cadmium; one hopes that is reclaimed at EOL. But a house fire with those on would seem to create a superfund site.
> not with me or loved ones dying 20 years earlier of cancer
The problem with this stuff is that it's not a hard "20 years earlier", it's minor tweaks to the statistical odds, and without special training humans are just not very good at coping with lots of different low risk of death issues.
We've seen this highlighted with COVID, where people have taken the death odds to mean both extremes of "this is completely irrelevant to me so I'm not going to get vaccinated or wear a mask" and "I'm not leaving the house again".
Those then cross over with the moralising of risk. This article is "I did everything right, I'm a good person, so why did I get cancer?" to which I can only answer that sometimes bad things happen to good people, and that we're all mortal and vulnerable to horrible internal surprises. Plenty of the people in the "not leaving the house again" category know that, if they were to catch COVID, people would point to their pre-existing conditions as a reason why they deserve to die, and would be blamed for taking risks.
People absolutely love to moralise about weight, as well. There was a story going around twitter the other day of "my dad lost several stone unexpectedly, couldn't get his doctor to do anything other than congratulate him, then died of undiagnosed cancer". Medical professionals being unable to look past the weight to realize that rapid weight loss is a bad sign.
They list 50 countries, and relevant to your post:
- Belgium #4 with 329.9/100K
- Italy #24 with 290.6/100K
Not a huge difference tbh. Regarding the comments about vitamin D, Sweden is lower than Italy. So I think the correct conclusion is: These things are complicated.
It would be helpful to know where the lowest rates are, even though reporting accuracy is probably also lower. The bottom third of the list would still be informative, but the Institute does not seem to have that.
We do know absolutely that some environmental pollutants cause cancer(s) and other health related.
Outside of the known pollutants I am curious to know how much of the world population living in normal polluted areas vs living in highly polluted areas have more cancers?
Also it would be interesting to get data on the tribes living in say the Amazon. If their incidence of cancers is above or below average the rest of the human population
Just checked with my cancer textbook and it cites a 1990 study from the Netherlands that indicates that curing all cancer would increase life spans by a little less than 4 years.
Most people who get cancer are quite old. This doesn’t lessen the tragedy of young people dying from cancer but it is rare.
Part of me thinks that "green energy", "saving the environment", "stopping global warming" are all partly promoted by big businesses who know that they're unattainable goals, to keep us focused on some lofty ideal rather than focusing on small-scale environmental dangers. I remember visiting San Francisco, supposedly the liberal utopia of the west, and finding that I was forced to endure choking smog in order to use any public transit. Why are California's public transit stations all built near major highways, at street level, parallel with huge trucks and busses, with no ventilation? Because no one cares about you, it's all about "being green", whatever THAT means.
This goes back to my pet theory that Humans do Not Scale: because we treat others as anonymous, the entire pork producing industry feeds waste plastics to their pork, and this is considered ordinary behavior.
This is why we can't have nice things or a nice life: everyone treats the anonymous other as disposable. That makes everyone disposable, and our society a degenerate hellhole.
>I'd dare to say that a not-so-phisically-active moderate-smoker living in a less polluted environment has way lower cancer risk than a bio-vegan athlete buddhist monk living in a polluted industrial hellhole.
I always heard of general phrasing like "increases likelihood of cancer", but this sentence gives me the impression that there have been multiple conclusive studies on the direct contributions of urban pollution to individual cases of cancer. Can someone here who looked through such studies comment, or at least point to them by any chance?
I hope we look at plastics/PFAS/pththalates in 50 years as we look at smoking and asbestos now. But given how anemic our federal government has been for the past 30 years and is only working for the people less and less, I'm not hopeful.
On a population wide evaluation, you are correct. However, some people are just more susceptible. It's complex, but if you just take a simplistic view of a single gene becoming cancerous, some people are only 1 mutation away and others are hundreds.
100% correct, but...this is the type of rhetoric that some industries employ to "muddy the waters" when they want to lobby against banning certain chemicals or processes.
Start with "it's complex" and "some people are just more susceptible" and you have a great platform for arguing against eg. banning lead-additived gasoline.
Then add the shifting away of blame from industry and corporations to individuals, sprinkle some "focus on what you can do" (eg. the "ban plastic straws" type useless token-gesture) or "it's that little things" and you get exactly the kinds of stuff industry is currently gaslighting us with, distracting us from high-impact but profit-lowering big measures that could be implemented instead!
Nuanced thinking can be weaponized against you just as well as black-and-white oversimplification...
Individually, a person can reduce their cancer risk with a few things like not smoking, and avoiding sunburns, etc. but that does not eliminate the risk of cancer. It's not a disease that primarily comes from unhealthy living.
That said, there is a toooon of cancer that we can prevent as a society though better public health messaging and better environmental laws, such as creating housing and cities that ban cars, so that we are not continually exposed to pm25 risks.
The most common cancer: colon cancer, would be 95% preventable if only people got over silly notions about their butts and got a colonoscopy when they have reached age 45-50.
Colon cancer takes a decade to develop from polyp to tumour. The main purpose of a colonoscopy is to find and snip any polyps there could be in the colon. Then you'd be safe from colon cancer for a decade or more.
You would normally not feel much: the sensory nerves in the colon are only really able to feel if you have gas.
And many hospitals offer sedation, so you wouldn't need to experience the procedure anyway.
The worst part is the restricted diet for a week before (avoiding foods that would cling to the intestine wall) and emptying the bowels the day before.
If you know that you have healthy kidneys, do ask your doctor for the good laxative that is a small dose that doesn't taste bad.
Myself I have an unusual genetic condition, so I unlike normal people, I do a colonoscopy every year. I stay awake and watch the monitor, because I actually want to see what I look like inside. At the end when you reach the small intestine, the cilia on the walls inside there are quite fascinating.
UK here for context. We only have to fast for 12-24 hours prior to the colonoscopy. You can drink water or plain tea (no sugar, cream or milk).
They offer "gas and air" mainly. You don't even have to have that. You are fully awake during the procedure, laughing at the live HD video feed from inside you on the big screen.
You can be fully anaesthetised but that's very rare here in the UK.
After the appointment, it's a free cup of tea, and some biscuits. You have to wait for a couple of blood pressure tests, but after 15 mins recovery you can leave and go home. The entire process from entering the clinic unti leaving is about an hour.
The process is mildly uncomfortable but not really painful. Nothing like childbirth for example.
Don't be scared. It doesn't hurt too much. And as other commenters have written, any polyps they remove could have become tumours in 10 years, and afterwards, you are effectively safe from colon cancer for a decade.
If the NHS (UK) find and remove any polyps, they'll add you to a watch list for regular colonoscopy procedures. I have one every 2-3 years, others have them annually.
Get that camera up you... It might save your life.
I've suffered from IBS all my life. At this point I've had several colonoscopies done in different countries.
The one in the UK was done without sedation and was a terrible experience. Apparently having an overly sensitive colon makes it pretty unbearable.
But yeah, the stigma around a doctor introducing a tube/camera up your ass is just that. You dont lose anything and you dont become any more/less anything. The prep is a bit rough but nothing unbearable as well.
I am 40 now, but will deffo get to it yearly once I'm 45.
In Switzerland it's 4 days restricted diet (zero fibers etc), a day fasting with liquids or sugar, and strong laxatives the evening before and the morning of the action. You sleep (aka pass out for like a blink) during the intervention then wonder at your incredibly clean pipe on TV. 5 years later you come again if they found and removed something, otherwise after 10.
> UK here for context. We only have to fast for 12-24 hours prior to the colonoscopy. You can drink water or plain tea (no sugar, cream or milk).
Are you saying you only have to fast, without laxatives/prep? How does that work? I find it hard to imagine that anyone's colon is clean enough to get a good view after only fasting for a day?
Based on how much my need for toilet paper depends on what I’ve been eating recently, I suspect diet makes a massive difference to how clean you are inside.
Not sure how waiting longer than 24 hours is going to get you much cleaner in any case.
I have to have colonoscopy every year since I was 18 because of risk factors. I agree it's much less awful than people think (and I especially agree that laxatives and liquid diet prior to it suck much more than the procedure itself). I never take sedation cause it doesn't really hurt and doctors say it's better to have feedback from the patient.
I also have to do MRI every year and it's much more frustrating for me because they always complain I'm breathing wrong, and I have asthma so it's not easy to "breath right". It takes ages.
I think it depends. It doesn't hurt for you but it does for me. I had to take some pain killers during mine. The doctor told me that having a bigger belly would help, though I should not become fat for the next time.
The first (and only) time I ever had a CAT scan was pretty awful because they didn't tell me exactly what to do.
I walked into an urgent care because I had severe back pain. They put me through a bunch of chest x-rays where they told me to inhale and hold my breath, then they bring me over to the CAT scanner and tell me to hold my breath when the light goes green. So I inhale and hold my breath. Then the tech comes out and tells me "did you inhale? don't do that, it ruins the results".
They decided not to re-run them because the odds I had something wrong even with those symptoms were apparently less than the odds of the additional CAT scan giving me cancer down the line. Certainly didn't help my peace of mind.
But the muscle relaxants and a proper desk chair seems to clear it up within a week so I guess they were right...
In my experience, the entire process takes up about 3 days: 2 for the colon cleansing, 1 for the process and recovery from sedation and possible biopsies.
Mine takes in total 1 evening and 1 morning; the cleansing is 1 evening and they biopsy on the way through which makes it take up a little bit more time but not much. And I never take the sedation as I want to really get out of there asap and I don't feel much anyway.
I have colitis ulcerosa and liver problems associated with that - called PSC in English I believe? When I was younger I did MRI every 2 years but now they told me to do it every year.
However, I have a hunch that frequent colonoscopies are maybe not a good idea.
Doubts:
1. We know more but we don't know all things creating colon cancer. Knowing the existence of cancers caused by viruses, disinfection procedures applied on the device could matter a lot.
2. Even if we disinfect properly, we know of a notorious little fellow: H.pylori, which can go down to the intestines. "Helicobacter pylori infection is associated with colon adenomatous polyps detected by high-resolution colonoscopy."
https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
3. H. pylori (which serves just as an example, there can be other bad guys) is really hard to get rid of with disinfectants. It builds up resistance over time so it's doubtful that our disinfectants currently in use will stay as effective as well.
4. Frequently putting a foreign object to different people's colons (yes, I know it's disinfected) would increase the probability of transmitting such unknown risks.
I didn't talk about perforation risk. Just the possibly transmissible cancer risk.
So I remain doubtful that it's completely harmless
It's necessary but every year? Doubtful without more data.
Finally, thanks for the people who invented and use it to save lives.
I wanted to share my doubts on frequent colonoscopies
Why are you concerned about it? Doctors aren't going to recommend intervals shorter than 10 years for people with no risk factors and even with risk factors the cancer screenings are every 5 years. If someone is getting them more frequently than that, there are probably additional factors.
In the US, insurance isn't going to pay for it unless a doctor says it is medically necessary.
There is an interesting difference between the way countries approach this btw. In US, sedation is standard and used in 90%+ of colonoscopies. In UK sedation is rarely used unless specifically requested by the patient, you usually get some gas and air instead. It's not even due to cost, it's just that sedation for colonoscopy is generally unnecessary, it's an uncomfortable but not particularily painful procedure.
The US loves to sedate. You guys get absolutely blasted when you have your wisdom teeth removed. In most of Europe you get strong pill painkillers for the first few days and then it’s paracetamol.
I don't know if you're expressing a common misconception here, but a lot of Americans also think general anaesthetic is widely used for wisdom teeth removal, and it isn't. What is widely used is deep sedation, a combination of ketamine and benzos which keeps the patient calm and, the nice part, prevents any memories of the event from forming. It's maybe an extra hour of recovery, same-day procedure in either case.
Post-care is a few day's worth of entry-level painkillers unless the patient gets a dry socket. We use acetaminophen for post-treatment rather than paracetamol, since it's better (never understood the British obsession with that stuff, it's nasty business).
Anywhere else I would walk away from a terrible joke like that, but this is HN. I'm joking.
It depends on the situation. I had all of mine out this past weekend (in the US) and, because they were fully grown in, all they had to do was some local anaesthetic (about 8 shots around various parts of the mouth), wait 15 minutes, and loosen/pull them all. Total procedure was less than 30 minute and no painkillers prescribed after the fact.
It's unnecessary but a lot of pain medication is "unnecessary." We use it to reduce pain because we don't like to feel pain. This seems self evidently common sense to me. In New Zealand my colonoscopies were carried out with ketamine, which is incredibly safe under medical supervision. Unless there are contraindicated medical conditions, I see no reason not to use something like ketamine or a light dose of oxygenated nitrous oxide.
In Poland they give you option for sedation, but advise against it because sedation disables the feedback from patient and that slightly increases the risk of complications. When they do the procedure they ask how you feel and when it gets too uncomfortable they change the angle etc.
I've had like a dozen of colonoscopies (have to be checked every year cause of risk factors), and they were never really painful.
Nitrous oxide is a fairly strong anagelsic (pain medication) but a very weak sedative. That's exactly why it's often used for minor routine procedures where keeping the patient awake and reasonably alert is more valuable than keeping the patient fully sedated.
How many have you had? My understanding is the risk of a perforated colon is actually quite high, like 1 in 500. Do you worry about that risk? I got referred to a gastroenterologist before I was 45 and he talked me out of it because he didn't think it was going to show anything (my symptoms that I was referred there for were gone by then) and the risk wasn't worth it. Obviously if you're going to get some life-saving results, the risk-reward calculation changes.
I've heard such numbers before and asked my doctor about them, but been told that those are overexaggerated. A higher risk apply to patients with intestinal diseases such as Chron's (not me) or when doctors have conducted minor surgery from inside the gut.
A normal colon is quite flexible, and should not get hurt just from the endoscope being pushed through the gut.
Snipping a "normal" polyp or taking a biopsy would cause a little bleeding, but should heal up quickly. I've been told that I could see blood in my stool after it, but it's been so little that I haven't.
You consider 1 in 500 high? That's only 0.2%. At that rate, assuming the probability of complication for each procedure is independent from all the others, you could undergo the procedure 20 times with only about a 4% chance of complication. Since the American Cancer Society only recommends colonoscopy every 10 years, starting at age 45, most people wouldn't even have 5 procedures done in a lifetime, which would give about a 1% cumulative chance of complication.
It would be one thing if you were to have done that math to show "the risk of colon cancer is so high that this decision is worth it"--and to be clear: maybe it is!--but the idea that you simply don't find a 1% chance of a complication to be a big deal as the absolute number looks small to you (as opposed to making some relative comparison to the rate of preventable cancer) horrifies me... and, for your sake, I hope you aren't that careless continually with all of the other decisions you make in your life (any number of which might also have a 1% chance of going badly for you). 1 in 500 is absolutely a very very large number.
... which might lead one to ask "do you worry about the risk of complications?" when hearing about someone who gets the scope 10x as often as recommended. The answer may be "well, even if the risk of complications is 10x, my risk of getting a disease the scope will catch still far outweighs it, so it's worth it. Or it may be "yeah, that is a concern, but it's mitigated somewhat by xyz factor." And both of those are interesting answers. Why the hostility to this conversation?
You realize the context of my question was that I was responding to someone who actually does get one done every year, right? And that I acknowledged that the risk-reward calculation changes quite a bit depending on what risk factors you have? I don't know what point you're trying to make, unless you think I'm just wrong to be asking this person in a special circumstance how he thinks about the risk. For example, perhaps there are extra precautions that I don't know about that can be taken for someone for whom yearly scopes are important.
After being diagnosed with colon cancer when I was 26, I'd say start even earlier. Don't settle for "it's probably just hemorrhoid's". That's the reason my kids will start when they are 16.
Does anyone know why I got cancer? No. Does it really matter? Honestly, no.
Just to re-iterate the point: Go through all the screening you can, cancer (of any form) is easer treated when caught early. Or even prevented.
>Go through all the screening you can, cancer (of any form) is easer treated when caught early. Or even prevented.
There's reasons why we don't screen for all cancers all the time - one being that when you are young and healthy the false negative rate and risk of complications of the test are often higher than the chance the test catches something.
Full-fledged biopsies, without any other indication, are exaggerated. A simple colonoscopy isn't. Nor are the other, standard, screening tests. And still most people just don't even use the standard screening options. My personal guess, because people are afraid the screening is finding something. Without the screening, you can happily continue your life in ignorance. Usually, this is regretted if they actually have cancer later, once the cancer is so advanced that actual symptoms manifest.
If you got it at 26, I'd recommend a gene test to see if there is a hereditary factor, and for your kids too.
That is what I have. "Luckily", out of four siblings, I'm the only one that tested positive and therefore the only one in my family that gets checked every year.
I did mention the available screening, didn't I? High risk is much earlier, for sure, and much more frequent. I'm down to one every 5 years now, plus some routine checks every two.
Hemorrhoids, initially. Being rather, young with damn office job, that's the initial diagnosis. Lucky for me, I had a good doctor that started to feel uneasy and insisted on a colonoscopy. All things considered, I think I was lucky!
So were no serious symptoms so, cancer is a sneaky bastard.
In my country we have a national program that screens via a stool sample, no need for colonoscopies unless the test comes back positive. It’s for 60-74 year old who aren’t at high risk of bowl cancer, those with family history still get colonoscopies.
I've had a colonoscopy and yeah: it's a nothing procedure. You're anesthetized for it and there's no recovery period so its just been and done. You also feel great afterwards from the prep medicine (at least I did).
If you have the money, I recommend a bidet toilet seat (which I recommend anyway) before you do the prep for it - makes the whole process a breeze.
I know some gastroenterologists and they take competitive pride in how good they are at scoping patients. Not everywhere does the restricted diet as long as you suggest, but just don't eat bread with little seeds on it. They hate that
You're clearly someone who takes care of yourself, so why watch polyps being snipped from your colon on a tiny screen? Hi, I'm Cologuard. I'm a non-invasive product to detect altered DNA in your stool. I find 92% of colon cancers even in early stages.
This is good advice but that laxative can be a doozy. I was pooping for 12 hours straight. I had to drink several litres of laxative. I'm sure it was squeaky clean inside afterwards.
> Myself I have an unusual genetic condition, so I unlike normal people, I do a colonoscopy every year. I stay awake and watch the monitor, because I actually want to see what I look like inside. At the end when you reach the small intestine, the cilia on the walls inside there are quite fascinating.
Same here, but I stopped watching the monitors; I just watch a movie on my phone; makes it go (much) quicker for me => I hardly notice anything if the movie (or tv show) is good.
To whomever might be curious, the author probably is talking about MUTYH-Associated Polyposis. If you have 2 of the wrong genes, you are very likely to develop colorectal cancer at some point in your life. That's why it's indicated that you test every year.
My sincere admiration for the author's strength in the face of this terrible hardship.
A person can also avoid cancer by choosing a career that is not cancer-inducing. Given the author's cabin crew history:
3.4% of female flight attendants reported having had breast cancer compared with 2.3% of women in the general population group
2.2% of female flight attendants reported having had melanoma skin cancer compared with 0.98% of women in the general population group
1.2% of male flight attendants reported having had melanoma skin cancer compared with 0.69% of men in the general population group
7.4% of female flight attendants reported having had non-melanoma skin cancer compared with 1.8% of women in the general population group
3.2% of male flight attendants reported having had non-melanoma skin cancer compared with 2.9% of men in the general population group
The skin cancer + flight attendant connection has to be due to white people working in the industry. People tend to fly to places with plenty of sun and warm climates. Australia's skin cancer rates are also very high, although not so much among the aboriginal population.
I would imagine it's because of the increased radiation you receive during a flight. For one flight, it's negligible, but if it's your job to be in the stratosphere for 20+ hours a shift, year round, it will probably start to add up. It would be like spending all your work life on the beach.
> It would be like spending all your work life on the beach.
This is where flight attendants spend their non-work life :-)
The radiation from the flight could be a factor of course; but being from Norway myself, and getting burned like a cooked lobster every time I go to Spain etc. I can't imagine that stuff being healthy to do regularly (or perhaps at all).
After some googling I found a few studies that seem to show an increased risk for pilots as well, particularly skin cancer. I think the increased risk of skin cancer is interesting since that would (layman's speculation) probably be the most affected by radiation.
Normal glass has low transmission for UV-B and UV-C, but significant transmission of UV-A. This in combination with high altitudes (so less atmosphere) and also simple thermal heating, could already explain this.
Perhaps aircraft should add an UV-A blocking layer to their windows?
I don't think increased radiation levels would contribute differentially to skin cancer, because we're talking about gamma rays.
It was interesting that reading that abstract, that it didn't cite another possible reason - more regular medical examination. I wouldn't be surprised in such a job, flight attendants might be expected to do regular medicals or have other reasons like needing prescription drugs say for sleep tablets. Having more eyes looking may pop up more incidents.
i'm guilty of the kind of avoidance that negates this. For example, you can't be forced to quarantine if you never get tested for COVID. I wonder if there's an official term for this state of mind, it's a tough habit to break and your life could depend on getting passed it.
But they are not really exposed to the elements while up there. How much aluminium and airplane interior does it take to replace 10.000m of atmosphere?
According to the CDC, a west-east coast flight is about 0.035 mSv per passenger.
The average annual exposure per person in the US would be about 3.3 mSv (without medical radiation from xrays and such)[0], mostly from natural background radiation. There are high regional differences[1], could be as low as 1 mSv or as high as 20 mSv. Human made factors play a role as well, e.g. coal burning (e.g. in power plants) will dose people living close by with radioactive elements in coal ash.
Anyway, a busy crew member can do maybe the equivalent of 100 such flights a year, which would be roughly an additional dose of 3.5 mSv per year.
Their total annual exposure would then come out as double the average (US).
For comparison, an xray can be as low as 0.1 mSv for a chest one, but a whole body PET scan comes in at about 23 mSv.
So I'd conclude that being a flight crew member would of course somewhat increase your radiation-induced health risks, but maybe not as bad as people might think.
Looking at other health factors for crew members, like in-flight air quality, increased exposure to fuel (kerosene) fumes and burn products working in airports and planes, or work/sleep schedules might offer additional/better explanations for the increase in cancer in this group compared to the average population.
[0] the world average is about 2.4 mSv, Germany comes in at 2.2 mSv, Japan 1.5 mSv. Didn't find a good number for India, where the article author lives.
I would also think the exposure to jet exhaust. For me, that smell evokes a nostalgia for picking up grandparents at the airport. It is probably hazardous to work at an airport and breathe it all the time.
It's caused by frequent air travel. While flying, there is less atmospheric shielding against cosmic ray radiation compared to being on the ground. Even though you get less radiation from an average flight than from medical x-ray, it adds up.
Ah I see! What alloy do you think could block the cosmic ray radiation, I though lead was doing that, isn't there enough of it on the paint? Or maybe the windows are letting the radiation in?
The author is from India. India has been experiencing a wave of changes in the face of a growing middle class. The pollution level in every major cities is just abysmal, there is very little regard for quality control - parts of India in the north are basically covered in toxic fogs for a decent part of the year. Add to that an increasing adoption of plastics, recipes involving frying oil in high temperature and western style take out meals, even the wealthy Indians are not leading as healthy of lifestyle as they might think.
Here is an anecdote - growing up we used to have local festivals in the temples where they would distribute meals in banana leaves almost exclusively in all the temples. Fast forward these have been replaced with single usage low grade plastics and cups which when served hot I honestly fear leech plastic into food. The number of cars in any metropolitan cities have exploded - older forms of transportation like rickshaws are almost gone (not that I am saying I condone the poor rickshawalas having to pull weights twice their own but just setting context). Traditional Indian meals involved less frying and using ghee, which has higher smoke temperature compared to soybean which is also very poor quality.
Edit: of course country averages are mildly pointless, since it can strongly vary between different places in that country, so it might be worth to check on the city level
The high values in Sweden (and partly perhaps Finland) was partly(there are also geological reasons) due to a popular popular brand of concrete (called Blue Concrete colloquially) being made with Alum Shale that happened to contain a large amount of Uranium (and thus the radiation/decay will eventually produce Radon gas).
This combined with Sweden being a fairly cold country (with people keeping their windows shut) was a recipe for disaster with the further combined effect of smoking and radon gas leading to quite a few fatalities.
These days multi-family housings are regularly inspected to make sure that Radon gas amounts aren't too high (even if the required limits are fairly high in an international context).
The way I think about cancer: Each and every one of us is playing Russian roulette daily with a revolver with a giant drum with tens of thousands of empty slots and a single bullet. And some people load more bullets in the drum by smoking, drinking, getting sunburned, other risky behavior or just losing the genetic lottery.
At the end of the day, the outcome is still random. You'll still come across chain smokers that live to be 100 and people like Seema in the post, who get cancer despite doing everything "right". It doesn't seem fair - because it isn't, it's random. The best we can do is change the odds, not guarantee the outcome.
At the root of medicine is biochemistry, and at the root of chemistry is quantum physics: the formation and breaking of chemical bonds is at core random events shaped by probabilities. We can only say how likely events are, not which ones will happen when.
Half of cancers in the developed world are due to lifestyle; so how you live has a huge impact in you chances of developing cancer. People often overlook other factors that increase your chances of developing cancer such as obesity, exposure to viruses, immunodeficiency, background radiation etc.
Humans are in quite an unlucky position when it comes to developing cancer, due to our relatively small size and long lifespan. Cancer doesn't affect smaller animals so much, as they generally don't live long enough for it to develop. Larger animals that live long lifespans aren't affected so much, such as elephants and whales.
These ‘X % of cancers are due to lifestyle’ statements are an extrapolation from observational data we know is confounded and are an overestimate for sure. What they mean by ‘lifestyle’ isn’t even consistently defined, and thus has no predictive let alone explanatory power. Just look at the data from animals, they get cancer all the time and they aren’t eating cheerios and binge drinking. Cancer does effect smaller animals just as much [1].
One other major factor people also overlook is genetics - not that you can do anything about it, but if you have cases of cancer in your family, you should probably be extra careful. Plus the obvious things like fair-skinned people needing to be more careful about skin cancer etc.
No, it most definitely isn't. I'm originally from the US, by the way. The midwest, if that helps. Some families will talk about it, others don't, and a lot will pass on talking about it if it was 'no big deal'. So the weird mole? Yeah, you probably didn't hear. You especially didn't hear if it was your cousin. Not everyone will talk about their prostate, especially folks more embarrassed about bodily functions or anuses. A lot of prostate cancer doesn't require treatment, after all, and no reason to talk about it. If your great grandmother had cancer, you probably don't know, especially if she died from a heart attack or stroke. Doubly so if your parents and grandparents are still alive and have not had cancer.
And yes, I've met all sorts of folks like this. I worked in a pharmacy for years.
You just assume everyone will talk about such things.
Ok I see. I’m from Italy and I know what medications my grandfather takes, that my grandma had cryosurgery for a malignant mole, and when my father goes to the proctologist.
Also: families usually go to the same doctor so even if you don’t personally know something, your doctor probably will.
Ah, yeah, definite difference. Even when I was a child, we didn't go to the same doctor as my parents. My parents went to doctors that specialized in adults and wouldn't take patients under 18 - and it has been some time since I lived in the same town as my parents. Heck, it has been nearly a decade since I lived in the same country.
As far as I can tell, the US and Norway are similar - but heck, I'm an immigrant and haven't actually looked into this.
One of my parents died recently due to cancer and I beg to disagree with your statement "It's not a disease that primarily comes from unhealthy living".
Perhaps not that scientifically savvy but this video presentation by a medical doctor does highlight the anomaly of the Middle East population that have significantly least mortality due to cancer, most probably because of their lifestyle and habit.
[1]Why Does the Middle East Have the Lowest Cancer Rates in the World:
Its nice that we have all these distinct populations to give clues to a broader solution, but there is still nothing to emulate, no rubric to follow, just a couple things to help you feel like you’re in slightly more control than you actually are
All these rates of cancer stats per capita are based on detecting the cancer, which we are notoriously bad at. It is either by happenstance or because its too late. We don't know how fast it grows, some practically overnight, some over decades. The delta changes as well. When detection methods get more personalized and better, I think the rates will go up dramatically while also providing the biggest chance at fixing and figuring out real prevention methods.
Yes you are right nothing concrete yet but it's beginning to take shape now regarding the lifestyle and habit as the risk factors for cancer.
For more scientifically savvy research please check this recent video presentation from Dr. Leeper, Professor of Surgery and the Chief of Vascular Medicine at Stanford University. He's a cardiologist and co-founder of two biotechnology companies, 47 Inc. and Bitterroot Bio, that aim to prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease.
[1]What do cancer and heart disease have in common?
Not green spaces, as those do provide significant value to humans, and that value does show up economically too, even though we shouldn't value them primarily in that respect.
It's more about people hoarding lots of land for parking, roads for cars that are unsafe for use by non-car users, and then also vertical space above short buildings that goes unused.
No mention of diet although you hint at it indirectly when you say avoid subburns.
So Copper is used to make melanin the skin pigment which then converts 99.9% of UV radiation into heat. Now if the copper in your diet is going towards the melanin production there is less for Interleukin-2 which helps white blood cells become more accurate. Ironically, people eat more leafy greens (salds) during the summer months when UV levels are highest so there is a seasonal environmental element to factor in as well.
Too much copper though and it will make you paranoid (dopamine-noradrenaline), and the female oestrogen pill (oestrogen) increases or retains more copper in the body which might probably explains some young womens reports of not feeling too brilliant when young and on the pill.
My brother had mild breathing issues and back pain for a really long time. He resisted getting tested until the day his pain got severe enough to call for an ambulance. It turned out to be a giant tumor - large enough to press against nerves and cause back pain. He’s the fittest person I know and we all thought he overdid himself at the gym causing a back issue.
It’s just that everything can be cancer and nothing. Some cancers have obvious symptoms others not so much. Any unexplained and rapid weight loss seems to be the most obvious. I don’t want to look up all the symptoms. Everything from gastric issues, back pains to moles and warts can be due to cancer.
From what I can tell as a non-medical professional, some of the most concerning warning signs are:
- Sudden weight loss (>10-15 pounds without a change in exercise or diet)
- Any kind of recurring pain, especially headaches
- Your poop is messed up
- Blood anywhere - coughing up blood, nosebleeds when you don't usually have them, blood in your poop or urine
- Mood or behavior changes (helpful if you have someone close to you who may notice this)
- Feeling fatigued even when well-rested
- Swelling or lumps anywhere
- Trouble sleeping
Which is a lot of stuff, but fortunately can be summed up as "If you feel consistently worse than you usually do, go see a doctor".
The key is to make your judgement of "I am indeed feeling consistently worse" within a couple of weeks, not a few months or even years while hoping it'll get better on its own. It's harder than it sounds - life is always busy and it's easy to tell yourself that your discomfort is mild and you can hold out a little longer. I waited too long to act on some bad heartburn and my few months of delay were rewarded with permanent damage to my lower esophagus...
when i was in my 20's a drank a lot of dr pepper. I switched to diet dr. pepper just by chance and it stuck as a habit. I lost so much weight so fast i went to the doctor fearing the worst. He did the math in front of me around how much less sugar i was consuming by that switch and it all added up. i was blown away.
For anyone reading with children... My daughter has cancer in her eyes. The only symptom was a barely noticeable squint despite it being very late stage (and then suddenly, dilated pupil and a color change in her pupil). In theory, the other symptom would have been a white reflection in her pupil had we ever taken a flash photo.
Yes it's most probably one of the main risk factors and it's being actively research at the moment. Please check my other comments for the recent video presentation that's based on the state-of-the-art research from a Stanford University Professor regarding the risk factors for cancer and CVDs.
It doesn't take much to realize that no one can answer this. Causes of death get really weird as you go back in time. And it isn't like we can dig up bodies to know since soft tissue isn't usually preserved. We know cancer has been an issue for centuries, though.
We've not been doing colonoscopies nearly as long and we still don't do them to the general population (Even if your country recommends you get them once you reach a certain age: Healthcare is sparse in many areas of the world). This does mean that we really don't know how prevalent it is except in some populations. And even then, we probably don't know since we do not routinely do them to younger folks.
I'm sure there are all sorts of other issues with this, but I'm a layperson and I'm guessing you are too.
When a cancer like this hits, there's a surprising amount of victim-blaming that goes on. People's fear of random events like this make them look for reasons why it hit you but could never happen to them, so they scour your personal choices for any sign of recklessness.
I love that the author of this kicked it off by saying she's the healthiest person she knows. It short-circuits the victim blaming and lets you see it as the unfortunate random event it is.
Thanks for this. I have someone in my family who staunchly believes that if you eat only the "right" foods then you'll never get cancer.
It's sad to me to see this. It is denying reality and it is unnecessarily hostile to those who are already struggling. I have a sister who died of breast cancer in her late 30s. It's a slap to my face for someone to blame her for getting sick and dying.
Each of needs to be able to accept that sometimes bad things happen to us regardless of the choices that make.
It seems that the title claims this person was healthy, but apparently also in a higher-risk occupation. Cannot say how much the occupation influence things, looking at the article probably very little, but I think it's relevant to mention it.
Also she mentioned working primarily in cities. You know, the location on our lovely planet where pollution is highest. It's a rather understated cause when searching for "why I got cancer", but pollution will do changes to your body that are still researched and still much not understood.
Recirculated airplane air isn't healthy. High-stress lifestyle, sleep deprivation, and androgen-boosting exercise while exhausted isn't healthy. (Did she take birth control?)
Radiation exposure due to less atmosphere during high altitude travel causes dna damage and can be a real cancer risk. ESP people that flight often, passengers, flight attendants, pilots, astronauts, etc.
I was diagnosed with lymphoma at 24. While chemo isn’t fun (and if I ever have another lumbar puncture in my life it’ll be too soon), the mental side was much harder than the physical for me.
I needed inpatient treatment, so from probably August until just before Christmas I was mostly in hospital, with the occasional week or two break. By the end I was having people bring me McDonald’s most days, because the idea of another bland hospital meal was incredibly depressing—which sounds silly writing it out, but it really started getting to me.
Interrupted sleep and reduced privacy on the ward starts to wear you down too—the times where my immune system was as its lowest and I was moved to private side rooms were actually a big improvement for me, it got lonely but being able to put some music on and having my own bathroom helped a lot.
Not sure what my point was with this but 0/10 would not recommend.
Hey, I never had that significant of an experience but I spent some weeks in the hospital myself in my 20s-early 30s and I can relate at least somewhat. It does get depressing. For me it was being next to someone in chronic pain crying out for hours every day and that's all you're around the entire time, in addition to the lack of sleep. The food thing doesn't sound silly at all to me. Hospitals are a depressing place after a while.
Anyway thanks for sharing and I hope you're recovered.
Cruel to make people recovering from illnesses share rooms with other people. Improved recovery rates from better facilities would probably outweigh their costs..
In our modern societies there are lots of cancer risk involved that (most) people can not see.
For example using a microwave with microscopic cracks in the glass and staying nearby. All the diesel particles and exhaust car fumes and tire dust in the cities. The terrible air quality near maritime ports because of the bad quality ships do with ultra cheap fuels.
The extermination of gut microbiota with the use of pesticides and the use of artificial sweeteners.
Genetically engineered food that is flooded in pesticides(engineered so the plant can withstand them).
The excess use of liquid oils and refined sugars that were never consumed by humans and that are correlated with cancer and cardiovascular disease.
The excess use of the fridge and premade foods making essential nutrients go away as the food freezes, so you eat but starve.
Contraceptive pills that are hormone bombs in your body.
Chemical products like benzene that industries like energy extraction's leak on aquifers and Perfluorooctanoic acid you could generate just burning a teflon pan you forget to put oil or butter in(or using the 3d printer with exotic materials).
All of those risk can be extreme but most people just can't see it. I have seen people burn out a teflon pan and not understand that they have to trow it away immediately. I have seen people handling benzene like water.
You can believe that you are eating healthy because you eat lots of vegetables but if those are flooded in pesticides, then it is not so healthy.
I too am curious - if I had to speculate, maybe the crack is a high surface area for microwave scattering which means the rays escape the device so is an irradiation hazard?
EDIT wavelength of microwaves is 1mm so could also be efficient diffraction
Long time since I've had to think about these things...
Unsure...
Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, it does not pose a cancer risk in the same sense that X-rays or UV light does. A quick DDG search found one article that matches GPs claim, but had zero citations and did not support any of its claims. I don’t know about the other claims, but the microwave cancer risk doesn’t make sense to me.
> using a microwave with microscopic cracks in the glass and staying nearby
No, this is false. Microwave are non-ionizing radiation, and microscopic cracks in the glass won't do anything. Maybe large cracks in the metal mesh under the glass would allow a bit of micro waves to come off, which you might be able to feel as heat would be transferred, but since this is non-ionizing, it would be exactly the same thing as your hear heating up if you stay on a cell-phone for a long time. Just heat.
(For example freezing can destroy cells and tissue, but how can it destroy molecules? Microwaves are non-ionizing so how can they give you cancer? Plus someone already mentioned that it's the metal mesh behind the glass - a Faraday cage - that keeps the microwaves inside.)
yes, people think they are living healthy lifestyle for example if you eat fish thinking it's healthy but you may not know that fish has micro plastics inside it's flesh from the polluted ocean/seas that eventually goes inside human body.
Do you have any research papers linking microplastics in fish with certain cancers, and how/why is microplastic in fish is more harmful than... All other microplastic we i gest?
If you want to blame fish for ill health, you could do more than citing microplastics. Fish (especially in the oceans) tend to accumulate heavy metals like mercury. The risks from that are far higher than a tiny amount of microplastics.
We can added cosmetics/deodorants/etc and cleaning products to the list, fire retardants, micro plastics, radio waves (perhaps?), and the list goes on. Every one of them is a potential hazard.
Where it gets even worse is that these potentially carcinogenic toxics are hardly tested individually for their long-term effects, let alone in combinations. And unfortunately, the few biotoxicology studies that have been done show that mixes are dangerous at concentrations 1 to 2 orders of magnitudes lower than the different items taken individually..
That was a reasonably good summary. In general suspect anything that is foreign in nature( eg. plastics) to be harmful. The bar to deem them safe must be really high. Of course everything natural need not be safe either ( example green potatoes)
One important thing to add: Vegetables are not the super food that they are made out to be, and red meat isn't a carcinogen, It's the opposite. Good quality red meat is one of the superfoods and vegetables must be carefully chosen/cooked to negate their bad effect.
There is absolutely zero correlation between microwave radiation at 2.45GHz and cancer. The photon energy levels are multiple order of magnitude lower than the energy levels required to disrupt DNA links or any other chemical bond.
While I personally have doubts about this microwave "cracked glass" concept being implicated in cancer--if anything I'd be more concerned about the effects of eating stuff that came out of the microwave for various reasons--we know that "non-ionizing radiation" is not the same thing as "can't cause cancer": it only means it can't directly damage DNA, but has been shown to be able to re-fold DNA or indirectly lead to oxidative stress via localized vibration and heat.
As usual correlation don't imply causation. My uncle was a professional national level runner, he was the healtier person that I know: he ran several kilometers every day, ate correctly, no drinking, no smoking, sleep at least 8 hours/day, etc.
He died from cardiovascular problems.
This not means that a correct and healty lifestyle is not going to reduce the risk, but it's not the only factor.
A significantly higher rate of coronary artery calcification existed in long-term marathon, ultramarathon, and extreme runners than in submarathon runners. Marathoners and ultramarathoners also had a higher incidence of calcification, as well as higher average plaque burden, as compared to a standard database. Marathoners and ultramarathoners also had above-average coronary calcium scores as compared to a national database.
Other forms of endurance exercise (swimming, cycling) have similar effects if taken to excess . Sprinting short distances is great, and walking seems to have no upperbound on how much you can safely do of it (the Hadza do it all day and have childlike levels of LDL and minimal CAC).
There is a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia. People who eat normal, balanced diets have LDLs levels in the 1000's (normal is less than 100). You can take a blood sample and watch the fat float to the top like cream in fresh milk.
They often die of cardiovascular disease when young. And it's just a genetic defect.
FH does not seem all that well understood. It runs in my spouse's family, multiple clinical/genetic diagnoses, but no history of cardiovascular disease. Doctors haven't been convinced whether intervening with statins is necessarily justified, especially in the face of any side effects.
My family on the other hand, generally normal bloodwork, normal BMI/fitness levels, and everyone dies of heart disease fairly young. At least it's one way to avoid cancer.
The former captain of the Indian cricket team, Sourav Ganguly, recently suffered a heart attack while he was exercising. He was lucky that he was able to get prompt medical attention and recovered. But he was a fit professional athlete who was used to exercise from a young age and even he suffered from cardiac problems.
I had a heart attack last year whilst swimming and at only 39 despite swimming five times a week and having no obvious underlying issues. It feels profoundly unfair!
No I have zero chronic conditions, no auto-immune disorders that might cause issues with clotting, family history and so on. Basically from a root cause perspective it's unexplained.
So sorry to hear that. Did you experience any warning signs before, like mild chest pains, palpitations, or shortness of breath, that day or in the weeks prior? Also, were you pushing yourself on that day compared to other days of your week, or did it just come out of nowhere at an average pace day?
Sad to see you being downvoted like this, but I wanted to know the same thing you asked.
It seems people are really sure that exercising a lot and not eating meat or whatever is the healthiest thing one can do, for weight and health reasons... But evidence says the complete opposite, most of the time.
People are so fascinated about the idea that exercise and certain foods are so good, that they don't even bother to check the studies and the evidence, they just know it's true for some reason. It doesn't matter that everyone you know is going to a gym or running (a million more times than, say, 50 years ago) and yet the populations are only getting more obese by the minute. Or how athletes are dying young and have many health issues everywhere... Or that indigenous people don't even hunt or do nothing at all for a week (between each hunting trip), and yet they are so thin and don't have cancer.
In other words, no one really knows yet if running several kilometers every day is good for you, or if it's actually killing you. And no one knows yet what exactly is "to eat correctly", though I'm pretty sure all the stuff we've read in those paid studies made in the last 100 years are just absolute garbage.
Yeah, thanks for that link. That's exactly the kind of garbage I was talking about.
They just take information out of (food-industry-sponsored) horrible studies, or just repeat the same old stuff they've been repeating since those first studies were published. That page even has the obligatory "stay active" in a "what to eat" recommendation. Five-star stuff.
No wonder we've all become obese since these studies and articles started to pop up...
People seem to hate it when you point things out like this. Had a guy in another thread become livid when I said I don't eat modern foods. You pretty much can't trust any nutritional study, and so as far as I'm concerned, eating like an antemodern hunter gatherer is as good as anything else.
I'm not sure what young athletes could do to be healthier; I imagine most of their issues are environmental. I personally err on the side of preindustrial when any question of lifestyle comes up, but who knows.
Definition of "junk food" also varies a lot. For example, many people have no idea that white bread has a higher glycemic index than sugar itself. So except for the very limited nutritional value of it, it's actually worse than just eating spoons full of sugar. So it passes the definition of "junk food", because hey it's not processed, and it's done in a bakery, traditional right? (not saying it's your case - in general) even though it's as junkier as it gets.
It's possible some people do actually eat healthy and still get very unlucky. But I bet a lot of what many consider healthy isn't. Also, we don't know what we don't know. People didn't know about lead poisoning was a problem until they did. I wonder how many unhealhty stuff we do/consume that passes totally invisible in front of our eyes. The type of things future generations will look back and say "no wonder those people were dying so young of cardiovascular diseases and cancer they were doing X! And get this, they even thought it was healthy/they didn't even know about it!"
I know someone going through cancer treatment right now. They got some bad news a few weeks ago. Now they are taking two weeks off. They are very private about their issues, so I wasn’t sure what was happening. This article made me realize they are going through chemo and what that means. I hope it helps me be more accommodating.
Her husband is a billionaire and she has access to some of the best healthcare out there. Not that many people from India get a mamogram on a regular basis. So her husband's wealth must have helped her with the screening that helped her to diagnose breast cancer at an early stage.
Her husband being a billionaire is besides the point.
Your conclusion doesn't follow your premise. It's at best a speculation.
Do you think only billionaires in India get diagnosed with cancer, and the remaining cases go undiagnosed?
Both billionaires and non-billionares in India get diagnosed with cancer at an early stage. Sure, plenty go undiagnosed as well, and there are plenty of late diagnosis as well.
(The final outcome in the end is a different question though).
The idea is that as her husband is a billionaire, she had access to better healthcare and more likely to undergo screening. I know many breast cancer patients from India and almost none of them underwent regular screening, and as a result all of them caught the disease as it had progressed a lot more than the case of Seema. As she had access to regular screening, and got diagnosed at a earlier stage, her prognosis was a lot better than for the average upper class Indian with access to quality medical insurance. You must also consider the fact that most medical insurance in India dont cover breast cancer screening.
I don’t see many articles about a homeless guy with cancer making the front page of HN. You’re right it doesn’t change the article, but knowing the context helps us understand how we ended up reading it. And then helps us question the truth of the article.
If they are in the US, the homeless guy is more likely to simply die instead of being able to get treatment. The homeless guy couldn't have gotten a preventative scan to catch it, after all, and even if he felt it, what would he do about it?
Poverty - or lack thereof - changes the story itself because not everywhere cares about its people.
Exactly, who cares who's wife she is. Steve Jobs was one of the richest in the world but still died of cancer fairly young unfortunately. It's a deadly disease that affects millions every year and unfortunate thing is that we still don't have a guaranteed cure.
Not many. Also awareness is extremely low. Couple it with low income, extremely low number of hospitals and doctors. And when you move away from metros the number decreases from less to close to zero and most of the non metro hospital/clinics are essentially scam shops. Eventually you’d just want to not even consider all this and just settle for really bad.
So many interesting comments around defining a healthy lifestyle. We often look at health in general terms - i.e. how things work on average. This works really well to find generic risk factors, like smoking, excessive drinking, pollution, etc. These things are bad for everyone.
Our bodies are super complex and there is huge variability between individuals. We label certain foods with specific as good and bad, but we know that there is large individual variability in the glycemic response to the same foods. So how can we know if we are eating healthy? I think future of health will need to be more individualized - I need to figure out what is healthy for me, and it's likely to be different for you.
I know there are a wide range of products that try to help with this from DNA testing to glucose monitoring. A lot isn't really viable for the masses due to various factors like price, more research needed, etc. But it makes sense to me that if we better understand our individual bodies and take action that we can reduce (but probably not eliminate) certain risks - like cancer, dementia, etc.
She mentions a diet rich in Protein. Even Supplements like Whey Protein Shakes. I wonder how that extra growth fuel contributes to cancer cell growth.
At the very instance kf cell division, there is a small chance of the cell going 'rogue', becoming a cancer cell. In all of our bodies, all of the time. Thankfully the chance is pretty slim, but when I train a lot and eat a lot of protein, then I will have a much higher frequency of cell division.
It's what I always wonder when I drink my whey protein after workout, being almost 40. Can my body handle all the growth right?
Protein shakes and workouts wouldn't lead to a higher rate of cell division in the breast, would it? Those cells just go through their natural turnover, influenced mostly by estrogen (which actually has been suspected to play a role in causing breast cancer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17113977/ )
If anything, you'd expect cancer of the muscle, myosarcoma, to be involved with muscle growth, which thankfully is really rare. Possibly because muscle growth is mostly a matter of hypertrophy of the muscle fibers, not the growth of more muscle cells.
I'd be surprised if the very real health benefits of staying active didn't way outweigh the possibly increased risk of cancer due to increased cell activity.
David Sinclair is right about mTor and IGF-1 but i find him to be really untrustworthy.
he has so much riding on Resveratrol and has put so much into videos, books, gotten grants and so forth, that when studies came out proving Resveratrol isn't the miracle substance he (and many others) purported it to be, he basically just started doubling down and refusing to engage with other scientists calling him out on it.
if you have some time here's a good break down of what's transpired as it's escalated into a bit of social media drama:
David Sinclair also will site highly biased sources if they re-affirm his existing premise. For example, he's been increasingly vegetarian and vegan over the years (and hey - they're good evidence backing up that less meat is mostly a positive).
But he'll site things like Adventist studies on a regular basis.
These studies are shit b/c they're observational
But they're shit moreso because Adventists are vegetarian as a matter of religious faith.
That's their whole angle. They're not going to produce anything that contradicts that worldview.
In fact, Adventists are founders of companies like Kellogs and they're responsible for peddling bad science for decades, like the Ancel keys Seven Nations study that left out countries to make up a bullshit conclusion about Saturated Fats that simplly didn't exist in the data.
This has shaped national nutrition policy and advice for decades. All so they can keep pumping processed products and PUFA's to the public to enrich corporations founded on their religious values.
So to site them, when they aren't doing hard science and trying to use your credentials as a scientist to validate it.. is just bullshit.
Sinclair gets a lot of stuff right but i wouldn't trust him as far as you could throw him.
he doesn't have an alliance to facts anymore. he has his self-interest and his worldview and everything else has to conform to it.
That's a pretty outdated view of him. I've seen him admit resveratrol was thematically the right idea, but admittedly not as revolutionary as hoped. Lately he's been more interested in sirtuins, NMN and the like as ways of dealing with the 4 yamanaka factors etc.
I highly recommend his youtube channel where he puts it into pretty easily consumable content
> "All the money in the world can’t buy you perfect health, and it is crazy how many just ignore it. Small changes to diet and physical activity can go a long way in improving health."
This is so confusing for me, with the sense of helplessness, so she saying small change to diet or physical activity, and that she was healthiest person in world but still got sick, so what is the point than ?!
I mean you can do everything and still get sick, and some people drink, smoke eat junk food and never get sick, so what gives?
I mean more or less it looks like lottery with different probabilities, you can do all good and still pull unlucky card, or you do all bad and you still have health lucky card.
I guess, for me most depressing is how little we know about the cancer and things that causing it...
The point is that you have a lot of influence over outcomes. There are mountains of evidence to support that fact, with comparatively easy and accessible interventions ranging from abstaining from smoking, to eating healthy food, to getting exercise. As with everything else in life, though, what you are doing by living healthily is turning the probabilities in your favor. That means that someone with unlucky genetic predispositions, or with an undiagnosed infection/deficiency/toxin exposure etc, might develop cancer despite doing everything in their power to avoid it, while a lucky bon-vivant smoker/drinker/junk foodie might just roll those dice favorably enough times to die of other causes. The point is that you should live your life based on the expected outcome of your actions, rather than on specific example cases, which may be outliers not representative of what you might expect if you follow their lead.
May be we have to look at this using the low of diminishing returns. At some point optimising your "healthy life-style" won't yield significant reduction in probability of getting sick. But on the other hand very unhealthy life-style will yield sickness with very high probability. I guess a good balance would be to allow yourself a "treat" from time to time, but generally avoid things which are well-known to cause health problems like smoking for example. Also remind yourself not to go over-board with the "healthy life-style".
I guess being healthy isn't just about disease but wellbeing. You could drink/smoke/eat fast-food/never exercise and live till your 90 but you might feel shit every morning.
People think they're healthy bc they're doing what fitness gurus or "smart sounding" pro-PUFA types like you see a round here on HackerNews all the time, say.
Want to prevent cancer?
Fast on a regular basis.
Eat Nrf-2 activators (cruciferous veggies) , drink green tea, make tumeric a staple, a diet heavy in fruits and veggies should be the staple of your diet.
And keep inflmattory omega6s low in your diet.
But the biggest thing is fasting to keep mtor/igf-1 unactivated
I'll pile on the pieces i've gathered from various sources (will just list names, we can google/youtube them). I'm extremely unqualified to give medical advice, but it's the path I'm personally following.
Expose yourself to heat shock[1] or cold shock[2] to increase memetics and sirtuins
Give your body a chance to clean up after mTor & IGF -- have low protein days (~ <50g), consider metformin for off label usage and affect on blood sugar (else keep blood sugar from spiking), exercise but not too much there is a dose dependent amount that stimulates health but more is just wear and tear + anabolic growth factors.
[1] - peter attia on sauna usage
[2] - wim hoff on cold exposure (i dont care for his breathing stuff, personally)
1. Fast semi-regularly. I, personally, do an 18/6, 5 days a week. I do a 48-72 hour fast once a month. I drink things that spur on autophagy (green tea, black coffee, cinnamon) especially while in my fasting window. I, also, tend to exercise while fasted.
2. Protein at 0.5g per kg for weight for lifespan, 1g of protein per kg for healthspan. I waffle between the two. I probably exceed 1g some days. Between #1 and #2, I hope i'm giving my body a rest from mTor/IGF-1 activation. If i feel i had a lot one day, i just auto-correct over the next 2-3 days and have a low amount of protein.
3. Keep drinking to a minimum. I keep it to Fri/Sat and special occasions. No more than 3 drinks but usually less. I try to stay to low sugar, low alcohol low sulfate, red wines. I probably shouldn't do this at all but if i am, i do it in the least-bad way possible.
4. Eat tons of NRF2 activators. Mainly broccoli sprouts ( i grow my own) but also kale, brussel sprouts, watercress (for the sulphorophane). But other NRF2 activators too - such as tumeric. I'll buy maluka honey once in a while but frankly it's not worth it for what you pay for how little it activates NRF2.
5. Eat things that lower blood pressure: flax seeds, garlic, beets (in moderation and when paired with calcium to offset oxylates), celery, natto, hibiscus tea.
6. Get enough VitaminD (15-20 min of sun exposure a day when possible, or 2000-4000 IU in supplements), and Vitamink K2 - i get this from eating natto. This all helps build a healthy immune system and ensure calcium is going where it should (bones/teeth) as opposed to where it shouldn't (arteries, brain, kidney, heart)
7. Avoid and minimize exposure to seed oils. No canola, corn, safflow, rapeseed, cottonseed, soybean, peanut or other high omega6 oils. I stick to Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Butter, Ghee, beef tallow or duck fat. If i feel like spending a lot of money, I'll buy macademia nut oil (high MUFA, low PUFA, high spoke point). I will consume avocado oil in Primal Kitchen products, but I still think it's too high in PUFA's.
8.. Stay low in meat high in omega6s (due to changes in feed). So wings become a rarity. I stick to chicken with fat and skin trimmed off. Grass fed beef. Pasture-raised/cage-free eggs. Pork is a rare event.
9. Eat things high in probiotics. Natto for the win here again. Yogurt (milk or coconut based), kraut, kimchi, pickles, kevita, keifer, sometime kombucha.
10. Make sure you're getting tons of catcheins, spermidine (peas, mushrooms, wheat germ), Anthocyanins (blueberries, acai), Polyphenols (olive oil, red wine, 95-100% dark chocolate), Isothiocyanates (cruciferous veggies, moringa), antioxidants and other phyto-nutrients, which means staying pretty plant based. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, arugula, purple cabbage, carrots, radishes, the odd citrus fruit, the odd round of cherries, etc. If you're getting all of the above, then chances are high you're getting enough of the more essential vitamins and minerals.
11. Keep sugar low. This means keep sweets to a minimum. I don't add sugar to anything at all. I don't eat cookies, chips, cakes, candy, pies, ice cream, etc. (unless it's a rare treat). On this note i also keep rice, bread, cereal, and even most starchy veggies like potatoes and sweet potatoes to a minimum. I don't have a hard rule against them but after doing keto for 6 months, 2 years ago, i don't find avoiding them to be difficult.. I almost never have pasta of any kind. I use alternative noodles (palmini, zuchini, konjak)
12. Put lemon in your water (vit c and citrate to help avoid kidney stones).
13. Avoid high oxylate food - spinach, almonds/almond-flour. I make an exception for beets in moderation. When i eat oxylates i always pair with calcium.
14. I try to eat meat only 4 times a week, but i'm not the only person in my house and dinner is about family for us.. so i probably do it 5x a week
15. Don't go out to eat often. I violate this one too much.
16. Exercise 6 days a week. I do 3 days of cardio (5k+) and 3 days of lifting.
17. Daily Sauna (or hot bath).
18. Cold Shower once a week. The more i read here the more I feel cold exposure is really more about breath work and the benefits of it than cold stimulating proteins in the same fashion or the level of effectiveness that say a sauna would. Wim Hof's twin brother doesn't do any of the cold exposure stuff and he has the same amount of "brown fat" as Wim. Either way, i find it mentally healthier and i sleep better the nights i do this.
19. Take fish-oil 4x a week. Stay under 2G. Eat salmon 1-2x a week. I sprinkle Cilantro on any fish i cook b/c it's a heavy metal chelator.
20. Sleep on a schedule with little exception. To enhance my sleep, i do not eat anything beyond 6-7pm.
21. Eat things that lower uric acid - low fat dairy (again, i waffle on this), cherries, celery, celery seed (as a seasoning).
22. Don't add salt to anything. Buy low-sodium versions of things when there's the option.
I struggle to get into meditation and I struggle with spirituality - both I know are strongly correlated to health. But I'm working on it.
1. A healthy diet and activity cannot prevent illness entirely
2. She would possibly have handled the illness not as good, if she was eating junk and out of shape.
Short takeaway: we cannot influence everything about us, but we can influence activity and diet, and it does have a measurable impact on our health.
I recall a study that estimated ~2/3rds of all cancers are due to uncontrollable factors outside of lifestyle choices - genetics, random mutations, etc.
Apparently she worked for years as cabin crew. Cabin crew do get subjected to more mutating cosmic radiation than other people.
Some routes are worse than others of course: the worst are the ones over the North Pole (Europe-Alaska or Europe-Japan/Korea/Beijing) where the Earth's protecting magnetic field is weaker. I've been told that one such flight provides a dosage about equivalent to that of a CT-scan. Imagine doing that every day.
That's me and my experience with testicular cancer. No known causes, no family history, no risk factors other than being a white male. I was even outside the typical age range.
Sometimes life just kicks you in the nuts. Literally in my case :-)
Did you perform monthly self-exams? My doctor gets onto me for not doing them, but everything on those lumpy bastards feels like cancer. I don’t know what I am doing. I suppose if I’d felt a few pair that did have issues, I would know what to look for, but short of going on Craigslist, that’s not going to happen.
Anyhow, I sincerely hope your issue is just an “oh yeah. that happened” that you tell whippersnappers about when in your 80s.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm hopefully on the other side of it now having gone through it about 1.5 years ago. Smack in the middle of the original COVID peak, which made the situation all the more fun. I'm in what they call "careful observation" or "surveillance" now - blood work every 3 months, CT scan every 6. So far, so good!
I did perform the monthly self-exams, and that is how I was lucky to have caught it so early. I had a similar feeling about "how am I going to feel a lump on this thing" for years, but when the time came it was a combination of feeling what I thought was a lump but feeling what I KNEW was a difference.
The trick is in doing the exam enough times to know the lay of the land well. Then it becomes an exercise in detecting a difference, rather than a specific bump.
A decent plan of attack might be to start with your next physical/yearly visit. The doctor should check them out, so take that opportunity to ask any questions or even ask for a walkthrough on how to do it yourself. At that point you know you're "good", so anything you are feeling is just how yours are. Then just practice the exam and build your mental map.
For what it's worth, most of the lumps we think we feel tend to be the epididymis which is at the top and can run down the back of the testicle. Also, the cords can get in the way sometimes. We've got some space down there, take advantage of it to shift things around to get a different angle!
We're on HN, so I hope to pull on technicality and not get _completely_ bashed ;-)
OP mentioned (and I didn't check) that 2/3 of incidents are non-controllable, and not that we can't control 2/3 of causes, that's completely different. I'm going to naïvely assume that it's much harder to have a clean slate (no meat, no pollution etc., healthy lifestyle etc.) than to live in carcinogenic to some degree environment.
As a thought exercise I'm assuming (completely sucked out of the finger) numbers in which 95% of population lives in carcinogenic environment and 5% has a clean slate. 2/3 cases being uncontrolled in such heavily swayed population would pretty much make any control pointless. If I remember correctly there's a method for calculating this, but I long forgot it. For comparison regarding chance perception "casino always wins" relates to a 1-5% house edge on games, and here we're talking about potential 33.3%.
Current knowledge is that human body consist of dozens trillions of cells which regenerate on variable rate (some couple days, some couple years). There's quite a lot of times where chance can go sideways and spawn something you don't want.
Those numbers are completely offtopic and without any base whatsoever (and once again, I didn't verify OPs claims). Spiraled on numbers :)
yes, but much of it may be out of your control. See earlier post on air pollution, likewise water pollution, and add any number of other environmental impacts. Some of which you can mitigate through personal choice, but there is also a case that these are societal problems which need societal/institutional solutions.
Even things that people don't usually associate with cancer have an impact, such as alcohol consumption, medication, oxidative stress caused by diet etc...
I suspect that she'll do fine, but she's quite young, to have gotten it. When you are young, they tend to treat it quite aggressively.
I live on Long Island, NY (AKA "Cancer Central"). Before I moved up here, I had never known anyone that has had cancer.
The last 30 years (since moving up here), I have had at least one friend/acquaintance a year, that has dealt with some form of cancer. Most have survived; a few have not. I have one chap that just got done with the "Uncle Fester" routine. It looks like he'll be OK. I know of at least three other women that are dealing with breast cancer, right now.
Long Island is a big fat Superfund site. It became an industrial site during WWII, and pretty much had no environmental controls. I suspect that continued for a long time, afterwards.
The plus side, is that we have the best cancer treatment centers in the world, here.
I remember reading once that if humans didn’t die of old age, on average something like 99% of all people would get cancer by the time they were ~2,000 years old.
That's a very promising statistic! I'd have also believed it if the 99% mark was pinned around ~200 years old instead of ~2000. As a sort of hard cap on longevity, 2000 is quite a decent lifespan :-)
I have no proof to offer, exceptthe report of a video I did watch myself. In 1974 a Dr made a study on animal protein and cancer. In mice test subject in a laboratory he found cancer cells in the mice needed animal protein as food to survive and grow. Versus plant protein as food which they did not grow. I have looked for this study to no avail. I am a vegan now. This is my only post here, as I only read. The ladies story compelled me to share whether it was received or not. I fully believe the government would never let a cure be known unless it was pills and expensive. Good luck. All cancer Dr's put you on a high protein diet of animal flesh. Maybe not all but it is recognized as a path forward.
I think healthy/unhealthy is not just about "very healthy diet, good fitness routine, good sleep, low stress, and no other health issues"
It's actually also about regularly stressing your body with things like cold/hot exposure (using natural elements/seasons), for example a pragmatic daily fitness (for example commuting with a bike) instead of a more 'artificial' fitness in a gym, an organic diet foraged yourself (with enough knowledge of course) instead of bought from shops, getting sometimes sick and recovering, reinforcing immunity
This all seems like bad advice stemming from some naturalistic fallacy.
>a pragmatic daily fitness (for example commuting with a bike) instead of a more 'artificial' fitness
For example this just seems random. Driving a bike is not even more natural (were there bikes in the EEA) and if anything will just expose you to more polluted air, and increase your risk of dying by a car crash compared to gym alternatives. This doesn't mean biking is bad compared to not doing anything but that's not the claim here.
sure, but most people would use cars for commuting to different places, including their indoor gym, and the other idea is practical working out (commuting is your working out)
These are really interesting maps, but I'm missing a few important data points.
For the cancer one, I feel like it's misleading. E.g. Russia and Central Africa might be low in cancer because of their low life expectancy, and Central Africa additionally because of its majority black population (which I assume to be less prone to skin cancer). As a white person, I believe it would be a mistake to move to Central Africa expecting to reduce one's skin cancer risk, as evidenced by the high skin cancer rates of white people in South Africa or Australia. So for that map it would be great to be able to filter it by age group and ethnicity.
The disability-adjusted life years (DALY) one seems much more useful. What stands out there is how much healthier people are on average in Western Europe compared to the U.S. Perhaps that is in part because of the more egalitarian societies and health care systems in European countries, which greatly improve the health of the less well-off. I wonder if that comes at the cost of the better-off, i.e. if say the top 10% in the U.S. are actually healthier in the U.S. than in Europe. It would be interesting to be able to filter by income level.
> the more egalitarian societies and health care systems
As someone from Romania, I believe that is true. But since joining the EU, we've also seen changes in food laws, which have a large impact on health.
For example, recently it became mandatory to label citrus fruit when it was treated with preservatives, to know whether the peel is edible. People used to consume the peel regardless; now more people are aware.
There is also an important difference between "flavorings" and "natural flavorings". For instance, artificial butter flavoring causes "popcorn lung".
Your last paragraph goes off the rails a bit, the diacetyl in ordinary butter is no better for your lungs than its synthetic equivalent. If there's a difference it's the amount of exposure, not whether the identical molecule comes from in vitro synthesis rather than in vivo.
I figure some of those light coloured countries have more people simply not getting a diagnosis. Additionally going to central africa as a white person might increase your chance of skincancer enough to offset any reduced of other cancers.
It's probably better to just go to where people live the longest and adjust to the local diet/rythm, etc
You can take it as far as you want to—and then you can still get cancer. A healthy lifestyle helps put the odds in your favour, but is no guarantee whatsoever.
One can put oneself in a low risk population by making healthy choices, but that population still has a probability of getting cancer associated with it. The risk can be inherent (you can be very healthy but with brca mutations a women will have something like an 85% probability of having breast cancer by age 45 I believe). You may also live near a gen-x dumping factory and not be aware of it, and then there is just the dumb bad luck of having errors during DNA replication and subsequently in the DNA repair mechanisms.
I looked into this revently, from what I can tell, no study could show a reduction in deaths from doing mammograms. This is because they detect many cancers that would go away on their own thus unnecessarily exposing you to chemotherapy which brings other health risks. A good starting point on this topic is this video: https://youtu.be/_sg14En-Z7A (I was doubtful at first, but everything he says is backed up by studies)
> I have been getting a full-body health check-up done regularly for many years.
I’m curious how this works in other countries, because in mine doctors don’t really do “full body checkups”. You’d might get a few specific tests if you knew what to ask for, but doctors really do not do any kind of regular comprehensive exams sufficient to detect early cancer like this. If you insisted, you’re likely to just be treated like a hypochondriac unfortunately.
Whatever healthy living for a young Indian middle class woman may be, breast cancer is correlated to multiple factors to varying degrees.
But a lot of those women suffering from breast cancer have to die because it is still underdiagnosed in India.
And that has probably more to do with culture, social characteristics, and the socioeconomics of India.
What always amazes me is the surprise of people who think that they can never get hit, because they have done everything 'right'.
Just like people who don't realize how lucky they were to have been born in a certain place at a certain time.
Intermittent fasting has been proven to significantly lower the risk of breast cancer in particular. There was a landmark study less than 2 years ago that hit the top page of HN.
"Intermittent fasting once a week for 4 seeks cuts risk of breast cancer by ~40% "
The jury is still deliberating whether it also lowers the risk of other forms of cancer.
"Healthiest" is very subjective. For example, people still believe low-fat diets are healthier and that saturated fats are evil and PUFAs are not (although people like Ray Peat call them "toxic at any dosage"). Excessive exercise is another proof that toxicity is all about the dose - because a sedentary lifestyle is possibly unhealthy, people wrongly conclude that working the hell out is any better.
Also, the environment does a huge toll - you can have the healthiest lifestyle in Los Angeles, but you still inhale one of the most polluted air. Also, you drive a new car, which intoxicates you, and reverses your lifestyle efforts manyfold!
Many consider eating kale to be healthy... and they drink kale juice, eat raw kale, not realizing how goitrogenic kale actually is.
So, when I hear "I live a healthy lifestyle", I really interpret it usually as "I suffer from orthorexia".
I work in the healthcare sector and the good news is that the standard of care amongst cancer patients continues to go up. There is a lot of time, money, and brain power that goes into this every year. It's one of the few things that people around me agree is terrible no matter your background/political affiliation and I am excited to see its advancements in the years to come.
That said, some people do get unlucky and get it early, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't take care of yourself. Living a healthier lifestyle reduces your risk not just of cancer, but other health concerns as well, and also improves your recovery times when you do get sick. But make no mistake, even if humans lived 1000 years and had no other illnesses, Cancer could still happen. Just the free radicals in the oxygen you breath is enough given enough time
I have read a lot of comments about reducing risks, which is a reasonable and practical approach. But given than almost all of us are going to die of one health condition or another, I think it is reasonable to budget and architect our society around/against that fact. Like, having a medical research tax apart from ordinary income tax, and of course with different accounting and governance.
And it is not about funding healthcare (which is what politicians talk about in their speeches), but about funding medical research, which is a different matter altogether. A country can have universal healthcare and zero medical research, for example. Then again, I think that this distinction would be lost on most people.
Whats the heathy diet she refers to?
Sugar intake?
Carb intake ?
She seems in physically great shape but has this been attained by eating food all day, not giving the body time to rest. Would time restricted eating have helped?
All bodies are different, but having tried various diets over the years , fasting or time restricted eating seems to give me the best benefits, I look at lot younger than my age(45).
I see a lot of long distance athletes in my own country(Ireland) the same age as myself that look aged, is this because of the copious amounts of high carb food that they eat to sustain their energy. Also have seen a lot of cases of heart attacks recently in these so called fit people. Sorry a bit blunt there
But there are a lot reasons (it is bad news but it is the science):
- you are living in a country (or place in your country) with enviroment that it increases the % cancer. I don't talk about the human or no-natural things, I am talking about the natural things such as radon gas from granite...
- some cancers are from a tiny bug in the code our DNA (sometimes the code bug is from a infection of virus)
And at the moment you can check all the things (the science are working to find or clear more of them...but it is the far future or near) that they begins a cancer.
From a personal perspective, I feel that opening sentence.
Genetics has had me have high blood pressure since I was 25, left handed, prostate, lung cancer in family.
I put effort into low salt diets, exercise, monitoring, some small drugs, yet I know a lot of people who are significantly less healthy will outlive me. From time to time - I feel the pang of bitterness at that notion.
It is 100% recognized, my overall disposition in life is _extremely_ privileged. It's still a feeling nonetheless.
If it makes you feel any better, the study that claimed that left-handed people have a much shorter life expectancy has been debunked: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988352. Left handed myself...
That sucks but I wouldn't beat myself up over a diagnosis over something like that. It's largely genetic.
My dad is a Vietnam vet in his 70s who drinks, smokes, and has way too much coffee. And he's fought 2 tours in Vietnam, 3 bouts of cancer, and a whole other host of issues.
Some people can't be killed. Others get cancer in their 20s. You do the best that you can and try not to beat yourself up if you get an unlucky draw.
Cancer is not a taboo in India, why would it be? I have lived in 6 different states of India and have heard/seen relatives/friends/people openly talk about having breast cancer, lung cancer, having cancer treatments etc. I really don't understand why she repeatedly mentions that in her, otherwise, insightful post.
I feel that currently I pull the lucky health lottery ticket on a constant basis since I am healthy but cannot afford a health insurrance in the US. Every time I hear of a cancer story I am horrified and reminded of how lucky I am but aware that my luck could run out at any moment. And how many of us there are…
It's all about risk, and a lot of risk factors are still somewhat unknown. I think about cancer like rolling dice, we all roll by the nature of existing.
A smoker might be rolling a 6-sided die with cancer on one side.
An athlete is still rolling a die with cancer on one side, but it's more likely a 100-sided die.
There is so much we're still learning about what "healthy" even means, like dairy consumption seemingly being a high risk factor for a number of diseases. Breast cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's, to just name those I'm aware of. Not a doctor.
> As cliché as it may sound, health really is wealth. All the money in the world can’t buy you perfect health
Sometimes I feel mortality and health issues are a good reality check for the super rich who think their money can buy everything in the capitalist world.
Cancer is often random, just like how it was random that she married a guy who went on to become a billionaire. You can't have everything in life.
Would be curious if she did genetic testing and was BRCA or BRCA2. That increase your odds of all cause cancers quite a bit. You can live a seemly pristine lifestyle and your genetics will still get you.
Could this be the case where she was not as healthy as she thought? I mean, we do not know if there was some vitamin / mineral deficiency or the diet for that matter that she was following exactly.
People do all sorts of things to "be healthy". That's great, if they are doing it to have a better life. But I get the impression some are doing it in an attempt to overcome death.
I know plenty of people who smoked/drank alcohol frequently (not alcoholic), never exercised and ate a "bad diet" and lived to 70/80 and others who "lived a healthy lifestyle" who dropped dead/died < 70.
I think genetics/randomness/accidents/homicide/genocide/suicide etc are 95% the cause of mortality. Drugs/booze/smoking/obesity are much smaller than people think.
I sympothize with the poster but the headline is potentially misleading.
I don't think the article really qualifies her status as a healthy lifestyle individual. I'm sure she may think she leads a very healthy lifestyle but there are a lot of misconceptions out there, when it comes to health. What exacerbates it is, once people learn that some things are not healthy, they switch to alternatives without understanding that the alternatives their going to are just as bad.
I know I'm going to get downvoted severly for what I'm going to post, but the truth must come out. These are all things which people generally believe are healthy but there is ample evidence out there and talk to nutritionistal scientists and they'll tell you, the following are not necessarily healthy:
- eating dairy and meat (both of these can be quite carcinogenic, lots of research proves this) - even fat free dairy, even fat free meat -> check out the china study, it's quite comprehensive and enlightening, study the blue zones
- excercising, running more than 20 miles per week is actually detrimental to your health (surprising i know)
- eating more than 2 meals a day
- the list of foods that market themselves as healthy but are not, is extremely long: certain cereals, to granola bars, etc
- non dairy creamers - sorry, but these things are loaded with partially hydrogenated oils, aka trans fats. trans fats are so bad, they've been made illegal but companies can get away with putting them in products by printing 0g of trans fat on the label becuase they're allowed to round down from 0.5g to 0. You might not think that's a big deal but they make the serving size super small, so 0.5 easily becomes 1 to 2g. even 2g of trans fat is enough to make a health difference.
- high protein diet can speed up MTOR production, IGF-1 levels and increase cancer risk. research has shown it's only the over 65 yr crowd that really need high protein diets for good health because their IGF-1 levels are already to low.
- Oils are NOT good for you, EVEEEN if their canola oil, extra virgin olive oil. All those mediterarean diets that show better health outcomes, do so "inspite of olive oil", not because of it. Scientists have observed the impact of olive oil up close, and they will tell you, you're endothelial cells which line your arteries do NOT like Olive oil or any other kind of oil running through your system.
- Not to mention, most people vastly underestimate their junk food intake because it's density is so much greater. I mean, if you eat 1/4 of your plate with cookies, your diet isn't 25% junk. it's actually more like 90% because cookies 12 times more calorie dense than vegetables and fruits.
- A salad with ranch dressing on it, you'd think would be healthy but look: the 2 TBS of ranch are 240 cals and the salad is like 20 cals, so your meal is mostly just oil and sugar. And yes, it's the calorie which is the unit of account: nutrition researchers use it, and your stomach uses it to determine your fullness (satiety is yet another completely misunderstood concept )
- It is VERY EASY to underestimate the amount of saturated fat you're consuming. The WHO recommends no more than 5% of your diet from Saturated fats which is about 11g. it's not commonly known but super provable from the USDA's own database, that saturated fats are present even in healthy foods but it's the right amount. even, in your rolled oats, and your spinach and your veggies there's some saturated fat, but it's not much. but you're already getting 5g a day just from the super healthy foods, so it's very easy to go over that 11g limit.
You list a lot of things that aren't healthy. Can you give an example of a typical 2 meal day that doesn't include oils, fat, meat, dairy, or whatever else isn't healthy? I'm genuinely curious.
You'd have to stick with vegetables and fruits, but even then there's debate over what is truly healthy. Is corn healthy? Is wheat healthy? Are carrots healthy? They're all plants after all, however... All three are high in carbohydrates and would be considered "unhealthy" from a keto-perspective.
The best bet here: don't listen to one source of information. There are literally thousands of experts on diet, health, and nutrition, no one of them is totally correct. Find what you can tolerate, what you can stick to; eat mostly plants, and not too much.
One NY times article stated: "Just eat food". As a general rule of thumb, they stated, if your great grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, it probably isn't.
The primary food groups are:
- Beans
- Whole Grains
- Fruits
- Vegetables
the two secondary groups are:
- Nuts
- Seeds
And, you can eat some oil and sugar, just make sure it's not a vast amount. Know that anything in a wrapper or box or plastic bag that was made in a factory is roughly 50% oil. With Sat Fat, gotta be much more careful because it takes very little to go over in that category.
People always wonder what's so special about these foods (beans, whole grains, fruits, vegies), why are they healthy? why can't we just eat cheeseburgers everyday. It's just that, the whole foods plant based diet is what our ancestors ate for millions of years. it's what our body has adapted to for millions of years.
When scientists followed the hazda tribe (an untouched people, who still mostly live the way our ancestors lived) through their native area, they found that they mainly just ate plants. they grazed all day long, going from bush to bush eating leafy green vegetables, the occassional fruits. Their 2 day meal plant consisted of grabbing whatever leafy greens they happened to find that day. Of course, they're expert foragers and know what to eat. It may not seem like a varied diet but, there are over 80,000 edible plant species in the world. You likely have over a dozen growing in your backyard if you know what they look like: Dandelions, Dock, american willoherb, holleycock, mallow, wood sorrel, miners lettuce, nasturiums, etc.
Simply put, the diet that most closely mimics the foods that humans evolved to eat, are the ones that cause the least amount of health issues.
If you don't like eating greens all day, here's another idea:
2 Meal day:
Breakfast: Cacao powder with hot water and 1 TSP of soymilk or oatmilk*
Lunch: Oatmeal, 2 mangos
Dinner: Cabbage soup: carrots, tomatoes, cabbage with spices and beans,
Steamed Broccoli. a piece of whole wheat bread, and for dessert: some high fiber cereal with a little bit of soymilk and honey on top. (Yum!)
breakfast: cacao powder with hot water and soymilk.
Lunch: Juiced greens from the garden (whatever's growing that's edible), an apple, pear, couple of almonds, Lentil soup
Dinner: Garden salad with nuts, brown rice, tofu and tomato dish
dessert: chia seed pudding with soymilk and cinnamon.
*(Oatmilk - this is another one of those alternative health foods to watch out for: alot of these things are filled with oil and sugar. they say 2% oil but that's by weight, not calories, so vastly misleading). check the ingredient labels. Soemtimes, You can reverse engineer the real ingredient breakdown by calculating the % of fat or sat fat listed on the label vs the % of fat found in rolled oats.
Most people don't have time to eat greens 10 hours a day like the hazda do, so we have to rely on Beans and Whole Grains, nuts and seeds and fruits for most of our calories.
Just skimming over your 2 meal day idea, it involves meal 1, meal 2, meal 3, meal 4. That seems a bit confusing to your don't eat more than 2 meals a day.
It's weird everybody's on the PFAS-bad train but nobody wants to touch that fluoride itself is being injected into the water supply and being drunk by millions of people daily for their entire lives, "for their health".
You can find it elsewhere. It’s likely to be good, considering they seem well-informed and wealthy enough to take advantage of that information. In any case, here we go: (the husband, but likely also the wife)
> Nithin starts off his day with coffee just before his workout, and then has oats and whey protein. Then for his breakfast he has egg whites and vegetables with the water of a tender coconut. Around noon, he has a glass of fruit juice along with the fiber in it, without straining it. For his lunch, he usually has some dal and some quinoa as he switched from rice to quinoa a while back because his gut feels much better with that. In the evening, he snacks on some healthy cheese and crackers. Dinner for him is usually non-vegetarian, and since he loves fish, it's mostly fish and some vegetables.
I’m 45 and I’m just now half way through my last chemo treatment for colon cancer. I would not say I’m you for cancer but definitely on the younger end of the spectrum for this type of cancer. I probably wouldn’t have gotten the colonoscopy that found the cancer had I not been lucky enough for the cancer to cause an infection where gut bacteria passed through my colon and made me extremely sick. I treated that with antibiotics and got a colonoscopy.
Results were that it was stage 3 c as I had 4 lymph nodes affected. The first step was surgery and about 12”/30cm of my colon was removed right where it meets the small intestine. This was the most difficult surgery I have been through and happens during the delta surge last summer. That means I couldn’t have visitors for the week I was in recovery.
Next up was surgery for a port after 3 weeks of healing. That went in my right shoulder near my collar bone with an iv line to my jugular. Once that healed started the chemo…
I didn’t take to chemo very well at first and I had a severe reaction to one of the drugs and landed in the hospital again for a few days. They could not figure out what was really happening but I basically had severe chest pain and jaw pain. They suspected heart/cardio problems and did a cardiac cath which came back normal thankfully. The fix was to reduce the dose of that particular drug by half. As time wore on the other drug in the cocktail started causing neuropathy in my fingers, feet and teeth/gums. Picture your finger tips always asleep. That can last for up 2 years but in some cases is permanent.
Now that I’m on the other side of the diagnosis and treatment I still have the post treatment scan. Typically colon cancer makes its was up to the lungs and brain if left unchecked. I get that scan mid April. To me that is the scariest part. I think it would be a huge gut punch to find out that it spread even after surgery and chemo.
As for life post treatment there are adjustments I have had to make:
While I used to like spicy food my colon has decided that spice is a laxative now and usually sends me to the restroom within 2 hours. I have to plan my coffee intake with meetings. I have some days when things seem normal and the others when I’m going to the rest room 4-6 times per day.
In my 30s I was in marathon shape until I severely broke my foot at 38. I have slowly gotten out of shape since. I think this was a bit of a lifestyle reminder for me so the plan is get back in shape and check my diet.
I have quit alcohol for treatment so I’m going on about 9 months with no drinking. I don’t know if I will continue abstaining or not.
I am certain that had I not had that infection I wouldn’t have gotten a colonoscopy. I think that’s the takeaway for me. Get your colons checked folks. Age 40 is the new recommendation my doc has mentioned.
People doing their regular "cardio" and eating their soya crap have the belief they are somehow never going to get ill or die. We all are, why live a dull monotonous existence only to live a few years longer in a care home not knowing who you are. I would rather live life to the max.
Maybe cancer is way to common and keeps being formed in the human body... but also the body gets rid of it by itself. This is why most people who have cancer never find out about it.
The few people who are always going for "regular screenings" are the only ones who find out about it and get "treatment" when it was completely unnecessary.
Here's another alternate explanation:
Maybe what is marketed as "healthy" by the food industry by funding scientific research and selecting results favorable to them is not really healthy.
But not everyone is so lucky. Some cancers may kill you in a few months even with the best treatment currently available.
And there are a big chunk of cases were a good early diagnosis is the difference between dying in one or two years or dying in ten or twenty years, or perhaps more.
RCT with two groups of (similar demographic) people. Everyone is given a full body checkup for finding cancer. Half of them are treated for any cancer found and the other half are left as is.
Check the longevity and status of cancer in both groups.
"I am the healthiest person I know" so others might disagree? Such self-centered perception of "being healthy" is one of the reasons people fool themselves while actually having a healthy lifestyle instead of being actually healthy. Any exercise also has an impact on health, it can be not just "healthy" but also unhealthy at the same time, at the expense of overall health. Also, cancer does not discriminate lifestyles. It's chance. There is always risk. "I am healthy"-people only fool themselves that it cannot happen to them.
It was the same for my father, and even the doctor’s mother whom I regularly see. I wonder if these issues are caused by the immune system becoming lax over time.
For example, I know one of the treatments for arthritis is Humira, a monoclonal antibody that suppresses TNF-A (tumor necrosis alpha). It could be the immune system suppresses TNF and this causes the perfect environment for cancers to remain latent.
There should be markers for a “pre-cancer” chronic condition. In multiple myeloma (what my father had) there is a clinical definition of “smoldering” myeloma which I understand to be a pre-cancerous condition. There ought to be more of those
Many contributors have already made good suggestions how to reduce the risk of getting cancer, or how to deal with it; but I found most posts quite _technical_.
Speaking in general terms, cancer is not a disease like a common cold. The human body sooner or later is bound to decay, which pretty much starts once one is fully grown, and mutations get less often corrected by the wonderful repair processes our bodies are equipped with. Occasionally, mutations lead to uncontrolled growth of malign tissue, some incidents of which are bound to lead to death, others not.
And while it is absolutely a good idea to life healthily and to take care of one's physical and emotional well-being, one should also never deny that we are all mortals, and cancer as well as traditional diseases can and eventually will wipe any individual out. I am at peace with that, for we need to make space for the next generation (only adding people to planet earth would not be sustainable, as resources are scarce - imagine nobody would ever die). Being on this planet for a limited time period makes it more important to make the right choices, because we have only one life.
Because it is a statistical process, we can forecast how many are affected, but not which individual, and everyone can try to minimize one's chances to be affected, but this does not mean they will live forever. And it's not just cancer, there are many ways one may pick the unlucky straw: it is not widely known, but the number of people who die from a heath attack in their 20s is significant. Make the best of every minute you have, and live it as if it were your last.