What I find interesting is the concept of dead food versus live food. This is just something I wonder about. For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now. Long shelf life - is the crucial change in our eating that I can see. When was the last time you had a fresh apple? Does the food industry want us to consider the health benefits of a dead apple versus a living apple?
Let think twinkies! You can open a package of twinkies and let it sit out for a long time. A long time. A long, long time. They you can eat it. Long shelf life means it does not succumb to digestion by random microbes etc in the environment. Does the twinkie then succumb to the random microbes in your gut? I think not, but what do I know.
Then there is living food. You can take milk, put a culture in it and let it grow for 10 hours. Instant pot, heating pad, whatever. Then you eat it. It is now filled with living cultures. It tastes better to me than any store bought yogurt, costs exactly the same as the same quantity of milk. With a chopped apple, cinnamon and a tiny bit of sugar it tastes better to me that most of the faux ice cream you get these days.
What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
> For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now.
It has always been normal for certain fruits and vegetables, such as apples, pears, potatoes, etc. to be stored for months in a cellar. In the old days, you simple could not get a fresh apple outside harvest time.
Your concept of "dead food vs live food" seems rather questionable.
Mainly because the distinction you are making doesn't actually exist.
An apple doesn't "lose" anything by being stored. There are no preservatives, just refrigeration. The apple will proceed to go bad just as quickly once taken out of storage, and it will be just as nutritious as if you had eaten that same apple fresh off the tree.
You can also take that same apple that's been in storage for a year, press the juice out of it, put a culture in it, and it too will grow and be filled with living cultures. The year-stored apple is no less "living" than the milk that you also had to inoculate to turn to yogurt.
In fact, the list of edible things that will not be filled with living cultures, hours after you add a culture to them and then keep them warm for 10 hours, is very short.
This is simply not true. A calorie is a calorie might be true, and its hard to know which is healthier for any single fresh vs storage example but plenty of chemical processes are going on. It could certainly be the case that a small number of storage examples where particular changes occur cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer.
"It's not at absolute zero, therefore there's some chemical process going on, therefore we don't know if it's causing significant portions of cancer"?
The number of things you can say that about is frankly infinite. You have zero reason to believe that any of the "chemical processes" that happen to an apple (or any food) in long term storage have anything to do with cancer.
This is a great example of correlation not equaling causation. You might as well say that writing years starting with a "2" could cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer because of the different motions of our hand affecting our lymphatic system etc etc.
Irresponsible fearmongering with no foundation whatsoever.
Sounds like nonsense to me. The reason we can eat year old apples is because they keep really well at the right temperature. A lot of root vegetables also keep well.
For the apple, why call it living vs dead? why not old vs new?
Milk is also probably the best example of dead vs. live except you have it backwards. The milk sold in stores deliberately kills off the good bacteria to greatly extend shelf life and prevent food borne illness (pasteurization). Your point is more consistent with raw milk.
> What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
Hate to say it, but it's because it comes across as unscientific woo
We can measure the differences between an apple freshly picked and one preserved for a season. We can objectively see how the sugars and carbs and calories change, if they do.
Maybe there's some yet-to-be-discovered process in our bodies that deals with preserved food differently than fresh food, but if that is the case it's more likely because of the preservatives than the food being "dead"
If I had to bet, it would be on HPV causing a majority of the rise in colorectal cancer. It is a major cause of throat cancer in men[0] and causes almost 100% of cervical cancer in women[1]. We have had a significant increase in anal sex over the past 10+ years[2] and are now seeing an increase in colorectal cancer.
"Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it."
Still needs to be studied more as there don't seem to be any large studies yet.
"We found that colorectal tissues from 28 (51%) of 55 patients with colorectal cancer were positive for HPV DNA." [3]
Kinda surprised at the idea that HPV is the cause; at least in the US, there was a fairly large push about 15 years ago to get more people (particularly teenage girls and young women) vaccinated against HPV. Would we not see a corresponding dip in deaths related to HPV-associated cancers by now?
The air we breathe is one of the most overlooked things IMO. There's so many toxins especially in cities. If your apartment is unventilated or the ventilation has no filters get a high airflow air purifier now.
"in the United States, the incidence of advanced colorectal cancer has increased by about 3% each year since around 2010 in people between the ages of 20 and 49. In 2023, colorectal cancer became the leading cause of cancer death in this age group."
Also in TFA:
"Uterine cancer and liver cancer diagnoses and deaths are rising in young women"
The increases in colorectal and liver cancers seem to point to unhealthy food, probably combined with other factors that reduce the resistance of the body to unhealthy food, like pollution, lack of physical exercise and of good sleep.
No till farming is probably helping. I learned this year what that really means by seeing farms where they spray herbicide to kill the plants,then they plant new seed while the old dead is still standing around. They then use herbicide as a desiccant to kill the plant at harvest. They probably use pesticides too. The cycle then repeats. I was so disgusted as seeing new crops sprouting amongst the dead vegetation. It must be engineered for that. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the farmers are poisoning everyone rather than have to offer real jobs to native born laborers.
Buckets of *cide, herb and insect, through the cycle. Those no till fields full of crops are some of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. That soil will have applications and applications of *cide soaked in it top to bottom. Like eating plants from a toxic waste dump.
Disgusting. That's the critical national need for glycosphate. Feeding us all engineered stuff from toxic waste dumps so farmers can not need workers or mowing and tilling equipment.
I don’t doubt what you’ve seen, and how some farmers are doing no-till.
However, there are better ways to do no-till that don’t require large herbicide input. No-till is really good for reducing the amount of water needed to farm and preserving soil structure, which is beneficial for all kinds of reasons. It’s not inherently a bad thing.
That’s how they do lentils in Canada. They use planes to spray roundup to kill the plant (because it doesn’t die naturally like it does in Europe, because of the climate), then harvest it, then sell it in Europe (without even rinsing them).
For European lentil growers it’s illegal to use roundup. But if the roundup has been applied outside of the EU it’s not toxic nor forbidden anymore and it can be eaten by humans.
That’s one of many many many examples. We live in an insane society.
I know of two women under the age of 30 who got cancer, they were spouses/girlfriends of friends of mine. I didn't know them well personally, and only met them a handful of times at outings.
Because they weren't married yet I'm sure it's just compounding their financial struggles.
I was shocked when I heard they had cancer, I almost didn't believe it. Under 30 is such a young age to be diagnosed.
for millions of years we were constantly fasting, then we hunted and killed animals, eating their protein and fat, no carbs, we were constantly in ketosis
We recently begun eating carbs, And very very recently started eating tons of processed carbs (because now we got the tech)
We are rarely in ketosis, and because of high carbs/sugar consumption, we start developing insulin resistance. (the idea is simple, we create resistance for most drugs/substances we take, be it anti depressants, caffeine, nicotine and so on.. the same happens with insulin. each time you eat too much sugar, your pancreas needs to issue insulin, so your cells can absorb more sugar. they start being resistant to it, so your pancreas need to work stronger and issue more and more insulin)
insulin is oxidative and inflammatory. we simply weren't built to regulate our blood sugar levels down (we are only equipped with insulin to do so), we are more well equipped to spike glucose levels up (gluconeogenesis, glucagon, cortisol and so on...)
because we are rarely in ketosis, we rarely get into the autophagy state (which is the auto-recycling cell system). so our cells multiply and the most error prone structure is the mitochondria.
mitochondria can make energy either from glucose or fat(keto bodies). it will always prefer glucose, only fallback to keto bodies (fat) when there is no glucose available. the synthesis of ATP (energy) from keto bodies will need oxygen as input, and will yield water as output. if we have inflammation, there is no oxygen (that's why severe chronic inflammation can lead to cancer), also that's why we usually use ice when we hurt ourselves, that place is inflamed, and by putting ice on it, it will change temperature (which changes pressure) and boosts blood circulation, blood carries oxygen, oxygen helps with inflammation.
a cancer cell, with a problematic mitochondria, will not be able to metabolize fat(keto bodies), because it has a problematic carburetor. fact is that the PET scans look for high glucose metabolism places in your body, because the cancer cells are starving for glucose.
the cell DNA is like ECC memory, it has self correction, but the mitochondria lacks the self correction, so it's way simpler to have it gone bad.
every single day we are having tons of cancer cells in our bodies, which self destruct or are detected and destroyed by our immune system.
the Middle East is the region in the world with the least cancer rate in the globe, yet they are one of the top consumers of sugar. but in islam they do the ramadan, in which for one month they make intermittent fasting basically, which boosts autophagy.
anyway... do healthy keto, boost autophagy, avoid ultra processed foods.
actually, I will extend this a little bit more... if you want to enter in keto...
go to the grocery store and buy this:
- meat (ground meat is fine and easy to prepare)
- eggs (the most fresh ones if possible)
- broccoli
- butter or extra virgin olive oil
the portions will depend on your body type and so on.. but you would make meat and eggs on either butter and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and steamed broccoli. in my case it was 250g of ground meat, 4-5 eggs and one whole broccoli.
you must eat the broccoli first (it's fiber, you can't actually use it, the bacteria in your stomach does, it will make them very happy). if you eat meat+eggs first, you will feel full and will not be able to eat the broccoli, if you eat broccoli first, you will not feel full at all. use salt and pepper and olive oil.
eat the whole broccoli, that's like an ETF of micronutrients, it's very diversified!
then eat eggs+meat no problem...
you gonna feel very very full... do not eat any sugar/carbs.. it can take up to 3 days for entering in ketosis..
you can eat 2 to 3 times a day, eat only when you are genuinely hungry (your hunger will change drastically on how it's built over time)
then slowly entering in ketosis..
the rationale is that you need to cut off the garbage.. meat has high quality protein and fat, so does eggs (an egg has everything needed to begin a freaking life, fun fact: no carbs/sugar in it...)
and the broccoli has micronutrients and make your gut bacteria happy.
the quality of those 3 foods will depend on some things..
for the broccoli, it's the soil... is it contaminated or not? where did it grow?
for the eggs, is the chicken healthy? did she get sun? did she eat insects, worms, or just genetic modified ration?
same for the cattle...
but you are limiting a lot the potential contaminations sources..
Of course you can make the case that we did consumed some carbs, that eggs actually have a tiny trace of carbs, and get technical on some points...
But the thing is... just restrict potential contaminated food sources.
One example, vegetable oils... God had NO participation in the creation of those.. think about it..
How do you make extra virgem olive oil? you take the olive, then press it.. boom. olive oil..
How do you make avocado oil? Same thing! How do you make cocoa butter? same thing..
Butter is just raw milk shaken, you shake shake shake and you get butter!
These are natural fats.
Now just make a quick google/YouTube search on how is canola/soybean/sunflower/cotton oils made... it's a very complex, multi machinery step, that uses hexane (from crude oil) and other chemicals...
the majority of carbs today are made by processing food. the word (processing) means subtraction, removing things of the food.. they take like a genetically modified corn, process it and then can make some kind of "food", focusing on texture.
because our minds get addicted not only for the taste, but on the texture.. that's what the patents are for...
This is a vibes-based argument, there is no science behind it.
Many traditional foods from around the world have relied on nasty, toxic chemical processes since before chemistry was a real science. If anything, modern understanding of chemistry has made the removal of nasty chemicals much more complete and precise.
I agree with a lot here and practice keto throughout the year and occasionally break to eat burritos, rice, pasta and drink beer because I enjoy them. But our ancestors were not in constant ketosis. They ate substantial carbohydrates in the food they consumed seasonally, though not as much as we consume today because of our tech. Also, doesn’t ice reduce blood flow? Lastly Ramadan and cancer rates are not supported. This discounts age distribution, smoking, genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
also like obese young children... how is this even possible? this is very recent... so yeah.. they did sabotage our food.
if you think about the human being a black box, and food (macro nutrients, fiber, carbs, protein and fat) being inputs, you could test it and find how to break the system, make it weak, obedient and addicted...
It's mostly obesity, which the article sort of mentions ("known links to obesity") but kind of obscures by saying "obesity does not fully account for the rise" and "a clear answer remained elusive." The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that. We know obesity is really bad for you, including causing higher rates of cancer. We know over what time periods young people became more obese.
Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades? I'm not sure that's the case. We used herbicides and pesticides 20 years ago too, of course. It's becoming increasingly clear that fiber intake is linked to cancer rates, but again I'm not sure diets 20 years ago had higher fiber on average.
Obesity indeed is a massive elephant in the room in public health discussions. And even in TFA "ultra-processed foods" are put first, which is a) just a silly category, and b) effects from poor quality nutrition are mainly via obesity.
The obesity epidemic is by far the most important public health problem in the developed world, but discussing this publicly, and thus effectively addressing it, is very difficult.
> The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that.
I can't help but think about the same thing with "co-sleeping". It's been discouraged altogether on the basis that it increases the incidence of sudden death syndrome in newborns, which sounds like a sensible policy until you notice that co-sleeping actually only increases risk of SDS with obese and/or smoking parents. But you have to actually read the research for that, and it's never communicated like this.
> The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people
Maybe, or maybe it's the bottomless pockets of the sugar industry lobby.
> Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades?
Diet is only one of the factors on obesity and it's health consequences, you also have stress, sleep deprivation, lack of exercises, loneliness and isolation.
Diet and exercise (to lesser extent) are the mechanism of obesity. The other factors may affect diet and exercise. A massive other factor for the latter is driving.
> I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.
Back when I was young in the 90s, this was exactly how I spent the last 5-6 hours of my days, reading books in my bed until the sun came up in the morning and I actually started getting tired.
Now, I sleep much better, the bed and bedroom is limited to just two activities, sleeping and funtime with partner, otherwise I never just chill in the bed or have anything else interesting in there. And if I can't sleep, I go up again and do something else until I'm tired enough to actually lay down in the bed. Probably helps a ton, as even with the phone on the nightstand next to me, I do fall asleep relatively quick.
Lack of sleep, not because of phones but because of more demanding lives due to modern education and workplace demands. Phones might contribute too, but consider how normal it is today to work till late hours compared to previous generations.
I believe that county specific studies seem to support your thesis. For instance, countries that eat less processed food (eg Italy) and have stricter rules about pesticides didn't see an increase in stuff like colorectal cancer [1]. Some cancers incidence did grow, but others decreased keeping incidence more or less the same.
What a shame that "no definitive culprit yet" somehow becomes "nothing specific to worry about yet, carry on" instead of "we can't answer because there are too many horrifying trends all at once".
Besides all the other factors mentioned, which I think are all valid, there's also indoor air pollution from things like aerosol sprays, cleaning products, fragrance, creams, soaps, other products.
Plastics, the increase in background radiation, pesticides, and or a side effect of extra calories are all possibilities. Daily allergy medicines might also be a factor as those reduce immune response slightly.
I appreciate that comment ironically, as a concrete example of exactly how this type of conversation goes. Opinions come first, facts come later if at all, and never change the opinion.
Most people will have a pre-conceived opinion about this, just like they would have an opinion about politics. Put "Trump" or "DEI" or some other word in the title, and the exact same thing happens.
First, I would not say "debunked" is the most appropriate term. The studies were not shown to be false, but the article highlighted that come doubts have been cast due to potential contamination confounds. The letter (Challenges in studying microplastics in human brain https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3) will get integrated into methods research. See here for current citations: (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=2005...). Sciencing is actually harder than it looks from the outside, and therefore research fields goes through iterations of refinement. As the article you linked to included this quote: (Prof Lamoree “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples tissues, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.”).
Second, I do not think anyone is claiming that microplastic pollution is not ubiquitous, because that is obvious. That microplastics get consumed is also probably not that controversial. The extent to which microplastics get consumed but do not exit the other end of the pipe is an empirical question that has methodological challenges.
Third: I think there are some subtleties here involving the size of plastic particles. Microplastics is a catch-all term these days, but a more formal definition puts microplastics at plastic particles that range from 5 mm to 1 μm (micrometer), while nanoplasticsare 1 μm down to 1 nm (nanometer). micro- and nano- plastics can require different techniques to detect.
I’m not obese or overweight and while my main meals (breakfast and dinner) are generally very healthy - I can still eat a lot of trash (ultra processed)food as snacks.
Your guess is not wild at all, and the article implies that (at least until the payment popup shows up)
My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.
Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.
As a kid I used to do that with my family: Grow our own everything.
I'm currently trying to get back to it, until then I try to eat ecological and as much as I can cooked by myself. It is hard though, not everybody can aford a plot of land (ideally next to some decent sized town)
I wouldn't exactly call TV dinners "healthy". In many ways it was much more heavily processed fatty carbs than what passes for microwave food today. It was loaded with salt and sugar.
The main difference is that TV dinners were designed to be heated in an oven rather than a microwave, back when microwaves were less common.
My impression (as someone who was alive back then) is that the early TV dinners often weren't that different from something you'd cook yourself, but the industry has spend half a century optimising them into cheap chemical slop engineered for palatability.
Also, not all ready meals are crap. You can buy premium frozen meals from restaurant suppliers but they aren't cheap.
One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.
One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.
We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.
This would be a great thing for all of the AI companies to devote some energy towards. Especially with their reputations in decline. Surely there must be some patterns the AIs could find if we had enough data about the people who died from cancer.
The comments in this thread are amusing because everyone is confident they know the cause of this (complex and multifaceted) issue and of course each of their explanations is different.
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operation to survive, which aren't sustainable, so epidemic changes kick in, eventually creating a breeding ground for tumors.
Forever chemicals like PFAS are a runner-up. The fluorocarbon tail mimics lipids, so the body tries to use them, which damages/kills cells. They circulate around the body endlessly like allergens. Cancer happens after cells have split too many hundreds of times trying to heal damage. So accelerating damage accelerates cancer.
Since cancer is a multifactorial disease, we can only assign weights for each cause. And since healthcare (at least in the US) has been hijacked by regulatory capture to prop up big agribusiness and pharma, we can't do anything in the short term to limit our exposure to dangerous substances.
Meaning that we're left with diet and exercise as the main preventatives. I don't buy that drinking/smoking/drugs or other lifestyle choices are the main causes of cancer (although they certainly contribute) since they've been around for hundreds of years and we have solid data on those risk factors. I look at it more as, a body functioning healthily can recover from abuse better than a body on the brink of failure. Yet we have created a way of life around chronically elevated cortisol and mental health drugs to combat systemic burnout, then wonder why we're all dying. It's so weird.
Like with most problems today, I blame the rich and powerful for abdicating their spiritual duty to help others since they have the means to do it. Instead, they pull up the ladder behind them, or even participate in malfeasance since it profits them and their cronies. Imagine what a few billion dollars put towards mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and pure research would do for cancer. Yet our titans of industry have their sights set on space or bunkers or whatever, actively working to cut government spending on research. It's so weird..
A way forward is maintaining the body so we're ready for anything on a personal level, while working towards systems change on the public level. Otherwise, what are we good for?
At what point is something unsubstantive versus not being allowed to become known as being substantive over political reasons? Politics has utterly poisoned the sciences.
A post like this is worse than that ones that it criticizes.
You're right that commenters are idly speculating, but that's what people do in conversation: they ramble through personal associations. HN is an internet watercooler, meaning we're here for human conversation, hopefully with an accent on curiosity. It's no sort of scientific publication or journal. It's welcome to draw on such material for conversation here, but not required.
Treating normal chatter as inferior fodder for a snarky putdown is anti-conversation. It turns away from the topic, makes curious interchange less likely, and introduces hostility, which invites others to do the same. It makes people less likely to share what happens to be at the top of their head about things. In other words, a bummer.
It's common on HN, and I assume in many places, for people to react to what they don't like / disagree with in others by (a) making a generalization about the group as a whole, and then (b) making a supercilious remark about it. The underlying message seems to be: I'm here like the rest of you, but I'm better.
I don't mean this as a personal criticism! I do the same at times, and probably everyone does. It's ultimately a kind of self-protection. But because it negates the kind of conversation that we're trying for on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), it's within scope of moderation to ask people not to do it.
You are of course welcome to express your view in an open/positive way rather than a closed/negative way. This is always possible.
Chronic inflammation is almost certainly part of this and lots of things about our modern ways of living cause higher levels of inflammation.
- Obesity and sugary drinks/food
- Various chemicals we use in agriculture, food products, cleaning, etc
- Lack of sleep
- Lack of exercise
- Stress
- Pharmaceuticals. And to be clear because I know this will be more controversial, I'm not anti-pharma, but lots of people today are being prescribed daily medication at ever young ages. We know many of these pharmaceuticals can marginally increase certain cancer risks.
- Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
- Vaccines? Probably not, but I dunno... Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but if you're on your 5th Covid shot I feel like you might be putting your body at some marginally increased inflammatory risk there. Vaccines are quite literally deigned to induce inflammation to boost immune response after all.
- More radiation emitting devices – not sure about this one because I haven't done any research, but when I was younger people used to talk about this quite seriously and now it feels like something only conspiracy theorists say. I suspect there is some amount of truth to it even if 5G isn't going to literally give you cancer.
I think it would be more surprising if we didn't see an increase in cancer rates to be honest.
> - Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
> - More radiation emitting devices
Yeah you should absolutely not be going out in the sun for your vitamin D if you believe the latter to be a cause because the sun emits many orders of magnitude more radiation than human made devices in daily use.
tl; dr the first 4 sentences:
Ultra-processed foods, obesity, microbial toxins and agricultural chemicals were all considered. But a clear answer remained elusive.
Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).
I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.
Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).
The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.
I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.
That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.
The problem here is looking at a substance in isolation, instead of comparatively.
The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...
If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.
Nah, technology advancement is full of free lunches.
It breaks our ape brain intuition that anything good must also be bad. But consider all the food tech you take for granted while singling out zero-cal sweeteners.
> Current "safe" dosage on coffeine is like 8 shots a day. No side effects!
Still is, since none of the side effects of caffeine could be considered "dangerous". (Unless you're taking absurdly large amounts, of course, just like anything else.)
What I find interesting is the concept of dead food versus live food. This is just something I wonder about. For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now. Long shelf life - is the crucial change in our eating that I can see. When was the last time you had a fresh apple? Does the food industry want us to consider the health benefits of a dead apple versus a living apple?
Let think twinkies! You can open a package of twinkies and let it sit out for a long time. A long time. A long, long time. They you can eat it. Long shelf life means it does not succumb to digestion by random microbes etc in the environment. Does the twinkie then succumb to the random microbes in your gut? I think not, but what do I know.
Then there is living food. You can take milk, put a culture in it and let it grow for 10 hours. Instant pot, heating pad, whatever. Then you eat it. It is now filled with living cultures. It tastes better to me than any store bought yogurt, costs exactly the same as the same quantity of milk. With a chopped apple, cinnamon and a tiny bit of sugar it tastes better to me that most of the faux ice cream you get these days.
What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
> For example a dead apple is one that was picked a year ago, sold today, kept in storage until now.
It has always been normal for certain fruits and vegetables, such as apples, pears, potatoes, etc. to be stored for months in a cellar. In the old days, you simple could not get a fresh apple outside harvest time.
Your concept of "dead food vs live food" seems rather questionable.
> I keep wondering why.
Mainly because the distinction you are making doesn't actually exist.
An apple doesn't "lose" anything by being stored. There are no preservatives, just refrigeration. The apple will proceed to go bad just as quickly once taken out of storage, and it will be just as nutritious as if you had eaten that same apple fresh off the tree.
You can also take that same apple that's been in storage for a year, press the juice out of it, put a culture in it, and it too will grow and be filled with living cultures. The year-stored apple is no less "living" than the milk that you also had to inoculate to turn to yogurt.
In fact, the list of edible things that will not be filled with living cultures, hours after you add a culture to them and then keep them warm for 10 hours, is very short.
This is simply not true. A calorie is a calorie might be true, and its hard to know which is healthier for any single fresh vs storage example but plenty of chemical processes are going on. It could certainly be the case that a small number of storage examples where particular changes occur cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer.
Respectfully, that's a crock of nonsense.
"It's not at absolute zero, therefore there's some chemical process going on, therefore we don't know if it's causing significant portions of cancer"?
The number of things you can say that about is frankly infinite. You have zero reason to believe that any of the "chemical processes" that happen to an apple (or any food) in long term storage have anything to do with cancer.
This is a great example of correlation not equaling causation. You might as well say that writing years starting with a "2" could cause particular risks that account for a significant portion of cancer because of the different motions of our hand affecting our lymphatic system etc etc.
Irresponsible fearmongering with no foundation whatsoever.
Sounds like nonsense to me. The reason we can eat year old apples is because they keep really well at the right temperature. A lot of root vegetables also keep well.
For the apple, why call it living vs dead? why not old vs new?
Milk is also probably the best example of dead vs. live except you have it backwards. The milk sold in stores deliberately kills off the good bacteria to greatly extend shelf life and prevent food borne illness (pasteurization). Your point is more consistent with raw milk.
As every educated American knows, nothing good ever comes from asking, "What about the twinkie?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwC3ESdwZA
> What is funny to me is the conversations we have about "ultra processed food" do no address this aspect of the issue. I keep wondering why.
Hate to say it, but it's because it comes across as unscientific woo
We can measure the differences between an apple freshly picked and one preserved for a season. We can objectively see how the sugars and carbs and calories change, if they do.
Maybe there's some yet-to-be-discovered process in our bodies that deals with preserved food differently than fresh food, but if that is the case it's more likely because of the preservatives than the food being "dead"
If I had to bet, it would be on HPV causing a majority of the rise in colorectal cancer. It is a major cause of throat cancer in men[0] and causes almost 100% of cervical cancer in women[1]. We have had a significant increase in anal sex over the past 10+ years[2] and are now seeing an increase in colorectal cancer.
"Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it."
Still needs to be studied more as there don't seem to be any large studies yet.
"We found that colorectal tissues from 28 (51%) of 55 patients with colorectal cancer were positive for HPV DNA." [3]
[0] https://www.ucihealth.org/blog/2025/04/hpv-related-oropharyn...
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7062568/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/11/rise-in-popu...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1479314/
This statement is as true as it is offensive these days:
Anal sex is dirty.
Kinda surprised at the idea that HPV is the cause; at least in the US, there was a fairly large push about 15 years ago to get more people (particularly teenage girls and young women) vaccinated against HPV. Would we not see a corresponding dip in deaths related to HPV-associated cancers by now?
Obesity. Being overweight is directly correlated with an increased risk for over a dozen cancers. And people are fatter than ever.
That and forever chemicals and plastics used in food shipping, storage, and cooking.
Those are my two best guesses.
Stick to the science folks. Let the MDs do what they do.
Stats and population level studies are hard work. You need to vote somebody in who will support this, or live with the consequences.
https://archive.is/VlBAm
The air we breathe is one of the most overlooked things IMO. There's so many toxins especially in cities. If your apartment is unventilated or the ventilation has no filters get a high airflow air purifier now.
Are more young people getting cancer? How much? What kinds?
From TFA:
"in the United States, the incidence of advanced colorectal cancer has increased by about 3% each year since around 2010 in people between the ages of 20 and 49. In 2023, colorectal cancer became the leading cause of cancer death in this age group."
Also in TFA:
"Uterine cancer and liver cancer diagnoses and deaths are rising in young women"
The increases in colorectal and liver cancers seem to point to unhealthy food, probably combined with other factors that reduce the resistance of the body to unhealthy food, like pollution, lack of physical exercise and of good sleep.
Equally in straight/gay men/women?
The article is paywalled, so I cannot tell if they mention the link to PFAS/PFOS: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565352...
Some experts weigh in: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/he...
Don't forget about 5G.
Poor diet seems most likely. In particular too much focus on protein and not enough fibre.
Most people get enough protein but only 5% of Americans get enough fibre in their diet.
No till farming is probably helping. I learned this year what that really means by seeing farms where they spray herbicide to kill the plants,then they plant new seed while the old dead is still standing around. They then use herbicide as a desiccant to kill the plant at harvest. They probably use pesticides too. The cycle then repeats. I was so disgusted as seeing new crops sprouting amongst the dead vegetation. It must be engineered for that. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the farmers are poisoning everyone rather than have to offer real jobs to native born laborers.
Buckets of *cide, herb and insect, through the cycle. Those no till fields full of crops are some of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. That soil will have applications and applications of *cide soaked in it top to bottom. Like eating plants from a toxic waste dump.
Disgusting. That's the critical national need for glycosphate. Feeding us all engineered stuff from toxic waste dumps so farmers can not need workers or mowing and tilling equipment.
I don’t doubt what you’ve seen, and how some farmers are doing no-till.
However, there are better ways to do no-till that don’t require large herbicide input. No-till is really good for reducing the amount of water needed to farm and preserving soil structure, which is beneficial for all kinds of reasons. It’s not inherently a bad thing.
That’s how they do lentils in Canada. They use planes to spray roundup to kill the plant (because it doesn’t die naturally like it does in Europe, because of the climate), then harvest it, then sell it in Europe (without even rinsing them).
For European lentil growers it’s illegal to use roundup. But if the roundup has been applied outside of the EU it’s not toxic nor forbidden anymore and it can be eaten by humans.
That’s one of many many many examples. We live in an insane society.
I know of two women under the age of 30 who got cancer, they were spouses/girlfriends of friends of mine. I didn't know them well personally, and only met them a handful of times at outings.
Because they weren't married yet I'm sure it's just compounding their financial struggles.
I was shocked when I heard they had cancer, I almost didn't believe it. Under 30 is such a young age to be diagnosed.
for millions of years we were constantly fasting, then we hunted and killed animals, eating their protein and fat, no carbs, we were constantly in ketosis
We recently begun eating carbs, And very very recently started eating tons of processed carbs (because now we got the tech)
We are rarely in ketosis, and because of high carbs/sugar consumption, we start developing insulin resistance. (the idea is simple, we create resistance for most drugs/substances we take, be it anti depressants, caffeine, nicotine and so on.. the same happens with insulin. each time you eat too much sugar, your pancreas needs to issue insulin, so your cells can absorb more sugar. they start being resistant to it, so your pancreas need to work stronger and issue more and more insulin)
insulin is oxidative and inflammatory. we simply weren't built to regulate our blood sugar levels down (we are only equipped with insulin to do so), we are more well equipped to spike glucose levels up (gluconeogenesis, glucagon, cortisol and so on...)
because we are rarely in ketosis, we rarely get into the autophagy state (which is the auto-recycling cell system). so our cells multiply and the most error prone structure is the mitochondria.
mitochondria can make energy either from glucose or fat(keto bodies). it will always prefer glucose, only fallback to keto bodies (fat) when there is no glucose available. the synthesis of ATP (energy) from keto bodies will need oxygen as input, and will yield water as output. if we have inflammation, there is no oxygen (that's why severe chronic inflammation can lead to cancer), also that's why we usually use ice when we hurt ourselves, that place is inflamed, and by putting ice on it, it will change temperature (which changes pressure) and boosts blood circulation, blood carries oxygen, oxygen helps with inflammation.
a cancer cell, with a problematic mitochondria, will not be able to metabolize fat(keto bodies), because it has a problematic carburetor. fact is that the PET scans look for high glucose metabolism places in your body, because the cancer cells are starving for glucose.
the cell DNA is like ECC memory, it has self correction, but the mitochondria lacks the self correction, so it's way simpler to have it gone bad.
every single day we are having tons of cancer cells in our bodies, which self destruct or are detected and destroyed by our immune system.
the Middle East is the region in the world with the least cancer rate in the globe, yet they are one of the top consumers of sugar. but in islam they do the ramadan, in which for one month they make intermittent fasting basically, which boosts autophagy.
anyway... do healthy keto, boost autophagy, avoid ultra processed foods.
actually, I will extend this a little bit more... if you want to enter in keto...
go to the grocery store and buy this:
- meat (ground meat is fine and easy to prepare) - eggs (the most fresh ones if possible) - broccoli - butter or extra virgin olive oil
the portions will depend on your body type and so on.. but you would make meat and eggs on either butter and extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and steamed broccoli. in my case it was 250g of ground meat, 4-5 eggs and one whole broccoli.
you must eat the broccoli first (it's fiber, you can't actually use it, the bacteria in your stomach does, it will make them very happy). if you eat meat+eggs first, you will feel full and will not be able to eat the broccoli, if you eat broccoli first, you will not feel full at all. use salt and pepper and olive oil.
eat the whole broccoli, that's like an ETF of micronutrients, it's very diversified!
then eat eggs+meat no problem...
you gonna feel very very full... do not eat any sugar/carbs.. it can take up to 3 days for entering in ketosis..
you can eat 2 to 3 times a day, eat only when you are genuinely hungry (your hunger will change drastically on how it's built over time)
then slowly entering in ketosis..
the rationale is that you need to cut off the garbage.. meat has high quality protein and fat, so does eggs (an egg has everything needed to begin a freaking life, fun fact: no carbs/sugar in it...)
and the broccoli has micronutrients and make your gut bacteria happy.
the quality of those 3 foods will depend on some things..
for the broccoli, it's the soil... is it contaminated or not? where did it grow?
for the eggs, is the chicken healthy? did she get sun? did she eat insects, worms, or just genetic modified ration?
same for the cattle...
but you are limiting a lot the potential contaminations sources..
Of course you can make the case that we did consumed some carbs, that eggs actually have a tiny trace of carbs, and get technical on some points...
But the thing is... just restrict potential contaminated food sources.
One example, vegetable oils... God had NO participation in the creation of those.. think about it..
How do you make extra virgem olive oil? you take the olive, then press it.. boom. olive oil..
How do you make avocado oil? Same thing! How do you make cocoa butter? same thing..
Butter is just raw milk shaken, you shake shake shake and you get butter!
These are natural fats.
Now just make a quick google/YouTube search on how is canola/soybean/sunflower/cotton oils made... it's a very complex, multi machinery step, that uses hexane (from crude oil) and other chemicals...
the majority of carbs today are made by processing food. the word (processing) means subtraction, removing things of the food.. they take like a genetically modified corn, process it and then can make some kind of "food", focusing on texture.
because our minds get addicted not only for the taste, but on the texture.. that's what the patents are for...
This is a vibes-based argument, there is no science behind it.
Many traditional foods from around the world have relied on nasty, toxic chemical processes since before chemistry was a real science. If anything, modern understanding of chemistry has made the removal of nasty chemicals much more complete and precise.
I agree with a lot here and practice keto throughout the year and occasionally break to eat burritos, rice, pasta and drink beer because I enjoy them. But our ancestors were not in constant ketosis. They ate substantial carbohydrates in the food they consumed seasonally, though not as much as we consume today because of our tech. Also, doesn’t ice reduce blood flow? Lastly Ramadan and cancer rates are not supported. This discounts age distribution, smoking, genetics, environmental exposure, etc.
also like obese young children... how is this even possible? this is very recent... so yeah.. they did sabotage our food.
if you think about the human being a black box, and food (macro nutrients, fiber, carbs, protein and fat) being inputs, you could test it and find how to break the system, make it weak, obedient and addicted...
Yes.
Also:
Look at where the “fat” is being stored.
Realize it’s not all “fat” from calories - it’s inflammation, and toxin diversion.
Fat doesn’t get stored in your eyebrows in front of your sinus,
that’s swelling from eating what the body sees as toxic,
and often breathing poison indoors.
My wild guess before reading the article: unhealthy food. A big part of which is herbicides and pesticides.
I will now read the article.
It's mostly obesity, which the article sort of mentions ("known links to obesity") but kind of obscures by saying "obesity does not fully account for the rise" and "a clear answer remained elusive." The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that. We know obesity is really bad for you, including causing higher rates of cancer. We know over what time periods young people became more obese.
Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades? I'm not sure that's the case. We used herbicides and pesticides 20 years ago too, of course. It's becoming increasingly clear that fiber intake is linked to cancer rates, but again I'm not sure diets 20 years ago had higher fiber on average.
Obesity indeed is a massive elephant in the room in public health discussions. And even in TFA "ultra-processed foods" are put first, which is a) just a silly category, and b) effects from poor quality nutrition are mainly via obesity.
The obesity epidemic is by far the most important public health problem in the developed world, but discussing this publicly, and thus effectively addressing it, is very difficult.
> The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people, and this is more of that.
I can't help but think about the same thing with "co-sleeping". It's been discouraged altogether on the basis that it increases the incidence of sudden death syndrome in newborns, which sounds like a sensible policy until you notice that co-sleeping actually only increases risk of SDS with obese and/or smoking parents. But you have to actually read the research for that, and it's never communicated like this.
> The medical establishment and journalism have found it extremely uncomfortable over the past decade to notice that obesity has negative health consequences because it might embarrass some fat people
Maybe, or maybe it's the bottomless pockets of the sugar industry lobby.
> Have diets really gotten noticeably unhealthier over recent decades?
Diet is only one of the factors on obesity and it's health consequences, you also have stress, sleep deprivation, lack of exercises, loneliness and isolation.
Diet and exercise (to lesser extent) are the mechanism of obesity. The other factors may affect diet and exercise. A massive other factor for the latter is driving.
I don't think the medical establishment is covering it up; if they could sell Ozempic as preventing cancer they'd jump at the idea.
My personal bugbear is the lack of sleep & entirely tied to the phone for that.
I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.
Now, I can't sleep, there's an endless stream of things to keep me awake.
The jokes about "5G gives you cancer" is probably not as funny, if you think about the sleep you miss while you doom scroll.
> I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.
Back when I was young in the 90s, this was exactly how I spent the last 5-6 hours of my days, reading books in my bed until the sun came up in the morning and I actually started getting tired.
Now, I sleep much better, the bed and bedroom is limited to just two activities, sleeping and funtime with partner, otherwise I never just chill in the bed or have anything else interesting in there. And if I can't sleep, I go up again and do something else until I'm tired enough to actually lay down in the bed. Probably helps a ton, as even with the phone on the nightstand next to me, I do fall asleep relatively quick.
As you know this, why don't you fix it?
What is forcing you to doom scroll rather than putting the phone in a different room before going do bed?
Lack of sleep, not because of phones but because of more demanding lives due to modern education and workplace demands. Phones might contribute too, but consider how normal it is today to work till late hours compared to previous generations.
>The jokes about "5G gives you cancer" is probably not as funny, if you think about the sleep you miss while you doom scroll.
802.11g was good enough for that, no need for 5G.
I believe that county specific studies seem to support your thesis. For instance, countries that eat less processed food (eg Italy) and have stricter rules about pesticides didn't see an increase in stuff like colorectal cancer [1]. Some cancers incidence did grow, but others decreased keeping incidence more or less the same.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03008916241297078
What a shame that "no definitive culprit yet" somehow becomes "nothing specific to worry about yet, carry on" instead of "we can't answer because there are too many horrifying trends all at once".
Besides all the other factors mentioned, which I think are all valid, there's also indoor air pollution from things like aerosol sprays, cleaning products, fragrance, creams, soaps, other products.
Plastics, the increase in background radiation, pesticides, and or a side effect of extra calories are all possibilities. Daily allergy medicines might also be a factor as those reduce immune response slightly.
There is no increase in background radiation.
Why would you leave that comment?
An uninformed comment before you read the article isn't helping anyone.
I appreciate that comment ironically, as a concrete example of exactly how this type of conversation goes. Opinions come first, facts come later if at all, and never change the opinion.
Most people will have a pre-conceived opinion about this, just like they would have an opinion about politics. Put "Trump" or "DEI" or some other word in the title, and the exact same thing happens.
If anything, food supply in the past 20 years uses a lot less pesticides and herbicides: look at the rise of organic sections in any supermarket.
Since 2000 organic food went from niche to mainstream.
Almost all the pesticides you eat are naturally produced by plants, so I dispute your assertion. Plant extracts light up the Ames test for mutagens.
We are exposed to more more types of chemicals in our every day than ever before. Some offenders to me, besides herbicides and pesticides are:
[1]: ubiquitous flame retardants, which in America they put in every couch, carpet, and mattress
[2]: ubiquitous microplastics pollution,
[3]: joint effect of Obesity and Ultra-Processed Foods
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2022&q=flame+retar... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo... [3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...
Wasn't microplastics just debunked as not a thing?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...
First, I would not say "debunked" is the most appropriate term. The studies were not shown to be false, but the article highlighted that come doubts have been cast due to potential contamination confounds. The letter (Challenges in studying microplastics in human brain https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3) will get integrated into methods research. See here for current citations: (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&hl=en&as_sdt=2005...). Sciencing is actually harder than it looks from the outside, and therefore research fields goes through iterations of refinement. As the article you linked to included this quote: (Prof Lamoree “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples tissues, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.”).
Second, I do not think anyone is claiming that microplastic pollution is not ubiquitous, because that is obvious. That microplastics get consumed is also probably not that controversial. The extent to which microplastics get consumed but do not exit the other end of the pipe is an empirical question that has methodological challenges.
Third: I think there are some subtleties here involving the size of plastic particles. Microplastics is a catch-all term these days, but a more formal definition puts microplastics at plastic particles that range from 5 mm to 1 μm (micrometer), while nanoplasticsare 1 μm down to 1 nm (nanometer). micro- and nano- plastics can require different techniques to detect.
Upon reading: A bit unclear but yes it seems like unhealthy food + new microbe mutations + obesity
They talk about obesity as a separate cause than ultra processed food, I thought it was quite related, something I need to look into
I’m not obese or overweight and while my main meals (breakfast and dinner) are generally very healthy - I can still eat a lot of trash (ultra processed)food as snacks.
I’m sure that could have an effect.
Your guess is not wild at all, and the article implies that (at least until the payment popup shows up)
My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.
Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.
As a kid I used to do that with my family: Grow our own everything.
I'm currently trying to get back to it, until then I try to eat ecological and as much as I can cooked by myself. It is hard though, not everybody can aford a plot of land (ideally next to some decent sized town)
Well since we're speculating randomly I vote for
* too much rage bait videos raising rage hormones
* too much performing for social media
* suppressing expression for fear of cancellation
* exposure to too many varieties of food/cuisine
* video games
* anime
Yes, these are all tongue-in-cheek but come on, the random speculation here is all ridiculous
* Inadequate exposure to UV leading to depressed vitamin D levels.
My guess is unchecked capitalism.
I won't bother to read the article.
Don't people eat more healthy than they did 50 years ago? Weren't microwave dinners a big thing in the 70s?
“TV” dinners were, packaged in aluminum foil. Microwaves didn’t become prevalent until perhaps the mid 80s.
ah, interesting. Ok, so TV dinners != microwave dinners, and maybe they're more healthy than microwaved dinners or food that comes in plastic.
I wouldn't exactly call TV dinners "healthy". In many ways it was much more heavily processed fatty carbs than what passes for microwave food today. It was loaded with salt and sugar.
The main difference is that TV dinners were designed to be heated in an oven rather than a microwave, back when microwaves were less common.
My impression (as someone who was alive back then) is that the early TV dinners often weren't that different from something you'd cook yourself, but the industry has spend half a century optimising them into cheap chemical slop engineered for palatability.
Also, not all ready meals are crap. You can buy premium frozen meals from restaurant suppliers but they aren't cheap.
One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.
One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.
We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.
It's an easy guess because either human genetics either radical changed or the environment did
"Silent Spring" came out over sixty years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring
got massive coverage including a worldwide CBS News broadcast back then
Government and industry were never held to account and instead deregulated everything
We still allow leaded gas to be sprayed all around airports where everyone is exposed during travel and neighborhoods nearby
Golf Course neighborhoods are some of the highest cancer rates in the country
We've learned nothing and now the environment is so saturated with toxins that the immune system is under attack from birth
PFAS
Of my close friends of my youth, two have died of cancer before the age of 40. Fuck cancer.
My college roommate died of cancer before 30. Fuck cancer
I'm sorry for your loss. Very similar story amongst my friend group as well. It's tragic
This would be a great thing for all of the AI companies to devote some energy towards. Especially with their reputations in decline. Surely there must be some patterns the AIs could find if we had enough data about the people who died from cancer.
A dude at Oracle did that with a recent mass experiment of mRNA technology. We do not speak Of the results.
Yes, one good data point is pollution, which all these companies are prollific at.
Peak hackernews behaviour denying pollution from AI datacenters
industrial farming
The comments in this thread are amusing because everyone is confident they know the cause of this (complex and multifaceted) issue and of course each of their explanations is different.
I think it's endocrine disruption from microplastics. Hormones act like relays in the body, so when one system goes, a cascade of failures often follows (the most famous being diabetes). The body goes into maladaptive modes of operation to survive, which aren't sustainable, so epidemic changes kick in, eventually creating a breeding ground for tumors.
Forever chemicals like PFAS are a runner-up. The fluorocarbon tail mimics lipids, so the body tries to use them, which damages/kills cells. They circulate around the body endlessly like allergens. Cancer happens after cells have split too many hundreds of times trying to heal damage. So accelerating damage accelerates cancer.
Since cancer is a multifactorial disease, we can only assign weights for each cause. And since healthcare (at least in the US) has been hijacked by regulatory capture to prop up big agribusiness and pharma, we can't do anything in the short term to limit our exposure to dangerous substances.
Meaning that we're left with diet and exercise as the main preventatives. I don't buy that drinking/smoking/drugs or other lifestyle choices are the main causes of cancer (although they certainly contribute) since they've been around for hundreds of years and we have solid data on those risk factors. I look at it more as, a body functioning healthily can recover from abuse better than a body on the brink of failure. Yet we have created a way of life around chronically elevated cortisol and mental health drugs to combat systemic burnout, then wonder why we're all dying. It's so weird.
Like with most problems today, I blame the rich and powerful for abdicating their spiritual duty to help others since they have the means to do it. Instead, they pull up the ladder behind them, or even participate in malfeasance since it profits them and their cronies. Imagine what a few billion dollars put towards mRNA vaccines, CRISPR and pure research would do for cancer. Yet our titans of industry have their sights set on space or bunkers or whatever, actively working to cut government spending on research. It's so weird..
A way forward is maintaining the body so we're ready for anything on a personal level, while working towards systems change on the public level. Otherwise, what are we good for?
We can't handle the truth.
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
At what point is something unsubstantive versus not being allowed to become known as being substantive over political reasons? Politics has utterly poisoned the sciences.
A post like this is worse than that ones that it criticizes.
You're right that commenters are idly speculating, but that's what people do in conversation: they ramble through personal associations. HN is an internet watercooler, meaning we're here for human conversation, hopefully with an accent on curiosity. It's no sort of scientific publication or journal. It's welcome to draw on such material for conversation here, but not required.
Treating normal chatter as inferior fodder for a snarky putdown is anti-conversation. It turns away from the topic, makes curious interchange less likely, and introduces hostility, which invites others to do the same. It makes people less likely to share what happens to be at the top of their head about things. In other words, a bummer.
It's common on HN, and I assume in many places, for people to react to what they don't like / disagree with in others by (a) making a generalization about the group as a whole, and then (b) making a supercilious remark about it. The underlying message seems to be: I'm here like the rest of you, but I'm better.
I don't mean this as a personal criticism! I do the same at times, and probably everyone does. It's ultimately a kind of self-protection. But because it negates the kind of conversation that we're trying for on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), it's within scope of moderation to ask people not to do it.
You are of course welcome to express your view in an open/positive way rather than a closed/negative way. This is always possible.
Chronic inflammation is almost certainly part of this and lots of things about our modern ways of living cause higher levels of inflammation.
- Obesity and sugary drinks/food
- Various chemicals we use in agriculture, food products, cleaning, etc
- Lack of sleep
- Lack of exercise
- Stress
- Pharmaceuticals. And to be clear because I know this will be more controversial, I'm not anti-pharma, but lots of people today are being prescribed daily medication at ever young ages. We know many of these pharmaceuticals can marginally increase certain cancer risks.
- Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
- Vaccines? Probably not, but I dunno... Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but if you're on your 5th Covid shot I feel like you might be putting your body at some marginally increased inflammatory risk there. Vaccines are quite literally deigned to induce inflammation to boost immune response after all.
- More radiation emitting devices – not sure about this one because I haven't done any research, but when I was younger people used to talk about this quite seriously and now it feels like something only conspiracy theorists say. I suspect there is some amount of truth to it even if 5G isn't going to literally give you cancer.
I think it would be more surprising if we didn't see an increase in cancer rates to be honest.
> - Low Vit D levels – seriously everyone should be supplementing
> - More radiation emitting devices
Yeah you should absolutely not be going out in the sun for your vitamin D if you believe the latter to be a cause because the sun emits many orders of magnitude more radiation than human made devices in daily use.
https://archive.ph/VlBAm
tl;dr ultra processed foods and pesticides
tl; dr the first 4 sentences: Ultra-processed foods, obesity, microbial toxins and agricultural chemicals were all considered. But a clear answer remained elusive.
If I had one unqualified guess free — and boy am I unqualified here — I’d wager it’s those „zero sugar“ stuffs.
No way you can just replace (also very very not good for you) sugar with something else and end up with all the upsides and no downsides.
Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).
I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.
Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).
The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.
I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.
That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.
The problem here is looking at a substance in isolation, instead of comparatively.
The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...
If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.
Nah, technology advancement is full of free lunches.
It breaks our ape brain intuition that anything good must also be bad. But consider all the food tech you take for granted while singling out zero-cal sweeteners.
I’m pretty sure it’s the avocado toasts.
I would just point everyone to scientific research about smoking in 1969ties. High endorsement and no risk at all.
Current "safe" dosage on coffeine is like 8 shots a day. No side effects!
Why did you write it as "1969ties"?
9 is next to 0, so my guess was typo.
Not the commenter, but the same tobacco companies came up with many of the highly processed foods
Just because system is trying to kill u, does not mean to stop all fun.
> Current "safe" dosage on coffeine is like 8 shots a day. No side effects!
Still is, since none of the side effects of caffeine could be considered "dangerous". (Unless you're taking absurdly large amounts, of course, just like anything else.)
We're speedrunning so we don't get to live in a token based reality
The normalization of anabolic steroid usage is likely a large contributor to certain cancers in men.
Probably not common enough to move the needle much; they’re not _that_ normalised.
And tattoos, too.