Always a good read, most cancers are environmental, and most of these are caused by obesity, bad diet and smoking/drinking, fix these four things in your life and you reduce your chances of getting cancer by 50%+
mapontosevenths 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
The things you mention here make it happen sooner, but no amount of healthy living lowers your risk to zero and I think that's important to note when you say things like "cancer is caused by".
Cancer is caused by math. This stuff just steepens the slope.
devin 4 hours ago [-]
I hear you, but I also think it is this kind of attitude that leads a lot of otherwise intelligent people to not even try. I've talked to people who listened to the Maintenance Phase episode on the complexities of calories in/calories out take the information as an excuse for not even attempting to try to improve their weight problem.
yesco 1 hours ago [-]
I think this is one of those areas where the translation from research to the public ends up too precise on the details, beyond the cognitive load most people are willing to commit to it day to day.
In the same spirit of upāya from Buddhism, I like to compress this type of topic into a simpler model, even if imperfect.
Here's how I model cancer, and how I judge whether something is likely to give me cancer, without trying (and failing) to memorize a million risk factors individually:
You are a collective of cooperating cells. When cells rebel, the order that holds your body together collapses, and you get cancer. Cells generally don't want to rebel. They're content as long as they get their energy, their paycheck.
But what about activities that cause frequent cell death? A sunburn, smoke in your lungs, alcohol in your bloodstream, radiation (essentially atomic shrapnel flying through your tissue). Anything that causes inflammation, especially chronically. When cells die before their expiration date, the survivors have to keep dividing to replace them, and they start to get pretty mad about it. Maybe even rebellious.
With every round of division, they are in essence "evolving" away from their cooperative nature to cope with a hostile environment. A cell doesn't care whether the collective lives or dies, and it doesn't have the capacity to reason about that in the first place.
So the question becomes: are you keeping your cells safe? Are your activities hurting them? If they're not happy, they'll rebel, and you'll die.
This is where the model earns its keep. Take obesity. It's on every risk list, but excess fat isn't what makes cells rebel. The real culprits are the conditions obesity creates: chronic inflammation, more cells that need to be maintained and replaced, a body that is generally harder to live in.
Weight loss is on the list because it's the easiest way to fix those conditions, not because thinness is protective in itself. Once you see that, you don't need the list. Anything that makes your cells' lives harder, day after day, is raising your odds, whether or not anyone has published a paper on it yet.
The math is real, but a model like this tells you which variables you actually control.
mapontosevenths 42 minutes ago [-]
> Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?
Are you sure that people should try? Will they live longer, or happier lives if they do?
From 1900 to 1950 the average US life expectancy went from about 47 to roughly 68. Penicillin and sanitation did most of that.
From 1950 through present day we added another 10 years. What most folks don't realize is that:
- 70% of those gains, or 7 out of the 10 extra years, came from cardiovascular health. Mostly because we got better at surviving heart attacks, and people smoked less.
- 19% came from infant mortaility gains (2 of the remaining 3 years of gain).
- 11% came from EVERYTHING ELSE that people did to become "healthier." So 1 year.
The US spends $5.3 trillion per year on healthcare, give or take. That's about $15.5k per capita every year. It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States. That's 2 out of every 10 productive dollars going towards healthcare.
In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.
In exchange for constantly worrying, exercising, staying up to date, eating right, etc you buy yourself one year more of life, and it's not even going to be a GOOD year. It's going to be one more year of being 80+ years old with everything hurting and constant medical needs.
Is it really worth 20% of the money you make every year for you entire life to live one extra, shitty, year?
I just don't think people have done the math on this one.
oarfish 27 minutes ago [-]
Well at least exercising will actually add life to your years and not just years to your life.
mapontosevenths 2 minutes ago [-]
This I can get behind. Quality of life is worth something. Is it worth 20% of the GDP? No, but it's not where we spend those healthcare dollars anyhow. We spend them on trying to extend the lifespan by one miserable year via end of life care, mostly.
nezi 18 minutes ago [-]
There are a lot of medical problems that can make life miserable that won't kill you that are excluded from your simple objective of "how many years am I breathing."
skrtskrt 30 minutes ago [-]
Not only is this utilitarian nonsense, the "math" here is full logical nonsense.
It shocks me how anyone could string this pile words together and think they sound like anything at all.
> "2 out of every 10 productive dollars"
As if those dollars have anything to do with the time people work, or that they would get those dollars and time back by not caring about health.
As if the tiny portion of those dollars that actually gets spent on patient healthcare isn't dominated by end of life care.
The US healthcare system spend is so far divorced from whatever idea of "productive dollars" anyone has when it's 60-80% admin cost.
The US should not even be mentioned in any conversation about the ROI of health spend.
devin 14 minutes ago [-]
So is this what you tell yourself to justify sitting in your chair eating doritos and mountain dew while blasting cigs and chugging beers?
What are you even talking about?
toasty228 6 hours ago [-]
It's also important to note that getting a random cancer at 80+ sucks orders of magnitude less than going out at 45 from colon or throat cancer in every measurable metrics you can come up.
devmor 5 hours ago [-]
I would heavily disagree with this - it depends entirely on the cancer you get. If it's something slow growing that would take a decade plus to kill you, sure - just trying to treat it would be worse than letting it ride.
But my father died of cancer nearing age 80, (most likely mesothelioma, though we didn't do heavy tests as it was discovered late), and it was incredibly painful and miserable for him. He had fast growing tumors in his ribs, forcing bone to spike out and hit his lungs, the tumors that grew in his lungs caused constant pneumonia and kept leaving him unable to get enough oxygen to his brain to communicate for hours at a time.
jobs_throwaway 4 hours ago [-]
That sounds far better than dying at 45 unless you have an extraordinarily unpleasant life in the interim
devmor 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think I want to die in excruciating pain and confusion at any age, personally.
alpinisme 4 hours ago [-]
I think the original point was that cancer 80+ is better than cancer at 45, so you should still try to avoid habits that make it more likely earlier, even if the chances remain 100% at sufficient time scales
jobs_throwaway 2 hours ago [-]
Of course not. But if you are given the choice of it at 45 or 80, which are you taking?
devmor 2 hours ago [-]
If I had to die like what I saw, to live to 80? I'd take quickly at 45, I think.
jobs_throwaway 56 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
dolebirchwood 23 minutes ago [-]
What an absolutely obnoxious way to respond to someone who was willing to share his experience about a subject as personal and painful as losing his father to cancer.
toasty228 5 hours ago [-]
Would he have had a better time at 45 not seing you growing and missing 35 years of life?
I'm not saying it's good to get cancer when you're old, I'm just saying if you had the choice no one would chose to get it earlier.
2 hours ago [-]
devmor 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, but like - no one wants to die like that. It's horrible. He was begging us to let him die at the end.
BizarroLand 2 hours ago [-]
I feel your pain, I really do, but I think you missed the point. In almost any metric, if you have to die, it is better to die after having lived a full life than it is to die young.
devmor 1 hours ago [-]
I used to believe this without a shadow of a doubt, but without the choice to go out on your own accord, I don't know if I do any more after what I saw.
AdrianB1 10 minutes ago [-]
Why don't you have the choice?
ahelwer 4 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately a lot of us will die in comparable ways if we are lucky enough to get that old. My grandmother was healthy & mentally with it until stroking out in her garden one day at the age of 90. That is the best any of us can hope for and the reality will almost certainly be far more painful and prolonged.
devmor 4 hours ago [-]
No, I don't think most people die in excruciating pain.
overtone1000 3 hours ago [-]
It depends on mechanism, but many cancer patients do deal with a great deal of pain, especially near the end of the disease process. I am sorry for your experience. It is not uncommon.
HoldOnAMinute 3 hours ago [-]
It is inhumane that we don't offer every possible option to those who are suffering.
overtone1000 2 hours ago [-]
It is unfortunately a complicated situation that often doesn't have a perfect solution. Without trying to cover every possibl nuance, I'll just say that many end-stage patients have pain so refractory that sufficient doses of pain medication are effectively lethal. This is usually offered, but obviously not everyone accepts.
The truly sad cases are those in which the patient no longer has decision-making capacity and it falls on a family member to make such decisions. When you aren't the one experiencing the pain, it's much harder to weigh that decision rationally. This is why so many providers push patients to establish legal documentation of their end-of-life wishes.
yubblegum 5 hours ago [-]
> it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live. Most people just don't live that long.
Hmm, that actually parses for me as "it is not important to note" since the 100% assertion doesn't apply to most of us as we won't live that long.
What applies to most of us is that certain behaviors can dramatically increase your chances of getting cancer.
goodmythical 3 hours ago [-]
Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?
A person drunk driving at twice the speed limit in moderate traffic on a dark and rainy night without their lights on in an old vehicle with shoddy breaks and no traction control while not wearing a seatbelt and texting their ex probably has a near zero chance of developing a cancer given their near 100% chance of dieing in the next few moments.
mapontosevenths 1 hours ago [-]
> Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?
Suicide is at once the worst and most effective cure for cancer.
Aurornis 3 hours ago [-]
When we talk about factors that reduce cancer rates we normally talk about like-for-like, adjusted for age.
Discussing lifetime risk of cancer without accounting for years lived is not useful.
I don't think it's helpful to point out that everyone gets cancer on a long enough timeframe, because that wasn't what the conversation was ever about.
scottLobster 6 hours ago [-]
Cool, let's make that timeline a step function with the risk of cancer being effectively zero until 200 years of life and cure cancer.
jurgenburgen 6 hours ago [-]
> I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.
“Most people just don’t live that long” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
epihelix 5 hours ago [-]
> If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
Well, 100% likelihood is a bit silly, but the point of the person you were responding to is true -- we will all eventually die of something, and if it's not heart disease or dementia, it will almost certainly be cancer.
The question shouldn't be "will I get cancer?"; it should be, "how long do I want to live a happy, healthy, active, independent lifestyle for?" If you exercise, eat a healthy diet, don't become overweight and keep your blood pressure low, you'll maximise your changes for living well, for as long as possible.
copperx 5 hours ago [-]
> If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
This kind of comment lowers the level of discourse dramatically.
lunchbucket 5 hours ago [-]
The risk is compounding, so no, centuries is not on the table without fully swapping bodies.
pstuart 4 hours ago [-]
This is guaranteed for men. You'll either die from or with prostate cancer if you make it that far.
fabian2k 5 hours ago [-]
That paper links a random blog post as source for these statistics (reference 9). That's a huge red flag for me and not what I'd expect in a scientific paper. I find the numbers wildly implausible in any case since they only have two categories: hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.
toasty228 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's the "other" part in "environmental".
> hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Unless you can demonstrate supernatural causes these are the only two broad categories you need. It's either coming from inside (genes) or outside (diet, random neutrino bit flipping your shit, smoking, x-rays, etc.).
fabian2k 4 hours ago [-]
But a significant part of that is not something we can influence. Getting cancer is a side-effect of living. Our own metabolism causes DNA damage.
There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.
toasty228 3 hours ago [-]
A significant part of the insignificant part yes, just don't be fat, don't drink and eat clean, that plays a much larger role than luck
epihelix 6 hours ago [-]
And not just cancer. Top risk factors for dementia and heart disease are also diet, obesity, blood pressure, and lack of exercise.
Basically, live healthily, and you'll have a (much!) happier and longer life.
didibus 4 hours ago [-]
Throwing in blood pressure in the mix is interesting? That's not really something you can control isn't it?
tryptophan 3 hours ago [-]
Well thats caused by obesity , lack of exercise, bad diet. You can also take pills to fix it.
smt88 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, you absolutely can control it
All of the following affect it, and many other things do too:
- sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium intake
- exercise
- obesity
- many drugs (including ibuprofen and stimulants)
- alcohol
- smoking
- prescriptions for lowering BP
3 hours ago [-]
jensgk 3 hours ago [-]
There are no guarantees.
jasondigitized 2 hours ago [-]
But there are probabilities, even if that probability ultimately doesn't apply to you.
fithisux 5 hours ago [-]
and you'll have (probably) a (much!) happier and longer life.
lanfeust6 7 hours ago [-]
What's interesting is how low alcohol ranks compared to obesity and diet. It makes the recent moral panic following loose interpretations of the Lancet study seem hypocritical, if not misguided. If anything deserves a "may cause cancer" sticker, it's nitrate-ridden processed meat.
ryan_n 6 hours ago [-]
Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it (unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?):
> unless you mean a literal sticker warning when you buy meat from stores?
What else could it possibly mean?
ryan_n 5 hours ago [-]
I thought they meant it figuratively I guess.. I don’t know in hindsight maybe that’s dumb?
shiandow 5 hours ago [-]
I guess I see how you could read it like that, but no I'm pretty sure this was meant literally.
lanfeust6 4 hours ago [-]
correct, and I mentioned it because cancer warnings are explicitly now on the table for policymakers in the West related to alcohol, iirc
esperent 6 hours ago [-]
> Nitrate ridden processed meat already has a “may cause cancer” sticker on it
Not in any country I've ever been in. Do you mean in the US?
tarentel 6 hours ago [-]
I like to drink. With that being said, there are a lot of downsides to alcohol other than an increased risk of cancer. Also, alcohol can lead to obesity and a bad diet. Is it ever healthy to drink? I do not know. I am going to do it anyway though.
esperent 6 hours ago [-]
There's downsides to heavy or frequent drinking, sure. But since the cancer risk is minimal, what's the downside of a glass of wine or beer a couple of times a week?
I'm less convinced of the negatives of this than I used to be. Humans are quite well adapted to alcohol.
If it's something you enjoy, I'd say go for it, in moderation. It's probably less unhealthy than e.g. living in a city, eating processed meat, or working an office job.
estetlinus 4 hours ago [-]
Its all fun and games until you get cancer. I had cancer (and a few drinks) myself, it sucked. Can you ever be certain it was caused by an unhealthy lifestyle? No. Probability and causality is weird tbh.
epihelix 5 hours ago [-]
> Is it ever healthy to drink?
No. But drinking every now and then makes so little difference it's not a huge concern. Drinking a lot, though -- that's more problematic.
Like most of my friends around my age, I've cut out almost all alcohol in the last few years. None of us miss it. But it's still nice to drink occasionally, and I'm not going to stop entirely.
lanfeust6 4 hours ago [-]
Of course. It's just that cancer as a key risk factor has grown in salience.
ak_111 5 hours ago [-]
Is there really a moral panic? Apart from a few viral Twitter posts, I don't see a major sobriety push by my colleagues.
Profits of main alcohol suppliers has certainly taken a hit over the last 5 years but this is arguably far more because of rise of remote working, inflation (drinking at pubs have become much more costly than before) and people in general just addicted to their phone rather than going out (similar to the impact on almost all social activities no just going to pubs)
lanfeust6 4 hours ago [-]
It's been covered everywhere in social media, including HN. Try the search function
purpleflame1257 6 hours ago [-]
Recent demographic shifts have given rise to a vocally anti-alcohol contingent in large parts of the Western world. There's substantial motivated reasoning.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
Its not demographics, its American cultural influence.
mbreese 6 hours ago [-]
In the US, there is a large demographic shift on alcohol drinking. What I've seen is not an explicitly vocal anti-alcohol stance. But younger generations just aren't as interested in it. At the very least what they consume is different.
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
frmersdog 3 hours ago [-]
People are broke. They can't afford the bottle or the place you go to to drink a glass. Or the Uber back/costs associated with a DUI. There's no reason to waste any of that money when you can just stay home and goon.
Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
That's my theory too. When I was in college (late 1980s) the bars had dime beers. It was bottom-end lager and served in an 8 oz cup but still, going to the bars for a night could be done cheaply. Now a drink is $10 and you pay a cover charge even if there isn't a band performing.
skissane 4 hours ago [-]
A common consequence of taking GLP-1 receptor agonists is losing interest in alcohol.
Now, I agree that’s not the only factor — there’s something else going on reducing alcohol consumption even in people who’ve never taken GLP-1RAs — but when you have >10% of the population taking them, that’s another significant factor contributing to falling drinking rates.
graemep 6 hours ago [-]
I do not know the US well enough to comment, but the US has always been a lot more anti-alcohol than (almost anywhere in) Europe.
mbreese 5 hours ago [-]
What I'm talking about is slightly different than that.
This is more like alcohol apathy - not drinking, but also not explicitly anti-alcohol. That the more generational shift in Gen Z that I've seen. But, those sentiments can certainly change over time.
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
What I have noticed in the UK is:
1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits
2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.
throwaway_7274 5 hours ago [-]
Which recent demographic shifts?
moralestapia 4 hours ago [-]
Assuming you have those under control, what about sustained stress? Little sleep, etc...
tripleee 4 hours ago [-]
On sleep I'm not actually sure if they've parsed out whether it's little sleep itself that affects you or if it's little sleep making you not exercise or eat well
I'm wayyyy less likely to exercise if I've only slept 5 hours
underlipton 3 hours ago [-]
Chronic low-grade inflammation is the link between obesity and cancer incidence, so yes, those are not good. Better to be fat and chill (and active) than thin and stressed-out.
sandworm101 5 hours ago [-]
And gentics. Some people/families are just more prone to cancer than others.
A long while ago i read about this and a link to wealth. Of those families with know genetic problems, the poor ones seems to have actively dealt with the issue internally after realizing the problem. They adopt, have fewer children, or use surrogacy. They cannot afford sickly kids. But wealthy families did not, the best examples being those royal families with known problems.
Personally, my cancer risks went way up when my heavy-smoker uncle died of throat cancer. Going from zero cancer in related family to "some" moved me up the charts.
hobo123 4 hours ago [-]
Generics is always claimed to be a reason, but nutrition also runs in families.
It's like saying BRCA1 causes breast cancer, but 90% of cases don't involve the gene, and many people with the gene don't get cancer.
I'm not saying it can't be a reason, but it looks like it's a common and maybe convenient excuse.
sandworm101 4 hours ago [-]
There is an easy line to draw between the two. "Family history", which includes eating/smoking/drinking habits, follows habitation. Genetics follows blood. So differences between bloodlines easily stand apart from family trends.
toasty228 4 hours ago [-]
> And gentics.
Really no, not that many, 5-10% estimated. And I'd not be surprised if a lot of the "everyone in the family get cancers" aren't environmental either (factory next door, working in a field using chemicals, etc.)
sandworm101 4 hours ago [-]
"Only about 5% to 10% of all cancer cases are hereditary, meaning they are caused by an inherited gene mutation."
No. This is 5-10% are from inherited genetic issues, not environment. And that is the canadian cancer society saying so, not a random website or drug company. 5-10% is a monumental number of cancers. If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
toasty228 4 hours ago [-]
We're saying the same thing yes... and both websites too
> If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
I have one, stop drinking, where is my nobel?
jjice 5 hours ago [-]
I always get a kick out of YouTube and other social media people proclaiming what is "healthy" or not, when we all pretty much know. Eat fruits and vegetables and not too much junk food. Eating too much consistently isn't good for you. Drinking and smoking are bad for you. We've mostly known smoking is bad as a society for a good while now and outside of the old myth that a glass of wine with dinner was good, we know drinking isn't a positive for your health.
And you don't even have to be hard and fast with any of that. Drink on occasion and eat stuff that isn't good for you on occasion and you're probably still getting 95% of the benefits. Not sure about smoking though.
It's very simple at the end of the day. Simple != easy to do. Drinking is fun. People enjoy smoking. Junk food is appealing because it's relatively cheap and tastes good.
The best biohack is to eat like your doctor recommends while we all nod along and silently ignore. Just eat what is widely accepted as good for you and you'll have a good chance at living a happy, healthy life.
It's interesting that up until the 1970s, viral infections were the predominant theory for the cause of cancer (this is before my time so apologies if I'm exaggerating). This was due to discoveries like src, ras, EBV, etc, so a lot of these carcinogenic pathogens were well known and studied. It wasn't until several discoveries in the 70s and 80s that we started focusing more scientifically on genetic drivers. But it's not like these infectious drivers went away, even if they are no longer as strongly associated with the disease in the public conscious.
hobo123 4 hours ago [-]
Is it 100% clear cut that the infection causes the cancer, or can there be a common problem (like immune system degradation) that causes both the infection to develop (or develop easier) and the cancer the grow (which always involves failure of the immune system to kill it, if I'm not mistaken)?
Many viri are present in many human beings, but they don't develop cancer after all.
so it's not surprising that infections can lead to downstream, systemic problems in the human body which then allows for things like cancer to arise (especially given that we just lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic that is still ongoing)
tptacek 3 hours ago [-]
Has there been a clear epidemiological signal post-COVID in elevations of any cancers? There are obviously stories about elevated rates of e.g. colon cancer in younger people, but those long predate COVID.
paimapi 1 hours ago [-]
not for COVID afaik but it seems like the mechanism is similar - systemic shocks to the body of some sort by viral loads leading to future pathologies
tptacek 60 minutes ago [-]
I'm not asking if it's plausible, I'm asking if there's evidence it happened.
2 hours ago [-]
jobs_throwaway 4 hours ago [-]
If you haven't gotten your HPV vaccine yet—go get it. One of the easiest interventions you can take to reduce your cancer risk.
ck2 6 hours ago [-]
well they are finding forever-chemical and micro-plastics in all freshwater in the USA now and even in ALL mother's milk
so safe bet that cancer rates are never going to be lower than they are today
remember US also just deregulated all pollution from power plants, funded re-starting coal plants and dropped car engine efficiency requirements
oh they are also trying to double oil-fracking output which toxifies groundwater and air for miles around it with offgassing
every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere
so next decade should end well for cancer rates
mchusma 4 hours ago [-]
You seem stressed. I think there are incredible things happening in energy (solar is really the dominant story by far right now, this other stuff is noise) but in cancer: better detection than ever (Grail), better treatments (stem cell, CAR-T, immunotherapy). Most likely you will see stage IV cancer rates down 50% in 10 years, and cancer deaths (age adjusted) down about 70%. We will have an early permanent moon base, the first step in getting space stations with the equivalent landmass as a billion earths.
It’s really a golden age for cancer treatments and energy.
jasondigitized 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you
tonmoy 1 hours ago [-]
US is an outlier, globally we are making great progress in using renewables and cutting down carbon emissions (still a long way to go)
Humans are making progress figuring out how to make space use sustainable as well! There are multiple companies out there working in de-orbiting satellites that have reached end of life. A single launch can possibly de-orbit 3-6 satellites. The capacity of a single one of these companies is enough to stabilize the number of space junk today
scottLobster 6 hours ago [-]
You can't be worried about fracking and coal at the same time in the US. The former is the reason for the latter's demise
cassepipe 5 hours ago [-]
You can. It's not because fracking has displaced coal that it's overall a net benefit (I know it is somewhat true for climate change, I don't have an informed opinion concerning environmental pollution) and it's what should have happenned.
For example either renewables + batteries or nuclear could have displaced coal. Just because there wasn't enough money/political support for it doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about both fracking and coal usage consequences.
scottLobster 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, on a long enough timeline we should be moving away from fossil fuels as much as possible, but in the meantime fracking has allowed us to substantially lower carbon emissions without massive societal upheaval. It's like equating hybrid cars with traditional ICE vehicles. Sure they both have problems, but one has a lot fewer.
And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.
solarkraft 4 hours ago [-]
Why shouldn’t one be able to worry about 2 bad things at the same time?
ck2 5 hours ago [-]
wow that's the most repeat fallacy, I even see in political commercials now
we don't use domestic oil, we sell it overseas
and oil until pop-up "ai" datacenters was not used for power production
you are thinking about solar and wind power for coal's demise
which now they are also defunding, even worse reusing the funds for coal investment
scottLobster 5 hours ago [-]
No, but we get so much natural gas as a side effect of the fracking that we literally can't distribute it all, it's effectively free. Which is why natural gas plants have been displacing coal plants for the last 20 years.
You... really need to read more before forming your opinions
linkregister 3 hours ago [-]
Solar and wind subsidies have been illegally halted, and are the subject of ongoing litigation.
Solar and wind are commercially viable and provide about 30% of the electrical energy in Texas. Around 50% of California's daytime electrical energy is provided by solar and wind power. New projects are typically hamstrung by transmission permitting constraints.
While subsidies would help substantially, they aren't a necessary condition for continued adoption of renewable energy sources. Storage is probably the next big hurdle to displace fossil fuels once there's sufficient progress with transmission.
Vrondi 5 hours ago [-]
No, really, when the fracking boom hit, it was so much cheaper than coal that it made a large dent in the coal industry for energy production. Solar and wind expansion have been far slower to roll out nationwide, but fracking was an almost overnight expansion of gas power production at that time.
verity_check 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
realityrunner 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
crayforbrains 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
samso26 6 hours ago [-]
The striking part is that many infection-linked cancers already have prevention or treatment options,but access and uptake are uneven. That makes this partly a delivery problem: vaccines, screening,and treatment only reduce cancer burden when people can actually get them. i’d be interested to see the estimates broken down by how much could be prevented with tools we already have versus infections where theres still no effective intervention.
neom 6 hours ago [-]
Almost all your comments are flagged. Get yer clanker off HN buddy.
Pannoniae 5 hours ago [-]
FYI the prev comment is also clanker stuff, it's just purposefully prompted to inject grammatical errors. It's obvious from the word choice and the sentence structure, it's very stilted in an inhuman way. The wrong commas aren't a common error (unless you're 70+ yo) but LLMs keep doing "word ,another" and "word,another" to appear quirky
esp when all the caps are missing but all the punctuation are perfectly present
Frieren 6 hours ago [-]
> HPV vaccine hesitancy in Europe: side effects, uncertainty, and mistrust
> When individuals mistrust those communicating about vaccines, perceiving, for instance, that they are not being fully transparent about the potential side effects of the vaccine, it can affect their confidence in the HPV vaccine even if they have received information confirming that the vaccine is safe and effective
> This was seen with the rapid spread of You-Tube videos of young girls believing to have been affected by HPV vaccination in Denmark, Japan, Colombia, Ireland and the UK.
Governments around the world are losing citizens trust. And that has terrible consequences. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
We may know how to reduce the risk of cancer. We may have vaccines for that infections. But if governments care more about power than serving citizens all that knowledge is for nothing.
This gets things exactly backwards. The trust was eroding well before the re-emergence of "far-right contrarian governments" and that is what enabled them to emerge. It has eroded because of greater access to information: people see things that they disapprove of but otherwise could have ignored because it doesn't affect them personally.
etcetcetcetceta 6 hours ago [-]
Suspect this is caused by demographic shift, don't know any people who have even the remotest HPV vaccine hesitation over the past twenty plus years.
Know that it is common among certain demographics though.
foobiekr 5 hours ago [-]
About ten years ago I was at a party and an Australian coworker and I were talking. I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens. He declared, “I’m not going to turn my daughter into a whore.”
You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.
Nasrudith 5 hours ago [-]
Which brings to mind a horrifying and inappropriate counterarguement to such twisted puritianical logic - who says she is consenting if she gets infected? Is it worth adding cancer to a rape victim?
tialaramex 2 hours ago [-]
Even without that, the position implies they haven't understood that she's an individual and so her future is her own to determine, at least to a much greater extent than this acknowledges.
What ever happened to parents who just wanted their children to be happy? Maybe she wants to be a whore. The more figuratively you're happy to deploy that term the more likely her choices overlap.
baud147258 5 hours ago [-]
what kind of demographics? I don't think HPV vaccine is a subject I've ever heard about in the social circles I've been in (whatever the opinion on the vaccine).
jimmar 5 hours ago [-]
> And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
I'm old enough to remember when Trump was recommending the Covid vaccine and democrats were fear mongering about it. Trump was even booed at his own rallies for promoting the vaccine.
Always a good read, most cancers are environmental, and most of these are caused by obesity, bad diet and smoking/drinking, fix these four things in your life and you reduce your chances of getting cancer by 50%+
The things you mention here make it happen sooner, but no amount of healthy living lowers your risk to zero and I think that's important to note when you say things like "cancer is caused by".
Cancer is caused by math. This stuff just steepens the slope.
In the same spirit of upāya from Buddhism, I like to compress this type of topic into a simpler model, even if imperfect.
Here's how I model cancer, and how I judge whether something is likely to give me cancer, without trying (and failing) to memorize a million risk factors individually:
You are a collective of cooperating cells. When cells rebel, the order that holds your body together collapses, and you get cancer. Cells generally don't want to rebel. They're content as long as they get their energy, their paycheck.
But what about activities that cause frequent cell death? A sunburn, smoke in your lungs, alcohol in your bloodstream, radiation (essentially atomic shrapnel flying through your tissue). Anything that causes inflammation, especially chronically. When cells die before their expiration date, the survivors have to keep dividing to replace them, and they start to get pretty mad about it. Maybe even rebellious.
With every round of division, they are in essence "evolving" away from their cooperative nature to cope with a hostile environment. A cell doesn't care whether the collective lives or dies, and it doesn't have the capacity to reason about that in the first place.
So the question becomes: are you keeping your cells safe? Are your activities hurting them? If they're not happy, they'll rebel, and you'll die.
This is where the model earns its keep. Take obesity. It's on every risk list, but excess fat isn't what makes cells rebel. The real culprits are the conditions obesity creates: chronic inflammation, more cells that need to be maintained and replaced, a body that is generally harder to live in.
Weight loss is on the list because it's the easiest way to fix those conditions, not because thinness is protective in itself. Once you see that, you don't need the list. Anything that makes your cells' lives harder, day after day, is raising your odds, whether or not anyone has published a paper on it yet.
The math is real, but a model like this tells you which variables you actually control.
Are you sure that people should try? Will they live longer, or happier lives if they do?
From 1900 to 1950 the average US life expectancy went from about 47 to roughly 68. Penicillin and sanitation did most of that.
From 1950 through present day we added another 10 years. What most folks don't realize is that:
- 70% of those gains, or 7 out of the 10 extra years, came from cardiovascular health. Mostly because we got better at surviving heart attacks, and people smoked less.
- 19% came from infant mortaility gains (2 of the remaining 3 years of gain).
- 11% came from EVERYTHING ELSE that people did to become "healthier." So 1 year.
The US spends $5.3 trillion per year on healthcare, give or take. That's about $15.5k per capita every year. It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States. That's 2 out of every 10 productive dollars going towards healthcare.
In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.
In exchange for constantly worrying, exercising, staying up to date, eating right, etc you buy yourself one year more of life, and it's not even going to be a GOOD year. It's going to be one more year of being 80+ years old with everything hurting and constant medical needs.
Is it really worth 20% of the money you make every year for you entire life to live one extra, shitty, year?
I just don't think people have done the math on this one.
It shocks me how anyone could string this pile words together and think they sound like anything at all.
> "2 out of every 10 productive dollars"
As if those dollars have anything to do with the time people work, or that they would get those dollars and time back by not caring about health.
As if the tiny portion of those dollars that actually gets spent on patient healthcare isn't dominated by end of life care.
The US healthcare system spend is so far divorced from whatever idea of "productive dollars" anyone has when it's 60-80% admin cost. The US should not even be mentioned in any conversation about the ROI of health spend.
What are you even talking about?
But my father died of cancer nearing age 80, (most likely mesothelioma, though we didn't do heavy tests as it was discovered late), and it was incredibly painful and miserable for him. He had fast growing tumors in his ribs, forcing bone to spike out and hit his lungs, the tumors that grew in his lungs caused constant pneumonia and kept leaving him unable to get enough oxygen to his brain to communicate for hours at a time.
I'm not saying it's good to get cancer when you're old, I'm just saying if you had the choice no one would chose to get it earlier.
The truly sad cases are those in which the patient no longer has decision-making capacity and it falls on a family member to make such decisions. When you aren't the one experiencing the pain, it's much harder to weigh that decision rationally. This is why so many providers push patients to establish legal documentation of their end-of-life wishes.
Hmm, that actually parses for me as "it is not important to note" since the 100% assertion doesn't apply to most of us as we won't live that long.
What applies to most of us is that certain behaviors can dramatically increase your chances of getting cancer.
A person drunk driving at twice the speed limit in moderate traffic on a dark and rainy night without their lights on in an old vehicle with shoddy breaks and no traction control while not wearing a seatbelt and texting their ex probably has a near zero chance of developing a cancer given their near 100% chance of dieing in the next few moments.
Suicide is at once the worst and most effective cure for cancer.
Discussing lifetime risk of cancer without accounting for years lived is not useful.
I don't think it's helpful to point out that everyone gets cancer on a long enough timeframe, because that wasn't what the conversation was ever about.
“Most people just don’t live that long” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If you have a healthy lifestyle you would need to live for multiple centuries to reach 100% likelihood.
Well, 100% likelihood is a bit silly, but the point of the person you were responding to is true -- we will all eventually die of something, and if it's not heart disease or dementia, it will almost certainly be cancer.
The question shouldn't be "will I get cancer?"; it should be, "how long do I want to live a happy, healthy, active, independent lifestyle for?" If you exercise, eat a healthy diet, don't become overweight and keep your blood pressure low, you'll maximise your changes for living well, for as long as possible.
This kind of comment lowers the level of discourse dramatically.
Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.
> hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.
Unless you can demonstrate supernatural causes these are the only two broad categories you need. It's either coming from inside (genes) or outside (diet, random neutrino bit flipping your shit, smoking, x-rays, etc.).
There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.
Basically, live healthily, and you'll have a (much!) happier and longer life.
All of the following affect it, and many other things do too:
- sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium intake
- exercise
- obesity
- many drugs (including ibuprofen and stimulants)
- alcohol
- smoking
- prescriptions for lowering BP
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/diet_alcohol/re...
https://publications.iarc.who.int/Book-And-Report-Series/Iar...
What else could it possibly mean?
Not in any country I've ever been in. Do you mean in the US?
I'm less convinced of the negatives of this than I used to be. Humans are quite well adapted to alcohol.
If it's something you enjoy, I'd say go for it, in moderation. It's probably less unhealthy than e.g. living in a city, eating processed meat, or working an office job.
No. But drinking every now and then makes so little difference it's not a huge concern. Drinking a lot, though -- that's more problematic.
Like most of my friends around my age, I've cut out almost all alcohol in the last few years. None of us miss it. But it's still nice to drink occasionally, and I'm not going to stop entirely.
Profits of main alcohol suppliers has certainly taken a hit over the last 5 years but this is arguably far more because of rise of remote working, inflation (drinking at pubs have become much more costly than before) and people in general just addicted to their phone rather than going out (similar to the impact on almost all social activities no just going to pubs)
My personal theory is that they are scared of ending up on the Internet when they don't have control.
Of course, there are still people who go out and have a good time, or who grab a bottle on the way home from work. But as with most things these days, there's been a socioeconomic bifurcation that has split the fertile consumerist middle into haves and (mostly) have-nots. And the have-nots aren't bothering.
Now, I agree that’s not the only factor — there’s something else going on reducing alcohol consumption even in people who’ve never taken GLP-1RAs — but when you have >10% of the population taking them, that’s another significant factor contributing to falling drinking rates.
This is more like alcohol apathy - not drinking, but also not explicitly anti-alcohol. That the more generational shift in Gen Z that I've seen. But, those sentiments can certainly change over time.
1. health concerns mean moderate drinkers drink less, but heavy drinkers have not changed their habits 2. young people seem to go more to extremes: either drink a lot or be teetotal.
I'm wayyyy less likely to exercise if I've only slept 5 hours
A long while ago i read about this and a link to wealth. Of those families with know genetic problems, the poor ones seems to have actively dealt with the issue internally after realizing the problem. They adopt, have fewer children, or use surrogacy. They cannot afford sickly kids. But wealthy families did not, the best examples being those royal families with known problems.
Personally, my cancer risks went way up when my heavy-smoker uncle died of throat cancer. Going from zero cancer in related family to "some" moved me up the charts.
It's like saying BRCA1 causes breast cancer, but 90% of cases don't involve the gene, and many people with the gene don't get cancer.
I'm not saying it can't be a reason, but it looks like it's a common and maybe convenient excuse.
Really no, not that many, 5-10% estimated. And I'd not be surprised if a lot of the "everyone in the family get cancers" aren't environmental either (factory next door, working in a field using chemicals, etc.)
https://cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/reduce-your-risk/che...
No. This is 5-10% are from inherited genetic issues, not environment. And that is the canadian cancer society saying so, not a random website or drug company. 5-10% is a monumental number of cancers. If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
> If someone came out with a drug to reduce cancers across the board by 5-10% there would be talk at the Nobel commitee.
I have one, stop drinking, where is my nobel?
And you don't even have to be hard and fast with any of that. Drink on occasion and eat stuff that isn't good for you on occasion and you're probably still getting 95% of the benefits. Not sure about smoking though.
It's very simple at the end of the day. Simple != easy to do. Drinking is fun. People enjoy smoking. Junk food is appealing because it's relatively cheap and tastes good.
The best biohack is to eat like your doctor recommends while we all nod along and silently ignore. Just eat what is widely accepted as good for you and you'll have a good chance at living a happy, healthy life.
diet, tobacco, infections, obesity, alcohol, others
Many viri are present in many human beings, but they don't develop cancer after all.
Viri is the latin plural for men
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744845/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12185401/
so it's not surprising that infections can lead to downstream, systemic problems in the human body which then allows for things like cancer to arise (especially given that we just lived through a once-in-a-century pandemic that is still ongoing)
so safe bet that cancer rates are never going to be lower than they are today
remember US also just deregulated all pollution from power plants, funded re-starting coal plants and dropped car engine efficiency requirements
oh they are also trying to double oil-fracking output which toxifies groundwater and air for miles around it with offgassing
every rocket launch and deorbit by starlink et all also put toxic pollution into the atmosphere
so next decade should end well for cancer rates
It’s really a golden age for cancer treatments and energy.
Humans are making progress figuring out how to make space use sustainable as well! There are multiple companies out there working in de-orbiting satellites that have reached end of life. A single launch can possibly de-orbit 3-6 satellites. The capacity of a single one of these companies is enough to stabilize the number of space junk today
For example either renewables + batteries or nuclear could have displaced coal. Just because there wasn't enough money/political support for it doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about both fracking and coal usage consequences.
And no, renewables + batteries and nuclear couldn't have displaced coal precisely due to a lack of money and political support. Why are those constraints any less important? The goal isn't just to build renewable tech, the goal is to build a functional society that uses renewable tech. There also is a technological constraint here, fracking became viable in the early 2000s before modern battery and solar tech existed at its current price point.
we don't use domestic oil, we sell it overseas
and oil until pop-up "ai" datacenters was not used for power production
you are thinking about solar and wind power for coal's demise
which now they are also defunding, even worse reusing the funds for coal investment
You... really need to read more before forming your opinions
Solar and wind are commercially viable and provide about 30% of the electrical energy in Texas. Around 50% of California's daytime electrical energy is provided by solar and wind power. New projects are typically hamstrung by transmission permitting constraints.
While subsidies would help substantially, they aren't a necessary condition for continued adoption of renewable energy sources. Storage is probably the next big hurdle to displace fossil fuels once there's sufficient progress with transmission.
esp when all the caps are missing but all the punctuation are perfectly present
Governments around the world are losing citizens trust. And that has terrible consequences. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.
We may know how to reduce the risk of cancer. We may have vaccines for that infections. But if governments care more about power than serving citizens all that knowledge is for nothing.
- https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/hpv-vaccine-hesitancy-in-e...
Know that it is common among certain demographics though.
You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.
What ever happened to parents who just wanted their children to be happy? Maybe she wants to be a whore. The more figuratively you're happy to deploy that term the more likely her choices overlap.
I'm old enough to remember when Trump was recommending the Covid vaccine and democrats were fear mongering about it. Trump was even booed at his own rallies for promoting the vaccine.