Jan 07 2013
Everything we eat causes cancer…sort of
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36 Responses to “Everything we eat causes cancer…sort of”
Sayeth Joe Jackson:
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer
Don’t touch that dial
Don’t try to smile
Just take this pill
It’s in your file
Don’t work hard
Don’t play hard
Don’t plan for the graveyard
Remember -
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
Everything
Everything gives you cancer
There’s no cure, there’s no answer
Everything gives you cancer
Don’t work by night
Don’t sleep by day
You’ll feel all right
But you will pay
No caffeine
No protein
No booze or
Nicotine
Remember -
Heh. I forgot about that song. If I had remembered it, then I would have started my post out with a snippet from it.
I recommend foodpolitics.com for good reporting on nutritional research. Marion Nestle has a bona fide science background and writes in a very user-friendly way. Her books are excellent as well. She has no particular ax to grind except the difficulty of doing proper nutritional studies. Her work centers on public health, which is where the politics come into the picture.
Why doesn’t the link turn blue?
[...] report from Science Based Medicine continues its tradition of rational and balanced reviews of medical [...]
I have an old cartoon showing a long row of dead lab rats with signs showing what killed them. The signs cover pretty much everything: tobacco, foods, pharmaceuticals, air pollution, etc. Only one has a smile on its face. Its sign says “Sex.”
“When you boil it all down, it’s probably far less important what individual foods one eats than that one eats a varied diet that is relatively low in red meat and high in vegetables and fruits and that one is not obese.”
This is the bottom line. Over the 20yrs I’ve substantially revised and cut my Nutrition & Cancer lecture to just one 50min talk. After we cover rates and basic cancer biology, I’ve dropped nearly all the nutrient side of it ’cause the data just don’t hold up. Their take home is what you state above. Plus we talk about sunlight, alcohol, smoking and genetics.
Would love to post more but I am literally starting the 2200 mi drive home from my Oregon sabbatical.
Looking forward to reading the AJCN paper when I return.
Buried in the middle of this interesting analysis is what I consider your “money quote”, namely: “When you boil it all down, it’s probably far less important what individual foods one eats than that one eats a varied diet that is relatively low in red meat and high in vegetables and fruits and that one is not obese.”
Unfortunately, the pervasive tone of the article as a whole, and that of many of the following comments, is the sort of fatalism that leads right back to the destructive Standard American Diet, something like, “since no strong science shows that this particular steak, or Coke, or Twinkie, will kill me, I’ll just go right on eating my steak AND Coke AND Twinkie.”
Joel Fuhrman MD is a clinician and has been writing good science-based books on nutritional topics for over a decade. His new book is “The End of Diabetes”. Here are a couple of quotations from that book:
p. 31: “Moderation doesn’t work.”
p. 39: “Following a correct diet and exercise plan as a remedy should not be labeled alternative or complementary medicine. It is simply the way all properly educated doctors should be practicing. Everything else should be called malpractice medicine. Offering patients drugs and surgical interventions without informing them that, for most diseases, nutritional excellence and exercise are safer and more effective in the long run is not adequate informed consent to the use of medications. The risks of medicines are downplayed and their supposed benefits greatly exaggerated by a medical profession and drug industry who offer drugs as the panacea to all that ails us.”
And as a result of all those sensational press releases like “Tomato sauce protects from cancer” or “Bacon causes cancer” over here we even have a saying “American scientists found that…” – which basically means that what follows is rubbish. Sad but true.
Joel Fuhrman claims with a straight face that “headache is the body’s detoxification response to the stress placed on it.”
Well, yeah. That’s why coffeehouses in California must now display Prop 65 warnings. Roasted coffee — along with a great many other cooked foods — contains acrylamide, which is (of course) carcinogenic in sufficient quantities. Not the quantities found in coffee (or pretty much any other cooked food) as far as anyone can tell, but Prop 65 brooks no rational threshold.
Now that a Prop 65 warning is posted on almost literally every single place of public accommodation in the state, you’d think SOMEONE would see the uselessness of it.
Is it just me who thinks the first sentence of the post has a typo?
Your friendly neighbourhood (well, my neighbourhood) vegan reminding us all that there are ethical reasons not to eat meat (or indeed any animal products) which kind of obviate all these long-winded debates.
Lytrigian:
Having recently moved away from the Land of Fruits and Nuts, I was contemplating making a similar comment about the ridiculousness of Prop 65 warnings. A couple years ago my wife wanted to make a quilt for a friend who was having a baby so she dragged me to the local, chain-fabric store to find fabric. She then proceeded to hem and haw and spend WAY more time then needed trying to find the right fabric because there was a Prop 65 warning posted over most of the quilting fabric (apparently because they use formaldehyde in the processing of it). It was either new or we had never noticed it in the many times we had gone there previously. The exterior of every building of the apartment complex that we lived in (and all other complexes I could see) had the same prop 65 warning…
Unfortunately, ethical debates are not immune to long-windedness.
There is an old Bill Cosby routine that features Bill, now that he is getting older, going to his doctor for a physical and advice on how to live longer. Part of the conversation goes something like:
“So, Bill, do you eat food?”
“Uh, well, yes….”
“STOP IT! It will kill you.”
Clearly, Dr. Gorski wishes to discuss some meat he has encountered in the literature.
But bell ringers don’t go into the bell towers to ring bells. Can you image how deafening that would be?
The Dave:
Being from Massachusetts, I had not encountered the joy that is Prop 65 until a few weeks ago. As a New Year’s Resolution I had decided to start working out more, and so I ordered a set of kickboxing DVDs that came with gloves/resistance bands.
When I got it, there was a huge Prop 65 warning label on it that the gloves might give me cancer.
At the point where you’re warning people against exercise in favor of a chemical that might have been used on the product at one point, I think you’ve gone too far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daGR7ZEbwqM
Something to chew on about nutrition, even if it is not (directly) related to cancer:
Triglycerides and Carbohydrates
http://rdfeinman.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/reading-the-scientific-literature-a-guide-to-flawed-studies/
@TonyMach
I can’t tell if you are recommending this or what. It looks like a load of science-y rubbish to me. One comment goes on at length about Bastyr “College” in Seattle and all the wonderful Naturopaths he knows.
I lost 45 lbs. Have kept it off for seven years now. I eat carbs as part of a balanced diet. I eat real serving sizes. I minimize carbs and get them from whole grains and veggies, veggies, veggies. I don’t eat meat, but that’s personal, not diet advice.
No one sticks to severely restricted “diets”. Only about 5% of people who lose weight, keep it off more than a year or two–because they can’t stay with the unrealistic regimens they subject themselves to. These endless discussions of carbs vs. protein, good fats/bad fats (as if you can eat all the olive oil you want!), and all the rest are just useless. Eat what you like, within reason, and don’t exceed your DAILY CALORIC NEEDS. If you “eat good food, not too much, mostly plants” as Michael Pollan so succinctly summarizes, and weigh yourself regularly, you’ll do better than worrying about nutritional studies that are nearly impossible to properly conduct to begin with.
Maintaining weight is simple, but never easy for most of us. I think that one is from Marion Nestle.
“When you boil it all down, it’s probably far less important what individual foods one eats than that one eats a varied diet that is relatively low in red meat and high in vegetables and fruits and that one is not obese.”
Sure, this is great advice, but I really don’t understand the attitude about Ornish from you or the article you linked to. I guess it’s easy to throw your hands up in frustration because it’s hard to get Americans to eat better, but I would say that’s a pretty emotional, non-scientific response. If all Americans were smokers and drug addicts, it would probably be hard to get them to participate in studies to see if it’s beneficial to not smoke or do drugs too.
The fact is that most highly refined foods and many animal foods are made deliberately to get the highest dopamine response possible from the brain, ensuring that they crowd out the healthier options we have available. It’s exactly the same as addiction. You get addicted to cocaine and pretty soon everything else in life pales in comparison. It takes a while to get off the drugs and get back to a normal life. The same goes for getting off the super calorie-dense food and learn to enjoy fruits and vegetables again.
It may feel like “monk-like determination and self-denial” for the 3-6 weeks it takes to neuroadapt to a lower calorie diet, but I’d bet most of the people you know that aren’t smokers or drug addicts don’t see their every-day abstinence of those vices as “monk-like determination and self-denial” either.
There’s nothing wrong or even difficult with abstaining from junk food and animal products completely. The social stigma is a hard one to get by and the constant presence of marketing from companies who make millions from getting us hooked on those foods certainly makes it worse, but it’s going to take educating people about it, like doctors like Ornish are trying to do–just like doctors had to educate America about the dangers of smoking–not throwing our hands up and shaming them because the average person is too difficult to work with.
On Science Friday jan. 11. there was a very interesting interview with Robert Lustig, author of “Fat chance”, about diet, sugars (especially fructose), exercise. He also talks about addiction to sugar.
This is frankly nonsensical. You think frozen-pizza manufacturers are running PET scans in product testing? Feedlots were established with dopamine release in mind?
You have a rather crude understanding of the neurochemistry of addiction, as well. If it were all about dopamine, only a single target drug would be needed in the treatment context. The big boy in ethanol, benzodiazepine, and barbiturate dependence, for example, looks very much to be downregulation of GABA(A) receptors, with upregulation of NMDA receptors coming in second. It should not be surprising that sedatives are rather different from stimulants such as cocaine.
(Oh, and the vast majority of the recipes in Eat More, Weigh Less are freaking ghastly.)
Pretty run-of-the-mill for SF these days. An extremist with an axe to grind given a totally unquestioning platform to say whatever he wants, regardless of evidence.
When somebody wants to claim that 99% of the established knowledge base about diet is completely wrong and utterly backwards (e.g. calories, body fat, and obesity are all completely irrelevant), writing a book about it is not convincing. And then the mind-boggling clueless oversimplification that all we need to do to fix medical costs is regulate fructose… hello, that’s NOT what’s different about the US.
Even if there’s ultimately a certain amount of truth to his claims, he’s going about it the wrong way.
@Narad
I’m no scientist and I don’t claim to be an expert in any field, but I’ve worked in marketing and advertising for a long time and I know how food products are focus tested and I can tell you it’s a fact that frozen pizza manufacturers don’t give a crap how nourishing their product is, only that you prefer the taste of it to all of the other options available to you.
I apologize for making the mistake of using the word “dopamine” when i meant it in a more general sense than trying to describe the specific mechanisms of addiction.
@PernilleN
I’d watch out for Lustig, he aligns him self pretty heavily with the paleo crowd.
@oraknabo: I didn’t say I subscribe to everything he says, but it was interesting. And I don’t care what crowd he’s with.
PernilleN:
When I listened to that, I kept thinking about this article: High Fructose Corn Syrup: Tasty Toxin or Slandered Sweetener?
It probably stuck in my head a bit more since I have seen Dr. Laidler give that talk in person.
@Narad – you might think its a ridiculous notion that PET scans could be used in product testing, and I realize this is a fairly recent development, but some corporations really do spend significant marketing money on brain scans these days:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1769238/neurofocus-uses-neuromarketing-hack-your-brain
I’m going to try to avoid assumptions here as much as possible, but I think I can safely start out by assuming that the basic drive of this blog is ethical and that most people posting here and most of its readers probably agree exposing quacks is valuable because it’s unethical to sell people things under the claim that they are beneficial when they have little provable effect or detrimental effects.
I would also assume because of that that most readers of this blog won’t fall back the argument that marketing success outweighs any ethical concerns involved in selling people food. If you can make that argument, then what’s wrong with misleading people to sell homeopathics or being as popular as Dr Oz?
I may not be an expert in addiction, but there have been studies to show that there have been addiction-like responses in animals to high-calorie foods and that eating high calorie foods decreases interest in healthier food choices:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2947358/
“We found that development of obesity was coupled with the emergence of a progressively worsening brain reward deficit. Similar changes in reward homeostasis induced by cocaine or heroin is considered a critical trigger in the transition from casual to compulsive drug-taking. Accordingly, we detected compulsive-like feeding behavior in obese but not lean rats, measured as palatable food consumption that was resistant to disruption by an aversive conditioned stimulus. Striatal dopamine D2 receptors (D2R) were downregulated in obese rats, similar to previous reports in human drug addicts. Moreover, lentivirus-mediated knockdown of striatal D2R rapidly accelerated the development of addiction-like reward deficits and the onset of compulsive-like food seeking in rats with extended access to palatable high-fat food. These data demonstrate that overconsumption of palatable food triggers addiction-like neuroadaptive responses in brain reward circuitries and drives the development of compulsive eating. Common hedonic mechanisms may therefore underlie obesity and drug addiction.”
I don’t have much data to link to on this, but I think it’s pretty obvious that most animals, free from involvement in humans will not develop significant amounts of obesity, cancer and heart disease and the species that do are usually either humans themselves, pets of humans or lab animals deliberately exposed to the causes of these diseases. The common thread here is that all of these species are fed by food produced by humans, specifically by the contemporary food industry.
http://www.petobesityprevention.com/big-pets-get-bigger-latest-survey-shows-dog-and-cat-obesity-epidemic-expanding/
That’s as much logic as I can put into one blog comment about this. Maybe you can deduce my meaning from the above facts and assumptions better than in my original comment, but all I’m trying to say is that food is made by most food-producing companies to be more appealing than nourishing and that it takes a lot of education and basically withdrawal from harmful foods to learn how to eat well. Doctors like Dean Ornish are trying to have a positive role in reversing epidemics like heart disease and obesity and I don’t think it does anyone any good to call out their efforts as being useless because the average american doesn’t want to give up their Big Mac.
@Scott:
“When somebody wants to claim that 99% of the established knowledge base about diet is completely wrong and utterly backwards (e.g. calories, body fat, and obesity are all completely irrelevant), writing a book about it is not convincing.”
Are you sure we heard the same program? I didn’t hear him say half of that.
Regards
Pernille Nylehn
He definitely said, not quite in so many words, that calories, fat, and obesity don’t matter – only fructose consumption. I specifically recall a spiel where he said that somebody could be obese, but if they got that way without consuming fructose, it wouldn’t cause metabolic syndrome. The first part of the sentence you quoted is my interpretation of said statements.
He definitely said, not quite in so many words, that calories, fat, and obesity don’t matter – only fructose consumption. I specifically recall a spiel where he said that somebody could be obese, but if they got that way without consuming fructose, it wouldn’t cause metabolic syndrome. The first part of the sentence you quoted is my interpretation of said statements.
Apologies for the double – no idea what happened.
He did (as I remember) say you can be thin but metabolically unsound, and vice versa, which is absolutely true. (Not if you are really obese of course, but a few extra kilos don’t matter if you’re fit and have a healthy diet.)
And he definitely said that exercise is the best thing you can do for your health, even though it often doesn’t help you losing weight. Perhaps that’s why I liked him.
But I may have to hear it again.
Pernille Nylehn