logoalt Hacker News

lm28469today at 9:31 AM2 repliesview on HN

> people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin

If you're not you should, colon cancer is becoming a leading cause of death in people under 40...

https://www.cancerresearch.org/blog/colorectal-cancer-awaren...

https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/0...


Replies

TeMPOraLtoday at 10:01 AM

Listing "risk factors" without quantifying them is useless waste of readers' time, but even then, "diet" is only one of eight listed, with three others being the obvious ones - alcohol, smoking, and low physical activity/obesity (arguably those should be two separate ones).

-

The chart you linked only talks about incidence ratio, and is more than adequately explained by improvements in access to tests, quality of tests, as well as improvements in healthcare in general, as people don't suffer and die today from what they did up to few decades ago - or anything else, really, since the world has been steadily improving across the board in every dimension.

In fact, non-linear effects of population growth alone could explain that chart: people talk more, including about colon cancer, so over time, more people in the population with access to testing would go test themselves after being made aware of the potential problem, biasing the sample.

Or, more fundamentally, the fact that medicine graduated from voodoo to proper science only around 100 years ago, would explain it too, because we're less than a century into doing proper studies about anything at all.

show 1 reply
lkbmtoday at 4:34 PM

Note that the risk factor of diet in your chose to highlight exactly one food to avoid: red meat.

Yeah, you should probably eat more low-processed foods like veggies, but the Beyond Burger is used as a replacement for beef, not for carrots.