alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is guaranteed for men. You'll either die from or with prostate cancer if you make it that far.
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.