Yves here. KLG focuses today on an important topic: the world rise in cancers among younger people. Note that the key papers he discusses, one published in 2022, the other 2024, both built data sets for time periods Before Covid (for the 2024 paper, from 2010 to 2019). That means the trends have gotten even worse since then. IM Doc has seen in his own practice a marked rise in cancers, particularly ones once considered exotic, as well as particularly fast-moving ones in the After Covid era. His observations are confirmed by oncologists in tertiary medical centers.
Although no one seems to know the causes of this shift, Anthony Leonardi has offered a plausible thesis, that of T-cell depletion. In simple layperson terms, T-cells are a second line of defense against pathogens. T-cells also police the body for cancers and stop the cancers we are growing all the time from becoming dangerous. T-cells do not replenish in adults.
Leonardi has argued that Covid taxes and may even deplete T-cells. More cases of Covid lead to weakened immune defenses, including against the recurrence of Covid as well as other infectious diseases. And that would also produce a greater risk of cancer.
Note that it is possible, but again not proven, that the Covid vaccines could also produce this effect. Recall that the mRNA vaccines produced such a strong immune system response that even healthy young people often had to take a day or two off from work.
So we have a serious rise in an underlying pathology apparently kicked into higher gear by Covid. And the more recent increase, if acknowledged, may take the focus of the underlying trend, which KLG points out could be addressed….if officials took serious interest in the lifestyle issues that promote obesity.
KLG’s introduction:
Younger and younger people are getting cancers that have been previously more prevalent in an older cohort. The most likely reason is that younger people are exposed to risk factors that were not there for their parents and grandparents. One primary risk factor is epidemic obesity, which puts the body in a chronic inflammatory state that is conducive to cancer progression. More than 20% of Americans are now living with obesity. This presents health problems, but epidemic obesity is also a problem of the political economy of diet and lifeways, Therefore, while directed medical approaches are essential, reduction of the burden of early-onset cancer is also a problem of political economy. This makes the problem more difficult but also more tractable. As the US government turns over in the next several weeks, it will be essential to pay attention and hold Make America Healthy Again accountable.
By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health
A search using “cancer in young people” as the query returns a long list of hits. Articles in the popular press are often over the top, but epidemic or not, this is a real concern. The primary question is “What to Know About Rising Rates of ‘Early-Onset’ Cancer.” The scientific literature on this topic is large, and two recent comprehensive articles, both available to all readers, cover the subject well.
Before getting into the evidence, a few reminders about the origins and nature of cancer may be useful: Cancer is a multistep process that begins with a mutation leading to dysregulated proliferation [1] of the mutant cell. This initial mutation is followed by others that further enhance proliferation and cancer progression. Subsequent mutations may also allow cancer cells to move to other places in the body and seed new tumors. For example, liver metastases from the primary colon tumor are often the cause of death in these patients. My father died of a brainstem tumor that was secondary to his lung cancer, which was acquired by the usual exposure to mutagens. Cancer therapies [2] have been developed to interfere with every stage of cancer progression, and the successes of clinical oncology for many cancers have been spectacular since the National Cancer Act was signed by Richard Nixon fifty-three years ago. Nevertheless, cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in the USA, and most cancers are caused by an environmental insult of some kind.
The first article is a comprehensive retrospective and prospective review: Is early-onset cancer an emerging global epidemic? Current evidence and future implications (Ugai et al. 2022). It was published in October 2022 in Nature Reviews: Clinical Oncology by an international team of authors. Key Points of this paper include:
- The incidence of cancers of various organs diagnosed in adults ≤50 years of age has been rising in many parts of the world since the 1990s.
- Evidence suggests an etiological role for risk factor exposures in early life and young adulthood, although specific effects of individual exposures remain largely unknown.
- The early life exposome (including, among other factors, diet, lifestyle, obesity, environmental exposures and the microbiome) has changed substantially, with variable trends observed around the world since the mid-20th century.
- The early-onset cancer epidemic might be one manifestation of increasing trends in the development of many chronic diseases in young and future generations.
- Raising awareness of the early-onset cancer epidemic and improving the early-life environment should be our immediate goals: these are likely to reduce the burden of both early-onset and later-onset cancers.
Although cancer screening has improved, this implies that novel environmental risk factors in early life (from conception) and childhood lead to early-onset cancers, as shown in Figure 2.
Most of these risk factors are well known. Their relationships, some of which are not completely understood yet, to early-onset cancers are described in this lightly edited excerpt from Table 1.
The key to this perspective is that the relevant risk factors with an increasing trend are often behavioral, whether intentional or not.
For example, early-onset colorectal cancer (CRC) has been linked to high adulthood BMI. [3] Studies have also shown that high childhood or adolescent BMI predisposes one to early-onset CRC. Sedentary lifestyle and physical inactivity are correlated with early-onset CRC. Since obesity and a sedentary lifestyle with little physical inactivity are commonly linked, this makes perfect sense. As noted in Table 1, obesity is a risk factor for endometrial cancer, esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, multiple myeloma (a form of leukemia), and pancreatic cancer. Obesity causes a generalized chronic inflammatory condition that leads to responses characterized by cell proliferation and other abnormal states For example, cell/tissue changes in the esophagus caused by gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD/heartburn) can progress directly to esophageal cancer (average 5-year survival rate: 20%), which is why symptomatic relief of heartburn is not sufficient to prevent progression of GERD to cancer.
Current evidence on early-onset breast cancer shows “the trend of reproductive factors, central obesity, physical inactivity, alcohol consumption and dietary westernization since the mid-20th century might have contributed to the rising incidence of premenopausal breast cancer.” For example, earlier menarche may be due to the Western diet. The molecular signatures of pre- and postmenopausal breast cancers are also different, which is further evidence that early-onset breast cancer is a distinct disease.
All of this goes together with changes in the “Western” diet, especially in the United States over the past 50-60 years. Thus, it is unsurprising that the increase in early-onset CRC has accompanied the obesity epidemic during this period. As covered before in this series [4], when dietary fat (lipids) and cholesterol (which is not a fat but the two are usually conflated) were demonized in response to the Diet-Heart Hypothesis, fat calories were replaced by carbohydrates. This is undoubtedly the proximal cause of the obesity epidemic, which may also have been aggravated by the prevalence of ultra-processed foods (UPF) in the Western diet. [5]
Ugai et al (2022) are very convincing in their description of the epidemic in early-onset cancer in young people below the age of 50. But what do the population data say? This has been addressed in Differences in cancer rates among adults born between 1920 and 1990 in the USA: an analysis of population-based cancer registry data (Sung et al. 2024) published in Lancet Public Health in August 2024. They begin with the following Summary:
- Trends in cancer incidence in recent birth cohorts largely reflect changes in exposures during early life and foreshadow the future disease burden…we examined cancer incidence and mortality trends, by birth cohort, for 34 types of cancer in the USA.
- Data were extracted for 23,654,000 patients diagnosed with these 34 types of cancer and 7,348,137 deaths from 25 of these cancers for individuals.
- 17 of the 34 cancers had and increasing incidence in younger birth cohorts, including nine that previously had declining incidence in older birth cohorts. These findings add to the growing evidence of increased cancer risk in younger generations, highlighting the need to identify and tackle underlying risk factors.
These data are congruent with previous research: “Ten of 17 cancers with increasing incidence in younger birth cohorts are obesity-related cancers (colorectum, kidney, gallbladder and other biliary, uterus, pancreas, gastric, estrogen-positive breast, ovary, myeloma, and liver), suggesting a potential role of obesity (and the obesity epidemic) in emerging cancer trends in recent generations.” (lightly edited) The data presented in the paper are very clear but difficult to transfer.
In addition to their agreement with the obesity hypothesis, Sung et al. also discuss the linkage between the gut microbiome and gastrointestinal cancer and how the Western diet and overuse of antibiotics have altered the gut microbiome in the younger birth cohorts. The microbiome and early-onset cancer are covered in a recent open-access paper: The microbiome and rise of early-onset cancers: knowledge gaps and research opportunities (2023). Microbial dysbiosis caused by environmental insult leads to heightened oxidative stress and inflammation.
Hopeful notes in their data include the accelerated downturn in cervical cancer due to the effectiveness of vaccination against HPV. Women born in 1990 were ~16 years old when HPV vaccination was approved for women and girls aged 9-26 years in 2006. Wider adoption of HPV vaccination should reduce the incidence of HPV-caused cancers in both sexes. Tobacco-associated cancers are also down in the younger birth cohorts due to the rapid decline of smoking in these groups, although the deleterious health effects of smokeless tobacco (cancer) and vaping remain.
Taken together, the results described here show that during the second half of the twentieth century successive birth cohorts have shown increased incidence of common cancer types that have different origins. The findings of both papers highlight the significance of early exposure to risk factors in this cancer burden. More importantly, the data also indicate that avoidance of environmental insults and changes in behavioral risk factors will prevent much of the early-onset cancer in future birth cohorts.
So, what are we to do about early-onset cancers? A general scheme is illustrated in Ugai et al., Figure 3. As an outline, this is very good. As a political plan, not so much. But that is not up to the authors. Rather, it is up to all of us.
Starting from the upper left box and leaving the other conventional recommendations for another time, how will it be possible to promote healthy lifestyles from childhood? Bullet point the first: Implement healthy school meal programs. Yes, this is very desirable. But it is not possible now in the United States. When I was an elementary school student, the “lunchroom ladies,” who were loved by students and teachers alike, actually cooked lunch every day. Three out of five days the entire building was suffused with the aroma of yeast rolls made from scratch. On hot dog day, the slaw and cinnamon buns were made from scratch. Same for what they called pizza (it wasn’t recognizable as such, but it was good). Raw celery, carrots, apples, oranges, plums, grapes, and bananas were common. Students drank water or milk. An extra glass of milk was five cents. This continued into junior high school (middle school). Selections were more varied in my public high school, and many went to the new McDonalds for lunch. But the kitchen still functioned as a kitchen instead of an oven attached to a large walk-in freezer that had been stocked with ready-to-thaw ultra-processed food-like substances.
Things have changed over the past 30+ years. This is not the place for an extended discussion but these fifteen lunches from around the world illustrate the issue. Thirteen, possibly fourteen, of the countries have a serious food culture and expect everyone to partake, especially the children if these meals really are illustrative (admittedly a legitimate question). One country, #15, does not. But, somewhat breathlessly, in the US “Multiple lunch options like salads, sandwiches, soups, smoothies, pasta, pizza + so much more. With over 20+ choices a week, the combinations are endless, making lunch anything but typical!”
We could do with more typical if typical were like the other school lunches. Other search results are similar. In this array, with some duplicates from the first, Country #1 this time is serving green peas from a can, fruit in syrup, and breaded mystery nuggets with ketchup. So, will Big Ag and Big Food and the Big Distributors “allow” US schools to approximate what may be the practice in France, Brazil, Greece, Spain, India, or Italy from the first array? That is the question. The command to “Move fast and break things” is called for once again, but masters of things that must be broken are unlikely to acquiesce.
Bullet point the second: Promote sustainable healthy food production and distribution systems. Another laudable goal, but one that industrial agriculture cannot meet, by definition, and most certainly would not if it could. Industrial agriculture is a category mistake that has nothing to do with healthy food and everything to do with wealth extraction.
Thus, early-onset cancer is a problem of political economy as much, or more, as it is a problem of medicine and health. This leads us to our current politics, in which Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and its people have big plans. MAHA is constituted as a PAC – Political Action Committee – apparently with two current websites, here and here. Senator Roger Marshall, MD (R – Kansas) recently formed the Congressional MAHA Caucus:
Today (19 Dec 2024), U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, MD, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, announced the creation of the Congressional Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Caucus. This new caucus will focus on nutrition, access to affordable, high-quality-nutrient-dense foods, improving primary care, and addressing the root causes of chronic diseases. (emphasis added)
As in the entire healthcare discussion, “access” does a lot of work here, but the focus on nutrition, primary medical care, and the root causes of chronic disease is absolutely correct. The details matter, however, and one of the major MAHA influencers seems to be Casey Means, MD, [6] who published Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health along with her brother in May 2024 (NB: I have not read this book, which is on order; therefore much of what follows is from the Amazon link). Good Energy represents:
A bold new vision for optimizing our health now and in the future. (emphasis in original)
What if depression, anxiety, infertility, insomnia, heart disease, erectile dysfunction, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia, cancer and many other health conditions that torture and shorten our lives actually have the same root cause? Our ability to prevent and reverse these conditions – and feel incredible today – is under our control and simpler than we think. The key is our metabolic function – the most important and least understood factor in our overall health. As Dr. Casey Means explains in this groundbreaking book, nearly every health problem we face can be explained by how well the cells in our body create and use energy. To live free from frustrating symptoms and life-threatening disease, we need our cells to be optimally powered so that they can create “good energy,” the essential fuel that impacts every aspect of our physical and mental wellbeing. (emphasis added)
It would be silly to say that good nutrition is irrelevant to how the body handles any condition or that poor nutrition can lead to disease, with heart disease and Type-2 diabetes as prime examples. But to say that that cancer and Alzheimer’s disease have the same root cause, and that this is due a lack of “good energy” is ridiculous. Metabolic energy is energy. Not having enough is indeed a problem, but I will have to read the book to learn the meaning of “bad energy,” forthcoming. MAHA world is likely to be a place of never-ending wonder.
Still – to eat well, get enough sleep, have a rewarding job with the expectation of a comfortable retirement, to know that your children are not severely at risk in the coming world, and to not have an overwhelming dread that one illness can bankrupt you if your “access” to health care is denied – is to live a good life. These are problems of political economy. They are currently unsolvable under the Neoliberal Dispensation in which “the market” is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured. What politicians of the Uniparty fail to realize is that virtually all of us already have “skin in the game.” But maybe MAHA-PAC can be as successful the many other PACs operational today. Several come readily to mind.
Finally, as an aside, the blurbists for Good Energy are the usual suspects, although Robert H. Lustig was a minor surprise. One who is not well known but should be is Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia (pop. ~115). He is a visionary farmer and businessman with the deepest roots in his community:
“In Good Energy, Dr. Means makes a bold case for why food – and particularly regenerative agriculture – must be at the very center of healthcare. She has emerged as one of the strongest physician voices teaching doctors and patients that we will never achieve optimal human health without optimal soil health and biodiversity – a message that the healthcare system would be wise to pay attention to. Dr. Means makes it clear that we can’t drug our way out of a broken food system.”
This is exactly right, and the case has been made by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson since the 1960s, and F.H. King(Farmers of Forty Centuries, pdf) and Liberty Hyde Baily (The Holy Earth) long before. But it also illustrates the problems we face. White Oak Pastures is the wave of the future, if only a ripple now, especially as the world gets smaller in the coming inconvenient apocalypse. But it cannot serve the local or regional community and compete with an industrial livestock industry (sic) in which >90% of yearling cattle, according to a friend who works for the Georgia Department of Agriculture, in Georgia are shipped to feedlots in the Great Plains to be finished with industrial commodity grain, followed by the product being shipped back from where it came. [7]
Under the Neoliberal Dispensation, the negative externalities associated with industrial agriculture are left unaccounted for in retail prices, by design. The only White Oak Pastures product available locally at retail is their grass-fed lean ground beef. It is very good and I use it often even though yesterday the price was $11.49 per pound, about 30% more than industrial ground beef and up from $8.99 (28%) during the Biden Inflation. I recognize the ability to keep my money in the regional economy is conditional on being a member of the Professional Managerial Class – PMC. However, if there were 20-100 White Oak Pastures in each of these United States, the possibilities for our entire political economy would have few limits. And be much better for the health of the people and planet Earth, the sooner the better.
What remains to be seen as the US government turns over in the coming weeks is whether MAHA-PAC can have a larger reach than the more likely MAHA-PMC-PAC. If MAHA-PAC succeeds, early-onset cancer and a large host of other sociogenic health problems can be solved.
It’s up to the citizenry to make this happen. Somehow.
Notes
[1] Cancers are often said to consist of “rapidly growing cells.” While the length of the cell cycle of a cancer cell may be slightly shorter than that of the normal cell, both cells take about 24 hours to divide after the process begins. The problem with cancer cells is they continue to divide when they are not supposed to, not that they divide/grow faster.
[2] Their development is covered by Siddhartha Mukherjee very well in The Emperor of All Maladies. His books on the cell and the gene are also excellent contemporary treatments for the general reader.
[3] Body mass index (BMI) is an imperfect measure of obesity. Many with a high BMI are very physically fit, such as the power lifter I knew with a BMI in the “obese” range. He could deadlift more than 500 pounds and run as many 6-minute miles as he wanted. But BMI is useful as a general measure of the spectrum from “low-weight to over-weight to obese.”
[4] Including: The Diet-Heart Hypothesis and Carbohydrates, The Diet-Heart Hypothesis and Cholesterol, Industrialism is Bad for Our Health.
[5] Note that UPF was added Table 1, as indicated by the asterisk. UPF are included in the paper but attention to UPF has increased markedly since this paper was published. The book on UPF has been discussed in Ultra-processed People in an Ultra-Processed World.
[6] From Amazon: “Casey Means is the Chief Medical Officer and co-founder of Levels, a health technology company with the mission of reversing the world’s metabolic health crisis. She has been on faculty at Stanford University, lecturing on metabolic health and health technology. She received her undergraduate degree with honors from Stanford, where she was President of her class. She graduated from Stanford Medical School and trained in Head & Neck Surgery at Oregon Health and Science University before leaving traditional medicine to devote her life to tackling the root cause of why Americans are sick.” As noted in her Wikipedia entry, “Means withdrew from her medical residency at age 30. She has attributed this decision to the lack of training she received about nutrition and the underlying causes of chronic disease. Means dedicated her practice to functional medicine, a marketing term associated with medical practices that are not science-based.” That she did not complete her residency means that Dr. Means cannot properly identify herself as a physician. From STAT the relevant passage reads: “Casey dropped out of medical residency on her 30th birthday. It’s a cinematic story, retold often: She was in the operating room, gazing down upon a child with incessant sinus inflammation, and disturbed that she didn’t know what was causing it – something she says she never learned. Means realized she was never taught about nutrition as a therapeutic tool, either. (This last assertion is disputed by a fellow Stanford-trained doctor, neurosurgeon Tyler Cole, who graduated around the same time as Means.) Casey became a functional medicine doctor, focused on holistic approaches to care, and editor of the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention. She later started Levels.
[7] It would seem that a large part of the carbon footprint of cattle “farming” lies in this madness.
We’d noticed how Reagan’s Miracle era community gardens, food-buying, CSA & organic co-ops (foraging, varmint-hunting & fishing) enhanced our health? As interaction with diverse age, race, class & refugee groups worked together to replace horrific supermarket, restaurant, fast-food & agribusiness/ fad diets & forestall any interest/ participation in GE Monoculture/ CAFO, convenience store nightmare that followed! Dumpster diving, growing our own & poverty, likely extended lives? (Test your soil & crops, though!)
I would almost say that it is a given that cancer rates are increasing recently as Covid is weakening our immune systems. And certainly what we feed young people has to be a huge factor. From what I saw in the 2004 doco “Supersize Me” it looks like in the US, school foods are all about profit by private corporations and who cares what the effect on young people are. Here is a clip from that doco talking about school lunches and which caused me to treat with suspicion all foods coloured light brown-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7f6hAwf9io (6:02 mins)
But I do not think that the tens of thousands of chemical compounds released into our environment over the past decades can be ignored as how many of them were thoroughly tested before being put to use? In fact, it might be worthwhile taking samples from bodies buried in permafrost before WW2 to get some sort of base line study going into what humans had in them before the modern era.
For what it’s worth, SuperSize Me is a work of fiction masquerading as a documentary. From what I recall the director had a serious alcohol problem and never actually revealed what he ate, so in all odds he was consuming 5k calories a day to put on weight so dramatically and create an interesting conclusion to the film. Others who have tried eating exclusively at McDonald’s for 30 days have not had such dramatic results.
I bring up his alcoholism not to slander him, but to point out that the liver damage and poor cholesterol probably are better explained by that than bingeing fast food
His alcoholism didn’t start with the doc. He didn’t just eat at McDonald’s every day, he stopped walking and he always agreed with suggestions like would you like fries with that and would you like to SuperSize.
One of the earliest counters involved young Europen men who were active military and eating a different menu. The next was someone who ate at McDonald’s three time a day but mostly avoided burgers and fries and nuggets.
It is true that he didn’t document every single meal in detail, and he did hit an age when things can start to fall apart before he began, and he may have been able to binge drink more in hotel rooms than at home. Also true that he only mentioned the alcoholism in the context of abuse allegations (which he apologized for.) So there’s more in the mix than people today think. The idea that his drinking was responsible for the medical results is a stretch.
eat real food, mostly plants, not too much. (try to avoid sugar and industrial seed oils, too).
ironically nothing (nutriton-wise) has changed since Pollan’s book. And Pollan popularized ideas that were decades old at that point.
You don’t have to fanatical about it and become vegan. moderation.
Once good research conclusively emerges, it’ll probably be a multi-vector problem: diet, water-borne chemicals, sugar, etc.
Vegan here! What’s fanatical about wanting want to reduce the harm we cause others? Not wanting a chicken to live a short and brutal life and experience a terrifying death is no different from not wanting the dogs at my local pet shelter to be killed for want of homes. I can’t save the dogs beyond spaying/neutering and adopting, but I can make a difference 3 times a day for other animals.
As always, thanks for your work KLG. In addition to poor diet, I have to wonder about the prevalence of microplastics in our water and soil that I am increasingly seeing reported on and what it is doing to our bodies. Younger folks have been exposed to microplastics for much if not all of their lives. What does that add to the mix??
Also with regard to BMI, we shouldn’t settle when we have the simple measurement of waist to hip ratio (WHR) as a much better indicator of health than BMI “ WHR has been shown to be a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than simple waist circumference and body-mass index. The study by American Heart Association has shown that measuring waistline and comparing it to hip size might be a better way to predict heart disease risk than a widely used body mass index.” I have read about this elsewhere and my now retired doctor was using it at least a decade ago during physicals. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waist%E2%80%93hip_ratio#:~:text=WHR%20has%20been%20shown%20to,widely%20used%20body%20mass%20index.
Also chemical/micro-plastic leakage via hot-food containers: styrofoam, plastics, aluminum, etc.
Non-science anecdote, my brother’s/his wife’s family eats out/gets delivery *a lot*.
I’ve always wondered if that had an impact on my nieces’/nephews’ allergen situation. As lifestyle-wise that is our biggest variable difference.
Add use of non-stick cookware instead of cast iron or stainless steel…
You can make cast-iron or carbon-steel cookware non-stick by traditional prep
I have an easier way. Stand in front of a mirror. Do you look huge? You are huge. There is really only one health directive that is important: loose the lard! Nothing else matters. Of course, nowadays, we can’t even say fat. We must worship obesity as just mother healthy lifestyle.
PS: a friend (from WV, who’d taken part in SuperSize Me) loved the updated “school lunch” photos (microwaved in
forever chemical trays!) But remembered what we’d noted, back when it started: US school lunch ALWAYS looked like made-up NATO propaganda about Soviet Siberian gulag & Chinese reeducation camp food. It was FAR worse in 1950s Catholic schools, believe me!
Given the federal school lunch program’s origins, i.e., soaking up agricultural surpluses – why Republicans in the Farm Belt have traditionally supported it – and maintaining minimal growth and physical development of children and youths to supply enough conscripts for war – large numbers of potential soldiers in WWll were medically unfit due to deprivation during their formative years – none of it is surprising.
We’d work 84hr weeks, in “Red State” mills; usually eating at Mongolian, Halal, Creole, Mexican or Indian buffets. Sneak out to farm markets, smokehouses, along with church basements, Big Lots & Target to cook a few meals each week. Lots of the mill hands (1/2 our age) would bring their families when we did. It was terrifying to watch their kids encounter actual food for the first time? Our junk food childhood spawned our lust for REAL food?
Lambert, we’ll miss you. But, one of your enduring quotes will live forever in infamy: “Tis a mystery”
Happy New Year!
The Daily Mail and Epoch Times have really good health sections (of all places!….i know, i know about the awfulness of their other sections) and have been covering early-onset cancers, among other health-related topics, for a long time.
arguably they have a better, or at least just as good, health coverage than WaPo and NYT. IMO. YMMV.
There’s a long running joke from somewhere about the Daily Heils attempt to classify all foods as either cancer causing or cancer curing.
Come for the health advice, stay for the sexism, racism and classism.
Awfulness? You mean diversity of opinion?
Well, it is dominated by celebrity and the Royals gossip and salacious crimes.
Re: school lunch, Max Miller has a couple of interesting videos on their history, one featuring a school lunch from a USDA booklet from 1934, and the other featuring that wildly flexible (and pour-able!) pizza crust from a 1988 USDA recipe (my elementary school distributed a printed lunch menu calendar on 8-1/2 x 11 pastel copier paper for us to take home each month, and I always circled pizza days in orange or purple ink).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NjH7ssGctuM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=40MvjFaTVzE
There is another factor: chemical toxins are increasingly prevalent and difficult to escape. Microplastics are poisonous as study after study shows, impacting the body in a variety of terrible ways, and they are now being found everywhere, even in rainwater.
Many other toxins cause cancer too. Some pesticides cause cancer, and when Monsanto’s pesticide stopped working so well a few years ago, they got permission from the gov’t to dramatically increase the dose of toxin so that plants who’d adapted to the earlier pesticide version would still be killed. But that increased dose of toxin gets to humans too.
Try walking through a grocery store and counting the items you could buy that don’t contain human-made toxins – in the big stores where I live, it is a small list! Even fresh fruits and veggies that aren’t wrapped in plastic and don’t have cancer-causing pesticides will often at least have a plastic sticker on them. But the vast majority of items have at least some cancer-causing human agent: pesticides, plastic wrapping on the meat and cheese, some kind of heavy metal due to heavy metals in the soil. Home cleaning products, skin care and hygiene products, you name it. Fire retardants at airports, all those products at the hardware store that say “This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer” (or whatever the exact warning is)… we are surrounded by cancer-causing chemicals, and even people with financial means are finding it hard to avoid them. Those without means have a very hard time.
The book Our Stolen Future documented the steady rise in breast cancer in the US starting in the 1940s and linked it clearly to the steady rise in chemical production, and it was published in the mid 1990s. Things have only gotten worse since, and as this article notes, Covid and the vaccines, obesity, and other factors also worsen the situation.
A few people are making huge fortunes producing cancer causing chemicals, and many people make their livelihood at jobs that these poisons’ manufacture and sale. I believe this why it is so difficult to address cancer politically. To get to the heart of the matter will mean upsetting many rice bowls.
Try finding a plastic wrapped loaf in a mainstream US supermarket that hasn’t got some additional ingredient to make it sweet.
The kids don’t eat the lunch. They load their plates and ninety five percent goes into trash. Why not? It’s free!
One word: microplastics.
Well, more than one word: the environmental toxins don’t go away at the end of the year. This is a cumulative effect. In ten years we’ll be wondering, how could people complain about such a low level of cancer in the young back then? On top of that, the continual appearance of pandemics will leave the population in worse shape for handling the other environmental insults to their systems (in refutation of the idiot that said what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger). And as far as producing and distributing healthy food, how can the oligarchs profit from that? Every time you read an article that talks about “lifestyle” issues, just substitute the word “capitalism” for “lifestyle” to get a more accurate picture.
So maybe, one word: capitalism?
The Oligarchs do not pry your mouth open and stuff it with crap. Every dimwit in the country knows which foods are good to eat, and which are not. They choose the not. Microplastics? Nonsense.
An excellent piece, the US has always been the most bourgeois nation (after the defeat of the landed interests in the Civil War), going to the greatest extremes under neoliberalism, with everything being buyable for a price – whether it be judges, politicians, state administrators, and it seems also the health of our children. Very sad.
“Break and fix” would definitely be the best way of overcoming the resistance of Big Ag etc., don’t give them time to react. Now if Trump really cared about Making America Healthy Again…
My passion is family history, and over the decades I’ve built up a (very!) extended family database of distant cousins, most of whom live in the South from NC to TX (the so-called “Walmart Land Whale” belt now).
I have looked at literally countless thousands of death certificates/ obituaries and WW II draft registration cards. The dc’s show age and cause of death, the cards give the height and weight of the men registering.
In an odd kismet, I mentioned to my wife a few days ago how healthy the men seemed to be back then. By far most fell into the 5′ 7″ to 6′ height range (5′ 8″ – 5′ 10″, more specifically), with weight generally in the 135 lb to 150 lb range. Over the last few years I cannot recall seeing anyone over 200 lbs at all — and very few over 170, for that matter.
Only a few states in the South have put their death certificates online; most of those only began registering births and deaths around 1900, with generally spotty compliance by the counties until the early 1920s (which is also when the forms began to include more data fields). What I find most striking re the article’s topic is how relatively rare cancer was: by far the overwhelming cause of death was heart problems, closely followed by nephritis (kidney). The majority of the cancer cases were lung cancer, with the rest a fairly wide variety.
Most (free) online obituaries only start appearing about 20 years ago. The “good” news is how many of the people — mostly women — were over 90 years old when they died, with a surprising number 98-102 (94-95 seems to be the general “deadline”). The sad news is how many of the obituaries state that these oldsters were preceded in death by their children and, over the last few years, even their grandchildren.
Over the last 50 years I’ve interviewed several dozen family members born in the early 1890s – early 1900s, including one who just turned 102 (and renewed her AARP membership for 10 years when she turned 100!). Taken altogether, it seems to me that the Boomer and following generations are not nearly as healthy, overall, as our parents and grandparents were — and that general physical (and mental?) health has been deteriorating at a rapidly accelerating pace over the last couple of decades.
Make of it what you will….
While diet of course plays a role in health, it feels like a simplistic boot-strappy argument that’s potentially lazy due to easily collectable data. Let’s blame the patient instead of all the chemicals in food and the environment that can’t be measured.
Thanks for the article, interesting and important topic. Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Natural Causes has an extended discussion of the relationship of the immune system and cancer (she had a PhD in immunology). Turns out leukocytes both attack and abet cancer and are crucial for metastasis to occur. My takeaway from her discussion is it’s something we don’t have anything like a complete understanding of the system and its interactions.
Cancer as a metabolic disease is an idea that makes a lot of the pieces come together. Like why a ketogenic diet would help in cancer treatments. Or why cancers in a single person show multiple mutations but not derived from the same first mutation.
Tripping Over the Truth by Cristofferson is a pretty convincing read. Also:
“The metabolic profile observed in cancer cells often includes increased consumption of glucose and glutamine, increased glycolysis, changes in the use of metabolic enzyme isoforms, and increased secretion of lactate. Oncogenes and tumor suppressors have been discovered to have roles in cancer-associated changes in metabolism as well. ”
From
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3873478/
Louisiana has a famous stretch of the Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley. My guess is that all of the causes of early cancer in both the article and the comments above are factors of significance. I would just remind us to focus as much on systemic problems, such as Cancer Alley, as on individual responsibility. Sort of like with global warming, where British Petroleum successfully shifted attention from institutions to individuals by focusing on Carbon Footprint.
Determination of the primary cause(s) of modern illnesses is a challenge. Unfortunately, only limited short-term studies of modern influences are easily found. If anyone has found comparison studies PLEASE share. Ultra-processed food, definitively associated with modern diseases, are related to pesticides, additives, nutrient-removal processing, plastics, feedlot meat/dairy, seed oils and industrial agricultural practices (mono cropping, repetitive chemical use and regular tillage). Whole foods, raised in a healthy manner and prepared at home without plastics/chemicals, are increasingly attractive. Bonus points apply, for playing in a community garden and/or growing and sharing backyard goodies.
Covid came later, but links to confirmed immune deficiencies. Recurring infection and long Covid arose at the same time as use of “warp speed” mandatory vaccines (with a grand total of 6 months follow up in formal testing), increased tele-medicine, surveillance, online work/school/most-everything and rising loneliness and inequality measures.
Lambert – best wishes, though you will be seriously missed. Your work has improved health and understanding for so many. Thank you. Hopefully your readers will be able to re-connect with you in some fashion before long. Take care.
I have a relative by marriage who is in her 40s and had symptoms last year and got scoped and she had literally dozens of colon polyps. Fortunately the largest ones were just under the line for counting as cancer, and she had them all removed; if she hadn’t had them removed they would have become cancerous soon. There is no family history of this kind of thing. She is an extremely skinny health-food eating academic. As a bonus strangeness, her young daughter developed H. pylori last year; the kid was in agony for about eight months because the idiot doctors kept telling her it was anxiety. H. pylori is supposed to be a disease that impoverished people in slums in poor countries get, but this is a family with stellar housekeeping practices. They’ve all had the vaxxes as many times as possible, and have all had covid.
I wonder if the solution could also include actual nutritional training for doctors and maybe more than 6 minutes with a GP (if you can find one) during an annual to discuss lifestyle issues.
The reality is that Big Ag health problems feed smoothly into Big Pharma profitability. Given regulatory capture it’s hard to foresee effects outside the margin absent some kind of collapse (or inconvenient apocalypse).
We know this: obese people get more cancer.
We know that obese persons suffer high levels on inflammation which is linked to dysfunctional autonomic nervous system. It probably tires immune system
When diet is discussed, there should be more focus on what the modern American diet lacks: fruits and vegetables. This is adjacent to the processed foods topic but not the same. I’m a flower farmer, began this career growing vegetable specialty crops (think farmer’s market farmer). While I was happy to get business from people who thought local produce was better than store bought, I often met customers who were convinced that store-bought produce was dangerous to their health. I’m obviously a layperson when it comes to chemistry. But I feel like the risk of pesticide residue exposure is far less than the risk to health from refraining from eating fruits and vegetables.
I’ve heard gossip in ag circles that the “Dirty Dozen” fruit and vegetable list put out by Big Organic has dramatically reduced demand for produce. I saw it first hand when selling my own produce. The majority of people I know cannot afford farmer’s market prices. So this fear of pesticides is one contributor to the terribly low consumption of nutrient-rich food among Americans…
Nice article and very structured. I do wonder however if we exclude USA because of its specific problems what cancers we are seeing elsewhere. I read bowel cancer but that is very common. What is interesting is rates of detection which have been quite poor in places like U.K. which has pitiful outcomes compared to better parts of Europe.
In many cases cancers are thriving because the wrong ailment is treated – IBS instead of cancer – or Reflux instead of oesophageal cancer – I know those two examples from family
I do think of narcotics use too. It is known amyl-nitrite suppresses the immune system and that it was contributory in what what known as AIDS – itself acquired immune deficiency
The BionTech mRNA marketed by Pfizer and funded by Gates and Strungmann Brothers with German government partners was infant a Cancer Drug ab initio
Its developer claimed to have re-purposed it on a Saturday afternoon for COVID. It was still in essence designed to enter rapidly replicating cells and terminate them. It used pseudouridine to suppress rejection by the autoimmune system – which in itself is problematic
I doubt the uptick in cancers is monocausal. I do think there needs to be a fundamental re-evaluation of how deviant societal norms are from human biological needs
Thanks for this interesting article. There are multiple (largely theoretical) mechanisms by which the mRNA vaccines may cause cancer, many of which relate to the now well-established presence of DNA contaminants:
– DNA in the cell can trigger cancer pathways
– Insertional mutagenesis
– Oncogene activation by the SV40 promoter, the presence of which has been demonstrated in the Pfizer products at least
Additionally, the spike protein has been shown to bind and inactivate p53, an important tumour-suppressing protein. This mechanism is of course in common with Covid infection.
Glad you mentioned this. I wanted to, but was traveling yesterday.