Why are so many young people getting cancer? What researchers do and don't know
55 points by Brajeshwar 2 hours ago | 22 comments

noIdeaTheSecond 32 minutes ago
My wild guess before reading the article: unhealthy food. A big part of which is herbicides and pesticides.

I will now read the article.

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gopalv 17 minutes ago
My personal bugbear is the lack of sleep & entirely tied to the phone for that.

I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.

Now, I can't sleep, there's an endless stream of things to keep me awake.

The jokes about "5G gives you cancer" is probably not as funny, if you think about the sleep you miss while you doom scroll.

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embedding-shape 11 minutes ago
> I remember being in my 20s and not being able to sleep, but the most distracting thing I could reach for was a pile of books in my bedside table.

Back when I was young in the 90s, this was exactly how I spent the last 5-6 hours of my days, reading books in my bed until the sun came up in the morning and I actually started getting tired.

Now, I sleep much better, the bed and bedroom is limited to just two activities, sleeping and funtime with partner, otherwise I never just chill in the bed or have anything else interesting in there. And if I can't sleep, I go up again and do something else until I'm tired enough to actually lay down in the bed. Probably helps a ton, as even with the phone on the nightstand next to me, I do fall asleep relatively quick.

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Projectiboga 16 minutes ago
Plastics, the increase in background radiation, pesticides, and or a side effect of extra calories are all possibilities. Daily allergy medicines might also be a factor as those reduce immune response slightly.
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marcyb5st 14 minutes ago
I believe that county specific studies seem to support your thesis. For instance, countries that eat less processed food (eg Italy) and have stricter rules about pesticides didn't see an increase in stuff like colorectal cancer [1]. Some cancers incidence did grow, but others decreased keeping incidence more or less the same.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03008916241297078

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artyom 23 minutes ago
Your guess is not wild at all, and the article implies that (at least until the payment popup shows up)

My grandmother used to grow her own vegetables and fruits and had a minimal chicken farm for eggs until the early 2000s, all in her regular backyard, it's not ancient history or something that required a lot of real state.

Now there's a 15-story building and no land whatsoever where her house used to be.

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noIdeaTheSecond 11 minutes ago
As a kid I used to do that with my family: Grow our own everything.

I'm currently trying to get back to it, until then I try to eat ecological and as much as I can cooked by myself. It is hard though, not everybody can aford a plot of land (ideally next to some decent sized town)

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noIdeaTheSecond 17 minutes ago
Upon reading: A bit unclear but yes it seems like unhealthy food + new microbe mutations + obesity

They talk about obesity as a separate cause than ultra processed food, I thought it was quite related, something I need to look into

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JimBlackwood 9 minutes ago
I’m not obese or overweight and while my main meals (breakfast and dinner) are generally very healthy - I can still eat a lot of trash (ultra processed)food as snacks.

I’m sure that could have an effect.

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VirusNewbie 4 minutes ago
Don't people eat more healthy than they did 50 years ago? Weren't microwave dinners a big thing in the 70s?
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witx 4 minutes ago
We're speedrunning so we don't get to live in a token based reality
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economistbob 11 minutes ago
No till farming is probably helping. I learned this year what that really means by seeing farms where they spray herbicide to kill the plants,then they plant new seed while the old dead is still standing around. They then use herbicide as a desiccant to kill the plant at harvest. They probably use pesticides too. The cycle then repeats. I was so disgusted as seeing new crops sprouting amongst the dead vegetation. It must be engineered for that. I came to the inescapable conclusion that the farmers are poisoning everyone rather than have to offer real jobs to native born laborers.

Buckets of *cide, herb and insect, through the cycle. Those no till fields full of crops are some of the most disgusting things I have ever seen. That soil will have applications and applications of *cide soaked in it top to bottom. Like eating plants from a toxic waste dump.

Disgusting. That's the critical national need for glycosphate. Feeding us all engineered stuff from toxic waste dumps so farmers can not need workers or mowing and tilling equipment.

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ifjfkfkfkfj 10 minutes ago
I would just point everyone to scientific research about smoking in 1969ties. High endorsement and no risk at all.

Current "safe" dosage on coffeine is like 8 shots a day. No side effects!

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SubiculumCode 7 minutes ago
Of my close friends of my youth, two have died of cancer before the age of 40. Fuck cancer.
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goldylochness 17 minutes ago
it's 100% not the covid vaccines, and anyone who suggests this is a crackpot
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black6 3 minutes ago
All the down voters have their heads in the sand.
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mspgrunt 26 minutes ago
https://archive.ph/VlBAm

tl;dr ultra processed foods and pesticides

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jeffnv 11 minutes ago
tl; dr the first 4 sentences: Ultra-processed foods, obesity, microbial toxins and agricultural chemicals were all considered. But a clear answer remained elusive.
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kernal 19 minutes ago
[flagged]
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ManuelKiessling 25 minutes ago
If I had one unqualified guess free — and boy am I unqualified here — I’d wager it’s those „zero sugar“ stuffs.

No way you can just replace (also very very not good for you) sugar with something else and end up with all the upsides and no downsides.

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aeturnum 47 seconds ago
Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).
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hombre_fatal 21 minutes ago
Nah, technology advancement is full of free lunches.

It breaks our ape brain intuition that anything good must also be bad. But consider all the food tech you take for granted while singling out zero-cal sweeteners.

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ahoka 22 minutes ago
I’m pretty sure it’s the avocado toasts.
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