Cancer is not just 'bad luck' but down to environment, study suggests

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35111449

by Perados • 11 years ago

92 40 11 years ago

miseg3• 11 years ago

From my understanding, the article means the "environment in which your body finds itself in" rather than "you're living in an environment and that's all the matters".

What I mean is that much of your "environment" is what you, your body, puts in itself and does to itself. (In other words, eat well and exercise to give your body a good "environment".)

akerro3• 11 years ago

"environment in which your body finds itself in

Yes, you are what you eat. If you eat cancerous substances once per week, you put yourself in risk zone. It's what you eat, drink and breath with build your body cells, you give them weak building material and treat them poorly, they are weak and can be attacked easier. Already decades ago some scientists said that cancer is environmental and you decided whether you got it or not. Eat healthy, not processed meat, fresh vegetables (not frozen), drink clean water.

The same rule applies to other illnesses like alzheimer, it's something "new". First alzheimer was described in modern history, while thousands of others illnesses were described and diagnosed even 3000 years ago by Egiptians.

danielschonfeld• 11 years ago

I think both of you have over simplified a much more complex eco system. It's not a winners vs losers. Yes, sure, eat shit die faster but that's not what an environmental vs bad gene pool comes to teach us.

If cancer was an absolute case of being born to the bad gene pool we'd have to tackle the problem in how do we advance our genes to be more error resistive.

Being that it's more of an environmental, the problem suddenly change to how do we as a whole bring up our environment several levels up to a more healthier region.

You can et the healthiest stuff there is, it still won't help you when the can lining is full of BPA. You can excursive every day and it won't help you if the weights contain materials you breathe which disrupt cellular functions. You can eat the most nutritious fish and vegetables and you're still going to be hit by the cancerous materials they've been brought up in.

Adopting the attitude you do, does nothing to better everybody. Only creates yet another us vs them partition in an already well divided society.

noondip2• 11 years ago

Sorry to nit-pick, but can you tell me why you perceive frozen vegetables to be cancer-promoting, whereas (unprocessed) meat not to be?

Edit: Actually, you may be right about the former, at least w.r.t. frozen cruciferous vegetables, such as broccoli, and some inert enzymes. This is pretty interesting:

Frozen broccoli can provide a cheaper product, with a longer shelf life and less preparation time than fresh broccoli. We previously showed that several commercially available frozen broccoli products do not retain the ability to generate the cancer-preventative agent sulforaphane. We hypothesized that this was because the necessary hydrolyzing enzyme myrosinase was destroyed during blanching, as part of the processing that frozen broccoli undergoes.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23915112

Good news, though, at least if you like radishes:

Daikon radish root supported some sulforaphane formation even when heated at 125 °C for 10 min, a time and temperature comparable to or greater than microwave cooking. Daikon radish (0.25%) added to frozen broccoli that was then allowed to thaw supported sulforaphane formation without any visual alteration to that of untreated broccoli.

What's more:

Sulforaphane has been shown to provide cancer prevention through a number of mechanisms including the upregulation of detoxification enzymes and epigenetic changes. Optimal temperature and pH for sulforaphane formation from broccoli was determined. Sulforaphane formation was measured in three commercially frozen broccoli samples pre- and post-cooking. The results show that in these products, there was very little potential to form sulforaphane prior to cooking and essentially none after the recommended cooking method was performed.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1756464613...

Looks like sprinkling some radishes, horseradish, and even wasabi revitalizes the sulforaphane production, though.

Not such good news for kale though - looks like we're better off eating it fresh than frozen, indeed (in vitro, cancer cells were suppressed ~10x more with fresh Brassica)

Brassica vegetables contain a diverse range of phytochemicals with biological properties such as antioxidant and anticancer activity. However, knowledge about how biological activities are affected by processing is lacking. A green cultivar and a red cultivar of curly kale were evaluated for water/methanol-soluble phytochemicals before and after processing involving blanching, freeze storage, and boil-in-bag heat treatment. In both kale cultivars, processing resulted in a significant decrease of total phenolics, antioxidant capacity, and content and distribution of flavonols, anthocyanins, hydroxycinnamic acids, glucosinolates, and vitamin C. Interestingly, the red curly kale cultivar had a higher capacity to withstand thermal loss of phytochemicals. The extracts of both green and red curly kale inhibited the cell proliferation of three human colon cancer cell lines (Caco-2, HT-29, and HCT 116). However, extracts from fresh plant material had a significantly stronger antiproliferative effect than extracts from processed plant material.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf300875f

KhalilK2• 11 years ago

Yes it is down to the environment but right now we don't know what these environmental exposures are. I've always considered "chance" and "luck" in science to simply be a placeholder for the unknown.

dmichulke• 11 years ago

I fully agree, random today means one of the following very different things:

- we know with certainty that it follows a <xy> distribution and there is no way we could know more

- we don't know enough so it appears random to us.

If I were forced to bet on one of these, I'd say it's always the latter except in the case of Heisenberg uncertainty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Udo2• 11 years ago

Every student entering a bio field who learns what cancer is and how it works already knows that this is a disease shaped by many factors. Fundamentally, the problem of fighting cancer is the problem of fighting a set of evolutionary mechanisms that are trying to kill you. The popular press always insists on boiling everything down to one easy-to-understand factor, that's how we get those ridiculous and recurring exclamations about cancer that have to be thrown out next week.

There is no single thing you can do as an individual that gets you off the hook for cancer. You can try reducing your probabilities based on the results of studies, but in most respects that's a way more complicated endeavor than what the media portrays it as. Even regular prophylactic screening is not as good a tool as it instinctively seems. Many studies don't give you the complete picture at all, so it rarely makes sense to change your life based on the latest breathlessly exaggerated finding blared at you by the press.

williamjennings2• 11 years ago

I read the headline and wondered:

"Since when is 'Bad Luck' anything other than a euphemism for the physiological stress which is symptomatic of poverty?"

Clever science journalists note that nearly everything outside of the organism can be generically labeled as the environment.

__As a reply to DanBC:__

normal random mutation

This phrase does not mean anything in terms of molecular biology or genetics. It is equivalent to "Bad Luck", or "mutation triggered by something". The phrase is inappropriate because it equates point mutations, insertion mutations and deletion mutations.

As a rule, when thou wants to say the modifier "normal random"; thou should instead say "normally distributed", and then make sure that is worth mentioning in that field of science.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

In this specific case: "bad luck" was being used to talk about normal random mutation, as opposed to a genetic predisposition or a mutation triggered by something you ate or drank or smoked or otherwse exposed yourself.

It's unfortunate that the original researchers used that phrase; and the the reporters did a terrible job of explaining it; and that the reporting of this newer study uses similar language.

rsync• 11 years ago

"There is no single thing you can do as an individual that gets you off the hook for cancer."

It's not going to get you off the hook, but I think it's safe to say that regular, vigorous exercise drops cancer risk, all else being equal.

There aren't many magic bullets, but regular, vigorous exercise appears to be pretty close - for just about everything from lower back pain to dementia.

run4yourlives22• 11 years ago

It's actually been shown time and time again that the most obvious benefit in the "lifestyles to discourage cancer" department is to simply not smoke cigarettes.

But certainly exercise is a close second; add to it all of the other benefits you mention.

beagle3• 11 years ago

Cancer is tens (perhaps thousands) of substantially different diseases. And yet, we group them under a common name "cancer" because they do have commonalities, and while so far treatments focus on very specific cancers, it is not unthinkable that we WILL actually find a common treatment.

The naked mole rat has apparently solved the cancer problem[0] - and while it is not perfectly understood, it is definitely NOT by mitigating hundreds of different cancer factors - the prevailing theory is that it detects and destroys "overcrowding", regardless of cause. We might be able to do something like that for humans, although right now it is still in the realm of science fiction.

The most promising venue to the best of my knowledge is the Warburg Effect[1]; unfortunately, it has been promising and not really delivering for 80 years now, although DCA[2], which showed promise and is undergoing clinical tests as a cancer treatment, is at least conceptually related - malfunctioning mitochondria and fermentation-in-lieu-of-glycolysis seem to be two sides of a similar coin to my (untrained, ignorant) eyes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat#Resistance_to_c...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warburg_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid#Cancer

DanBC2• 11 years ago

Some people are misunderstanding what this report means by "bad luck", which isn't surprising because this BBC report is lousy, and it follows on from a different paper that said something different and that was also poorly reported.

This older report suggested that two thirds of cancer was because of random mutation, rather than genetic predisposition or lifestyle.

Here's an example of the confusing way that older study was reported: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/02/two-thirds-ad...

Two-thirds of adult cancers, say the researchers from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in the United States, are caused by random mutation in the tissue cells during the ordinary process of stem cell division. In the other third, our genetic inheritance and lifestyles are the main factors.
The scientists have created a mathematical model which, they say, shows it is wrong to assume that there are such things as “good genes” that may prevent us getting cancer even though we smoke, drink heavily and carry excessive weight.

This new study disputes that, and says that normal random mutation only accounts for 10% to 30% of cancer, and the rest is because of lifestyle or genetic predisposition.

From a public health point of view that's pretty important. Stop smoking, and control how much alcohol you drink, continue to be important public health messages to reduce the incidence of cancer.

williamjennings2• 11 years ago

When you translate "Bad Luck" or 'Unlucky" into Confucian-era Chinese, the term is respectively equivocal to poverty or impoverished. "Random mutation" is vaguely technical enough to have the same connotation in the public lexicon. The term does not have specific meaning in molecular biology, so it might as well be superstition.

The risk factors are there because we do not do enough to care for each other as individuals in society. The statistics are the tool used for trading liabilities in the applied oncological epidemiology colloquially referred to as health insurance risk modeling.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Cite?

It's not "Confucian-era Chinese", but google translate gives : 倒霉 which per wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/倒 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/霉) I don't see anything relating to poverty or impoverishment.

KhalilK2• 11 years ago

Stop smoking, and control how much alcohol you drink, continue to be important public health messages to reduce the incidence of cancer.

That obviously depends on the type of cancer. Smokers are way more likely to get lung cancer but for other types of cancer with high mortality rates (prostate, breast, myeloma, lymphoma etc) there is no single attributable 'exposure' that is known to be the cause.

teach3• 11 years ago

I would disagree that there's no "exposure" component for many of those other cancers.

* Eating red meat

* Eating processed meat

* Drinking 3+ glasses of milk daily

* Inadequate levels of vitamin D

These are all well-known to the nutrition community to increase cancer risk.

JauntTrooper• 11 years ago

Smoking also increases the risk of cancer of the pancreas, liver, kidneys, esophagus, stomach, colon, cervix, breast, and bone marrow.

The link to lung cancer is the most high profile (and rightly so -- 80% to 90% of all incidences of long cancer are primarily attributed to smoking), but its carcinogenic effect can be seen all over the body.

tahssa• 11 years ago

And, apparently, smoking can actually prevent endometrial cancer; so yeah, no silver bullet for them all.

Note: Obviously I'm not advising anyone to smoke.

Retric• 11 years ago

Cancer requires more than a single mutation.

Also, "They did not look at tissues from two of the commonest forms of cancer – breast and prostate" this is not an accurate description of 'cancer' just the types of cancer they are studying.

Further, this is focused on types of tissue. Environmental factors that increase risks for all forms of cancer are ignored.

PS: Mathematically, if a very small percentage of the population had much lower risks of cancer it would be almost impossible to detect.

dominotw• 11 years ago

As a kid growing up in India I always thought of cancer as some western disease. I only knew one person who had cancer.

Now I know tons of people who have died from cancer or are battling it. Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" .

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

It depends really. How much industrialization has your part of the country experienced? I'm pretty sure you'll see some underlying pattern with that since many cancer causing chemicals are linked to several common manufactured products such as plastics.

Udo2• 11 years ago

Perhaps it was under diagnosed but I some blame it on "westernization" .

Scientifically, this does not hold water, because cancer is such a fundamental disease group that is inherent in the machinery of cells. There are two main factors at play in the apparent rise of cases. One is, as you said, cancers were generally not diagnosed before modern medicine arrived on the scene. The second is: people have to die of something, so when life expectancy goes up cancer rates skyrocket. People who would have died of infection ten years ago will now die of cancer in ten years from now.

run4yourlives22• 11 years ago

For values of "westernization" that equate to "living longer" and "better, more accurate health care".

Your anecdote is likely true because of those reasons, similar to the "rise" in autism.

ramanamit1234• 11 years ago

I've reduced my alchohol consumption. I did not drink as much as the NHS(UK) article warned.

http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/preventing-cancer/Pages/diet-and-...

My family does not drink much or smoke. Most of us are in a good weight category, except for me. My challenge is to reduce the weight.

Cancer is not just 'bad luck' but down to environment, study suggests

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