A new study investigates the link between processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, and trans fatty acids, to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.
The surge of cancer since the 1900s is also explainable by the surge in our ability to detect cancer and overall understanding of it.
One big reason papers always find these links is just that they are finding correlations, which are always there, even for unrelated things. When you are looking at loads of factors in a observational study you are almost bound to find some accidental correlation. It is very hard to tell if that is just random or if there is a true cause behind it.
That is a great point! there is debate about our diagnostic capabilities improving. However, pick a year, any year and use that as year zero. We still have to account for the geometric growth of cancer after that year.
Going back to pre-1900s cancer, it was seen on rare occasions, if it was as common as today (50% of westerners will have cancer in their lives) then it would have shown up with some frequency in the historical medical literature.
I would use the same thought experiment for type 2 diabetes, cardio vascular disease (someone would have made a record of otherwise healthy people just falling over dead randomly in the streets), etc… the modern chronic diseases all appear to have a common starting point in the historical record >1900, which suggests a common cause. I think metabolic health is the most likely unifying theory, I could be wrong, but improving metabolic health doesn’t hurt.
We know there is a 3x risk of cancer for people with obesity. We know there is a 3x risk of cancer for people with type 2 diabetes. We also know global obesity is going up, and type 2 diabetes is going up. There are almost 1 billion people in the world diagnosed with T2D. The country with the highest T2D rate is also the country that eats the least amount of meat (India). Some new thing has happened globally since 1900 to cause this change.
The surge of cancer since the 1900s is also explainable by the surge in our ability to detect cancer and overall understanding of it.
One big reason papers always find these links is just that they are finding correlations, which are always there, even for unrelated things. When you are looking at loads of factors in a observational study you are almost bound to find some accidental correlation. It is very hard to tell if that is just random or if there is a true cause behind it.
There are all sorts of spurious correlations if you look hard enough.
That is a great point! there is debate about our diagnostic capabilities improving. However, pick a year, any year and use that as year zero. We still have to account for the geometric growth of cancer after that year.
Going back to pre-1900s cancer, it was seen on rare occasions, if it was as common as today (50% of westerners will have cancer in their lives) then it would have shown up with some frequency in the historical medical literature.
I would use the same thought experiment for type 2 diabetes, cardio vascular disease (someone would have made a record of otherwise healthy people just falling over dead randomly in the streets), etc… the modern chronic diseases all appear to have a common starting point in the historical record >1900, which suggests a common cause. I think metabolic health is the most likely unifying theory, I could be wrong, but improving metabolic health doesn’t hurt.
We know there is a 3x risk of cancer for people with obesity. We know there is a 3x risk of cancer for people with type 2 diabetes. We also know global obesity is going up, and type 2 diabetes is going up. There are almost 1 billion people in the world diagnosed with T2D. The country with the highest T2D rate is also the country that eats the least amount of meat (India). Some new thing has happened globally since 1900 to cause this change.