[flunhat]

That's what I thought, too, but then I read this [1]:

> “The honest truth is nobody knows 100 percent why there is an increase,” said Dr. Mohamed E. Salem, an assistant professor at Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at Georgetown University. He said that he is older than about 60 percent of his patients — and he is 42. “It’s hard to blame it on obesity alone. We suspect there is also something else going on.”

The weird thing is that the sharpest increase is among young whites, and it doesn't seem to be entirely correlated with obesity.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and-recta...

[2] http://www.webmd.com/news/20170808/colorectal-cancer-death-r...

[toomuchtodo]

Diets high in sugars? I wonder if we can plot the consumption of sugar and corn syrup on a trend of colon cancer incidents over the last 4-5 decades.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/9298574/

[flunhat]

You could argue that high sugar diets are just a proxy for obesity, so if obesity has been ruled out as a cause for this new increase then high sugar diets can be ruled out as well. Plus, no real reason it would be confined to young white people only.

But I still avoid the stuff, because it seems so unlikely that the quantity of sugar we consume is just harmless.

[bnjms]

I dont think you can make that assimption at all. A lot of is have conditions or habits that result in modifying our eating habits and movement habits enough to always be thin even with high carb diets.