[paulpauper]

A lot of $ is spent on medicine because medicine works. Alternatives such as diet, exercise either are spotty in efficacy or do not work. Medicine offers a quick fix and in some cases the only fix. Someone who has cancer will need to be treated with medicine, not diet.

[NoPie]

Diet and exercise will work much better to prevent obesity than any medicine on market. It is just that long-term adherence to these things is very much determined by culture and will be much harder for Americans compared to Japanese, for example.

There are new discoveries in diabetes medicines recently but again, you will do much better by not getting diabetes in the first place.

The same goes for smoking which can cause, for example, lung cancer. Roughly speaking, once you get diagnosed with lung cancer you only have 40% chance living more than 1 year. Costly novel medicines often prolong the life by few months only.

We really need better health economy education for everyone.

[lambdaba]

I mean, it's not complicated, when we allowed the tobacco industry to manipulate people for profits while hiding the disastrous health consequence of their products, people got ill in larger numbers

It's the same for the processed food industry. It's time will come, soon, too, as healthcare systems everywhere are failing because of it.

[paulpauper]

all the nutrition info is on the labels yet people knowingly overeat. different type of problem.

[lambdaba]

I don't think people think much beyond calories wrt to overeating. I know my mentality was once "calories can come from anywhere, can always take a multivitamin to cover deficiencies", which I now find, to put it gently, silly.

[astrange]

Not "diet and exercise", just diet. Exercise doesn't contribute more than ~10% to weight loss (it helps for many other things but not that) - and if you're having trouble with the diet then it makes it more difficult because you get hungry, which sometimes cancels the entire thing out.

[NoPie]

Well, the idea is probably not to gain weight in the first place. Once you gain weight it is very hard to lose it. Many people manage naturally to keep perfect BMI by eating healthy diet and having enough exercise or by just moving around. Exercise will have more health benefits than just keeping your body weight low.

[lambdaba]

IME exercise (combined with appropriate diet, mind you), actually reduces food intake for me. Or at least, makes it so I eat less net calories after removing the expenditure. But otherwise agreed, diet is the foundation.

[lambdaba]

this is such a strange comment for me, and I beg people not to reflexively downvote and instead join in for a discussion, but I'm part / have been part of communities where people ROUTINELY achieve remission from disease the medical establishment deems incurable

I can go in further details if people ask, but lifestyle intervention has DRAMATIC results for many people, myself included, and results not provided by drugs or any commonly available medical intervention

Let me give you an example, RE: cancer and diet, look up "Andrew Scarborough brain cancer" and you'll find a detailed account of someone treating incurable brain cancer with diet and lifestyle; and this is someone working in the medical field (actually, precisely in oncology)

[danachow]

> and this is someone working in the medical field

Well, yes, even a crackpot can claim to be working in the field.

This in no way supports your claim of “routine” cures through diet. There is no evidence that a fucking keto diet will cure cancer* and it doesn’t pass any sniff test as at the end of the day your body still runs on glucose. This is pretty much an insult to anyone not fortunate enough for their cancer to go spontaneously into remission - and looking at the loon you posted, both he and a family member had some amount of treatment before diet, confounding any claim that diet was responsible for remission.

* whether such a diet can have some survivability benefits or some better or worse outcome is an open question, which has nothing to do with your crackpot claims.

[lambdaba]

I am only replying to your incendiary comment to say that your characterization is insulting and wrong, "fucking keto diet"(s) are having results for many people, whether you like it or not

Others, please research this person further, he's not a "loon" / "crackpot" just a regular smart young person who also happens to be a cancer researcher.

BTW, keto also cures epilepsy, and that's known since the early 20th century, is that also triggering to you?

[gahn]

Had to login just to counter the epilepsy part of this comment, though I think it applies to the rest of the topic wrt cancer as well. Keto diets can, in some cases, help epilepsy patients, particularly those with certain seizure types or genetic basis. But, like with cancer, epilepsy is complicated both in presentation and cause and to pretend that keto is any way a cure for epilepsy outside of a small minority of patients isn't true. See https://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures-and-epileps... for high level overview.

[lambdaba]

It sometimes is enough, sometimes not. But it does have SOME undisputed efficacy and it's an area of legitimate research.

[danachow]

Lol "sometimes is enough, sometimes not" is a bit of a backpedal from definitively putting cancer into remission.

If it's an area of legitimate research for cancer treatment, then why do you lead with a reference to an individual crackpot - instead of even a poorly designed peer-reviewed study in a low impact forum.

Of the millions of possibilities, why do you assume that it was the keto diet of this individual that lead to their remission? Do you lack the imagination that it would likely be something else?

[lambdaba]

Third point, and I'm going to end it here: I myself suffered from Multiple Sclerosis when I was younger; it was retrospectively very easy to correlate, at least in a large part, with diet and lifestyle. The changes I had to make to be in remission were DRAMATIC but worth it. I don't think I would've been insulted to read about people in similar situations experiencing remission from lifestyle adjustments, in fact, I would have been extatic to find out I'm not condemned to slowly drift into being eventually wheelchair-bound, as my doctors were predicting.

[lambdaba]

Also, re: this caricature you make of these "keto" diet cancer plans, it's not true that the "body still runs on glucose", in fact only 25 grams of glucose are manufactured by the liver per day in the absence of dietary carbohydrates. And I don't claim to know the mechanisms, but I know FOR SURE that human beings (and no other animal for that matter) evolved to live on candy bars and sugar water, and that replacing one's diet with something species-appropriate and nutritionally replete is bound to have some effect.

[devilbunny]

To elaborate: red blood cells are the only part of the body that absolutely must use glucose, and they're not incredibly metabolically active.

[lambdaba]

Thanks, I didn't know. It's weird to see this misinformation about glucose being the primary fuel for human bodies while it's quite obvious human biology is optimized for fat burning. Glucose is just dealt with in priority because it's only safe in a tight band, and chronically elevated glucose in particular is disastrous to blood vessels. Humans should spend a decent amount of time in fat burning mode with periods of fasting and adequate magnesium intake and exercise for optimal vascular health.

[danachow]

Because it’s not misinformation - the body absolutely needs glucose homeostasis to survive - if you don’t eat carbs it will make it out of protein. The body has numerous mechanisms and basically dedicated organs for the conversion, metabolism, storage, and production of glucose. The whole Krebs cycle is built around the processing of byproducts of glucose - so you’re utterly full of shit that it’s “only safe in a tight band”. That the body can additionally use fatty acids in the form of ketone bodies as a stopgap is a testament to adaptability - but even people on keto require a homeostasis of a close to normal level of blood glucose. And how do they get this? Through the metabolism of proteins which can be amazingly converted to the glucose the body needs to survive.

This is high school level biology, and easily reviewed with 10 minutes on Wikipedia.

[anonuser123456]

The efficacy of cancer prevention via fitness, diet and lifestyle far exceed the efficacy of cancer treatment by medicine.