[peoplefromibiza]

> Right, but you cherry-picked the most uninformative statistic possible out of the whole thing

in your opinion.

> In a study performed in the United States

I specifically wrote Worldwide, USA is only 4% of the World's population.

Who's actually cherry picking?

USA population is in particular quite shielded from all the other very numerous factors that can lead to lung cancer.

Smocking is only the most obvious and self inflicted

For example: China has the heaviest lung cancer burden, representing 36.98% of cases and 39.21% of deaths globally [1]

By choosing the USA as a reference, you're highly skewing the stats.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797233/

> that was a hypothetical scenario with made up numbers to illustrate how the 50% statistic on its own is uninformative

so, basically, a strawman to sell opinions as facts.

[wlesieutre]

You're right, I am looking at US causes. I didn't notice you had said Worldwide, but regardless I would say the US data is more relevant to readers on this site.

But I think you're missing my broader point, which is that even living in a smoggy coal-burning area like China it's still not reasonable to say "might as well smoke, I'm already exposed to other lung cancer risks." That's like saying "My car is older and not up to modern safety standards, and I'm probably going to die in a crash anyway, so I won't wear my seat belt."

You have a risk factor that you can't do anything about, and that does push up the statistics about how many non-smokers get lung cancer, but smoking is still a pointless additional factor that will only raise your odds of getting lung cancer further.

[peoplefromibiza]

> which is that even living in a smoggy coal-burning area like China it's still not reasonable to say "might as well smoke, I'm already exposed to other lung cancer risks."

Agree, but that's not the point I am making.

The point I am making is that we know that smoking is linked to lung cancer but the opposite is not a certainty. We don't know if the smokers getting lung cancer would not get it if they did not smoke.

Unfortunately.

So it is wise to not smoke, of course, but that's only a fraction of the entire story.

People are getting cancer in the west more now than in the 60s and 70s, when smoking was vastly more spread.

The peak was in the 90s, we are slowly going back to the numbers of the mid 1970s.

We know that cancer is linked to age, so maybe an aging population has more chances of getting cancer than a younger one.

This seems to be confirmed by the fact that in USA ~5% of the population has cancer, while in large areas of Central Africa, for example Somalia, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, it's less than 0.5%.

I'm quite sure it is not due to better living conditions and less cigarettes. But another reason could be that it is not detected nor reported.

Also in USA there are ~140 deaths every 100,000 people, in Iran ~95, in Mexico is ~90, in Algeria ~75.

Just to say that we still haven't found the root cause and why there are people living the same exact life in the same exact place, one gets it and the other don't.

So, in the end, intermittent fasting has mostly the same effects of eating less in general, it shouldn't be surprising, like it shouldn't surprise anybody that a lot of people, who never smoked, still die of cancer.

A more healthy diet would have a large impact on mortality in USA, where the leading cause of death is hearth disease cause by unhealthy diets.

Especially when intermittent fasting is defined as "the other group only had access to food 9 hours a day", which is how most people eat, simply following local traditions.