[tee_0]

Cancer rates have exploded since 1970. I told this to someone and they arrogantly corrected me. But I just looked it up right there and they had confused death rates with cancer rates. Thanks be to god for smartphones.

Diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression rates all exploded in unison starting around 1970. Why does everyone ignore the massive implications of this? It means there’s something we’re doing that is killing millions of people but everyone brushes that aside and supports treatments rather than figuring out what happened in 1970 that is actually causing it.

There are a trillion pet theories but nobody wants to do research to figure out. Nobody advocates for this research. What the hell

[dekhn]

This is already well-known and understood in science: cancer rates exploding is not because of an external force causing more cancer, but a sign that we addressed other things that kill you before you get cancer. And we also got far better at screening, including being able to identify benign tumors.

This sort of hyperbole- "killing millions", "trillion pet theories"- is needlessly alarmist.

[jokethrowaway]

It's most likely animal fat and meat demonisation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzQAHITIUhg

It's one of those things were effects are so far ahead in time you don't really realise they're there until you're 60 and cancer kills you. And then it's "oh well, old people die" or "he had too many beers"

I was striving to be vegetarian for more than a decade (avoid red meat, low fat diet) because of the "science", before I started developing issues.

Good luck in finding research to back this up, the trend seems to be going all towards vegan highly processed food. I was impressed when mainstream science recently reluctantly backtracked on animal fat and meat.

The USDA is still to update recommendations of course.

[Moldoteck]

what issues did you have? Were you tracking macros?

[zw7]

Cancer rates skyrocketed because we started screening for cancer. It's that simple.

[tee_0]

And obesity skyrocketed because nobody knew the difference between a fat person and a skinny person before 1970? We knew what cancer was before 1970. We certainly knew what diabetes was. The simple fact is that people started getting sicker in the 70s.

For a very long time people have been going to the doctor when they feel sick. Oliver Cromwell consulted with doctors and was convinced that he was very ill. Later on we understand that he had bipolar disorder. When people feel sick they consult doctors and have been doing this for hundreds of years. An illness like diabetes presents very specific symptoms and doctors have been aware of diabetes for a very long time. The same is true for many kinds of cancer. And even mental illnesses as I have pointed out were recognized as medical ailments by people for hundreds of years. It wasn’t that we suddenly started diagnosing these things.

Also, there are communities of people who do not develop heart disease or insulin resistance or depression or cancer. The common thread between every community like this is that they live outside of the modern world and do not eat modern foods. They live in an old way. This is well documented. Yet another insane data point that people somehow ignore. There are literally people out there who basically do not get cancer heart disease or diabetes and nobody seems to think it’s important to get to the bottom of this, people like you who leave snide comments and contribute nothing. A worthless parasite.

So there are communities that live in the old way and do not get any of these diseases. We see that these diseases exploded for us around 1970. It couldn’t be more obvious.

[zw7]

> An illness like diabetes presents very specific symptoms and doctors have been aware of diabetes for a very long time. The same is true for many kinds of cancer

You can have diabetes and high blood pressure and cancer and not have symptoms. That's why we screen for them. If you have symptoms, it is no longer screening, it's diagnosing. A lot more screening is happening now than before the 70s so we are obviously finding a lot more disease.

I'm not arguing against the fact that lifestyle and environment play a significant role in increasing cancer, but that doesn't change the fact that dramatically increased screening rates have contributed to dramatically increased disease diagnoses.

> There are literally people out there who basically do not get cancer heart disease or diabetes and nobody seems to think it’s important to get to the bottom of this

I think there is probably more research these days into causes of cancer than ever before.

> people like you who leave snide comments and contribute nothing. A worthless parasite.

Really?

[tee_0]

I don’t buy it. Cancer that is screened eventually will present. It doesn’t change the amount of cancer that presents. Again, this changes survival but not diagnoses. People who abstain from living in the modern way almost never get cancer or diabetes. Is this because they aren’t being screened? The explosion doesn’t correlate to change in screening methodology. Yes, people who ignore the simple facts are parasites. Like with the recent breakthrough in epigenetic aging, for decades the theory of mutation based aging dominated despite the clear and simple fact that there was contradictory evidence. For decades we had to put up with the amyloid theory of Alzheimer’s even though the plain and simple fact was that there were people without Alzheimer’s who had plaques and there were people with Alzheimer’s who didn’t have plaques. The reason why billions of dollars were spent on the wrong solutions and the reason why millions of people have suffered and died prematurely for no good reason is people like you who glom onto whatever is the least painful thing to believe. Whatever liberates you the most from accountability. No, it’s not anything we are doing, it’s just data anomalies and we are totally helpless. The same doom worship that is responsible for every global warming advocate getting really glassy eyed and avoidant whenever you start to discuss actual solutions rather than just rave about how utterly screwed we are. People don’t want solutions they want to resign to their helplessness. So yeah you are part of the problem in my opinion. You just want to resign to the fact that cancer is totally beyond our ability to comprehend or do anything about it. And you ignore these insane data points that demand to be scrutinized and made sense of because it would interrupt your world view.

[mixmastamyk]

The documentary “sugar coated” details this period when the sugar industry got everyone believing excessive sugar was fine and fat wasn’t healthy. Leading to a wave of low-fat sugar-fortified food in the late 70s on. Obesity exploded in response and related outcomes.

[nebulousnights]

Thank you for your comment. I studied anthropology, an imperfect field, but one thing was obvious right away and it is that point you are making here. Please keep telling people.

[lm28469]

I'm not so sure, cancers seem to be mostly due to environment/lifestyle [0]. Diet is a big factor and it definitely got worse since the 70s

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/

[zw7]

I'm not arguing that they don't, but the fact is

- the American Cancer Society didn't start promoting cervical cancer screening until the 1960s [1] - mammography was first recommended officialy in 1976 [1]

Screening was just coming of age 50 years ago so it's no surprise we started to find something once we started looking for it.

[1]: https://www.cancer.org/treatment/understanding-your-diagnosi...

[pja]

> Cancer rates have exploded since 1970

So has life expectancy!

Cancer is ultimately a numbers game & you roll the dice every single day. Life expectancy in the US today is ten years longer than it was in 1970. All those extra dice rolls add up. Ideally you could correct for this effect, but it’s not clear we know enough about how cancer risk accumulates over time to do this correctly.

[tee_0]

Cancer rates for each age have exploded, not just total cancer rates. Cancer rates for cancers that were known and diagnosed well before 1970 have exploded.

[refurb]

They have?

https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3322/caac...

Looks like they went from 400 to 500 then back to 450 since 1975. It's trending down.

And you'd need to correct for age distribution to make sure it's not just the population having older people and thus higher chance of cancer in a given year.

[tee_0]

What part of this document contradicts what I’ve said? The only chart that doesn’t start at 75 is cancer deaths, not incidence.

[refurb]

You said it "skyrocketed" since 1970. Unless it skyrocketed from '70 to '74 (which I doubt), the trend is not up, it's up then back down.

[kiliantics]

I think about things like this:

https://preview.redd.it/clcfr7xw08y31.jpg?auto=webp&s=6dc026...

It was around that time when modern society became remarkably efficient at poisoning or completely destroying ecosystems

[AlchemistCamp]

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[seanmcdirmid]

Could it be that people started living long enough to develop these problems, or that the problems were just previously undercounted? There are a lot of fairly boring theories that are more likely than anything extravagant.