Why is our beloved food causing us harm?

[wolram]

It seems from this page we are born to die of some form of cancer, we have been eating meat since the dawn of humanity so why is our food killing us?
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/eating-meat-officially-raises-cancer-risk?tgt=nr

 

[wolram]

From cancer research
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/incidence/age.

Cancer kills 1 in 4 deaths in the UK, that is horrific,but how many are caused by eating processed meat?

 

[wolram]

A quick search came up with this list of chemicals used in food.
http://phys.org/news/2010-01-chemical-additives-food.html

This just one on the list.

BHA (BUTYLATED HYDROXYANISOLE) AND BHT (BUTYLATED HYDROXYTOLUENE)

These antioxidants are similar but non-identical petroleum-derived chemicals added to oil-containing foods as a preservative and to delay rancidity. They are most commonly found in crackers, cereals, sausages, dried meats and other foods with added fats. The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer considers BHA a possible human carcinogen
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2010-01-chemical-additives-food.html#jCp

Now i can not even eat cereal.

 

[DaveC426913]

Our modern day food is killing us,

Is it? Or are we just eradicating all the things that used to kill us younger?

Something has to kill us.

 

[wolram]

Is it? Or are we just eradicating all the things that used to kill us younger?

Something has to kill us.

What things are you alluding to Dave?

 

[DaveC426913]

What things are you alluding to Dave?

Well, mostly disease and infection, but also malnutrition, famine, exposure, childbirth, etc.

As we lower the rates at which people die of specific things, we live longer and longer. Much longer than our DNA is evolved to handle. What's left is cancer.

Think of a line of production cars over years that keeps getting improved everytime they find something wrong. Engines seizing? Improve engine maintenance. Axles breaking? Thicker axles.
Eventually, cars will last longer and longer until there's something we just can't easily fix.

"Chassis rusting out is on the rise!" they cry.
Well, true, but only because cars are not breaking down due to seized engines or broken axles. All cars would have eventually stopped working if they lasted long enough, but they didn't last that long. That does not mean that rusting chassis are an recent epidemic.

 

[wolram]

Well, mostly disease and infection, but also malnutrition, famine, exposure, childbirth, etc.

As we lower the rates at which people die of specific things, we live longer and longer. Much longer than our DNA is evolved to handle. What's left is cancer.

Think of a line of cars that keeps getting improved everytime they find something wrong. Engines seizing? Improve engine maintenance. Axles breaking? Thicker axles.
Eventually, cars will last longer and longer until there's something we just can't easily fix.

"Chassis rusting out is on the rise!" they cry.
Well, true, but only because cars are not breaking down due to seized engines or broken axles.

I agree that many life limiting causes are being eradicated, but why add others that take there place.,

 

[DaveC426913]

I agree that many life limiting causes are being eradicated, but why add others that take there place.,

They're not being added, they were always there.

Every car had a chassis that was rusting slowly. It's just that most cars stopped working before that chassis rusted out. That doesn't mean rusting chassis are new.

This is an never-ending cycle. 10 years ago, the thing that was killing us was sun exposure, we fixed that with sun block education. We live fractionally longer as a race.

 

[wolram]

I think BHA (BUTYLATED HYDROXYANISOLE) AND BHT (BUTYLATED HYDROXYTOLUENE) was not there all the time along with many others. Dave.

 

[DaveC426913]

I think BHA (BUTYLATED HYDROXYANISOLE) AND BHT (BUTYLATED HYDROXYTOLUENE) was not there all the time along with many others. Dave.

:shrug:
Neither were many toxins, such as automobile emissions, volatile plastics and chemicalized paints.

Perhaps I am off-topic. Your opening post and title seem to be about dying young and cancer, it seems different than what you're talking about now - which seems to be about new chemicals.

 

[Jonathan Scott]

This recent fuss about bacon etc. is very unhelpful. I've heard many times over the years that nitrates and nitrites can undergo reactions which form nitrosamines, which have been known to be carcinogenic for tens of years. The relevant reactions are promoted by very high heat but inhibited by vitamin C (which is now normally added along with the nitrates), and it seems that they probably occur only in the presence of certain "precursor" chemicals.

As many vegetables contain just as much nitrates and nitrites, it seems that the main difference with bacon and similar is the cooking temperature. There is apparently a mild but statistically significant correlation between consumption of processed meats and colorectal cancer, which is the basis of the new WHO status as "carcinogenic" for processed meats. However, this isn't necessarily a causal link, and even if there is such a link it may well be that the presence of the "precursor" chemicals is more relevant than the consumption of processed meats, but statistics are not available for that.

I am not an expert on the above, most of which was obtain from older news reports and recent Googling, but I'm hoping I don't need to be. I don't eat much bacon anyway, and I'm not keen on salty food, but I do like the odd ham sandwich.

 

[wolram]

May be you have a good analogy Dave, the rusting chassis is the body dying of cancer, it is just that the chassis is rusting prematurely.

 

[Czcibor]

What things are you alluding to Dave?

That anyway ultimate the death rate is 100%?

 

[Dr. Courtney]

Is it? Or are we just eradicating all the things that used to kill us younger?

Something has to kill us.

I think this is the right answer.

Because of food preservation and production enhancements, we are no longer dying as often of starvation and food poisoning.

Increasing average life spans always means encountering new ailments that will be harder to solve.

 

[zoobyshoe]

As many vegetables contain just as much nitrates and nitrites, it seems that the main difference with bacon and similar is the cooking temperature.

I was googling around recently after I read the new condemnation of bacon and ran into a whole separate justification for it, which is it's fat content. Dioxins(so called) accumulate in fat, and are carcinogenic. There have been incidents where pigs (and other animals) have been fed dioxin contaminated feed, and that concentration gets passed right into the person who eats the animal. It's advised to limit yourself to lean meat.

 

[edward]

The FDA has always been slow to act on proven dangers in food ingredients. The recent FDA ban on trans fats is a good example. Based on the scientific evidence ,the ban should have happened over twenty years ago.

Then in 1990 a clinical study shook the ground. It found that eating trans fat led to higher levels of bad cholesterol and lower levels of good cholesterol. It also spurred a whirlwind of follow-up research, including a study by the USDA, which the food industry hoped would exculpate trans fat, but did just the opposite. Consuming it, study after study found, was associated with increased risks of heart disease.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ost-important-change-in-our-food-supply-ever/

 

[edward]

I was googling around recently after I read the new condemnation of bacon and ran into a whole separate justification for it, which is it's fat content. Dioxins(so called) accumulate in fat, and are carcinogenic. There have been incidents where pigs (and other animals) have been fed dioxin contaminated feed, and that concentration gets passed right into the person who eats the animal. It's advised to limit yourself to lean meat.

Zoobyshoe: What goes into animal food is sickening. For instance Beef cattle feed is allowed to have 20% chicken manure in it.

Poultry litter can be used as a feedstuff, but it presents special consumer issues that must be addressed. There are currently no federal or Missouri regulations governing the use of poultry litter as a feedstuff; however, certain common-sense guidelines apply. Poultry litter should not be fed to dairy cattle or beef cattle less than 21 days before slaughter. The reason for this prohibition is that the residues of certain pharmaceuticals used in poultry production may be present in poultry litter.

http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G2077

 

[russ_watters]

May be you have a good analogy Dave, the rusting chassis is the body dying of cancer, it is just that the chassis is rusting prematurely.

But it isn't: life expectancies continue to rise.
[edit]
Indeed, the rate of increase should increase over the next few decades as smoker rates drop and lung cancer/emphysema rates drop.

 

[wolram]

May be the rich are surviving longer but it seems the poor are getting the short end of the stick.

http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/1/3/167.full.pdf

 

[gleem]

In general the poor have always got the short end of the stick. Poor food, poor living conditions, poor health care. more stress less choices, the worst life has to offer. What may be the playing field leveler is genetics since some people rich or poor live significantly longer than the the average. But life span is limited in any event because DNA is continually be degraded by replication errors eventually leaving the organism non viable.

 

[DaveC426913]

May be you have a good analogy Dave, the rusting chassis is the body dying of cancer, it is just that the chassis is rusting prematurely.

But it isn't.
Uh, Russ in post 20 and Dr.Courtney in post 17 seem to have made my point.
Essentially, increasing life spans.

Look at a super simplified example. if the ideal "average" cancer kicked in at age 50, all across the human race's history, very few people would have died of it, since they didn't tend to live past 40 or so. Eliminate what they were dying of (disease, famine, etc.) and suddenly everyone's living to 80. And they're all dying of cancer - but at age 50 to 80. It would be folly to say "cancer is on the rise". It would be more accurate to say 'death is on the decline'.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Zoobyshoe: What goes into animal food is sickening. For instance Beef cattle feed is allowed to have 20% chicken manure in it.
http://extension.missouri.edu/p/G2077

That was unknown to me and is kind of horrifying, but to be fair, it's not 20% manure that's allowed but "poultry litter," which means the stuff they put down on the floor of chicken pens to absorb the chicken pee and poo.

Common bedding materials include wood shavings, sawdust, peanut hulls, shredded sugar cane, straw, and other dry, absorbent, low-cost organic materials.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poultry_litter

From your link, there's a certain amount of processing to make it more edible by cows, and we have to remember cows have their own strange kind of digestive system.

That said, it's still a repulsive concept to humans. You have to wonder what kind of demented farmer first tried this.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Eliminate what they were dying of (disease, famine, etc.) and suddenly everyone's living to 80. And they're all dying of cancer - but at age 50 to 80. It would be folly to say "cancer is on the rise". It would be more accurate to say 'death is on the decline'.

This came up in a thread a year or two back and made perfect sense to me. However, later I wasn't able to find any links that support it. Claims that cancer is on the rise seem to link rising cancer rates to other things.

Do you have any links that lay a higher incidence of cancer to increased longevity due to the elimination of other causes of early death?

 

[Enigman]

Well, the chances of cancer increases with age. The longer people live and the older they grow, the more their chances of getting cancer.

Cancers are age-related, much more frequent in the old than in the young. A University of Colorado Cancer Center review published July 2 in the journal Oncogene argues against the conventional wisdom that the accumulation of cancer-causing mutations leads to more cancer in older people, instead positing that it is the changing features of tissue in old age that promote higher cancer rates in the elderly.

Journal Reference: J DeGregori. Challenging the axiom: does the occurrence of oncogenic mutations truly limit cancer development with age?Oncogene, 2012; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/onc.2012.281

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120702134732.htm

 

[dipole]

...But life span is limited in any event because DNA is continually be degraded by replication errors eventually leaving the organism non viable.

Except there are animals which have evolved to be resistant to aging and cancer. Naked mole rats, for example, live an extremely long time and show very little signs of aging. Further, they are nearly immune to cancer, so much so that there is no known case of cancer in a naked mole rat.

Cancer and other aging-related diseases are not necessarily an inevitability. In fact, it's very likely that we will one day produce a cure for aging, or at least very good treatments for it that delay death and increase life span dramatically.

I do think that the leading cause of rising cancer rates is that we've cured many other early killers, but that doesn't mean that the huge variety of chemicals we're exposed to, that didn't exist only a hundred years ago, isn't also contributing. I personally avoid almost all processed foods - I don't eat anything that didn't grow in the dirt or wasn't carved from an animal (when I have a choice), but I do worry about what kinds of toxins and carcinogens I'm ingesting that may be contaminating meat and vegetables.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Well, the chances of cancer increases with age. The longer people live and the older they grow, the more their chances of getting cancer.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120702134732.htm

Yes, it's a concept that makes perfect sense.

I just googled and found this article:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/04/health/who-world-cancer-report/

It harps so much on smoking and other unhealthy lifestyle habits as the cause of worldwide rise in cancer, that the message that it is ascribable to most populations living a lot longer is de-emphasized, although it is there.

 

[Tolklein]

If Aubrey de Grey is to believed humans will be living forever sooner than we think, I'm a bit more sceptical.
For a while cancer and DNA deterioration have been the stopping points to hitting ages of over a dozen decades, no doubt these will be overcome, but what's next?
Who knows what else will start to go wrong at 150 or 200?
My understanding is that our cartilage never stops growing, at the very least, nose jobs will be on the rise.

 

[Silicon Waffle]

[...]
My understanding is that our cartilage never stops growing, at the very least, nose jobs will be on the rise.

People have to mate to share and pass down their genetic formats to their offspring. Having either too small or too big nose jobs isn't favored by people especially those with fixed or stereotypical lifestyles. And to me personally, I think my end now starts from here.

 

[zoobyshoe]

...no doubt these will be overcome, but what's next?
Who knows what else will start to go wrong at 150 or 200?

A book I read ("The Case of the Frozen Addicts") maintained that we all are on our way toward Parkinsons. That is: our substantia nigra is naturally deteriorating over the course of our lives and is more depleted than not in the average 80 year old. Another 50 years of life and everyone would have Parkinson's.

 

[DaveC426913]

If Aubrey de Grey is to believed humans will be living forever sooner than we think, I'm a bit more sceptical.
For a while cancer and DNA deterioration have been the stopping points to hitting ages of over a dozen decades, no doubt these will be overcome, but what's next?
Who knows what else will start to go wrong at 150 or 200?

Brain function will be next.

Longevity itself is not enough. The key is longevity while still remembering your own name.

 

[jack476]

Back in the caveman times, and in fact up until relatively recently, you were unlikely to live long enough to die of cancer. So even though humans have been eating meat for a very long time, the small cancer risk attached to eating meat wasn't enough of a risk for early death to have an evolutionary significance.

But the thing to remember there is that it's a small risk. A lot of things come with very small increases of cancer risk: being out in the sun or being friends with a person who smokes, for instance. And according to the WHO (source: http://www.who.int/cancer/prevention/en/), there is no safe amount of alcohol when it comes to cancer risk, yet many people who drink live perfectly healthy lives. The only way to truly eliminate your risk of cancer would be to put yourself in cryogenic stasis. And you also have to weigh that small increase in your cancer risk against the potential health ramifications of avoiding meat entirely, abruptly cutting out your main protein source without having a vegetarian alternative to replace it both causes a substantial loss of variety in the diet (lack of variety is an obesity risk factor) and leaves you with a potential deficiency of protein.

That said, what's really dangerous about meat, especially red meat, is that a lot of people eat too much of it, and it's often prepared with a lot of salt and served alongside unhealthy food (ie a Big Mac and fries). It's even worse when you're eating cheap meat, because that's guaranteeing that it's loaded with salt and fat. And that's exactly what this article is saying: meat in general is not dangerous, but cheap processed meat and eating too much red meat are bad for you.

There's also the environmental consideration. Methane produced by the livestock industry contributes 18% (in 2006, it's probably slightly more now as more people in the world can afford to eat meat, source: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/News/2006/1000448/index.html) of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (in terms of the carbon dioxide equivalent of the released methane). So down the line, that could also contribute to cancer risk if it results in more people being sedentary and staying indoors during the warmer months.

 

[jack476]

Brain function will be next.

Longevity itself is not enough. The key is longevity while still remembering your own name.

A book I read ("The Case of the Frozen Addicts") maintained that we all are on our way toward Parkinsons. That is: our substantia nigra is naturally deteriorating over the course of our lives and is more depleted than not in the average 80 year old. Another 50 years of life and everyone would have Parkinson's.

On the one hand I do think that Aubrey de Grey is a hack, but the claim that human lifespan can be increased substantially is not without merit and I think it's a worthwhile subject for researchers to pursue. Isn't there a lot of research being done right now in regards to how cognitive decline can be prevented or reversed?

http://www.theguardian.com/science/...could-rejuvenate-ageing-brains-study-suggests

 

[jackwhirl]

Recent conversation I had:
Other: Who said bacon causes cancer?
Me: WHO says.
Other: Yeah, who said it?
Me: WHO did.
---------------
Must say that I'm with Dave on this. Venturing into the uncharted territory of longevity we are finding novel and interesting monsters ways to die.

To answer the original question, we are born to live just long enough to reproduce. Barring a high degree of artificial selection and outright genetic engineering, I don't see that changing.

 

[gleem]

Look at a super simplified example. if the ideal "average" cancer kicked in at age 50, all across the human race's history, very few people would have died of it, since they didn't tend to live past 40 or so. Eliminate what they were dying of (disease, famine, etc.) and suddenly everyone's living to 80.

Keep in mind that the life expectancy is an average for a population and includes still births and early childhood moralities that heavily bias this statistic toward lower ages. Also infections and relatively minor accidents caused many deaths which do not occur today. Even in biblical times people lived into their eighties and longer. Also note that the longer you live the greater your life expectancy.

World wide life expectancy is 71 yrs, The best is Japan at 84 yrs. The US is 79 yrs ranked 34 in the world.

WHO stats show that the three leading causes of death world wide are ischemic heart disease, stroke, and COPD.

With about 2.6M deaths each year In the US the three leading causes of death are heart disease (0.61M), cancer (0.59M) and lower respiratory disease (0.15M)..

In the US the three leading causes of cancer deaths are lung cancer (men and women) (0.16M), Prostate (men)/breast(women), and Colon(men and women) (0.05M).

Although the WHO new findings on processed meat shows and increase in risk of 15% in colon cancer rate this translate to only a 1% risk in the absolute rate of this disease from 5.5/thousand to 6.6/thousand.

For colon cancer early diagnosis is important and easy(?) with a colonoscopy.. Interestingly Colon cancer is decreasing in 50 + age group but increasing in the 44 something age group. Maybe we need to lower the suggest age for a colonoscopy.

 

[newjerseyrunner]

Probably, humans were born out of the chaos of climate change in Africa. Animals that live shorter lives, can evolve faster as a group.