Well yes but they are spread by the wind and through the water table into streams and lakes. We aren’t Saskatchewan where you have a single crop type for hundreds of square kms. Our crops are planted side by side and are rotated so there is no purity.
Nobody rotates wheat with strawberries or cherries. Wind contamination is possible, but will have an infinitesimally small effect on observed cancers. As Tom repeatedly said, multiple causes are to blame, singling out one thing only does more harm than 2,4D in strawberries will ever do.
Having a think about this, if bowel cancer was caused by pesticides on fruit and vegetable crops, then vegans and vegetarians ought to have a higher incidence of bower than others.
I googled it and found a 2009 article:
Vegetarians Have Fewer Cancers But Higher Risk Of Colorectal Cancer, Study Says
- Compared with meat eaters in the cohort, and after adjusting for age, sex and smoking status, the vegetarians in the cohort showed an 11 per cent lower incidence rate of all cancers.
- However, for colorectal cancer, vegetarians showed a 39 per cent higher incidence rate compared with meat eaters.
I appreciate that a correlation doesn’t imply causation.
3 Likes
Opposingly:
Global Surge In Colorectal Cancer Linked To Junk Food
A lethal cancer which can go unnoticed for years is striking down younger people at an increased rate. While cancers have steadily fallen over recent decades, scientists have been mystified by an explosion of colorectal cancer cases, also known as colon or rectal cancer, in younger adults who have traditionally been at low risk of the disease. But scientists have now found a link between the notoriously hard-to-treat cancer and processed or “junk” food such as packaged snacks,…
Linking the vegetarian and junk food diets:
A 2018 study found that a lower-nutritional-quality diet was associated with a higher risk of colorectal, respiratory tract and stomach cancers.
2 Likes
New article in Nature on the areas of the brain that may be involved in UPF addiction:
Ultra-processed food consumption affects structural integrity of feeding-related brain regions independent of and via adiposity | npj Metabolic Health and Disease
1 Like
i would look more on the direction of viral infections or bacterial colonizations-- it is now known that they can trigger uncontrolled mutagenesis - maybe we just don’t know the specific types that trigger ‘other’ cancers (other than cervical / liver / oropharingeal / leukemias…). i remember there was one article not long ago that linked the increased gastric & colon cancers to young people’s infections with a specific strain of e.coli (but I didn’t read it)
There is a link between colon cancer and a low fibre diet and this may be why a lot of much younger people are getting colon cancer.
If people are eating a diet made up mostly of UPF foods then they are consuming virtually no fibre.
Maybe the wrecked gut microbiome in these people is allowing the conditions which lead to cell mutation? (through infections/inflammation/lack of healthy bacteria).
(Which is why the poster in the Obesity thread annoyed me so much when he seemed to think that a low fibre diet was OK).
So…why Inuit populations (who consumed virtually NO fibre) had ‘normal’ CRC rates --which have increased only in the last 30 years, due to the ‘change of diet’?..
I am not saying that we should’t eat more high-fiber diets - particularly because of our sedentarism. But I still believe that microbiota and viral infections (and external carcinogenic agents) might have a much strong relevance
1 Like
So what has caused the change?
here’s some plausible hypotheses
Geographic and age variations in mutational processes in colorectal cancer | Nature