IBD (including ulcerative colitis, which increases the risk of colorectal cancer dramatically) is also increasing in developed/westernized countries.[1]
It's unclear how much of this is is due to changes in diet, hygiene hypothesis, or environmental pollutants/endocrine disruptors.
My family has personally experienced this and it is terrifying to learn how little information and how few resources there are for young children with IBD.
Right out of the gate you hit the issue that there simply aren't many "very early onset IBD" (impacting children under 6 years old) specialists because historically there were so few cases. We've seen well regarded IBD specialists who reflexively try to order tests and procedures that their own hospital will then refuse to even perform because they can't be done safely on young children. The IBD specialists are in general simply unfamiliar with young children because of the historical rarity.
From the VEO IBD specialists we have worked with they all report that the numbers are exploding and no one has any real idea why.
On top of that most of the more modern and effective treatments for IBD and Crohns aren't approved for young children at all and even top tier insurance will fight tooth and nail against covering them because their use in children can be considered off-label.
Chloramine (chlorine and ammonia) in the water we drink has been linked to IBD, IBS and Crohn’s. Most large cities switched to this now in the US (San Francisco switched in 2004). It is also difficult to filter out of water. We shower in it too, vaporized into our lungs with hot water.
Why does San Francisco put anything in the water? It has some of the best tap water in the country. Hetch hetchy water exceeds all federal and state criteria for tap or bottled water. Raw.
I don't get why people think that water is somehow safe because it comes from some magical place.
Water still needs to be transported 167 miles from HH, during which it can pick up plenty of things, like lead, chromium 6, bacteria and all sorts of other fun stuff. Never mind it has likely sat in a local reservoir for some period of time and who knows what the condition of those things are.
Before it was chlorine and then apparently that wasn't enough, so they switched to chloramine. Then, they do shit like this, with some weird spin on it:
I had several fish tanks (one ~400 gallons) that I was caring for during that switch over. I tried to do filtration and additives and the fish were never the same, they all died. It just seems intuitive that adding something to water that kills fish almost instantly, couldn't be great for humans either.
Needless to say, I only drink RO water, put a filter on my whole house and in my shower. That probably isn't enough, but at least it is better than nothing.
"
Even when disinfection occurs during water treatment processes, bacterial regrowth may occur in the long journey through water distribution systems.
...
Bacterial regrowth in water distribution systems can occur because of the accidental entry of microorganisms at cross connections and broken pipes and the recovery of microorganism populations affected by disinfectants in water treatment plants.
"
Since this article was written, there have been fires almost every year. The water also moves from HH to other reservoirs along the way. Let's also not forget that the dirty air from SF, blows east.
I also wasn't talking about rainwater, I was talking about reverse osmosis.
I'm 99% certain it's a new lack of fiber as the American diet becomes more attuned to meat and starch.
I would bet MONEY that if you looked at IBD rates among people who tend to frequent taco bell (lots of beans == lots of fiber) and people who tend to frequent, say, McD's, you'd see a lower rate among TB-goers. Doesn't seem like a hard experiment to set up.
Fiber supplementation can worsen symptoms of IBS as it draws water into the colon. "Just eat more fibre" is a knee jerk response of people unfamiliar with the science. These conditions are corelated to inflamation and often it's FODMAPs which are a major contributor.
This is just wrong. First of all, IBS != IBD. Second of all, IBD doctors will flat out recommend high fiber Mediterranean style diets for anybody who is not in an active flair.
Low FODMAP is also recommended for IBD and is quite reputable although not a silver bullet. I agree with the above poster that Fiber if anything is an old hat approach which can make things worse as easily as they make things better. Low fiber diets are used ALL THE TIME in the treatment of ibs/Ibd, as are high fiber diets.
I am rather convinced quite a few peopl have IBS/IBD in significant part due to their high fiber diet which tend to be high in FODMAPs if not meticulously designed and inflame the intestines with solid residue. People blindly recommending fiber as a panacea, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have a place in the treatment of IBS/IBD, but just blindly throwing fiber at the problem as if it’s always going to help us legitimately going to land people in hospital.
A big advantage to the low FODMAP diet and why it’s taken off is that it can treat constipation and diarrhea without having to adopt a high fibre diet.
I have no idea, but is it possible that the lack of fiber can cause an illness, and that adding fiber at that point can make symptoms of that illness worse, once it's taken hold?
Yes, you can get inflamed from constipation and bacteria screwing with you and such, and then insoluable fiber and other material that doesn’t digest can cause more irritation, but I’d argue the biggest problem with fiber might not be fiber itself but the foods that have fiber in them because they all tend to have FODMAPs which are also implicated in ibs/ibd.
Fiber I believe it’s generally recommended you take as much as you can if you aren’t having issues.
Dennis Burkitt documented this in 1973[0][1]. Unfortunately "Don't Forget Fibre in your Diet" (1979) and "F-Plan Diet" (1983) have faded into history a bit.
The Mayo Clinic [0] says the recommended daily intake for adults is 38g for men or 25g for women. A little less if you're over 50.
The USDA [1] makes their calculations from a proportion of 14g fiber for each 1000kcal consumed - if you're an adult male with a healthy diet you're likely consuming around 2000-2500kcal, which puts your fiber needs at 28-35g per day.
You probably need more of it, but I'm not a doctor and even less *your* doctor, so please don't just take my word for it. :)
Detergents, preservatives, pesticides and low quality ingredients are all great examples of things you can cut out eating at home. While we don't seem to have enough data to point to each one of them individually, it seems pretty common sense these are the new contributing factors in our environment.
Lectins, specifically gluten, are strongly associated with IBS. Many people have found relief from IBS by reducing or eliminating lectins in their diet, especially gluten. It is worth pointing out that wheat is an extremely common ingredient nowadays, but most of the wheat we grow and eat is no longer the traditional emmer or einkorn but a dwarf hybrid that among other differences produces extreme amounts of gluten.
GF support groups are full of tales from people who were able to eat wheat in Europe but not NA.
What they don't tell you about wheat very often is that people figured out that if you defoliate a wheat plant, it will shove its remaining calories into the developing seeds and then die. You can control the maturity of a wheat field by spraying it with RoundUp late in the season.
So where the reality versus PR for the decay rate of RoundUp in the environment leaves a very long safety margin with early season and pre-emergent uses of the stuff, whatever you sprayed a matter of weeks before harvest very much matters on variance between fields and between customer and manufacturer.
Yes my girlfriend has the same experience. Can eat wheat in Europe but American wheat causes digestive upset. Appears not to have bad reaction to barley or rye.
What you say is true, but the hybrid wheat rich in gluten has already existed for a few millennia and during all this time it has been the main staple food for hundreds of millions or even for billions of people, who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Nowadays it seems that there are more and more people that are affected negatively by gluten consumption. Because this was much less frequent in the past, there must be an additional unidentified factor that causes gluten sensitivity and which has not existed formerly.
> who have suffered no undesirable consequences from it.
Is that really the case? I suspect it was more that people who had IBS or gluten sensitivity in the past just...died. If there was no understanding of the problem, then those suffering from it probably appeared to have something like dysentery, and would like just be lumped in with everyone else that had similar symptoms from various causes.
Unlike today, in Europe until relatively recently (before the use of maize or rice became common) there was no such thing as gluten-free food.
So absolutely everybody was continuously exposed to gluten, especially the poor majority of the population, for whom bread was the main source of proteins.
Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Nonetheless deaths with such symptoms were very rare.
> Anyone with gluten intolerance would have had very severe symptoms with no chance of recovery.
Exactly, anyone born with such intolerances likely didn't survive the early childhood, and anyone developing them later in life were probably not attributed to the gluten themselves. Anyone that made the connection between wheat-based products and their problems would also find themselves lacking nutrition most likely, which also leads to a whole host of problems.
What I'm saying is that we likely can never be sure what the 'baseline' prevalence was because the records do not have enough details to make that distinction. We can only really determine if its recently increasing. It may very well have also been a problem in past history too, but wasn't noticed as one, or was attributed to other causes.
What you say is certainly possible, but nonetheless I find it hard to believe that this has happened in reality.
The reason is that the non-existence of gluten-free food was not restricted to the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but in many places it remained true e.g. a half century ago.
Where I was born, in Eastern Europe, among the millions of citizens, there was no normal human who would not ingest a lot of gluten every day, but child mortality was very low and the incidence of celiac and similar diseases was low enough that the general public was completely unaware that such diseases even exist.
Moreover, there are published studies that conclude that at least during the last few decades the frequency of gluten-caused illness has been increasing.
AFAIU most people negatively affected by gluten are unaware of it, because the incomplete digestion of gluten yields morphine-like peptides which can mask the bowel symptoms.
While most emmer varieties have indeed more gluten than the hexaploid wheat, the varieties described in the article quoted by you have, as written in the article, between 30% and 40% more gluten.
Nowhere in this article an emmer with twice more gluten is mentioned.
Isn’t that article contradicting your point? They weren’t able to find any effect for dish detergent, and the effect they did find for rinse aids was not present at the concentrations used in residential dishwashers?
I just checked, and my detergent (Finish Quantum) has alcohol ethoxylates in it. I wonder if with newer high efficiency dishwashers that use less water, this stuff isn't getting rinsed off as well.
Not if you grew up in a household that never used "rinse aid" and never thought to look up what the little clear plastic window on the inside of dishwasher doors is for!
> "Interestingly, detergent residue from professional dishwashers demonstrated the remnant of a significant amount of cytotoxic and epithelial barrier–damaging rinse aid remaining on washed and ready-to-use dishware."
Yes, the article (and your parent comment) accepts that this is true for professional dishwashers (not household ones):
> A professional dishwasher completes 1 or 2 wash and rinse cycles using 3.5 L of water per cycle. The detergent and rinse aid are automatically dispensed into the water at a concentration of 1.5 to 4 mL/L and 0.1 to 0.5 mL/L, respectively. At these concentrations, the residual dilution factor after rinse ranges from 1:250 to 1:667 for detergents and 1:2,000 to 1:10,000 for rinse aids.
> Household dishwasher detergents in a normal cup and plate washing program typically consume a total of 12 L of water: 4.8 L during the washing cycle, 3.6 L of water for the intermediate rinse cycle, and 3.6 L of water for the final rinse cycle. Between the washing and rinsing cycles, 200 mL of water remains inside the dishwasher. Accordingly, the dilution factor for one 20-g tablet of detergent is 1:80,000 (w/v).
The detergent residue they are talking about there isn't the detergent from washing, it is the rinse aid. Rinse aids are detergents that cut surface tension to let the water bead off faster.
They found nothing wrong with washing with detergent, just using rinse aid to dry in a commercial setting due to the detergent residue the rinse aid could leave.
Because the linked research does not support the point the poster is making. The researchers did not find a link with dishwasher detergents. They found a link with rinse aids, but at quantities and concentrations far higher than you'd find in a dishwasher.
Also, I think we should all be skeptical of someone who says, essentially, "Don't want colorectal cancer? Rinse your dishes and don't eat at restaurants!" Such a simple explanation for colorectal cancer seems suspicious... at best.
This rapid increase is especially puzzling because the rate of colorectal cancer has plummeted among older adults—largely due to regular colonoscopies and lower rates of smoking.
“We don’t understand a lot about the causes, the biology, or how to prevent early onset of the disease,” said Phil Daschner, a program director in NCI’s Division of Cancer Biology. “And that’s important to learn more about because it may affect [approaches for] the treatment and survivorship of early-onset colon cancer.”
The cited paper is not sufficient to explain the dramatic rise. It would have been seen much earlier (since the 50s) that the trend was obvious. Putting forth "just do X" is a low effort post. It has a paper, which is something, but it's far from definitive, although it's phrased as such.
I'm sure someone thought the same as me, but they thought clicking the down button was the correct response. I don't agree, but I understand that not everyone is put together before the coffee kicks in.
I have had 2 quarter-coin sized growths removed from my colon. The underlying cause is undiagnosed. They were not cancerous, by analysis. I believe the growths started in Washington State 6ish years ago and black mold was a contributor, with other factors. Growths have not returned.
It's theorized that the fungus (which was everywhere in buildings I spent time in) created ulcers or disrupted ulcers, allowing the underlying cause to take hold.
The reason I asked is I knew someone who got lung cancer and died (a long time ago) and the oncologist said it was bc of the black mold on the walls in their room. I was wondering if the ill effects extended to colon cancer.
I'd start with gastroenterologists. I've started having some GI issues recently so I've been seeing one, but there was a 4+ week wait time to see anyone in my area.
Seconding a gastroenterologist. In Australia you have to be referred to by a general physician, and the GE will perform the colonoscopy procedure and also consult. I'm in my 30s and had mine done just the other week. The prep sucks but it's for a good cause, and the anaesthesia is divine.
Good on your friend ;) It's important to look after your brain's meat suit, particularly that area considering the growing body of research between the gut/brain
Could it be from people sitting on their butt all day? Not like, not working, but just physically constantly sitting? I don't think our ancestors spent most of their waking hours sitting down.
Fake foods, low vitamin D, iron shavings supplementation in flour -> bad vitamin B status, bad intestinal bacteria, intestinal damage -> chronic inflammation -> cancer
I'm guessing fake foods overloaded with preservatives... much like with increased oxidative stress in general.
edit:
noting: "There’s mounting evidence linking an unhealthy diet—in particular, one high in processed meat and fat, and low in fruits and vegetables—to early-onset colorectal cancer."
Sounds like it's the meat/fat/cholesterol myth 2.0 ... Not that I'm massively in favor of overly processed meat... but the body needs fat... we're still suffering from the hormone production issues a half century of disinformation on dietary fat has lead to... and the heart disease over a century of processed fats in unnatural ratios has lead to.
Fruits and Vegetables are not naturally available year-round, anywhere. If you want to choose to be vegetarian, cool... but to assume it's meat (part what makes us human for many millenia) and not the processed "foods" that didn't even exist 150 years ago is just absurd.
A quick google search says gay men have cancer rates double or more than straight men, so maybe. The article doesn't mention it so they either don't think it could be linked or wanted to avoid that subject since it would obviously be a touchy one. Although, if they do think there is a connection, it does seem like it would be important to target education to those who have anal sex so they know to get more screenings.
Subtle hint: thing in back pocket emits physical agent known to cause oxidative-stress leading to inflammation & dna damage. Colon tissue cell division rapid = more sensitive to said dna damage.
If the phone in your pocket is troubling, think about how many radio stations your car radio can receive- every one of those signals is blasting through your body, most of the time! And we swim in a sea of wireless router signals, as well.
The issues are wattage and whether the radiation is ionizing or not. I think, so far, every reputable study has shown that cell phones, radio towers, and wifi routers are utterly harmless to the people that use them as intended.
> The issues are wattage and whether the radiation is ionizing or not
As an EE-type guy the issue is actually the dose rate. Even if the effects were sub-linear, which it seems they probably are not (like, why would they be?), there is an incredible range in dosage from FCC permitted rates up to "those crazy broadcast engineers and ham radio operators doing questionable things".
If effects were proportionate to dose rates, then my broadcast engineer bros would keel over dead at work the first five minutes of employment, etc. Maybe not THAT bad, but pretty bad. If carrying around 0.6 watts peak increased cancer rates by 1 ppm, you can imagine what would happen to EEs working on MW class military radars, MW class broadcast transmitters, they would essentially all die of cancer before retirement. But they don't. So you can put a firm estimate on the death rate from cell phone radiation at "less than 10 people a year" because if more than 10 people a year died of cellphones then essentially all communications industry personnel would die very young; and they don't; so it seems likely to be many orders of magnitude less than 10 people per year, but it certainly can't be more.
Another way to look at it is there's a 50 KW broadcast farm near the interstate where I live; if a 0.6 watt phone increased the risk of cancer, then driving by 100000 times the power would realistically result in every car driver breaking out in tumors and dying the first time they drive past the antenna; yet no signal appears in the statistics, so it seems very unlikely a 0.6 watt transmitter could be killing people if something a hundred thousand times worse is definitely not killing anyone.
> A court-ordered study has found that electromagnetic waves beamed by Vatican Radio leave residents living near the station's antennas at a higher risk of cancer, Italian media said
* For adult men 8-10 km away, the radio station reduced cancer cases by 75%! Hooray!
* It had slight benefits for the same group at 4-8 km
* It caused a couple of extra cases at 0-4 km
But then you realize we're talking about drawing conclusions from an n=40 study... That's just not enough to draw meaningful conclusions. And for children, it was n=8 !!!!!
> you can imagine what would happen to EEs working on MW class military radars, MW class broadcast transmitters,
They're not getting exposed to MW level field strengths, or else they would be literally cooked.
The amount of power you get from a 0.6W phone in your pocket is dramatically higher than your exposure from the 50KW broadcast due to the inverse square law.
An isotropic radiator at 300m distance with 50kw power results in a field strength of 0.04421 w/m^2, while a 0.6w isotropic emitter at 3cm results in 53.0504 w/m^2. About 1200x higher. And unless you work at the transmitter you're not going to be within 300m of it most likely (there are fences set by exposure limits!), even if you work around it you're not going to be around it long while the phone is near you 12 hours a day, nearer than my 3cm example too. Though to be fair it's not putting out 0.6w all the time (though its maximum is also a lot higher than 0.6w for a normal phone, try more like 3w).
(the station is also not isotropic, but depending on the type of station the radiation pattern probably lowers exposure near the station-- no point in illuminating the ground!)
I'm mostly correcting your justification, the fact that we have limited evidence of problems from high power (except due to heating) is a good argument that lower levels of exposure are not likely an issue, but exposure levels from a running phone in your pocket are higher than you might expect simply because how close it is to you.
And when it comes to weak long term effects like cancer rates, it might actually be hard to tell for sure particularly since we lack any natural control group. Anyone different enough to NOT have a cellphone is different enough to make their cancer rates incomparable.
@knodi123: You write: "The issues are wattage and whether the radiation is ionizing or not". Wrong. Sorry. You are out of date with the science on this. Weasel-wording like "every reputable study" can't change that.
Its the modulation, polarization mostly, and to some degree frequency that are the culprit.
> Wrong. Sorry. You are out of date with the science on this.
Which science has updated this conclusion?
> Weasel-wording like "every reputable study" can't change that.
Is that a civil way to word things? And why call me a weasel, if one sentence earlier you charitably assumed I was simply out of date?
> Did you even look at the linked study?
Which one - The one you linked? No, I'm not paying $62 to see how they did their review.
The vatican radio thing linked by someone else? Yeah, I did. I replied to the guy who posted it with what I perceive to be some flaws in that study. If you want to discuss it civilly, I'd be interested in that. But not if you're gonna bring this reddit-style "screw you for being wrong" kind of energy.
It isn’t about preservatives. The EU is more tolerant of potential bacterial contamination and lack of mitigations than the US if the food process is deemed “traditional”.
The specific FDA bans reference relatively high incidences of food poisoning in Europe which can be directly connected to inadequate bacterial contamination controls that would be required in the US. One can say many things about food in the US but their bacterial mitigation standards are among the strictest in the world.
I have worked for one of the world's most important alcohol distributors, and have been in contact with high execs in the org. They are concerned that young people are not drinking as much as before, not the other way around.
Interesting because a friend of mine is a transplant hepatologist and has told me that the number of young people needing liver transplants due to alcohol abuse is abnormally high.
I suppose both "young people are generally drinking less alcohol" and "more young people than ever are abusing alcohol" could both be true statements.
Yeah, it's quite possible that alcohol consumption is becoming more bimodal and young people increasing either drink too much or don't drink very much.
They're concerned about profits as any capitalist enterprise is, but if it makes you feel any better they are trying to innovate and find new revenue streams (ex: in digital technologies related to lifestyle and events - that's how I was involved with them), and not necessarily getting more young people to drink.
prolly cuz beans contain a good amount of lechtins. personally I think beans are prolly good for keeping you healthy unless your gut is already compromised.
I read in an Atlantic piece that there was a "sex recession" [1] - many sociological studies show that people are having less sex than decades prior. It's counter-intuitive, but the data in the article meets my anecdotal observation (and I don't even live in the US). Assuming both articles are somewhat accurate the correlation would pull in opposite directions.
Some recent studies suggest that even HPV-infected individuals benefit from the HPV vaccine, decreasing the likelihood of symptomatic illness. The age of eligibility in many countries has been raised to 45. Here in Canada I know it is being given to particularly high risk individuals with boosters in some clinics.
But it's expensive. And only covered for teenagers and young adults here, otherwise about $400.
It was definitely a thing, much harder to get insurance to pay for it for guys. Maybe it changed in the US, but it looks like Canada for example still discriminates based on gender: https://immunizebc.ca/hpv
In the US, years ago, it was possible to get if you were a guy between 18-25 but you really had to demand it and confirm/claim a low number of sexual partners. Not sure if that's still the case, hopefully not.
When I said, "isn't really" I meant "is hardly." Penile cancer is incredibly rare, I don't think HPV would be an explanation for colorectal cancer rising in the entire population, which is mostly what I was referring to. It seems to be gay men in which HPV eventually becomes colorectal cancer. Not to mention we now have a vaccine. So there has to be something else.
Point taken. I was reacting to your post as stated because it's often said that HPV is not a cancer risk for men. You're correct that it wouldn't explain a general rise in colorectal cancer across the board.
When you see clickbait headlines talk about rates increasing, you know the absolute value must be very low or they're be trumpeting the actual numbers rather than rates, much like most coverage of the recent pandemic.
Unsurprisingly, I found out you're about four times more likely to die in a car crash than to be diagnosed.
Also unsurprisingly, the research in the article is at cross purposes; if you're fat the risk is apparently very much higher, if you eat a diet that makes you fat but you somehow remain thin then the risk of getting the cancer is slightly lower, therefore the advice is to eat the diet that makes you fat, carb and fiber up to the max.
Finally the end of the article is the stereotypical clickbait "don't actually do anything, just feel anxious and raise awareness".
It's unclear how much of this is is due to changes in diet, hygiene hypothesis, or environmental pollutants/endocrine disruptors.
I wish we understood this better.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4020403/