Hacker News Reader

Comment by methodover | Hacker News Reader

Phew, 186 thousand cancers included out of 1.4 million participants? I knew cancer was not entirely uncommon but... man. That's a lot of unhappy news. Feels bad to think about.

If it is true that exercising regularly reduces the risk of cancer, I wonder what the mechanism is? Exercise builds muscle mass, improves lung capacity... Why would that have anything to do with cancer?

View on HN

>Phew, 186 thousand cancers included out of 1.4 million participants? I knew cancer was not entirely uncommon but... man. That's a lot of unhappy news. Feels bad to think about.

2 out of 5 will get cancer during their lifetime.

http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/statistics

And close to 50 percent once uou cross the 80s. The biggest factor for cancer is aging.

I remember as a kid I used to play soccer 1 hour bike away from home. One week I had a bad flu, but I decided to go anyway. The next day I felt mostly cured. I expected that exhaustion (2 hours biking + 2 hours somehow intensive soccer amongst PE teachers .. really exhausting) would worsen the disease but it did not.

Few times since I could notice that in lesser scales.

Maybe increase blood flow, increased metabolism, endorphins, etc do help keeping your system active instead of going in suspend mode while the immune system reacts alone.

Just yesterday I had this metaphor of biology being a gyroscope, the more it spins the more it can dodge.

It's conjectured that fasting kills (pre)cancerous cells by basically starving them when they fail to downregulate their metabolism under a calorie deficit. Perhaps exercise could have a similar effect in diverting energy from higher-cancer-rate cells (skin, digestive tract linings, endometrium, etc.) to lower-cancer-rate cells (muscle cells)?

Doesn't that just mean that people who have cancer (and maybe don't know it) don't really feel like exercising?

I'd guess it doesn't really prevent cancer so much as boost your immune system so it can eliminate early tumors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com