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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions microplastics as a potential cause that's being looked into, and that seems pretty reasonable, but are there any other suspicious potential causes?

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One angle I read elsewhere is that a variety of 'forever chemicals' have been accumulating for some decades now and we may have reached a saturation level where it's noticeably impacting people born into this environment. But it's difficult to sift through, since the effects may not be any one chemical, but a combination of factors or even some kind of interaction when these things are jostling around together inside a growing human.

In the US, levels of some of them have declined significantly (following restrictions on manufacturing).

https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/us-population....

Note that there's 3 categories in the data there, occupational exposure, exposed communities and then the US general population. There's large declines in all 3 groups.

Brainstorm: Artificial sugars, chemicals in so many products from Amazon, hormones in meat, vegan substitutes, new preservatives, new herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers

Empirical observation: the two young people I know who had cancer (one died, other survived) frequented marijuana and had high levels of radon detected in their homes. But that doesn't necessarily support younger cancer trends.

Adding ultra processed "foods" to the brainstorm. It may contribute to reduced gut-health and affect the immune system.

The name is new but "ultra processed" - which is to say processed - has been with us for 50 years nowadays. Deleterious effects are known: obesity, diabetes and, yes, uptake in cancers.

Still, an unlikely candidate for a recent uptake in cancers amongst the young at least as a general category and not aiming at a specific new class of additives.

Its hard to make assumptions like this though. There is always the possibility that prolonged exposure to processed foods impacts reproduction over time. We could be seeing a delayed spike now because parents were exposed to the food for a decade or two before they had children.

This is all hypothetical, I'm not claiming this is the case. Its just worth considering delayed responses that require a generation or two before the symptoms are easy to spot.

> ultra processed "foods"

I think we reached a point where we shouldn't even call them "food", but "edible industrial products".

Why artificial sugars, which have been extensively studied as a food, when there are so many pollutants that are actual poison that we ingest every day? This meme never dies, just like the one about MSG

Quantity ingested

Artificial sweeteners, pesticides, and decaying non-stick pans typically crop up in these discussions.

Though it's a reasonable guess that it's a whole bunch of factors that have changed, including lifestyle factors.

> decaying non-stick pans

So what safer kind of pan should we use?

Cast iron, presumably.

Ceramic, it is as close as you can get to non stick without forever chemicals. I cook every day and that is the best I've found. Anything else requires more maintenance and cleaning. Cast iron has been a disappointment and I have made an honest effort with it multiple times.

Cast-iron, or enamel-coated cast-iron.

Supposedly ceramic coatings are getting better.

I switched to stainless steel, maybe issues with chromium and nickel though. It's also not non-stick, but if you add oil to a dry pan after it's already heated it up, it will form a sort of non-stick surface. (Scratches in the pan surface will impede this effect)

Stainless or carbon steel. Once you learn how to cook with a stainless pan it’s basically non-stick.

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned artificially created fats/oils

Canola oil, rapeseed oil, sunflower seed oil etc

They are in everything

but if we think about what rancid fats are, they are "fats and oils that have undergone a process of oxidation, or degradation, that causes them to develop off-flavours, odours, tastes, and textures" (Exposure to air, light, and heat)

When you look into how these oils are manufactured these oils are not particularly stable to begin with, and then they're exposed to processes like:

- Mechanical pressing

- Solvent extraction

- Degumming

- Neutralization

- Bleaching

- Deodorization

To get to that clear oil that you see in the shops, this is all before some places deep fry their oils to cook, if an oil has a rancid taste, that is one of the main ways you would tell that it is not good for you, but if something has been deodorised I'm not sure you would be able to say that the oil is rancid

I'd much prefer to stick to fats/oils that existed before the 1900s, you can tell many people are storing fats that have not reacted well within their body

The modern food oil industry is such a confusion one in my opinion.

For example, canola oil is actually just rapeseed oil. They had to cultivate breeds of brasiccas that were low enough in erucic acid for human consumption. Then they realized that selling rapeseed oil may not be a great brand and they named it Canola, Canadian oil low acid.

Also pretty much anything you would think of as a vegetable oil isn't actually a vegetable oil, its a seed oil.

Breastfeeding is also a possible cause, although I think there's evidence that's pointing in both directions.

"They found those who were breastfed as infants had a 23 percent greater risk of developing colorectal cancer as adults. Even more troubling, a younger group within that cohort exhibited about 40 percent increased risk of developing high-risk colorectal cancer before they turned 55."

Breastfeeding rates have increased from ~30% to ~70% between 1970 and 2010.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/10/study-finds-l...

It seems highly dubious to me that breast feeding alone would have anything to do with it. The idea that mammals evolved in such a way that women breast feed their babies only to get colorectal cancer specifically because they breast fed seems very evolutionarily confusing.

Maybe there is something else going on where environmental conditions or toxins combined with breast feeding somehow cause and issue, but I can't imagine its just due to breast feeding.

We're changing so many things at the same time, it could be anything from alcohol sugars used as low-calorie sweeteners, to zoonotic diseases introduced to new areas by globalisation and climate change.

Or worse (because it's harder to find) combinations where any one by itself is fine.

(I can't read TFA, paywall).

It’s against HN guidelines to imply that someone hasn’t read the article.

The only person they implied hasn’t read it is themselves, due to paywall. That’s not against the guidelines.

> The only person they implied hasn’t read it is themselves

That's the joke, yeah

HN guidelines are no joking matter.

I think you misread the text of the guidelines.

I would add PFASs to the suspect list.

Bloomberg did a good mini-doc on pfas 8 months back; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8qGtEVh7oQ

I suspect it might end up being an all or the above kind of situation, perhaps mixed in with transgenerational effects from atmospheric atomic tests and so forth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY, https://web.archive.org/web/20200507112343/https://www.cdc.g..., & https://www.americanscientist.org/article/fallout-from-nucle...)

Higher obesity rates is anther factor.

Metaphysical despair

This one is interesting, can you elaborate?

Not GP, but smart phones and social media lead to people having less real-world contact, fewer deep connections to others, less sex, ... which then leads to depression, anxiety, and "metaphysical despair"

I suppose that's what GP meant.

Literally none of those things cause cancer.

In fact they would all reduce the incidence of cancer, because cancer rates can only rise if detection does. In the US healthcare system, this is even more unlikely if one is withdrawn from society - you can have cancer a long time before you'll think something is "wrong".

Why are you so confident that depression and anxiety don't cause cancer? Even if they didnt cause it directly, there is a whole raft of associated drugs that could absolutely cause cancer. It's not like this is a thing a trial would always catch (for exactly the reason you point out).

Because depression rates and health effects are highly studied, and no one has found a correlation to cancer?[1]

[1] https://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20230811/analysis-depressi...

This is just one step away from "punishment of sins".

Let's not introduce unfalsifiable hypotheses into the ring, at least not at HN. There's plenty of them already on Facebook and X.

No, let me apologize for my glib comment. To be clear— I don’t blame cancer victims. I just had a friend die who was about the most pure of heart and connected individual I know.

What I’m pointing to, this metaphysical despair (as root cause), is the creation of an increasingly cancerous society.

Ready meals

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