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Posted by Walker on October 29, 1998 at 19:08:51:
In Reply to: take your vitamins and eat healthy posted by rpcman on October 29, 1998 at 12:14:44:
:RESTON, Va. (Reuters) - The all-American junk food diet could be…
: It could be…
: and they may pay…
Poor diet could damage…
There’s really nothing here to bite on.
Same goes for my favorite diet/cancer link:
http://oncolink.upenn.edu/causeprevent/diet/index.html
The first article, Decreased Breast Cancer Risk Related to Olive Oil Consumption, is [typically] reliant on some statistical study. And we all know how statistics are abused. (correlation=causation being the most prominent error)
Then you hear the stuff about antioxidants(from the same site)…" Besides reducing the incidence of heart
disease and stroke, antioxidants may help [did you notice that MAY qualifier again?] reduce the incidence of cancer. They act as protective substances by destroying free radicals, which are the harmful by-products formed through the body's metabolism. Free radicals damage cells and initiate carcinogenesis which is the development of cancerous cells."
Destroy free radicals how? Free radicals damage cells how? Initiate carcinogenesis how? Is s/he saying that in the absence of antioxidants, and organism will turn cancerous?
Maybe you can tell I’m skeptical about what is printed concerning diet as cancer prevention.
I believe what our doctors know about health and nutrition falls woefully short of what they pretend to know. (Lots of people are still dying of cancer aren’t they?)
Now with that said, my gut feel is that getting regular exercise and eating natural foods, especially veggies is the best way to stay healthy. I only believe that because it’s what our ancestors did for the last several thousand years so our bodies must be tuned to that right? They didn’t take vitamin pills, they ate worms and crickets, grass and berries. Was it the vitamins in these foods that they tuned their bodies to, or was is something else, or lack of something (like the plastic on your vitamin pills?)
I’m all for the medical community promoting vitamins and natural foods but please spare us the useless statistical mumbo jumbo. I want to something real like "we gave 10000 rats treatment A" After 2 years and under stressful (cancer causing) conditions, none of them got (type X) cancer, where as (type X) cancer was observed on the control rats. I think they’ve done this with lung cancer (treatment A being a lack of nicotine) and maybe skin cancer (avoid the sun) but the vitamins generally prevents cancers seems sketchy at best. BTW, a Scandinavian study showed beta-carotene did not prevent lung cancer. (The study was actually scrapped when it appeared that this antioxidant was increasing incidence of lung cancer).
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