Looks like it does subject/verb plurality agreement based on the presence of an 's' at the end of the subject. Thus: "Asbestos prevent cancer". Heh. Software.
“Asbestos” is a plural, though (in Greek and in Latin—where the word originates—by declension.) The fact that English bungled the receive doesn’t mean that the algorithm is wrong. I would expect a sufficiently-intelligent pluralizing algorithm (something like GPT trained on individual grapheme sequences) would pluralize asbestos too (in absence of direct evidence of its pluralization; and maybe even then.)
Wow, that was quite a read. What does seem to stand out is the danger of negative results not being published. 99 studies look at an ingredient, find nothing, don't publish. Through pure chance, the hundredth study finds a correlation, and everyone is immediately convinced that yet another ingredient is unhealthy.
Doesn't matter; before anyone even thinks of replicating it, it's already all over the fitness & lifestyle magazines and news columns regular people read.
This is the big way for p-value science to fail, even if every actor is honest. It's obvious once you understand what a p-value is (it literally takes 5 seconds to understand) but nearly nobody does. Even people I've worked with at a FAANG, which you'd expect have an above average understanding of mathematics.
Cancer Research UK (a medical charity) has a good summary of some common food controversies - foods that are claimed to either cause or curtail cancer.
The entry on 'super foods' states:
> "...the term ‘superfood’ is really just a marketing tool, with little scientific basis. It’s certainly true that a healthy, balanced and varied diet can help to reduce the risk of cancer but it is unlikely that any single food will make a major difference on its own."
You can basically dump all mouse studies, since the standard kibble was something high sugary/starchy. Add fat -> cancer; add more sugar -> cancer...; add more protein -> cancer
Epidemiological stuff is flawed as well. Unless the people are kept in a closed ward and every meal is kept under close observation, it's probably not "clean" data.
There is hope though... annecdotal evidence seems to point towards unprocessed food as a good tool to fight cancer. Even better when it's low carb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tteYZfMat4 some interesting talk about the efficiency of treatment in some cancers. Might help to make a better informed decision if it ever hits you.
I'm surprised to see your comment in good health. Everytime I link to Georgia Ede or meatheals I get downvoted to oblivion lol, just as this comment too will (as if there is a vegan bot on HN targeting my comments?).
I think we as humans are just associated with cancer. Regardless of what we eat.
My soul mate exercised, ate well and natural but still got breast cancer. Because it was in her family. Cancer hits so many people that it seems like it's just a natural way of population control to me.
Or perhaps a side effect from being multi-celled creatures in a universe with background radiation.
Sorry to hear about your partner :-(
The first part of the last paragraph makes sense. Multi-cellular -> more cells dividing -> more chances of mutations -> more chances of cancer.
The second half of your last para implies that cosmic radiation / something similar causes cancer. I’m genuinely curious : is there some link between cosmic microwave radiation and cancer ? Any sources ?
There's no known link between cosmic microwave background and cancer. Would do for one hell of a difficult thing to study, too.
There's perfectly ample evidence for cosmic rays (ie. high energy radiation from astronomical sources) increasing risk of cancer as does any ionizing radiation. Maybe GP conflated the two?
This is the inevitable result of clueless reporting on bad epidemiological studies.
Look at any study behind one of these headlines and there will be a raft of confounding factors that were never controlled for. The data is close to meaningless at a certain point.
I remember reading a few studies where malnourished individuals and with certain nutritional deficiencies had lower cancer incidence. There could be some truth to it. Time to dig into PubMed.
“Statistically significant results were more likely than nonsignificant findings to be published in the study abstract than in only the full text (P < 0.0001).“
I think infections are the primary cause of death for the oldest people. If lifespans were several times longer, most of us would be dying from an immune deficiency caused by cytomegalovirus. We just don't live long enough.
At this point I almost expect an article titled "All oxygen-breathing organisms are a fatally flawed design and are doomed to never live healthy no matter what".
I was under the impression that everyone has cancer all the time at about the same rate the body can fight it before it becomes an actual, detectable problem.
On the upside, oxygenation led to the explosive diversity of complex, high-energy organisms that led to us[0]!
Without living on the edge, you don't get complex, powerful organisms (like mighty trilobites).
Plus, there's no telling how much reprogramming for stronger oxidization-repair mechanisms can provide. Mammalian mitochondria are inferior to bird mitochondria (and birds have them in their blood cells unlike us which may help[1]), allowing birds to live longer even with higher metabolisms than mammals. Evolution hasn't exhausted the possible. There's hope!
Just not for us. :) Which is fine; everything's fine.
Interesting; could that be caused by most cities being near sea level and most people living near cities, and thus pollution rather than oxygen might be the root cause?
I don't have a link to the study, but the researchers of the study I read were very meticulous and did discard all other obvious explanations before concluding that altitude was the best explanation.
There are scientists who argue that what the mitochondria does is fundamentally cancerigenic on a long enough timeline, so in a sense, yes, everything we eat is associated with cancer.
Metabolism is a process with chemical and energetic exhaust that can damage machinery critical to cellular processes. And at some point it becomes evolutionarily favorable to just accept that damage and expend effort starting over again (offspring) as opposed to attempting complete repair of all the damaged systems.
In that way, all metabolic processes will logically lead to cancer (damage to dna). The world is on fire.
https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/