There is a lot of information out there about links between diet and cancer; I don’t know what to make of it but it’s not pseudoscience, just highly ‘organic’ and non-linear
This seems confused. There’s a large amount of work showing that diet can help prevent cancer. Claiming that diet does much of anything after one has cancer is not at all justified by any decent scientific work.
OK, I understand your point. I’m not familiar with the literature on this topic.
However—within this context of limited knowledge—it seems to me that if diet can help prevent cancer it might also help in slowing it’s progression, especially when you consider that there are a number of stages of cancer. Maybe with some cancers it would be an adequate solution if the cancer doesn’t progress. That is, if diet is related to certain cell conditions that make certain stages of cancer less likely, it seems these same conditions would also make (a) the transition from a lower-stage cancer to these certain stages less likely and (b) might also make the transition from these stages to more aggressive stages less likely. This just to clarify that I am (potentially) wrong rather than confused.
The stages of cancer do not classify cancers according to how aggressive they are (though, naturally, more aggressive cancers are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages). They just tell you how far the cancer has already spread. Any cancer, rightly so called, has already accumulated enough mutations to be capable of metastasizing, including mutations that greatly accelerate the rate of mutation. Once you have cancer, there’s generally not much point in trying to slow down the process of developing cancer.
The link between diet and cancer risk is only supported for certain cancers, and is generally not as strong as I think people imagine—even for colon cancer, the effect of diet is nowhere near as strong as the effect of smoking on lung cancer risk, for example.
Even so, I upvoted your first comment, for being the only one here to point out that Jobs had a pretty indolent cancer, and that nine months’ delay may or may not have made a difference to his outcome. There was a decent treatment of the question at Science-Based Medicine this week.
This seems confused. There’s a large amount of work showing that diet can help prevent cancer. Claiming that diet does much of anything after one has cancer is not at all justified by any decent scientific work.
OK, I understand your point. I’m not familiar with the literature on this topic.
However—within this context of limited knowledge—it seems to me that if diet can help prevent cancer it might also help in slowing it’s progression, especially when you consider that there are a number of stages of cancer. Maybe with some cancers it would be an adequate solution if the cancer doesn’t progress. That is, if diet is related to certain cell conditions that make certain stages of cancer less likely, it seems these same conditions would also make (a) the transition from a lower-stage cancer to these certain stages less likely and (b) might also make the transition from these stages to more aggressive stages less likely. This just to clarify that I am (potentially) wrong rather than confused.
The stages of cancer do not classify cancers according to how aggressive they are (though, naturally, more aggressive cancers are more likely to be diagnosed at later stages). They just tell you how far the cancer has already spread. Any cancer, rightly so called, has already accumulated enough mutations to be capable of metastasizing, including mutations that greatly accelerate the rate of mutation. Once you have cancer, there’s generally not much point in trying to slow down the process of developing cancer.
The link between diet and cancer risk is only supported for certain cancers, and is generally not as strong as I think people imagine—even for colon cancer, the effect of diet is nowhere near as strong as the effect of smoking on lung cancer risk, for example.
Even so, I upvoted your first comment, for being the only one here to point out that Jobs had a pretty indolent cancer, and that nine months’ delay may or may not have made a difference to his outcome. There was a decent treatment of the question at Science-Based Medicine this week.