I'm not sure if we have it backwards, but the article definitely oversimplifies it. It also makes some embarrassing points for ephasis, plants using antioxidants as defenses, green tea might be, but I doubt many fruits are NOT meant to be eaten by animals.
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.
We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and other antioxidants in pill form. The news there is not so good, it seems vitamin pills may be worse then useless.
With cancer it's more complicated. Some vitamins like C and D have proven anti-cancer properties but in doses that would kill you. In low doses C might actually be helping some cancers, as they can use it as well as healthy cells.
If you believe in evolution you'd have to put it the other way around: Plants who happened to evolve fruits that got spread around by animals had a higher chance of survival as a species.
True, but a more accurate description of what you meant is "if you believe in evolution by natural selection, you'd have to put it the other way around."
I don't see why one should necessarily assume that the diets might prevent cancer before it happens will cure cancer once it happens, yet it seems like the article is making something like an argument for this...
The actual data presented in the article suggests that anti-oxidants may aid the spread of cancer (metastasis) by reducing oxidative stress on dispersing cells.
Sure, but there's a difference between aiding in the spread of the cancer you are unlucky enough to have and contributing to causing someone to get cancer, which a complex and not fully understood process...
i'm more impressed with how much conflicting misinformations floating around while seemingly scientific
claims like x improves y are abundant. sadly we don't often see the %quantitative improvements and fall into "every little bit helps"
then we get another claim like "a prevents b", then blindly follows. while a and x are good in its own rights, the 'interaction' effect is so complicated that taking them will become net negative
While the logic here may be sound, you would expect the statistics to bear it out and since antioxidants are a well-studied area even weak correlation between antioxidants and cancer should be present in these studies and to my knowledge, it's not.
It's entirely possible that antioxidants make it less likely for you to get cancer but more likely to make cancer worse once you have it. Depending on how the two effects interact, the correlation could go either way.
> Plants have no claws or teeth, nor can they run from predators, so they have chemical defenses instead.
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds, and making it dangerous to eat them is an evolutionary mistake. fruits taste good because they want you to eat them, process their seeds, and 'deposit' them elsewhere in the world.
>After 7.3 years of follow-up care, the two groups had almost identical invasive cancer incidence, 16.7% in the intervention group, and 16.9% in the control group. Increasing intake of produce appeared to have no effect on cancer recurrence despite changes in blood levels of antioxidants.
and this couldn't have anything to do with anything else? environment? lifestyle? genetics? affluence? etc.? there's more than one way to get cancer, diet alone will not save you.
some do, sure. but plenty of plants rely on animals to disperse their seeds...
Yes, and that's noted in the article, a few paragraphs later:
Some hunter-gatherer tribes do eat substantial amounts of fruits and vegetables (wild types, which have even higher concentrations of poisons), yet remain free of cancer and heart disease. Significantly, hunter-gatherers tend to consume more fruits than vegetables. Fruits have lower toxin levels and enable a plant to work symbiotically with animals/predators to increase reproductive success.
indeed he does. but, at the end of a large "eating a lot of plants is bad for you" essay, to tack on the short note "oh wait, fruits? maybe those aren't bad for you" type of statement undercuts the credibility of the entire argument for me.
The vast majority of plants that most people eat have been so altered by selective breeding that they are quite unlike wild plants. When Richard Dawkins spoke in my town in March 2009, he made a special point of ridiculing a video purporting to show that the banana was intelligently designed by a divine creator, and finished his comments on that issue by showing a picture of a wild banana, which looks very different from the cultivated bananas that are universal in world commerce. The same is true of potatoes, rice, maize (especially), and most common foodstuffs.
goes back as far as the origin of genus Homo, and modern human beings would look--and eat food--a lot differently if they hadn't already undergone a lot of evolutionary selection for eating cooked food.
Exactly what I was thinking as I read the parent. Around here we have wild raspberries and grapes. They look so different I had to taste them to be sure and even then they taste different. The grapes are extremely acidic and taste awful (but make great wine :-)
Remember that by definition we only eat the edible fruits!!! Most plants bear some kind of fruit and most of them are inedible to humans.
i would consider fruits to be a nontrivial group. not saying they're a major part of everyone's diet necessarily, but they're not quite something to be brushed aside as not significant.
Ah, that is a good point. I hadn't thought of that. It should be possible to test for that with present data though, so you would think that somebody would have uncovered it before now since antioxidants are apparently given to cancer patients as a form of treatment. If it increased mortality rates in cancer patients looking at the data should be able to uncover that.
What I got from that blog post was 'there are lots of bad things in fruits and vegetables along with the good things'. Isn't that the truth for anything? Unless we start making foods that are homogeneous mixtures, every natural food that we eat will have good and bad things in it.
I somehow don't think that the solution is to have a diet that's heavy in meats and carbohydrates. I think that it would be interesting to take a look at cancer rates in Ireland (pre-potato famine). Most of the farmers/serfs there had a diet of mostly potatoes as I understand it. Did they have higher or lower cancer rates?
The sheer number of environmental, dietary, and lifestyle factors that would have to be adjusted for in a comparison of present-day cancer rates and those that took place ~160 years ago in Ireland would likely make any conclusions that you could draw conjectural, at best.
The problem with cancer rates from 200 years ago is that life-expectancy was so different and that they might not have have been able to identify the cause of death back then.
Trying to game the system as far as nutrition goes is a losing battle if history has shown us anything. Every time someone half-way understands some new aspect of nutrition we flood or deprive our bodies of something we've eaten successfullly for generations upon generations.
I like Michael Pollan's simple advice: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
One other thing, from a behavioral perspective, if you come out with a new health food, people don't stop eating bad food and start eating more health food, they just add the health food on top of the crap.
My experience has been that most things are a two-edged sword. Saying some things are "bad" and other things "good" is usually a huge oversimplification that is tantamount to lying.
I have my own pet theory on cancer. But that's probably not relevant to the discussion.
no discussion about cancer is complete without mentioning "the china study" by Collin Campbell
conclusion? eat whole food, plant-based diet
and we don't need labels like vegetarian/vegan. why? because eating fried fries, potatoe chips, smoking, drinking, sodas, candies ... while correctly not including animals ... are not healthy
That's sort of like saying no discussion of physics is complete without mentioning the latest article about how physics suppresses perpetual-motion researchers.
Ah, brilliant! I knew it from the age of 3 that eating chocolate exclusively is the way to go. Somehow my parents led me astray though. It's depressing :)
The health benefits of a diet high in fruits and vegetables are supported by very strong science.
We've also had some very good recent research into vitamins and other antioxidants in pill form. The news there is not so good, it seems vitamin pills may be worse then useless.
With cancer it's more complicated. Some vitamins like C and D have proven anti-cancer properties but in doses that would kill you. In low doses C might actually be helping some cancers, as they can use it as well as healthy cells.
In summary:
Backward? No.
Oversimplified? Yes, it is complicated.