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Scientists keep changing their minds….
“Scientists keep changing their minds, it’s better to ignore their advice.” That is the gist of a new survey published this week. The survey was commissioned by the World Cancer Research Fund, a charity that promotes a healthy diet and lifestyle as a way to avoid some types of cancer.
If you can’t see the video above, then you can read the text here. Or go to the WCRF website and read the report “straight from the horses mouth” in a press release from the 25th of May 2015.
So more than a quarter (27%) of Britons think it’s better to ignore health advice because its always changing. Is that a fair comment? Do I think the advice is always changing? No, not really the current advice to eat lots of fruit and veg and exercise hasn’t changed in the past 10 years. We now know that processed meat isn’t great, so the advice to limit how much burgers/sausages/pies etc you eat seems reasonable.
Type 1 Eat more pomegranates/oranges/kiwis/any other exotic fruit. It is a “super food”. It will stop (or cure) cancer.
I mostly ignore these stories. If any one fruit or veg was going to prevent all cancer in all people we’d all be eating it by now. Nature is much more complicated than that. So I’m very skeptical of reports that imply just one type of food is going to “save” me.
Again, I mostly ignore these stories too. Large scale epidemiological studies are difficult and expensive to do. Looking at an effect in 20-100 people does not give you a definite answer.
However, we shouldn’t be blind to history such as the women in 1920′s America, who developed cancer because of their job painting fluorescent watch dials with radium which exposed them to massive quantities of radiation.
Type 3 Scientists discover a new cancer gene/drug/treatment that will save us all.
These long time scales are not crazy, scientists aren’t deliberately slow or trying to make money out of sick people, designing drugs is difficult, most of the time the drugs don’t work and if you get it wrong you kill people. We need to make sure the drugs and treatments we develop help and sadly, this means “breakthroughs” don’t bring instantaneous help to those people who have cancer now. It’s a bit like car designers, they all have prototype cars that run on hydrogen but it’s going to be a long time before we all have an “eco-car” parked on our drive.
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