Well, this study passes the "we dumped a bunch of X on cancer cells in a petri dish and they did a funny thing" red flag test.
Xenographs (implanting human cancer cells into mice) have their own caveats (the immune system is almost always severely compromised), but this seems like a cool study. I'm no expert on oral cancers however.
Curious to see the implication of the neuronal cells here, I'm looking forward to reading the whole manuscript.
Cancer cells can consume multiple energy sources, not exactly news here. Concluding that dietary palmitic acid is a problem is questionable. Palmitate is produced endogenously and dietary palmitic acid does not even influence tissue concentration [1].
> Palmitate is produced endogenously and dietary palmitic acid does not even influence tissue concentration [1].
If there's no uptake by tissue, then wouldn't the tumor have a plentiful energy source once it vascularizes? (Assuming they can metabolize palmitic acid)
For everyone spooked by this. Cancer thrives on many things. And there’s little survival advantage for people who can effectively fight cancer after their reproductive age. All novel carcinogens aside(radiation, air pollution, baby powder), humans often are just not equipped to fight cancer. Certain diets probably can make it a bit better or worse, but they might not be the game changer. Our best bet is technology, like CAR T cells and whatever is invented next.
> "humans often are just not equipped to fight cancer."
blanket statements like this are almost never correct. our bodies are certainly equipped to fight cancer, having evolved a number of mechanisms in that regard, it's just that cancer is relentless and the cumulative probabilities tend to catch up with a number of us eventually, which necessarily skews mortalities older.
with that said, we're certainly unlikely to naturally evolve ourselves out of cancer risk in the next few millenia, so yes, technology is one of our best bets (along with developing tech to reduce novel carcinogen risks).
> humans often are just not equipped to fight cancer
But we are? The immune system is constantly at work killing malignant (or otherwise dysfunctional) cells. Cells themselves have mechanisms to commit suicide (apoptosis) if they are not working properly.
It's only when the several mechanisms we have get defeated at the same time (often due to mutations) that cancer can even develop.
If you mean, we are not as equipped as elephants or whales to fight cancer, then that's true.
> there’s little survival advantage for people who can effectively fight cancer after their reproductive age
There's some advantage, but as far as nature's concerned, there's indeed diminishing returns. As in, for the individual that has already reproduced there's no reason to stay alive, but this is beneficial for the offspring - until they are adults. So there's some selective pressures there, specially if you are competing against another group.
My understanding is there are cancer cells in all adults. They are constantly killed off and never develop into tumors or anything of significance until … they do in some people.
So to say we are not equipped to fight them is incorrect.
I’m not disputing that, just stating that there’s no evolutionary pressure on keeping adults cancer-free. There is a big pressure at eliminating child cancers from the population.
> If you mean, we are not as equipped as elephants or whales to fight cancer, then that's true.
There's some debate as to whether they have better cancer fighting mechanisms, or whether their size means they are less fast affected by cancers, and/or whether they are large enough that their cancers split into competing cancers before they are affected.
We have selective pressure to survive cancer for the first 40 years of our life (and not just barely survive but be unhindered by it). After that there are more subtle selective forces at work: having grandparents that are in good health and helping find food or care for children can certainly improve your survival chances. And of course the machinery we have developed to survive the first 40 years doesn't suddenly stop working after that.
But you're right insofar as there's fairly little selective pressure to prevent cancer over the entire lifespan of a human. We probably could have much better protection from cancer, but the energy investment for that isn't worth it from an evolutionary perspective.
> having grandparents that are in good health and helping find food or care for children
Maybe, certainly since the advent of nuclear families. But our much longer genetic lineage selects around tribes, such that direct grandparents' longevity may not be as critically important. Third-and-fourth cousins likely easily filled this role.
If your great-great-grandfather has a random genetic mutation, he can pass that down to both you and your third cousin. If that mutation helps your third cousin help you bring children to the world, you have a selective advantage. Of course that chain grows exponentially less likely the further you are from each other on the family tree, as the gene has to spread far enough by pure chance.
Its different when your grandparents are in their late 30's, early 40's. Modern reproductive ages are much, much later than they have been both historically and prehistorically.
Grandparents 600-4k years ago would have been in their late thirties, mid forties for all but a very few. Still unlikely to generate significant selection pressure considering that the vast majority of cancers are late in life.
Go to Trader Joe's and look at the ingredients, everything has Palm Oil as an ingredient.
This is important, and having a diet that suits your oxidative stress profile is important. And I do not care what anyone tells me, these oils are not something the body can handle well and are probably healthy only at low levels.
I don't know anything about palamitic acid but I know that carbs are the stronger driver of heart disease in our diet. Apparently everything causes cancer and heart disease and it's the 19th century people that magically avoided heart disease.
Both carbs and fats will cause mitochondria disfunction at high doses and lead to disease. There are just some of them that do it faster than others as well.
In the 19th century common folk did not have access to the large amount of calories as we do today. Plus there was much lower air pollution, pesticides, etc. To compare someone's health outcomes in the 19th century to someone living today is impossible. So all we can focus on is the now. And today we have an awful lot more people with metabolic disorders walking around.
> In some species, postreproductive females make substantial contributions to their descendants, either through direct parental care or through grandparental care. Such contributions continue after birth in all mammals (most notably primates), all birds, many insects, and some fish (15). Postreproductive bottle-nose dolphins and pilot whales baby-sit, guard, and even breastfeed their grand-children (15). Selection against the mortality of postreproductive individuals in such species would be expected to continue.
The article says palmitic acid, formally hexadecanoic acid, which is one of the most common — if not the most common — saturated fatty acids. It's named for palm oil, where it is predominant, but it is also found in coconut oil, lard, butter, cacao, and in smaller amounts in practically all liquid oils, with higher concentrations generally in solid fats.
Better to say "Palmitic acid favors tumor expansion" or even just "Common saturated fat favors tumor expansion".
> Nutella maker, Ferrero, launched an advertising campaign in response to reassure customers that their product is safe. The company insists on keeping their recipe the same, claiming that “making Nutella without palm oil would produce an inferior substitute for the real product, it would be a step backward,” according to Fererro’s purchasing manager, Vincenzo Tapella. The smooth texture Tapella is referring to could be achieved by more expensive oils like sunflower or rapeseed but would increase the cost of production by as much as $22 million.
This was basically the same BS that Johnson & Johnson used to defend BPA baby bottles before the ban.
Yeah, without the palm oil filler, it tastes much more of chocolate and hazelnut. Even better if you get rid of a bunch of the sugar, as well - Nutella is pretty much the same as cake frosting when you break it down.
Well, if you ditch the palm oil and sugar leaving nuts and raw chocolate, I dare say it even gets healthy. Maybe they could do that - they could then return to their marketing campaign presenting Nutella as healthy (in small servings!) and avoid hefty fines for lying to their customers.
Interesting article. One thing to note is that this study seemed to (correct me if I'm wrong) focus on palmitic acid, which can be found primarily in palm oil, but can also be found in meat, cheese, and butter, to name a few other sources.
There's some amount of palmitic acid in pretty much every dietary fat. Animal sources tend to be higher than seed oils, but e.g. olive oil, that many people like to tout as the healthiest, is something like 10-20% palmitic acid.
It's also the most abundant fatty acid in you, even if you don't eat any.
There's also a skeleton inside you right now! Spooky.
To clarify - you're not saying that meat, cheese, and butter include palm oil, but rather just one particular naturally-occurring chemical component of palm oil which occurs naturally in many sources. Palmitic acid is just a long-chain fat molecule.
The reason why palm oil is so widespread nowadays is because about 30 years ago it was widely promoted as THE best oil to grow - it has much higher yield than many other oils, and was seen as a "green" alternative since comparatively it takes less land than say, peanut oil.
The problem is that yes, it takes less land, but the land that it can be suitably grown on is very important for other things.
Why is it horrifying? That a naturally occurring long-chain fatty acid is found in multiple natural sources? The parent comment is NOT indicating that palm oil is in these things.
With every cell division, we are not only closer to death, but roll for a "cell transformation"[0].
A transformed cell is most likely to occur in a "cancerised field" of cells. Those fields might be induced to be transformed in-turn by the original transformed cell(s).
It's in this way that the snowball turns from a pea to a boulder, but all along the way there are trees ready to stop its momentum. Be it DNA repair systems, the immune system, the extra-cellular matrix, etc...
An oncologist once told me (and its not hard for me to conceive), that we're all likely die with a number of tumours in us... just not likely from them.
All this to say, yes everything causes cancer. When you consider the molecular biology behind it all, it's a wonder we're anything but giant, spherical, innervated tumours.
Just like everything else, you make your own risk assessments in life, but the advice boils down to: avoid undue risks of cancer if you can. What "undue" and "if you can" here mean is deeply personal.
[0] A fun euphemism for a cell that is cancer-like.
To be honest, we're in a constant state of almost having cancer, it's just that our immune system handles the little stuff before it gets out of control. Nothing causes cancer, but certain things tip the scales towards the cancer getting out of control.
Oh, well: I didn't think conceptualize, "we are always in a state of having cancer" was an optimistic view, just realistic :). But DNA gets damaged all by itself, but you're right: something like smoking for decades doesn't help matters.
Not trying to be pedantic but carcinogenic is something that _causes_ cancer, that is not the mechanism this study is describing with palmitic acid.
The study claims that palm oil promotes the growth of metastasis of an original cancer tumour. So it is not that palm oil _causes_ cancer but that it will _potentially_ promote more agressive copying of tumurous cells into other regions of the body.
A plantain vest. The rows of plantains attach to all of the body's normal banana receptors before the lethally radioactive bananas can, leaving you unscathed.
You do realise palm oil is older than 100 years, right? Used literally for thousands of years.
"Humans used oil palms as far back as 5,000 years. In the late 1800s, archaeologists discovered a substance that they concluded was originally palm oil in a tomb at Abydos dating back to 3,000 BCE.[4] It is believed that traders brought oil palm to Egypt"
> If I couldn't grow it or raise it 100 years ago, I don't want to eat it
Humans have been barbecuing meat for millennia. Possibly even before Homo Sapiens Sapiens was around. And yet, it has carcinogenic properties, specially if charred.
What's so special about 100 years ago anyway? 1000 might make a difference - but then again, life expectancy wasn't that great back then.
It's only because we are living so much that cancer is such a large problem. Also because, due to modern medicine, we can often diagnose the person before they just get sick and die from 'unknown' reasons.
Your best bet is to eat food from as many different sources as you can and not eat too much of any single specific thing (which is a modern thing btw, 100 years ago, it wouldn't be as easy to do) and let averages do the rest.
I realized at some point that "It's food iff your grandparents would call it food" either has to be amended to add a generation, or we have to accept Oreos pretty soon.
Margarine was invented in 1869. You need to go back a lot farther.
You are also skipping out a lot of newer stuff that wasn't possible back then, but after serious study seems safe. Most of what was done 200 years ago is accepted as safe, but there is no actual evidence for it, and in many cases we know it wasn't. (the obvious example of using lead in finishes for food contact items)
I suppose there's some merit in the "before we had cancer" thing. Certainly many people were dying of other stuff long before they would have gotten cancer.
Of note is the monstrosities we call chickens today are a product of breeding contests in the 1940s [0] (but does that mean there is anything wrong with eating them? who's to say).
It seems a lot more people today are taking a critical look at what they eat, though often excluding broad categories based on feeling rather than hard science. At first this looks reactionary, but on closer inspection one realizes that the science involved is typically biased or just lacking. We've invested comparatively little into understanding the downsides of modern food products like vegetable oil, but the little windows we have indicate they may be causing whole hosts of human maladies from dementia to type 2 diabetes [1]. Nutrition constitutes the inputs to the complex biological system, and large changes (eg disease) can end up being the result of nonlinear processes started by changing these inputs. Another example is a lack of magnesium in the western diet, through both soil depletion and food processing, leading to large scale deficiencies [2].
What's really dizzying, though, is that this information isn't widely known, and is typically found through either self-directed study or through listening to podcasts. When the average person makes decisions regarding their nutrition, they're relying on outdated and probably harmful advice, despite intending to make "healthy" choices. Maybe we need an app to scan a barcode or read a list of ingredients and respond with the known potential for harm and confidence. All I know is I'll never look at fried chicken the same way again (unless it's fried in lard, of course).
Not the worst place to start, but considering palm oil has been used in cooking for thousands of years it's not clear what that principle has to do with this story.
Ultra-processed foods are probably a consequence of trying to feed billions of people. Do you think there’s enough farm land, water, etc. for the earth population to only grow bio/eco produce?
Do you mean if you personally wouldn't have been to grow it or raise it 100 years ago? Or do you mean something more like "if it wasn't widely accessible 100 years ago"?
If palm oil wasn't as profitable they will just grow the next most profitable thing in the orangutan habitat. The problem is one of not setting aside land for preserves vs one particular industry or another. Anything will expand to fill the space if land is offered for sale and zoned for industry.
Your reply implies that your commenting style is good because a lot of people voted up your comments. That is an instance of the bandwagon fallacy [0].
I suggest you read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes before spending more time mocking keto. Ketogenic diets have lots of backing in science and have changed many lives and posts like these can be very hurtful.
The sponsors are listed at the end of the article. In the future, please read the article before commenting. Please refrain from posting low-effort comments.
My apologies, I was looking for a heading at the end of rhe article, but the sponsors were listed as a part of the article body.
For those wondering:
> The study has been funded by Worldwide Cancer Research, the Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer, the Marató de TV3, the BBVA Foundation, the European Research Council, the Government of Catalonia, the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain, the Lilliane Bettencourt Foundation, “la Caixa” Foundation, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Also, those "good old days", might describe "natural selection". You can't be certain that some of the survival benefits of your ancestors are NOT an adherence to traditions that give them a survival or reproductive advantage.
You can't possibly be comparing the wisdom of our ancestors with the agricultural-industrial complex? They do everything in their power to produce the lowest-cost version of "food" (some could argue it is not food) that people will pay for.
How would the opposite not be true? "an appeal to the modern". Just because something like palm oil is new, must it be better?
Consider that for years the "new" advice was to recommend aspirin to prevent heart attacks. [https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000678]
If you ignored this advice some smarmy pill pusher would say you're appealing to nature. What about non-addictive painkillers like oxycotton.
From wikipedia: "A genetically engineered rapeseed that is tolerant to the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate)".
"Exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides and risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma: A meta-analysis and supporting evidence" [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13835...].
So from the beginning the product is tainted.
Then the oil is bleached for a more palatable color. It refined like other industrials oils and often interchangeable for machining uses.
>How would the opposite not be true? "an appeal to the modern". Just because something like palm oil is new, must it be better?
What gave you the indication I was appealing to modernity? Being against naturalistic fallacy or the "good old days" doesn't mean I'm arguing "well it's new so it must be better!". I'm simply saying that we shouldn't give either side preference just because it's new or old.
>Consider that for years the "new" advice was to recommend aspirin to prevent heart attacks. [https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000678] If you ignored this advice some smarmy pill pusher would say you're appealing to nature. What about non-addictive painkillers like oxycotton.
This seems like a massive strawman/misrepresentation. People weren't taking/recommending asprin because it was new, they were taking it because it's what the clinical evidence was suggesting. Some reasonable objections might be that the studies were poorly done, or wasn't replicable, but "it's not natural" isn't one of them. Just because "it wasn't natural" produced the right result, doesn't really mean we should endorse it, or continue using it. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justification_(epistemology)
Early studies showed that aspirin was beneficial for preventing heart attacks. You seemed to suggest that was bad. However, trusting one study saying that glyphosate causes cancer is okay? The wikipedia article for glyposate describes the overall evidence for glyposate causing cancer as "inconclusive". The IARC also said there was "limited evidence" for the type of cancer you described. If you want to make the case that appeal to nature is good, you really should have used something less contentious.
>Then the oil is bleached for a more palatable color.
Well is that bad? If they're literally dumping household bleach into the oil, I might be a little worried. Then again, they also put bleach (chlorine) into tap water, so should we be worried about that too?
> It refined like other industrials oils and often interchangeable for machining uses.
We also put nuclear plant coolant (dihydrogen monoxide) into our foods. Should we be worried about that as well?
>Seed oil advocates themselves appeal to "the good ol days", as many peoples have allegedly used rape seed oil over history.
Right, and that's bad regardless of which side it's on.
What effect are you talking about? And what does the production process for vegetable oils have to do with anything? This article is about palmitic acid which apart from obviously palm oil, is most abundant in animal fats like butter (~30%), tallow (26%) etc. since its a saturated fatty acid.
Most vegetable oils like canola and soybean have much less palmitic acid.
Palm oil is a vegetable oil. The production of vegetable oil (read: palm oil) creates an end product that looks and feels like oil, but has all kinds of other bad shit in it. It gets refined, heated, bleached, heated, deoderized, etc...
The same thing happens to flour. We process the living shit out of it, then bleach it, then we have to add-in all the stuff we removed so that it still has some semblance of nutrition.
It's like the deep fried pickle. A pickle in and of itself is a pickle, but when you deep fry it, is it still a pickle? Some will argue yes. Does it still have the same general health characteristics, or more importantly, the lack of negative characteristics as the deep-fried one? No.
Palm oil isn't really in the same category as the vegetable oils that have had concern raised about them recently. It's not from a seed, so doesn't need a highly involved process to get meaningful amounts of it. Cold pressed palm oil has been in use for thousands of years. It's more like olive oil in this regard. (Of course, you can still refine it, and it often is refined. But it's not as easily oxidized as oils with a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fatty acids, so less concerning in that regard.)
> Heard it too causes cancer if you fry it though...
Frying at low temperatures with olive oil is one of the "healthier" ways to fry, though. Less volatile aromatic hydrocarbons are produced when frying with olive oil compared to other fats, and some of the compounds in non-extra virgin olive oil reduce the production of free radicals.
thanks to bring attention about canola oil, worse than palm oil. It is a genetically modified oil, invented in modern time to remove toxicity of the original property.
Xenographs (implanting human cancer cells into mice) have their own caveats (the immune system is almost always severely compromised), but this seems like a cool study. I'm no expert on oral cancers however.
Curious to see the implication of the neuronal cells here, I'm looking forward to reading the whole manuscript.