Lemongrove - it would depend what statistics you are looking at - which cancers for instance - do you have a source? Most cancer statistics are age adjusted, so you can make valid comparisons between populations with different age profiles. As far as I am know all multi-country cancer tables and graphs do this, so age is not an issue when comparing between countries - but if we have a statistitian among us it would be nice to know more. But I don’t doubt that age is a factor - I am sure there are hundreds of factors of which diet is also undoubtedly one.
I don’t have the info to hand but I recall that in Japan they are presenting with more lobular and TN cancers than before.
I have spent a lot of time in the developing world and as such always question the veracity of statistics from countries like India and China.
They don’t even really know how large their populations are let alone what percentage have cancer!
A statistic I would like to see is the incidence of female cancers in China since the implementation of the one child policy in 1978.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see a correlation with increase in BC cases as those young women from the 70s now become menopausal.
But does anyone honestly expect to have legitimate, accurate, unfiddled statistics from China?
I think that lobular cancer is the type that is associated more frequently with HRT. I therefore wonder if HRT may account for this in part?
Finty the point I made was for consideration, rather than to prove anything - so I saw no reason to provide a source.
I think you’re a very wise woman, and most of what you post is very interesting, but with respect I think this idea that we all have to provide sources, and only quote academic studies is wrong (this is a breast cancer forum, where we support and give snippets of information, not University).
The concern that some people have about this particular thread (including myself at times), is the lack of balance - not the lack of academic rigour. It’s great to read about different approaches to preventing and treating cancer, but it’s important to have all the information, not just information from one perspective.
I thought we’d moved on subject wise but it seems there is still more to discuss re this thread. I hope you won’t mind me adding something.
The main reason we have tried to support things with academic research is because of criticisms we’ve had in the past about using anything other than reputable academic sources.
The other point is that some of us opt to do this to find out if there is any substance to claims made about food substances, sometimes quite dubious ones such as apricot kernals etc. We can only do this by looking at academic studies.
People have unfortunately been shot down in flames and belittled many times on the forums when they have brought up such things on other threads. We’ve always tried to keep this thread open to anything and approachable but with the balance of looking at how these things have been researched, whether they might be dangerous etc. Ultimately each of us has to make a personal decision about what we put in our mouths.
I’m not entirely sure how this thread lacks balance. We’ve discussed so many things: different oils, omega 3, flaxseed, vegetables, fruits, fibre, rice as well as the more contentious subjects.
Elinda x
I’m really sorry Lemongrove I’m not trying to annoy you, but I honestly don’t know how to progress the discussion without knowing what the information is. And as Elinda says, I will get my head bitten off if I proffer an opinion not supported by evidence.
Msmolly I think you make a very good point about figures in developing countries, but I suspect China is the exception, at least from the 1970’s onwards - although that of course is very recent in epidemiological terms. In the 1970’s Chou EnLai was dying of cancer and initiated a nationwide survey to collect information about cancer. The survey covered 12 common cancers, and 650,000 (!) workers were recruited to survey 96% of their citizens. It resulted in the famous cancer maps of China. Although I am only guessing, I would imagine having set up such a huge database, they will have maintained it since then to some degree. The maps are fascinating because they show huge geographical variations in cancer rates amongst a population with a very similar genetic background. Some counties had cancer rates 100 times higher than other counties - by comparison in the US the largest differential is usually 2 or 3 times higher in different areas.
I’m interested in your views about the single child policy - is your point that the mothers will have had a higher lifetime exposure to oestrogen by having fewer children?
This has some information on current breast cancer risk factors in Japan:
jjco.oxfordjournals.org/content/29/3/137.abstract
It suggests that body weight, earlier menarche and height are an issue - just as they are here. I have also read - can’t remember where - that breast feeding is declining in Japan, which is also assumed to effect bc rates.
And this one on the rising rate of bc in Shanghai - the rates of increase are startling, a 31% increase in 10 years:
msnbc.msn.com/id/21568058/ns/health-cancer/t/breast-cancer-rates-jump-china/#.TldwjV0snTA
I think ‘oestrogen exposure’ is an oversimplification.
The female reproductive endocrines and breast tissue changes are much more complex than just that.
I’ll post again what I posted on a previous page Finty -
“Valerie Beral, head of the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said that to blame Westernisation was to miss the central cause – changes in child-bearing.
“We don’t need to seek subtle explanations when we know the main one. China has gone from the six-child family to the one-child family in a couple of generations. Most women in the past had six or seven children – it was fairly standard across the world. Each child was breast fed for two to two-and-a-half years, which meant they stopped ovulating and didn’t conceive. The hormonal changes that occur around child-bearing and during breast-feeding are protective for life.””
This makes sense to me.
The number of children women have had has decreased enormously across the globe - and most obviously in China where numbers have been forcibly restricted for 30 years now. I think these changes in our societies holder greater clues to female cancers than what we ingest.
The human female is at her most fecund in her teens. Women should be breeding like rats in our early years - that is really what our bodies are designed to do and many poor societies in developing nations still function that way.
My great-grandmother had 11 kids - which wasn’t unusual for her day. She was very fat - always had been. Very fertile obviously (so awash with oestrogen?). She ate the typical diet of her age - lots of butter, lots of cream, fried in lard, fatty meat and disgusting lumps of offal, plenty of home made cakes and sugary preserves.
But she didn’t drink alcohol. She didn’t smoke.
She lived into her mid 80s with no health problems at all.
And then fast forward 70 years and there is me. Always been a fussy health foody type - slim and fit. Veggy and vegan all my life. But I drank alcohol regularly and smoked for a good few years. Massive fertility problems. Finally have child aged 42 - and then cancer dx a year later.
I am the only woman for 4 generations to have cancer.
People are quick to poo-poo anecdote but I think my family history illustrates the point quite well.
Oops - cross posting - I shall have a look at the links.
That is a heck of a leap in China - and at no point in the article is the issue of the only child policy mentioned!
But then they wouldn’t would they.
So much easier to blame wicked Western hamburgers than an appalling state enforced human rights violation that has resulted in the genocide of countless female babies.
I notice several anti-abortion groups on the interent are highlighting the relationship between one child policy and increase in BC - but are blaming the actual abortions!
And that kids is how to manipulate facts in order to make a point!
I’m sure you’re right that birth rates have a very strong impact, but then if you look at the Shanghai rates increasing 31% in 10 years when similar effects aren’t seen elsewhere in China, it suggests that there is more in play.
One thing that I found very interesting in The China Study - sorry, I know you are not a fan, but bear with me - is the suggestion that diet is not initiating cancer but is promoting it when it is initiated by carcinogens. Your great-grandmother would presumably have been exposed to far fewer carcinogens than you were 70 years later - environmental as well as the smoke and alcohol. I don’t think anyone really knows the impact of the exposure to thousand of different chemicals in our environment, even if levels of individual chemicals are found to be safe, nobody has tested the combined effect. And he does not at any stage suggest diet is the only factor - just an important one, particularly in the wider sense that lifetime diet effects age of menarche, circulating oestrogen levels etc.
If you are looking at environmental factors - there was nothing so toxic to a populace as the bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
However - the massive Japanese atomic cancer “timebomb” has never really materialised thankfully - although there are increases.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7917541
This study notes that BC rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are among the lowest in the world.
I find it hard to accept that the typical Western person’s exposure to chemicals over a lifetime is in any way comparable to anything approximating the severity of nuclear fallout!
I don’t really subscribe to the idea that people of days gone by were exposed to fewer carcinogens- DDT was in common use along with scores of other appalling pesticides that are now banned. Asbestos was everywhere - in rooves, bricks, even in the plaster on the walls. Lead plumbing in every building. Lead paint on walls and doors. Lead paint on children’s toys! I remember my grandmother kept cleaning bottles in her pantry that had skull and crossbones on them - god knows what was in them.
If in the West we are under such massive assault from our food and from the evironment why, overall, are we living longer than we have ever done? Life expectancy here is 80.1 and in Japan it is 82.9.
Not really that great a difference if our Western culture is supposed to be so dreadfully toxic is it?
This is a very interesting discussion.
With regard to DDT from what I’ve read about this, it was used agriculturally from around the mid 1940s. It was actually banned until the 1970s in the UK. They say that the egg that made us would have been in our grandmother and therefore our generation are probably one of the most highly exposed as it would have been in the food chain while we were in utero too.
I found this interesting article from BBC about residuals of DDT.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5145450.stm
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not for a minute suggesting a simple cause and effect with regard to breast cancer. However, we do know that DDT has many damaging effects on all life forms.
I became interested in such toxins when I was diagnosed with endometriosis. One theory is that endometriosis is linked to dioxins. Like DDT this is a Persistant Organic Pollutant also sometimes referred to as the Dirty Dozen such as by WHO (includes DDT and dioxins among others). This is because they persist in the food chain and in the environment.
With regard to long life span, any damaging factors in our Western lifestyle/environment/food would be off set by huge medical advances including many medications and screening. For example, screening for high blood pressure and treating it will be preventing things like strokes. The advances in screening for and treating cancers is another example. And of course, another big one is care of the pregnant woman and prevention of death during child birth.
But Japan is a supremely advanced nation that has as much access to those medical advances, screening etc as us - probably more!
But even so the difference in average life expectancy between our nations is hardly significant. There is greater disparity between Surrey and parts of Glasgow!
So if the Japanese diet is so uniquely fabulous and they have access to the best modern medicine - how come they aren’t outstripping everyone in the longevity stakes?
According to this link Japanese women have had the longest life expectancy in the world for the last 25 years:
guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/01/japan-women-life-expectancy-rises
So it’s interesting that the generation exposed to all that nuclear fallout is still doing better than us. I’m sure cancer rates did rocket after 1945 - but maybe their diet protected them for higher rates? That is what Campbell found in the Philippines, where the toxin exposure was widespread, but only those in a certain diet group went on to develop liver cancer.
It’s a good point. Could this be to do with average human life span (as opposed to expectancy)? I think there is some debate as to whether life span is fixed or can increase.
My point was in response to Msmolly’s last comment not in response to Finty’s comment on life expectancy.
In 1950 life expectancy for Japanese men was 60 and for women it was 62.
UK life expectancy in 1950 was signicantly higher - 65 for men and 72 for women.
As the claim is that the established Japanese diet is and has always been life enhancing - how come, even with the deprivations of post war rationing, we managed to outlive them?
Incidentally the other current high life expectancies are in San Marino, Monaco and Andorra. All of which (apart from being piddling little places!) are Western European cultures with a high consumption of meat and booze!