Take With One Honkin' Grain of Salt

Hey, Fattie McFatFat, put down the Pringles, the steak and that third beer or you'll get cancer.

Scientists with the American Institute for Cancer Research and the World Cancer Research Fund in Britain have analyzed thousands of recent studies and produced 10 recommendations to help people lower their risk.

Men should consume no more than two alcoholic beverages daily, and women, only one, the report says. Several studies have associated alcohol consumption with elevated breast cancer risk.

Other recommendations include avoiding cigarettes, red and processed meats, consuming a diet rich in vegetables, and exercising 30 minutes a day.

“There is a major and very important conclusion,” said Walter Willet, one of the report’s authors, “and that is: Overweight and obesity can contribute to an individual’s cancer risk — abdominal circumference, especially.”

We think people should be as lean as possible without being underweight,” said Willet, an epidemiologist and physician at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

Fat, especially in the midsection, can increase the production of hormones that drive development and growth of cancer cells, he said.

{...}Experts evaluated more than 7,000 studies over five years to compile the report. Panelists found “convincing evidence” that carrying extra weight, particularly around the waist, may lead to cancer of the esophagus, pancreas, colon, kidney and uterus, as well as post-menopausal breast cancer.{...}

If you have massive amounts of time to blow, you can read the entire report here. All five hundred and thirty seven pages of it.

See, this is not how research dollars should be spent, in my humble opinion. Trolling through old studies, looking for evidence to back up pre-determined conclusions that just happen to coincide with major public health initiatives is not great in the overall scheme of things.

Color me skeptical about this report. Deep purply shades of skeptical, bordering on black.

I don't particularly like studies like this, where researchers compile data from numerous and varying studies and purport to draw previously unseen conclusions from said data. Correlation does not equal causation. It does not appear to me, not having read the study, that they actually did anything to prove that having some extra weight around the midsection actually increases your risk of cancer; it's that they looked over old studies and drew that conclusion. It may be true, but damnit, I want proof. Particularly when it appears that they're trying to link this finding to the overarching push against obesity. Again, correlation does not equal causation. It's just that simple. Never mind that it appears they looked very little at other factors, like genetics, that are equally if not more important in preventing cancer.

I'm tired of this shit.

Look, I can't tell you how many freakin' statistics I've had thrown at me since I was diagnosed. They're everywhere you look. The doctors and nurses shoot them at you, with increasing regularity and without a second thought, because these statistics are the only proof they can give you regarding your treatment, and, ultimately, your outcome. These statistics come from research done in the field, obviously, and health care providers would be lax in their duties if they didn't keep up with them. As such, they will tell you that you have a 25% increased chance of this, or a 25% decreased chance of that, and a 90% chance of the other. You, as a cancer patient, quite literally, have to make life or death choices based on statistics. You need those statistics to be good. You need good math to plan out how you're going to fight this disease. So, when someone trolls through a bunch of studies and tells me that, in their humble opinion, I'd better keep the fat off because there's an increased chance of my cancer returning if I have one extra hamburger per week, they'd better have good math, and ultimately a good study, to back up their conclusions. My life has been altered enough, thank you ever so bloody much. I'm not going to alter it more based on what I consider to be shoddy work.

It's one thing to educate yourself when you're looking at cancer. That's important and I'm not going to knock anyone who wants to do the research. What I will say, however, is that if you don't have an understanding into how a simple statistical poll is conducted, you'd better learn, and you'd better learn fast. If you don't understand how the study was conducted and what kind of math they used, you can't judge the veracity of it, let alone the efficacy. How many people will take the highlights of this study as the God's honest truth and will alter their lives because of it? Even though it's highly specious? Well meaning doctors will throw this one at overweight patients as added incentive, even if the link hasn't been conclusively proven, because fighting obesity is seen to be fighting for the greater good. Legislators will then get involved because there's a risk of cancer from being obese, they will predict health care costs will go up and all sorts of shit will start being banned for our own good. You can see it, can't you? It has the potential to spiral out of control. Individual choice will be then limited because of a specious study that doesn't actually prove anything.

Never mind that this is not how I want research dollars spent, thank you ever so bloody much. That's apparently not all that important in the scheme of things. But if you can link cancer to being overweight, because it so nicely dovetails with other public health goals, it's apparently all right to go for it. Because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Which ultimately means that you're screwing over the people who actually do have cancer, and would like a cure or an effective treatment, thanks ever so bloody much, because it's deemed more important to spend money researching how to prevent it in the first place. Just speaking as an ovarian cancer survivor, this pisses me off. We don't have an early screening test for ovarian cancer, along the lines of a Pap Smear for cervical cancer. You, generally, find out when you're on the table, if you're lucky enough to get to the table at all because the symptoms are so freakin' vague to begin with. For most women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, this means that they catch it late, when the chances of survival are low. I'm lucky they caught it when they did, but Dr. Academic admitted flat out that they don't know much about my stage of ovarian cancer; they know a hell of a lot more about the later stages simply because that's when more women are diagnosed. Currently, in the United States, we spend $600 per death on ovarian cancer research. With breast and prostate cancer it's $3000 per death. Yet, ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of death in women. Around 22,000 women this year alone will be diagnosed; of that number, roughly 15,000 will die because of the disease. That's almost two-thirds, which is just an unacceptable statistic, if you ask me, but they're not asking me where I'd like research dollars spent to lower that number. Nooo. They're more interested in spending research dollars on specious studies that don't prove anything when it comes to preventing cancer, but that do dovetail nicely with what they consider to be the greater good.

Just never mind all those dead cancer patients along the way.

Posted by Kathy at November 1, 2007 12:22 PM | TrackBack