Re:Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer
by nickpp on Thursday April 08, 2010 @11:22AM
(#1249995)
Lowers risk of heart disease or stroke instead. Sounds good to me!
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Re:Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer
by ZeroGravitas on Thursday April 08, 2010 @11:40AM
(#1250031)
It also lowers the chance of cancer, which you wouldn't guess from the headline:
"Eating more vegetables was associated with a small but statistically significant reduction in cancer risk"
It's a 4% reduction for 2 extra servings of veg, which they helpfully illustrated by saying if you had 10% chance of cancer without vegetables, eating them would mean you would then have a 9.6% chance. I'm guessing that was an attempt to downplay the significance. If they'd said for every 25 people who get cancer, one wouldn't then it might have seemed more like good news.
They also claim that number could be wrong and list various factors why the results could be skewed, but never explain why they think the number would only get worse, rather than better due to these confounding factors.
Re:Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer
by tokenadult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @12:09PM
(#1250111)
A good discussion of the different ways to report results of medical interventions (including changes in diet) can be found here:
But that means people eating more fruit and vegetables will actually increase the cancer rate in the society, as fewer people die before they develop cancer (which is an almost inevitable event in an ageing body).
Of course, this is related to the effect that you can double the number of people that suffer from a aggressive form of cancer by finding a treatment that makes them live twice as long after diagnosis (if you count all current cases and not only all new cases). Statistics and epidemiology are, ahm, fun is not quite the right word.
Re:Eating Vegetables Doesn’t Stop Cancer
by tokenadult on Thursday April 08, 2010 @12:11PM
(#1250117)
Looking for the "hard endpoint" of reduced all-cause mortality is always an important issue when studying a lifestyle intervention or medical intervention.
Thanks for finding the weirdly cynical lining to that cloud. You gave me a good laugh.