I recently had a large pre-malignant polyp removed even though my diet has been plant-based for 10 years (and low meat before that). Reduced risk is not no risk so please follow your doctor’s advice regarding screening.
How did you discover it?
I’m in my mid 40s and have some other pain in my pelvis (unrelated), when I saw a GI doctor about it he said I should get a colonoscopy because of both my age and to look for anything that might cause pain.
He didn’t find the cause of my pain but did find the polyp and sent it to the lab. Premalignant. The doc says it would have been cancer within a year or two.
Just to reiterate - polyps don’t hurt. It was just found during the course of a different investigation but I was supposed to get a colonoscopy anyway. I was putting it off because I didn’t like the idea of getting one. Please follow your doctor’s advice on this. Don’t wait, it’s not that bad.
I see. Hopefully you’re going to be doing yearly colonoscopies then.
That is what the doc recommends and I am pretty keen to follow that advice.
Fig. 2: Cancer mortality risk in mammals as a function of animal content in diet.
That was a long one but had some good info. I didn’t know 10-20% of cancer was of viral orign. Wonder if cooking meat gives humans an advantage there. Of course, going vegetarian would bypass that altogether.
the result that mammals consuming other mammals appear to have the highest cancer risk of all diet categories is consistent with a pathogenic origin of elevated cancer mortality risk among Carnivora. Host jumping of pathogens is most likely to occur in the case of phylogenetic proximity between the reservoir prey and the predator species33, making a mammal-to-mammal transmission the most likely host jump scenario.
Wonder if cooking meat gives humans an advantage there. Of course, going vegetarian would bypass that altogether.
Bovine leukemia virus relation to human breast cancer: Meta-analysis - ScienceDirect
Viral Oncology: Molecular Biology and Pathogenesis
Possible cancer-causing capacity of COVID-19: Is SARS-CoV-2 an oncogenic agent? - ScienceDirect
I’d wager that cooking can inactivate most viruses, depending on the temperature. But what you do before the heating process also matters. Cooking at home, normal cooking, can get messy. In a lot of places, people even buy freshly killed animals or kill the animals at home (usually chickens or fish).
That’s a great point. Not all viral interaction happens from eating food. Simple not washing a surface throughly could cause something later.
I wonder what the incidence of processed meats is. I- going to guess here that processed meats are a big factor. I am fully omnivorous, but tend to favor white meats, and seafood. For a while now I have been avoiding processed meats, as they somehow have become less appetizing for me.
my hypothesis for why this association exists is because I imagine that meat consumption promotes a gut microbiome high in putrefactive bacteria that produce a lot of toxic waste.
Maybe. Maybe not.
Reality is our world is filled with toxic waste that only humans create. Thanks Industrial Revolution.
Doesn’t matter what food you eat. It’s filled with toxic crap. You can’t even drink rain water because of all of the pollution in it.
You’re doomed to get cancer one way or another because you can’t escape the toxic wasteland we made this world.
This study comes with differing results, that you can make a choice for the better. So that you’re not ‘doomed’ to get cancer and live a relatively healthy life.
