Following on from the last post on random mutations causing most cancers, H/T Rose for news of the lifestyle medics rapidly striking back. Dr Emma Smith, Cancer Research UK’s senior cancer information officer, writes:
Yes, sometimes developing cancer is just bad lack – but that doesn’t mean you should keep smoking
The front pages today have given a good airing to research that says developing cancer can be simply down to bad luck. This isn’t actually new. It’s well established that certain gene faults can trigger some types of the disease. But – as the researchers themselves point out – we know that there are also other factors at play.
Cancer is caused by damage to our DNA. Environmental factors like UV rays and lifestyle habits such as inhaling cancer-causing chemicals in tobacco, can damage our DNA – as can the process of ageing. The damage builds up over time and if a cell becomes too badly damaged it can start to multiply out of control – leading to cancer.
This misrepresents the new theory, which is not that inherited gene faults can trigger cancer (which isn’t a new idea), but that random mutations of genes in dividing cells can also trigger cancers. You might start out with good genes, but end up with faulty ones. And because it’s a random process, it’s just bad luck if you end up with cancer.
The good news is that four out of 10 cases of cancer can be prevented by making small lifestyle changes. So it’s absolutely vital to look at ways to help stop the disease developing in the first place.
I don’t think the new research said that 4 out of 10 cancers could be prevented by small lifestyle changes:
Scientists looked at the number of cell divisions of 31 types of bodily tissue and compared them with the overall incidence of cancer in the population of America.
They found that the more cell mutations occurred, the higher the rate of cancer, suggesting that it was the number of random errors in replication that was driving tumours rather than outside environmental forces.
For example the cells of the pancreas regenerate far more quickly than those of the pelvis, which is why pancreatic cancer is far more common than pelvic cancer.
However some cancers such as lung and skin cancer had higher rates than their mutations should predict, suggesting that genetics or lifestyle factors had increased the risk.
Lead researcher Professor Bert Vogelstein, said: “Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their ‘good genes,’ but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck.
“Our study shows, in general, that a change in the number of stem cell divisions in a tissue type is highly correlated with a change in the incidence of cancer in that same tissue.
“We found that the types of cancer that had higher risk than predicted by the number of stem cell divisions were precisely the ones you’d expect, including lung cancer, which is linked to smoking; skin cancer, linked to sun exposure; and forms of cancers associated with hereditary syndromes.”
So there was a strong correlation of cancer with the number of cell divisions in various tissues. If the incidence of lung and skin cancer was higher than predicted, they suggested that this might be due to genetics or lifestyle. They didn’t say which.
The only question is: how much higher was the incidence of lung and skin cancer above that predicted? If it was 10% higher, and this was definitely due to lifestyle factors, then at most you could improve your chances of not getting cancer by 10% if you made the necessary lifestyle changes.
And giving up smoking isn’t a “small lifestyle change”, anyway. It’s a very large one. Particularly if it results in a gut bacteria catastrophe, and weight gain:
Weight gain after quitting smoking not caused by overeating
“The average smoker gains up to 5kg in the year after smoking and until now, experts have put the weight gain down to nervous nibbles or comfort eating to deal with stress.
But researchers at Zurich University Hospital believe that when we quit smoking the real cause of weight gain could be the bacteria in our intestines.
After quitting, researchers found gut flora in smokers became much more like an obese person’s.
Over nine weeks, the researchers studied faecal samples from 20 volunteers –– five non-smokers, five smokers and 10 people who quit one week into the study.
They found people who had recently quit have more Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes bacteria, which helps the body store fat instead of excreting it.
Over the nine-week study, the quitters gained an average of 2.2 kg, but said they had not changed their food and drink consumption.
“Under the same living conditions, they gained weight after the cessation of smoking, and they showed a change in the microbiota,” said study leader Professor Gerhard Rogler said.
But the lifestyle zealots – who are really just puritanical moralists – won’t abandon interfering in people’s lifestyles easily. It is, after all, their raison d’être.
Frank Davis 
CRUK’s stance on lifestyle and cancer is the epitome of anti-science. I have no idea why the CEO, who quite obviously supports this quasi-religious nonsense is still in a job.
Remember this john Hopkins is bloombergs hunting grounds he donated a billion to them.
Bloomberg donated 1 billion dollars to john Hopkins and that’s where all the JUNK SCIENCE to support bloombergs nanny state policies comes from like last years anti-gun violence study Owebama used after the sandyhook shooting took place…….
http://www.jhsph.edu/departmen…
Goals of the Department
Develop approaches for applying the findings of epidemiologic research in the formulation of public policy and to participate in formulating and evaluating the effects of such policy
Center for Gun Policy and Research
Welcome
The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research is engaged in original scholarly research, policy analysis, and agenda-setting public discourse. Our goal is to bring public health expertise and perspectives to the complex policy issues related to gun violence prevention.
An important part of the Center’s mission is to serve as an objective and informative resource for the news media, thereby providing the public with accurate information about gun injuries, prevention strategies, and policies.
Current Events
http://www.jhsph.edu/research/…
Bloombergs school of public health at johnhopkins also runs epidemiology studies for all their political objectives in the lifestyles war………..So this study here is a cover study for something else altogether. I feel it!
Yes, sometimes developing cancer is just bad lack – but that doesn’t mean you should keep smoking
So…. WHY NOT?
I find it odd my grand parents all smoked including their whole family back to when they were born in 1890-1900 all lived into their late 80s or 90s and all smoked like a freight train and only one an uncle ever got LC at age 86 he died 4 years later at 90.
But he worked his whole life at building and repairing coal fired steam generating plants his whole life!
My grandfather in Ky worked the coal mines for 45 years and never got any lung conditions……….Black lung not even that.
This research seems to be getting a lot of airtime, unlike so many of the “X is going to give you cancer” stories which have erupted over the last few years, which have been pretty much roundly ignored by most of the MSM because they – like everyone else – are thoroughly bored with them, so clearly it’s being taken quite seriously. This will, inevitably, put the leading lights of the anti-smoking (and anti everything-else) brigade, such as CRUK into a terrible tailspin. What a blow to all their dedicated brainwashing, endless repetition and hard work lying to everyone! I bet they are absolutely furious about this – no wonder they’ve rushed out an immediate, clearly ill-thought-out response, littered as it is with glaringly obvious misinterpretations of the study and a whole host of inserted “facts” which the study hasn’t actually mentioned at all. It’s real knee-jerk response stuff, isn’t it? Note their anxious attempts to immediately try and make the focus of the whole thing about smoking (which wasn’t the main focus of the study at all) – always the area that they regard as their “safe haven,” even if it isn’t as safe as it used to be any more.
There’s actually quite a big climb-down in CRUK’s response which, in their hurry, they clearly didn’t spot – i.e. the admittance that a mere “4 in 10” cancers are “preventable” by “lifestyle changes,” which is, in effect, admitting that a whopping 6 in 10 affected by following their instructions at all! Although they’ve never actually said as much, in previous diatribes they’ve pretty much given the impression that by adopting their recommended “lifestyle changes” you’d be virtually guaranteed not to develop cancer at all. A lie, as everyone on here knows only too well, but it was a lie which had been swallowed by a whole lot of people. Until yesterday and the bombshell of this study, that is.
I’m actually surprised that this study has been allowed to see the light of day. Most similar studies in the past have been well and truly strangled at birth. So maybe the power and influence of the anti-smoking lot really is now firmly on the wane. And about time, too.
Id guarantee you theres a new group of other studies fixing to pop up and that’s why Hopkins jumped and released this sham study on 1 January to beat everyone else.
The study was doen the same way the SG reports get done they go study shopping to support their conclusions from the mountains of junk being paid for and made via anti-smoking grant funding.
Weve all seen the mummy study it took down the saturated fats and heart disease myth along with smoking and exercise etc etc.
Now Id almost guarantee there are newer studies fixing to come out or already out that are destroying the last 75 years of the junk science theories that have been foisted upon us all as the gospel………eat ight get your LDL in check etc etc. We saw how they lowered levels of disease identity and created pre-disease as a new foundling in the woods.
Everything they’ve created is being challenged including their precious direct smoking claims. Now this basically takes the SHS risk for LC right into the dumpster if anybody hasn’t thought about it yet,
It seems that no matter how you cut it the actual number of cancers that can be linked with smoking is much smaller than the Antismokers are willing to admit. They conflate all lifestyle risks to get between 30-40% of cancers. They don’t separate by cause, only correlation. So a smoker that gets a cancer caused by random mutation is still counted as having a smoking-related cancer.
It is frustrating that countering the tobacco control propaganda is so difficult. May news sites don’t accept comments. others delete the one they don’t like. Many just report the tobacco control propaganda without fact checking perpetuating lies, cherry-picked data, and propaganda. Sadly, the uninformed public (including many smokers) believes the lies. I know this isn’t new to most people reading this. It has been seen for many years, the problem is that it is culminating in broad-based global bans. The data is ignored. Tobacco control has become a religion and any one who questions it is anathema.
You’re absolutely right it has become a religion. Just like Frank mentioned yesterday, the article he referenced had to mention the requisite “link” between smoking and cancer as a “dogmatic article of faith.”
SL: “They don’t separate by cause, only correlation. So a smoker that gets a cancer caused by random mutation is still counted as having a smoking-related cancer.”
Quite. It was my oncologist who told me I had the type of cancer that ISN’T smoking related, even though I’ve smoked for over 40 years.: non small cell adenocarcinoma. This is most common in women who are never smokers and exactly the sort of random cell mutation this research is about. But I will become another smoking-related death statistic.
It gets worse. All serious illnesses in Great Britain are now rated on a smoking scale. At some point it was decided that (say – I’ve invented the figures) 35% of all heart attacks are due to smoking. When they record the number of heart attacks, they now attribute 35% of them to smoking, whether the person smoked or not.. Now this may be true at the beginning, but the longer time elapses from the original estimate, the less likely it is that their figures are correct.
Which wouldn’t bother us except smokers are being blamed for their own and others’ illnesses on dodgy statistics, and far more seriously, it messes up serious research into treatment for heart disease and cancer, the biggest causes of premature death.
Lysistrata Eleftheria, Thank you for confirming my suspicion. It is sad that truth has to fall victim to prohibitionist dogma. You are right, it inhibits actual research into disease and demonizes persons with disease which is inhumane by any definition. The cruelty and willful hate of the tobacco control cult and Antismokers is a scourge. I don’t understand their motivation.
“All serious illnesses in Great Britain are now rated on a smoking scale. . . . When they record the number of heart attacks, they now attribute 35% of them to smoking, whether the person smoked or not.”
They are following the precedent set for alcohol, whereby drinking is assigned arbitrary responsibility for hospital admissions.
They found that the more cell mutations occurred, the higher the rate of cancer, suggesting that it was the number of random errors in replication that was driving tumours rather than outside environmental forces.
In the newly released study it points to lung and states NON SMOKER…………..LMAO!
Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their ‘good genes,’ but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck,” adds Vogelstein, who cautions that poor lifestyles can add to the bad luck factor in the development of cancer.
Theyre trying to save their own asses is what their up too……..As other research shows centarians it didn’t matter how they lived or were exposed to how much they drank,smoked or ate or sedentary life.
The whole study is a white wash to try and save face with the latest findings in other areas.
Theres a new longevity study that was just started like last year or so and I betcha those results will be hitting the web pretty soon.
This study shows that you can add to your risk of getting cancers by smoking or other poor lifestyle factors. However, many forms of cancer are due largely to the bad luck of acquiring a mutation in a cancer driver gene regardless of lifestyle and heredity factors.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/bad_luck_of_random_mutations_plays_predominant_role_in_cancer_study_shows
Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their ‘good genes,’ but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck,” adds Vogelstein, who cautions that poor lifestyles can add to the bad luck factor in the development of cancer.
Yet 94-96% of smokers never get LC and Ive read its even less like 2%………So they cant even make the claim above. It would work out as the same bad luck genes.
When LC strikes its nearly always in the old age groups 75-85. That’s where we find nearly all the other cancers too, age related with slowed immune response due to aging.
The WHO says secondhand smoke causes 600,000 worldwide deaths annually. Will the WHO now reduce this number by 360,000 ? They really have no idea.
I love your name.
A sad little postscript on the Telegraph article.
“Prof Hans Clevers, a stem cell and cancer biologist at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, the Netherlands, said the research would help cancer patients to realise that the disease was not their fault.”
How very wicked that anyone ever led them to believe that it was.
‘How very wicked …’ Yes, yes, yes, Rose.
Totally agree.
Lead researcher Professor Bert Vogelstein, said: “Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their ‘good genes,’ but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck.
So one would think that despite this recent statement about the random nature of cancer they would, over the past 50 years or so, have been able to replicate under laboratory conditions the mechanism of tobacco caused cancer.
After all, they must have subjected countless thousands of lab animals to a relentless and very heavy smoking regimen, so one would have thought they would have had at least a 10% success rate in duplicating the mechanism showing causation, as opposed to correlation.
But they have achieved no such thing. There is as yet NO empirical proof. And yet still they parrot the dogma.
Lead researcher Professor Bert Vogelstein, said: “Cancer-free longevity in people exposed to cancer-causing agents, such as tobacco, is often attributed to their ‘good genes,’ but the truth is that most of them simply had good luck.
MOST of them simply had good luck? REALLY? So, all the people affected by the various different cancers simply are too old to be viable for any other cancer causing agent other than tobacco? After all, we are being told that there “can be” a “lag phase” of 20+ years before the “tobacco induced cancer” begins to be a cancer.
Of course it is assumed that smokers, unlike non-smokers , do not encounter a vast number of politically correct, nevertheless cancer causing agents, thus leading to the (limited capability but loud PR) tobacco control & friends (who needs enemies with friends like that?) to get out their battered trumpet to sound off the nonsense we all are supposed to swallow.
There is NEVER one single cause for cancer. Quite a few things have to go wrong for a cancer to manifest itself. We all have and have had many times the onset of cancer. Our luck was that the other things (on a molecular level, e.g. the gene(s) regulating e.g. apoptosis) were/are working perfectly fine, thus the cancerous cells being “kicked out”.
There are many cancer causing agents in our lives; if e.g. high background radiation + high dioxin level in the soil we grow our food stuff in/being “run down” and thus more susceptible to viral infects + a genetic predisposition are met, you will find an established cancer.
We are breeding the cancers by running people down – to blame it on smoking. Tobacco control says so.
I have been wondering for many years, after the many attempts of tobacco control propaganda to make me feel guilty – and taking the blame if I was diagnosed with any form of cancer (which one isn’t attributed to tobacco these days?) as God’s punishment for enjoying the products of a plant GOD put on this earth to begin with?
There had to be more than this to someone like me who grows adenomas as a daily ration. Perhaps it is this ‘malfunction’ that has the side effect of also ‘nipping cancers in the bud’?
WHAT has protected me of getting cancer, considering I grew up with smokers around me? In my youth a lot of people smoked around me. To them it was a symbol of freedom. To me it was unimportant, anyway. I was busy being a tom boy and more busy having fun.
Looks like that Professor Bert Vogelstein finds his career in tatters if he says somethin tobacco control does not like. Neither of them cares about the people they slap in the face to push their anti-smoking agenda. And they know that their days are numbered!!!
When I ask WHY I, who-grows-adenomas-for Briton am still healthy, and KICKINGLY alive after 45 years of smoking, they try and tell me that so far I have been lucky. No mention of a lag phase, less even of the numbers of former smokers succumbing to cancers.
I want to know WHICH bit is the lucky bit. To this day I am awaiting a reply. I guess my question is a little awkward – nevertheless, I still get kicked out of pubs and have the anti-smokers finger pointing at me….
We need to ask a lot of questions and insist on answers.
It always pays to read the comments.
Cancer Act 1939
“The Cancer Act 1939 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom passed in 1939 to make further provision for the treatment of cancer, to authorise the Minister of Health to lend money to the National Radium Trust, to prohibit certain advertisements relating to cancer, and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid. The Act does not apply in Northern Ireland.
As of December 2014, the sole remaining provision is in respect of advertising to treat or cure cancer, all other provisions having been repealed or subsumed into other legislation.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Act_1939
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1929/jul/24/national-radium-trust
CRUK explains the Cancer Act 1939
There’s no conspiracy – sometimes it just doesn’t work
“At Cancer Research UK, we’re often asked about alleged “miracle cures” for cancer, usually based on claims made on the internet. There’s an impressive list of these collected on the Quackwatch website (here and here), ranging from the slightly wacky to the downright dangerous.
In virtually all cases, when researchers have rigorously tested these treatments, they don’t work. But the rumours persist, fuelling the belief that there is a “conspiracy” preventing cancer patients from getting effective treatments.
Not only is this simply not true – just because something doesn’t actually work, it doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy against it – it’s harmful to cancer patients. And, as we’ve found out whilst digging through our archives, it’s also not a new idea.”
There is no conspiracy
“Although the 1939 Cancer Act was brought in to try to stop the advertisement of fraudulent cancer cures to the general public in the UK, it has little jurisdiction in today’s international online world, where thousands of websites peddling quack cures are available at the click of a button.
It doesn’t matter how many unverified anecdotes pop up in the press or on the internet – if a treatment doesn’t hold up when subjected to rigorous scientific investigation, it doesn’t mean there’s a “conspiracy” to stop it. It means it doesn’t work.
For more than a century, scientists around the world have tried, tested and tweaked hundreds of ways to treat cancer. Some of them have worked – many more haven’t.
But scientists don’t claim that there’s a conspiracy to suppress their “miracle cure” when their investigations show that something doesn’t work to treat cancer. Instead, they apply the scientific method as it should be done – forming an idea, rigorously testing it, and seeing if it holds up.
If it works, then patients will benefit, as they do from the hundreds of effective treatments that have led to survival from cancer doubling over the past 30 years. If it doesn’t work, it means that their idea was wrong and it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Sometimes things just don’t work. Bright ideas can turn out to be wrong, or researchers find out that things are rather more complicated than they first anticipated.
To suggest that there is a conspiracy aimed at depriving cancer sufferers of effective treatments is not only absurd, it’s offensive to the global community of dedicated scientists, to the staff and supporters of cancer research organisations such as Cancer Research UK, and – most importantly – to cancer patients and their loved ones.
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2011/07/06/there%E2%80%99s-no-conspiracy-sometimes-it-just-doesn%E2%80%99t-work/
IWhich may explain the Saatchi Bill
“More than 40 medical professionals, including Prof Michael Rawlins – President of the Royal Society of Medicine and formerly a head of National Institute for Clinical Excellent, back the Medical Innovation Bill in a letter to The Telegraph.
The Bill, which will be debated by peers, will make it easier for doctors to try out new treatments on patients without the fear of being sued.
Patients will also be able to look up new medicines tried out on other ill people on a new database run by Oxford University and ask their doctors for the same treatments.
The Bill is being promoted by Lord Saatchi, the advertising magnate who started to campaign on the issue after his wife Josephine Hart died from ovarian cancer.
http: //www.telegraph.co.uk/health/saatchi-bill/10929131/Leading-doctors-join-with-cancer-patients-to-back-Lord-Saatchis-Medical-Innovation-Bill.html
Lord Saatchi
“You have drugs that are 40 years old. You have surgical procedures that are 40 years old. You have a survival rate that is the same as 40 years ago and the damage done to the immune system by the treatment is so severe that it’s hard to know if the patient dies from the cancer or the treatment.”
What others say
“We do not believe that Lord Saatchi’s bill will help patients, and are dismayed that it is being promoted as offering hope to patients and their families when it will not make any meaningful difference to progress in treating cancer.”
Letter to the Times signed by more than 100 senior oncologists.”
http: //www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/nov/16/observer-profile-maurice-saatchi-josephine-hart-cancer
But still doesn’t explain why CRUK is funding ASH.
Funding period: 01 April 2013 to 31 March 2016
“By funding ASH Cancer Research UK leverages support from the Smokefree Action Coalition which is coordinated and led by ASH.”
http: //www.cancerresearchuk.org/science/research/who-and-what-we-fund/browse-by-location/london/action-on-smoking-health/grants/deborah-arnott-16215-support-for-ash%E2%80%99s-full-programme
If you can understand that, then you are doing better than me.
Its a blank check for justification for the government to create sock puppets.
“scientists around the world have tried, tested and tweaked hundreds of ways to treat cancer. Some of them have worked – many more haven’t.”
But then, shouldn’t the question be: ‘how much worse have been the results of the alternative approaches’? Because the voices of the ‘choir invisible’ of the victims of the mainstream methods are also mostly inaudible…
From an e-mail I got yesterday:
A Nobel Prize winning scientist discovered that a special mineral causes your body to create its own kind of natural “chemotherapy.” It worked on colorectal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, and many others.
But then something strange — and horrifying — happened. Doctors were suddenly prosecuted… studies were designed to fail… the cure was discredited and its supporters sent underground.
Today, one brave doctor is breaking his silence. He’s finally revealing the truth behind what was covered up: A true cancer cure that SUPERCHARGES a substance your body naturally produces… making it seek out and destroy cancer cells by the millions.
Brian Chambers
Publisher
P.S. This video threatens a lot of people in positions of power. I can’t guarantee it will remain available long, so please go here now and watch it while you can:
http://click.healthrevelations.com/t/Ag/AAMZIA/AANPGg/AF19aQ/6ks/NDM2MDUwfGh0dHA6Ly9wcm8xLmhlYWx0aHJldmVsYXRpb25zLm5ldC8zMTU2NDIvP2VtYWlsPU5BUkJBTk9SJTQwaG90bWFpbC5mciZhPTImbz0yMDMwNDAmcz0yMTY4NTgmdT02MTI2OTUzJmw9NDM2MDUwJnI9TUMmZz0xODk./AQ/6pcB
Beware of that Mark Stengler fella from San Diego, California, they mention, he happens to be a proponent of the third-hand smoke scare (toxic curtains, deleterious carpet and all)!
Im starting to believe cancer research and groups are at a cross roads and their under attack.
Legislated smoking bans run contrary to the individual rights upon which the United States was built, Spann said. “Besides that, jobs and businesses are at stake with such draconian smoking bans.”
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/11/prweb8999897.htm
ASH caught trying to load the dice back in the day when we still had some semblance of integrity in our politicians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtvH8IbV3F4#t=98