Is cancer mostly preventable? Is avoiding a conflicting list of foods, or simply staying slim, the key to immunity from the scourge? "Experts" from the World Cancer Research Fund report their answers, but as Professor Patrick Basham and Doctor John Luik report, they just don’t make sense.
The experts rely as usual on "lifestyle epidemiology." When judiciously applied (rarely the case) this may suggest a statistical association (conventionally and fallaciously called "the cause" or "a cause") between two factors. For example: let us say professional drivers suffer proportionately more skull injuries than do office workers. An epidemiologist will state that driving causes skull injuries. He will disregard that the true cause of skull injuries — havoc to the skull — is independent of driving. Not just office workers but persons of all descriptions, who may never have had a driver’s license, fall downstairs or out of bed and crack their skulls, or have them cracked by other means, while most professional drivers have uncracked skulls. It may be argued that most lifestyle epidemiologists do have cracked skulls (metaphorically or otherwise), since such logic eludes them, but the point is that "cause" in the parlance of the debased profession never means "cause" in the true sense and usually means nothing at all. Cancer is dysfunctional cell replication. That is as close to stating the true "cause" of cancer as one can come.
When lifestyle epidemiology is injudiciously applied, as it is every day, and as long history has dismally revealed, it shows that whatever lifestyle epidemiologists are paid to investigate "causes" (or alternatively "prevents") anything or everything which statistical quirks and the investigators’ biases may light upon. Genuinely inscrutable cancer is of course a favorite for proving "causation," and with the politically correct fascination for banning pleasure, not to mention the zeal for ridiculing fat people, common to the schoolyard vermin who grew into health cultists, we are now scolded that enjoying food "causes" various cancers. Naturally, we’re told that the fatties are the most certainly doomed, while we’ve also been blitheringly warned that obesity is contagious, all of which suits the Healthist appetite for social anxiety and division. The bases for the "truths" about food and overweight and cancer are ably deconstructed by Professor Basham and Doctor Luik, who note the only thing the related literature really proves, in quoting the unconventionally skeptical epidemiologist Petr Shrabanek: "People who eat, die."
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