Many of these cancers are associated with obesity, and as we know, in recent decades, the rates of obesity have skyrocketed dramatically. So `highly processed´ means, they’re not natural. They have these substances that preserve them for a long time, and we don’t yet know how those things may lead to an increased risk of cancer, but we highly suspect that perhaps they’re shaping our microbiomes. And our microbiome, we know, has a lot to do with many different chronic diseases, and it may actually be contributing to why these cancers are rising in younger people.
Dr Kimmie Ng, WBUR Interview 2023
These food companies carefully formulate and market nutrient poor, addictive, ultra-processed foods, which now comprise two thirds of the calories in children and teens.
Sen. Cory Booker
In fact, we’d say what happened between 2010 and 2019 is that poor diet overtook tobacco as the leading cause of early death on planet earth. And so what we’re now pretty sure of is that when we say poor diet, what we mean is a diet high in industrially processed or ultra-processed foods.
Dr Chris van Tulleken
According to a 2023 study in the journal BMJ Oncology, cited by Dr Jalal Baig in a recent opinion piece for CNN, between 1990 and 2023, the global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1%, with fatalities due to early-onset cancer rising by 27.7% over the same period. Early-onset cancer is defined as presenting in adults under 50.
Further, more detailed data on these rising figures published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that from 2010 to 2019 in the United States, breast cancer accounted for the highest number of cases in the under-fifty population, while rates of gastrointestinal cancers were rising the fastest.
This dramatic increase in gastrointestinal cancers alone demonstrates the implications and risks associated with our modern culture.
As Dr Kimmie Ng, a medical oncologist, and Director of Dana-Farber’s Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Centre, told The ASCO Daily News in 2020: `By the year 2030, colon cancer is estimated to rise 90% and rectal cancer to rise by a staggering 124% in younger patients. `If you ask me what keeps me up at night, it’s why this is happening to younger people,´ she went on to say.
In an interview with The Boston Globe last year, Dr Ng points out that: `People born in 1990 have over double the risk of getting colon cancer compared to those born in 1950. And quadruple the risk of getting rectal cancer.´
As these cases of early-onset cancers mount, there is added urgency to identify why this rise in cancer among younger people is unfolding and who is at heightened risk. At least part of the answer appears to be found in the changes to nutrition and lifestyle that took hold in the middle of the last century, and which was the subject of a recent edition in this SoberOasis series.
In general, evolution unfolds very slowly. The underlying genetic risks of the populations surveyed in the studies cited above haven’t changed substantially over the past forty years, pointing towards the argument that environment and lifestyle, rather than our genetic makeup, are playing a major role in the increase of these types of cancer.
Increasingly, research points to culprits including ultra processed foods (UPFs) and societal stress. The most widely consumed ultra-processed foods include the following: Baby food, bread, breakfast cereal and cereal bars, fizzy drinks, fruit drinks, milk drinks, flavoured yoghurts, packaged snacks, ice-cream, biscuits, sweets and chocolate, cakes and pastries, ready-to-eat meals, sausages and burgers, packaged pies and pizzas, chicken nuggets, and so-called diet products.
Note how the list begins with baby food. This is no accident. I have listed the products in this sequence because my intuition tells me that the items higher up may have the greatest impact on the surge in the number of cases of gastrointestinal disease in the coming decades.
Societal stress encompasses factors such as poverty, racial prejudice, workaholism, sleep alterations, obesity, physical inactivity, and consumption of tobacco, alcohol, street, and prescription drugs.
These two main clusters of factors, each on their own, and especially in concert, can alter the internal processes of our bodies by upsetting metabolism, weakening the immune system, and increasing inflammation.
Dr Chris van Tulleken recently published a book entitled `Ultra-Processed People…´, which has caused a considerable stir in the media.
Dr van Tulleken states in an edition of the WBUR Podcast: `The food system is such that (particularly in the United States), for people living with disadvantage, which is broadly people of colour, indigenous groups, people without addresses, migrant populations, immigrant populations, they are people who are essentially forced to eat food that we are very sure is driving pandemics of cancer, metabolic disease, inflammatory disease.´
Further research efforts are underway examining whether changes in the gut microbiome, the trillions of microbes that reside inside us, are increasing our bodies’ vulnerability to cancer. This community of microbes is a crucial contributor to health, affecting digestion and the immune system. Poor diet, combined with excessive prescription of medications, – high consumption, direct and indirect, especially of antibiotics, – can cause an upheaval in this microbiome, which could then play a role in facilitating cancer.
In this WBUR Podcast he described what he discovered while writing the book, as follows : `I put on 6 kg in a month. So if I’d continued the diet for a year, I would have doubled my body weight, and I wasn’t trying to eat to excess. Then we did brain scans, and whilst I’m only one patient, I did this with colleagues at our National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (in the UK). We were doing these very robustly, and we saw enormous changes in my brain, in the connectivity between the habit centres at the back of the brain and the addiction reward centres in the middle ´.
While this may be alarming, it is not surprising. With the recent advent of neuromarketing, corporations have been mining the latest discoveries from neuroscience to get to the bottom of how consumers can best be manipulated to consume more and more of what these corporations can most easily and effectively produce and distribute, at the lowest possible cost.
Some of the largest UPF corporations, particularly those like Nestle, PepsiCo, Inc., Anheuser-Busch InBev, JBS, Tyson Foods, and Archer Daniels Midland, with large-scale ambitions to predict consumer behaviour, have invested in their own laboratories, science personnel, or partnerships with academia.
Neuromarketing is expensive, requiring advanced equipment and technology such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), motion capture for eye-tracking, and the electroencephalogram. By combining the new learnings from neuroscience and marketing research, with recent advances in AI, marketers have begun applying neuromarketing practices with great precision, to manipulate consumers to buy more of whatever product they wish to supply, regardless of the health hazards they may cause.
Dr van Tulleken continues: `So it was definitely having significant effects. The final change that was in a way the most alarming is that my hormonal response to a standard meal was dramatically altered. So at the end of the diet, my hunger hormones remain sky high at the end of a big meal. So this is food that’s interfering with our body’s ability to say, „I’m done.“
And we’ve all evolved. We do have a system inside us that controls all kinds of things, our oxygen intake, the way we get rid of carbon dioxide, our salt and water levels. We have a way of managing our intake and expenditure of everything. And this is food that’s hacking our ability to detect the energy coming in ´.
What really shocks me is the latest gambit in this hijacking of the human organism; a new generation of so-called anti-obesity medication is now making its way onto the market which promises, in turn, to manipulate the neural receptors to offset the effects of UPFs.
These medications alter one of the fundamental processes of the human body, weight regulation, by a combination of the following: reducing appetite and consequently energy intake, increasing energy expenditure, redirecting nutrients from adipose to lean tissue, or interfering with the absorption of calories.
The promised effect, for these very expensive medical `solutions´ is that we can continue down the path of degradation of food, without having to suffer the adverse effects which can be seen when we look around at any public gathering in the established and, increasingly, emerging consumer societies. The adverse effects are now making their way into the statistics cited above by Dr Baig.
Dr van Tulleken concludes: `But the biggest effect was just before the end of the diet, I was organizing some research with a colleague in Brazil, and we were talking about this food, and I kept calling it food. And she kept saying, `It’s not food, Chris, it’s an industrially produced edible substance. It’s like a tick.
She just kept saying this. The end of the phone call, I ordered fried chicken takeout. I could barely finish it. And we know that with addictions, and I am someone who I would say I have lived with an addiction to these products for a long time. With addictions, you can flick from addiction to disgust very quickly ´.
I hope that this `disgust effect´ will soon become operative in sufficient numbers of people to bring down the business model of the UPF corporations. They will not give up their ill-gotten gains without a fight however, as we see with the tobacco industry.
The resistance can be observed on any given typical TV night. Note how much of the advertising is connected, in one way or another, with ultra processed foods. Perhaps we will have to wait until the incidence of cancers and other adverse effects gets so high, that even the mainstream medical community will wake up from its stupor and raise the alarm, hopefully before it is too late.
