1 in 2 people will get cancer, why ?
When we were young how many people do you remember having cancer, it was a hushed rarely used word and certainly meant death . Yes we have modern medication and wonderful scientists and thankfully cures but why now 1 in 2 people .
Food sprayed , forced tasteless fruit and veg . Crops sprayed with chemicles , animals injected with hormines . All kinds of toxins around .
I am sure its our life style and modern fast day living
People are living a lot longer ?
I disagree.
As @Psmith said it is because we are living longer. The body really is there only to reproduce so any weaknesses in the genes passed on to offspring are those that occur in old age, that is an unfortunate evolutionary fact.
in 1900 life expectancy was about 45 years, people just didn’t live long enough to experience the diseases of old age, even by the end of WWII it was only just over 60.
Now life expectancy is something like 84 years so it would seem modern “living life style and fast day living” far from being bad for us, is doing us the world of good. More of it, I say.
There’s a huge number of younger people getting cancer now as well mind.
Also you can’t really argue with the science - more and more chemicals added to our food or in the food chain are finding themselves on carcinogen lists now.
But they probably always were, in years past these kids would have died and not bred, now modern medicine allows them to survive and pass their dodgy genes on to their off spring. So you can expect more childhood cancers, that’s evolution in action.
Call this living…Sat on our arses perusing the internet…
More children means more cases of cancer. Is it more percentage-wise than it used to be? Also, cases are better reported now. Figures are now gathered and held in databases contributed to by computers over very wide areas and sources. In years gone by, we would only have heard of cases local to us.
the life of riley
while cancer is more prevalent in old age, this doesn’t explain why so many in my generation (X) are contracting cancer in their 40s and 50s.
it could be that we have better diagnostics than in the old days?
So are we saying that scientifically interfered with food is not having any effect on our health?
Or the fact that we do far less manual labour and exercise than we used to? (driving everywhere instead of walking etc) which considering the pollution of the air and airwaves takes on a whole new reason by itself…
Better medical diagnosis? for example, as I understand it, ovarian cancer is usually symptomless so it is highly likely that middle aged women just died without a cancer diagnosis. Again, as I understand it ,cancer is not a single disease but a classification covering many diseases - I am not a doctor.
I think you answered your own question. (I didn’t see this until I after I posted the above)
Medicine has improved dramatically and we are living longer, I don’t think anybody disputes those two facts.
I think we eat far more processed food & sugars than in the old days.
Just turned 79 and still riding a bike. OK, it’s an e-bike now (15.5 MPH) but still out there. Rode to my brother’s (R.I.P.) house today to meet the Estate Agent. Had to ride back again as well of course.
I think it must be all the junk food and the additives in it that gives me the energy. 
Sorry to hear about your brother @mart 
Hope you’re doing ‘ok’ 
Well done for biking! With regards to diet, here’s a guy who follows a Palaeolithic diet and is 70 years old:
Yes …but he’s only a youngster.
Blimey Azz, Marks let himself go a bit…
When I was seventy I was still running marathons (well half’s anyway) cycling 50 miles a couple of times a week, and doing 40 push up’s every day…Oh! and then there’s the swimming…
I had muscle at seventy but never flashed it too much because of my scars. Maybe I ought to have been proud of those too.
Anyway, that aside, body appearance in later life might depend somewhat on diet but probably more on how much a person exercises any particular set of muscles. I’m told my bum and legs were in good shape.
OGF may i ask , after a life time of being so fit and strong , running swimming etc have you found your joints have suffered . I had a fitness friend who ran 15 miles a day to a from work great body , healthy etc but at 55 had to have two new hips and even then his body hurt elsewhere so he more or less stopped the fitness . .
My sister a horse trainer and rider for 20 yrs of her life now suffers with very sore knees . She is now bone on bone and waiting for knee replacements . She can hardly walk .
It makes me wonder if full on excercise is not so good for later life .
@susan_m I can honestly say that until recently, and probably caused by repeated attacks of gout, I have had no, or very little trouble with any joint. In 45 years of long distance running if I have spent six months of accumulated injury time I would be over estimating, and most of the injuries have been caused by stupidity…Leaping over stiles or expecting too much from my body. Having said that though, I now have heart problems which could have been caused by years of forced labour and abuse…
