Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - Is Aspartame, Hot Dogs and Sugar CAUSING CANCER to “SKYROCKET” in Young Adults? Separating Cancer Fact from Fiction with Dr. Andrea Love

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

In today’s episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, I will be chatting about cancer myths and truths with immunologist and microbiologist, Dr. Andrea Love of immunologic.org, a science and health education organization committed to debunking health wellness misinformation. Andrea and I kick off chatting about the popular Netflix series Apple Cider Vinegar and how natural cancer-treatment alternatives can often have deadly consequences. We will chat about the actual statistics related to the “spike” in colon cancer rates in young people and what you actual risk is. We will chat about foods like hot dogs, aspartame, sugar and other commonly demonized cancer-contributors, along with the potential role of keto and fasting on cancer treatment. And I’ll finish off by explaining where a lot of these scary “carcinogen” headlines come from, and why we shouldn’t throw out our diet coke so quick.Listen to my last episode with Andrea  - "Debunking RFK Jrs Most Dangerous Health Myths (Food Dye, GMOs, Endocrine Disruptors & More) & How to Actually MAHA with Dr Andrea Love"  at the links below, or wherever you get your podcasts.SpotifyApple PodcastsAmazon MusicCheck in with today’s amazing guest Dr Andrea Love:Instagram: @dr.andrealoveX: @dr_andrealoveWebsite: www.immunologic.orgReferences:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34455534/https://ccrisktool.cancer.gov/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23891579/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16985027/ Disclaimer: The content in this episode is for educational and entertainment purposes only and is never a substitute for medical advice. If you’re struggling with with your mental or physical health, please work one on one with a health care provider.If you have heard yourself in our discussion today, and are looking for support, contact the free NEDIC helpline at 1-866-NEDIC-20 or go to eatingdisorderhope.com. 🥤 Check out my 2-in-1 Plant Based Probiotic Protein Powder, neue theory at www.neuetheory.com or @neuetheory and use my promo code BITEBACK20 to get 20% off your order! Don’t forget to Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review! It really helps us out. ✉️ SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTERS ⤵️Neue Theory newsletterAbbey's Kitchen newsletter 🥞 FREE HUNGER CRUSHING COMBO™ E-BOOK! 💪🏼 FREE PROTEIN 101 E-BOOK! 📱 Follow me! Instagram: @abbeyskitchenTikTok: @abbeyskitchenYouTube: @AbbeysKitchen My blog, Abbey’s Kitchen www.abbeyskitchen.comMy book, The Mindful Glow Cookbook affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3NoHtvf If you liked this podcast, please like, follow, and leave a review with your thoughts and let me know who you want me to discuss next!

We know that wellness influencers have increasingly been pushing diets that are really high in animal fats, really low in fiber, keto diet, the carnivore diet, demonizing plant-based oils. And so are we seeing a shift in demographics because of this influencer impact? Welcome to another episode of Bite Back with Abbey Sharp, where I dismantle diet culture rules, call out the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. So a few weeks ago I posted an education-packed episode with Dr. Andrea Love. And honestly, I was just so eager to keep her on the line all day. So we decided to bring you another info packed app.

Now, in case you missed it, Andrea, as a PhD immunologist and microbiologist and founder of Immunologic.org, a science and health education organization committed to debunking health and wellness misinformation. In our last episode together, we focused on the wide range of current wellness myths as perpetuated by America's new health secretary, RFK Jr., but today we are going to be narrowing in on cancer. This rides on the recent release of Netflix's hit new series, Apple Cider Vinegar, that

delves into the true story of Belle Gibson, an Australian wellness influencer who falsely claimed to have cured her terminal cancer through natural remedies and a healthy diet. Much more than your standard con woman story, the series is really a cautionary tale of what happens when we look to influencers over legitimate health care providers for our health care advice. Today, Andrew and I are going to be talking a lot more about this dangerous online phenomenon. We're also going to be unpacking the truth about rising colon cancer rates, hot dogs, the effects of keto, and fasting on cancer cells.

And I'm going to finish with some realistic and hopefully reassuring statistics about the risk of so-called carcinogens like aspartame in our diet. A reminder that the information in this episode is for entertainment and educational purposes only and should never be a replacement for one-on-one healthcare. Especially when we are dealing with cancer. Also, I would love if you would give Fightback a follow wherever you listen to your podcast, and leave me a little 5 star review because it really really does help me out. And also, there may be some apple cider vinegar spoilers, so don't say I didn't warn you if you were planning to watch it.

Alright friends, let's get into it. Thank you so much Andrea. I am so excited to have you back on and thank you for taking the time again. Yeah, thanks for having me back. There's so many topics we can clearly cover. So many. Okay, so did you watch Apple Cider Vinegar? I did, actually. I got messaged about it incessantly and in between all of, you know, the dumpster fire that is the planet, I did manage to watch it. Now, I knew it was going to happen because I've been kind of in that world

for a long time. But it hits a little bit differently when you kind of see it, you know, created into a dramatization on a TV show. Yeah, I know. I'm such an empath. I cried so hard when like Milla's mom died because the burden of responsibility for that would as a daughter would just crush me. But I really just think it was like a cautionary tale of just the enormous amount of responsibility that wellness influencers have, even though they have like most of them have no business having that responsibility. You know, I'm a healthcare professional myself, and even I find that responsibility like a huge, you know, a lot to kind of process. So I don't take that influence lightly at all. And it's not even like we learned

from that experience. Like we just recently saw another Australian wellness influencer, Elle MacPherson, attribute her remission from breast cancer to, quote, unquote, holistic alternative therapies, even though she also had a lump, you know, a lump back to me and didn't really talk much about that. Like, I don't know how these people sleep at night when this is the message that they're putting out there. But why is cancer specifically just like such a magnet for dangerous misinformation and like quackery? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

And I would love to have like flip a switch, have the solution. But the biggest reason that cancer, the whole topic of cancer is kind of ripe for misinformation is because of what cancer actually is, right? Cancer, contrary to what some people believe, it's a category, it's a catch-all term for hundreds of different diseases. And each one of those different diseases is completely unique

in every single person that has cancer. And the reason for that is because cancer is a result of our normal healthy cells no longer listening to all of the cues and signals and regulation markers that they should be listening to, and they start growing out of control and then growing in places they shouldn't be. And when that happens,

they create this ecosystem within your body that is now completely ignorant of everything else that is going on in your body, no longer behaves like the cells it originated from. And as a result, harms your physiology, it starves your body of nutrients, it hijacks your immune system, and a lot of the complications that occur

as a result of tumors growing bigger and bigger are a result of your body shutting down because it can't compete with the cancer that's growing. And so cancers in and of themselves are incredibly complex because every single one is derived from an individual and every single person is genetically unique, which means every single cancer is genetically unique. And we also know that cancer now is one of the top three causes of death, right?

But the reason that it's a leading cause of death is because we're no longer dying of acute illness, infection, disease, because of things like vaccines and antibiotics and disinfectants and surgical measures and blood transfusions and all these things. And so as a result, our life expectancy has increased. And as a result, now people are living to the point where these mutations might happen as we live. And as a result, cancer develops. So cancer is really a disease of aging. So the longer a population lives,

the more likely people are going to develop and die of cancer because as morbid as it sounds, we're all gonna die of something. And cancer is a natural outcome because your cells can only behave properly for so long. And when you age, your cells age too. Right. And so a lot of the statistics about cancer

are also really misleading because people say, well, one in three people will develop cancer in their lifetime. And, you know, you have a 40% chance of developing cancer, but it leaves out that context, right? So the context is that 80% of cancers occur in people over 50 because cancer is a disease of aging and the median age of getting diagnosed with cancer is 61 and the likelihood that you will develop cancer under the age of 40 is 0.1% because again, your body actually

has ways to repair those mutations before they get to a point where cancer will, you know, progress. And eventually as you get older, those mechanisms, these corrective mechanisms, these error proofing mechanisms, they also start to age as well and they get less effective. So again, it gets really confusing because, you know, you say breast cancer and everyone knows someone that had breast cancer or you say pancreatic cancer. And a lot of people know someone that had pancreatic cancer and probably died from pancreatic cancer because usually when it's diagnosed, it's very late stage. But not all cancers are a death sentence and many cancers are incredibly treatable and curable.

But think of cancer as a very scary thing because of kind of the discourse that exists in the society. Because yes, it can be fatal. It is a leading cause of death, but you have to use that context when you're talking about cancer. And in reality, the earlier you detect a cancer, the more treatable it is and the better their survival is. Yeah. So you were talking about cancer being a disease of aging. And so, you know, we are now seeing a lot of these very scary headlines that cancer rates in young people are quote unquote skyrocketing, especially when we're talking about colon cancer, which is one that has really made the news recently. Like what's actually going on here? You know, is colon cancer rates skyrocketing because of our diet or is this just a matter of detection or what's actually going on here? You know, is colon cancer rates skyrocketing because of our diet, or is this just a matter of detection,

or what's happening? Yeah, that's a great question. And I would say, as with almost everything with cancer, it's probably multifactorial. There's probably multiple contributors. But the first thing is that the term skyrocketing is really, really misleading. It's really clickbait, and it's not what's actually happening.

So when we talk about cancer, we have to talk about incidents. And incidents is diagnoses. So new cases that are diagnosed or detected within a certain time period. Unfortunately, there's a lot of wellness influencers who replace that with prevalence, which is the number of people that are living with cancer,

meaning the better we are treating, the longer people live, the is the number of people that are living with cancer, meaning the better we are treating, the longer people live, the better the outcomes, you're going to have higher prevalence because they're not dying of the cancer anymore, right? They're surviving with the cancer. So we want to look at incidence. So this is new cases and we normalize to population because as our population grows, we don't want to artificially inflate our numbers. Of course. So we normalize usually to 100,000. So if you look at colon cancer rates, colorectal cancer is the most common of the age demographics in people over 65. So the rate is about 215 cases per 100,000 people over 65. The least common group is adults under 40, and that's about six cases per 100,000.

So yeah, I mean, older people are getting way more colon cancer than younger people are. Now, when we talk about the skyrocketing or the increase that has been reported, this relates to an increase in the rate. So we've seen an increase in the rate of colorectal cancer among adults under 50. And that increase in the rate is about 21%.

Now on the flip side, we've seen a decrease in colorectal cancer rates in people over 50. So we're seeing a little bit of an increase in the rates in people under 50, but that's matched by a decline in older people. So are we detecting them earlier? Are symptoms appearing earlier

and we're getting better at recognizing them? Or is it true, we're having this kind of shift in age? It could be a little bit of both, but when we're talking about like this 1% increase, we're talking about going from 6.4 cases per 100,000 to 6.46 cases per 100,000, right? So that 1% is a function of that rate, which means that we're talking about roughly 300 more cases in people under 50 relative to the 150,000 cases that are diagnosed in the

US every year. So is there a little bit of an increase in younger people being diagnosed? Yes, there's also a decrease in older people being diagnosed, but you have to have that context, right? On top of that, when they're talking about risk factors, every headline is like, it's the ultra-processed foods, it's the seed oils, it's this, it's the inflammatory. Well, we know a lot of risk factors for colorectal cancer already, and those are things that

are considered modifiable risk factors, and they're things that cancer biologists like myself have talked about for a really long time. So things that increase risk of colorectal cancer is a diet that is low in fiber. Fiber is incredibly important for a lot of body systems, but definitely gastrointestinal health, and that includes your colon and your rectum. It's also excess consumption of alcohol. Alcohol is a risk factor, a leading risk factor

for at least seven different types of cancer, including colorectal cancer. Tobacco, smoking, nicotine, anything kind of related to that bucket. I try to include smokeless tobacco. Those things are all increased risk factors for colorectal cancer. A sedentary lifestyle is a risk factor for colorectal cancer and also obesity. And I understand there's a diverse range of body types, but having excess fat tissue relative to your body mass is a risk factor for colorectal cancer.

So when we're talking about that and people are kind of demonizing the seed oils or the bag of chips, it's not the bag of chips, right? It's the fact that your overall dietary composition is not rich in lean proteins and fiber and things with lots of nutrients. A bag of chips is not singularly causing colorectal cancer. And so we really need to shift this discussion to there's no single food ingredient, there's

no single food that's harmful in and of itself. It's when your entire diet is something like that, that doesn't have fiber, that doesn't have nutrients, and you're not exercising. And there's a lot of societal barriers to these things. But those are known risk factors for colorectal cancer. So if we're talking about that, we need to be talking about what those trends are in this younger demographic. Right? We know that wellness influencers have increasingly been pushing diets that are really high in animal fats, really low in fiber, keto diet, the carnivore diet, demonizing plant-based oils like seed oils, when actually the data show that they're

actually one of the better sources of fat for your diet. And so, are we seeing a shift in demographics because of this influencer impact? I don't have that answer, but it wouldn't surprise me if we're seeing a shift because of these lifestyle habits that are causing people to not eat fiber, not do that. Then you have the added layer of, well, how do we find colorectal cancer in the first place aside from, you know, blooding, active blood in your stool, which is kind of a late stage symptom and you don't want to ignore that. If there's blood in your poop, you definitely want to go to the doctor. But usually screening, right? Colorectal screening like coli guard, which is a stool based test or a colonoscopy, which is the gold standard. And we know that people that participate

in wellness behaviors like rejecting, you know, dietary recommendations are also less likely to go and get their preventive health screening. So are they not getting their colonoscopy when they're supposed to and that's allowing it to progress? I don't know that. But we've also lowered the age of colonoscopy screening guidance from 50 to 45, allowing it to progress? I don't know that. But we've also lowered the age of

colonoscopy screening guidance from 50 to 45, about five years ago. And so are we now catching some people that kind of fell into that kind of bucket, that straddle bucket, and we're now finding them before they turn 50? Again, I think it's probably a combination of all these things. But if you're not screening for things, you're not going to detect them. And so we do have to normalize, well, how many more people under 50 are we now screening for colorectal cancer versus how does that rate change? 100%.

That's so helpful for people to have that context. And speaking of colorectal cancer and scary statistics, you know, I find in general, again, the media often does not do a good job at explaining numbers very well. So, you know, for example, there was a 2021 meta-analysis that really kind of made the rounds that found that a daily intake of 50 grams of processed meats increased the risk of colon cancer by 16%. And I think when people hear 16%, that sounds kind of like, well, if you eat a BLT, a BLT, you now have a 16% chance of getting colon cancer. And that's scary. But that's not what those statistics mean. Can you kind of better explain what that actually means for somebody? Yeah, absolutely. So this is all like relative risk, right? So if you're talking about your relative risk, it's gonna be, okay, well, you know,

of the however many million people in that age demographic, the likelihood that you might develop cancer of that type is gonna be X percent. And so often when they're talking about these percentage increases, it's relative to that relative risk. And so it's not a linear, you had 0% risk and now you have that relative risk. And so it's not a linear six, you had 0% risk and now you have 16% risk.

It's that ratio. So it's very similar to this ratio of the rate, right? So if you're saying it's a 1% increase, you're going from 6.4 to 6.46. That seems really small, right? And so that's the same reality that we're talking about when we talk about these relative risks. And so when they're saying there's an increased risk

or there's an increased likelihood, this is all relative to that pretty low baseline threshold. On top of that, usually these studies that are trying to kind of parse out a singular food ingredient are what we call observational studies. And observational studies mean that we're not controlling other factors that could confound the data.

And usually they're based on asking people to fill out surveys about their dietary habits and whether or not they were diagnosed with colorectal cancer in a certain period of time and so on. And so, you know, within these surveys, they might ask, do you eat, you know, bacon? Do you eat deli meat? Do you eat, you know, liverwurst, whatever? And people might say yes and, you know, approximate how often they ate it or how much they ate it. And that's not necessarily the only thing that's going on, right? Because you have to factor in their overall dietary

consumption of other things, right? Is it a skewed proportion where their majority eating these things that we know are devoid in other protective nutrients? Are they not going to their well visits? Do they have a sedentary lifestyle? Do they consume alcohol? Like all these other lifestyle factors that can impact that.

Now, some studies try to correct for that, but it misses a lot of the nuance inside because we know that certain communities have limited access to some of these things that we know are protective. And so generally speaking, there isn't a definitive study that says, if you eat a BLT, you're gonna get cancer, right?

Right. Because there isn't one, that data doesn't exist. And generally speaking, if you are going to have some processed meats every now and then, and everything else is, you know, healthy, nutritious, whatever you're doing doing all the right things, this isn't something that you should be fixating on. Because by the same token,

someone could be a lifelong smoker, chronic alcoholic, never exercise, never do anything, and they would never develop any cancer. And another person could be the healthiest on paper that you could possibly be. They go to the gym, they do the right amount of exercise, not too much, not too little. They get good sleep, they minimize their stress,

they do all this, and they could still develop cancer, right, because cancers are really complicated and really unique, and you can't predict if someone's gonna get cancer or someone's not, but that also makes it so easy to spread misinformation about it because these studies that are trying to just find associations are often taken out of context and it gets really scary.

And so my general rule of thumb for people is if they're making a claim that's kind of like blanket like that, the truth is almost always way more complicated than what the headline is trying to tell you. Yeah, 100%. And yeah, I think that how complicated cancer is really does play into why we as a society are so hyper fixated on finding that like one diet hack that, you know, that just cut this food out and and you won't get cancer because we want that sense of control. Absolutely yeah. But let's talk a

little bit more about nutrition and cancer because obviously we have tons of doctors on podcasts like Stephen Bartlett's Dyer of a CEO and obviously Joe Rogan and the usual charlatan circuit. They're all making these bold cancer diet statements. One of course being that sugar feeds cancer. So we gotta cut out sugar. We gotta go keto so that we don't get cancer or we can cure our cancer. What's the deal there?

Yeah, so this is, you know, just like with most pseudoscience, it's kind of grown out of a nugget of truth. And you pretty much find that with any claim you can find online, right? And so when it comes to this kind of sugar and cancer phenomenon, it started because of a biological phenomenon that was observed

a really long time ago. So there's a phenomenon called the Warburg effect, which is related to how cancers metabolize substances, specifically glucose, in order to produce energy. So essentially when a cell gets an energy source, right, when we think about calories, when we think about macronutrients, our body doesn't view them as that, right?

Our body breaks it down into these smaller subunits in order to get into these pathways, these metabolic pathways that they create energy from. So our usable form of energy is not a calorie, it's a molecule of ATP. And, you know, but that's kind of getting into the weeds on it. But when we talk about what a cell needs nutrients for, it needs nutrients to make energy so it can do all of its processes

so you can live, but it also needs nutrients to make new cells. And so this is called biosynthesis, meaning that when you eat fats, it's going to liberate the components, the subunits of fats to then make more membranes of cells, because membranes of cells are made out of fats, or it's gonna take proteins you eat and it's gonna use those amino acids to make proteins in your body, like those endocrine receptors we were talking about,

and so on. And so when your cells get energy or get these molecules, carbohydrates, fats, sugar, you know, so on, they're going to shuttle them into different directions, right? Some of them are gonna get used to make energy. Some of them are gonna get used to make these, you know, subunits that are gonna be used to make new cells.

So in the context of cancer, cancer's goal is to grow really quickly, right? So it's reproducing, it's making baby cancer cells more quickly than your healthy cells are going to be making healthy baby cells. And this process is called mitosis or cell division. And so in certain cancer types, this scientist Otto Warburg found that even when oxygen was present, which is important because we are aerobic organisms. We need oxygen to harness as much energy as possible. Even in the presence of oxygen, cancer cells were still using this

less efficient pathway and consuming glucose at higher rates. And it's because it's preferentially using this pathway to make more cell components so it can make more baby cancer cells because it doesn't need as much ATP. It's concerned with making more cancer cells are using glucose at a higher rate compared to a healthy cell was misrepresented by the public by saying, oh, well, the sugar is feeding the cancer cells. And this isn't actually true because if you deprive the cancer cells of sugar, they're just gonna find a different molecule to use to move into this pathway. Because if you don't have glucose,

it's gonna use something else. And so this got really conflated because every single cell in your body is using glucose as this precursor molecule to go into this metabolic pathway. And so this Warburg effect was basically saying that cancer cells are using glucose less efficiently, not that glucose is feeding cancer cells, right? And it's using it less efficiently because the goal is to make a tumor. And then on top of that, this is only true for certain cancer types.

Only a few cancers actually exhibit this Warburg effect. Now, on top of that though, cancers, tumors do have high metabolic rate because they're making a lot of cancer, right? They're making a lot of tumor cells as quickly as they can. They're reproducing more quickly than most cells in your body. And so that high metabolism means that they will consume

glucose quickly. So we use that phenomenon for a diagnostic test called a PET scan where we radioactively label a type of glucose and then we scan a person's body and you see where that glucose is being metabolized because once it's cut, it releases that radiation. And so you can see regions in the body that light up. That's used as a screening test to see if there are regions that might be a tumor. The problem with that is that

there are other places in the body that are gonna light up that are perfectly healthy, other places that are high metabolic sites like your brain, like your heart, like your spleen, which is an immune cell, your stomach, certain types of cells that turn over really quickly. So it's not unique to cancer cells because other cell types do have high metabolism. And we've actually done clinical tests where we've altered the sugar intake of cancer patients or people in general and looked at rates of cancer development or progression of cancer or remission of cancer.

And it's not having an impact, right? The main thing that's impacted by sugar is, what it's ultimately being used for, but you're not feeding cancer by eating sugar, whether it's added sugar or natural sugar, and you're not going to cure cancer or prevent cancer by depriving your body of it, because your body needs carbohydrates,

and if it doesn't get it from actual carbohydrates that you're eating, it's gonna take other molecules you've eaten and it's gonna break it apart into molecules that it can then shuttle into that metabolic pathway. Right, yeah, and is this kind of the same situation with something like fasting? Because again, we see that making the rounds that if you got to fast, you get every other day fast to kill the cancer. Is this kind of putting your body into a state of ketosis? Is that the idea?

So, you know, I'm not exactly sure where that first claim started, but, you know, obviously there's a lot of people that really don't understand like these actual metabolic pathways, but a lot of the fasting and the curing cancer also originated from Petri dish studies, where they're growing some cancer cells on a piece of plastic and they're like, hey, we're going to deprive it of some nutrients. We're gonna see what happens. And what happens is the cancer cells die, but your healthy cells will also die if you deprive them from nutrients

when they're growing on a piece of plastic. And the reality is, again, your body and a tumor growing in your body are not pieces of plastic. And so if you're fasting and you have cancer and your cancer has high metabolic demands, what's going to end up happening is that it's going to start digesting your tissues in order to liberate those molecules and get energy and get components to make new cancer cells. So it's actually very risky to fast or starve when you have cancer because your immune system

is also already out of whack because your immune system is also already out of whack because your cancer cells are actively suppressing and hiding out from it. It's messed with your vasculature, your circulatory system because it creates new blood vessels. So it's like shunting energy that it should be going elsewhere in your body to the cancer. And now you're actively depriving your body of nutrients,

which you need to fuel your immune system, which plays a really important role in surviving cancer. And so there's no good clinical evidence to suggest that, and it can be really, really risky. And I know you as a dietician, a lot of times people with cancer, they don't have an appetite, and that could be because of the cancer itself,

or it could be because of the treatment. And at that point, the goal is to get calories in them in whatever way possible, because at that point, the nourishment is way more important than the ratio of macromolecules. A hundred percent. It almost feels like, back to the Belle Gibson thing, it could be deadly advice. Absolutely. Really, when we are dealing with already weight loss, inadequate nutrient intake, the last thing you want to do when you've got cancer, when you're already dealing with low appetite, nausea, muscle loss, et cetera, is to further undernourish yourself. It's ludicrous, in my opinion. Absolutely. I agree. I think it's incredibly reckless and dangerous. And I wish that there

were repercussions, whether the person is a health professional or not. I mean, I've seen physicians make these recommendations and prescribe rigid diets. And we know that physicians are not dieticians. Dieticians are the ones that should be making nutritional plans and guidance, but even making these broad brush claims about how a keto diet is good for cancer, how you should do intermittent fasting, like there's no good evidence to suggest this, and there is evidence to suggest that it's dangerous. Okay, obviously everybody needs to, you know, work with their doctor alongside their doctor,

do their own risk benefit analysis based on a plethora of factors, which you know, you've outlined cancer is so it's individualized, it's unique. Your risk is unique. I'm curious just knowing so much about cancer, you know, as you do, what do you kind of focus on to reduce your risk long-term? Yeah, and this is, you know, it's tricky because, you know, we talked a little bit already about how

the reason that the wellness disinformation, especially when it comes to like the hacking your health and the unproven treatments and the dietary regimens, they gain legs because people want to control the outcome, right? They want to control the outcome in advance by preventing cancer, they want to control the outcome if they're diagnosed with cancer, they want to feel like they have an active role in it. And it can be really, really hard for people to contend with the fact that there's a lot

that's out of your control, right? And so for some people it's really liberating and it can really reduce your stress because now you feel like, well, I can do the fundamentals, but like in the grand scheme of things, like a little bit of a is a crap shoot, right? And for other people that can be really, really, really anxiety inducing. And as someone that really understands cancer and works in cancer immunotherapy research,

I kind of find it liberating because I think that, especially in this disinformation ecosystem, we have this like risk perception gap, right? People are fixated on all of these things that pose almost no risk to your health. And it causes this immense emotional, psychological and physical burden, right? They're scouring food labels,

they're reading all these vaccine scene inserts. They don't even know what's on the vaccine inserts. They're doom scrolling on social media. They're following all these people scene inserts. They don't even know what's on the vaccine inserts. They're doom scrolling on social media. They're following all these people that are telling them they're poisoning themselves at every single turn. And they're neglecting the contribution of stress and poor sleep and anxiety in our overall health, right? Your immune system is influenced by your stress levels

and how well you sleep. And if you're up all night because you're freaking out because of all these things, that's probably going to have actually a worse impact on your health than just ignoring all of that nonsense in the first place. And the other thing is that the reality is that those things, the reason it's called the risk perception gap

is because you're perceiving they're a risk, but in reality, they're not actually a risk. And we have a lot of good evidence, right? We know the big things, right? Usually when I talk about like supporting your immune system, these are the same things that can like mitigate or reduce your risk of cancer. It's not going to eliminate it because there are things out of your control, but getting good sleep, getting vaccines, including the vaccines that actually prevent cancers like HPV and hepatitis B, these actually prevent many,

many types of cancer because those cancers are directly caused by the virus. Minimizing alcohol, minimizing smoking and tobacco, getting moderate exercise, trying to minimize your stress as best you can, getting good sleep, a well-balanced diet, but that doesn't mean that you have to be super rigid. I have ice cream every single night, including in the winter, because it makes me super happy and I love it and I have no qualms about it. It also means like overall hygiene, right?

Oral hygiene, sexual hygiene, food hygiene, because all of these things can lead to infections that can increase potential risks of cancer. So those are the things I focus on. And then the other modifiable risk factors like minimizing excess UV exposure. So wearing sunscreen or wearing a hat, wear, you know, all of those sorts of things.

Now, I get very pale in the winter and I feel like a ghost and I love the sun in the summer. And so, you know, am I not quite as diligent about wearing sunscreen as I could be? Maybe sometimes, but again, that's the risk that I've accepted on the day that I forgot to put sunscreen. And I'm like, listen, I did that to myself. That was stupid.

I'm gonna do better next time. But you don't freak out about it, right? Because you can also go to a dermatologist and get any abnormalities looked at. And a lot of skin cancers are really treatable early on. And then that also means doing all of my preventive screenings, right? Doing my well visits,

getting my breast exams, getting my mammograms when I'm of age, when I'm, you know, when I'm eligible then and getting my colonoscopies, because the early detection, it's not going to prevent the cancer, but if you find it at an earlier stage, it's much more treatable. It's often cured, curative, and then you don't have to stress there on. So, you know, I, again, I focus on the big picture things. I'm very fortunate that I don't have any, like, specific genetic risk factors or things like that, but if I were someone that maybe had a BRCA mutation or a HER2 mutation or familial history of something,

then I would maybe add on some additional layers, right? Like, maybe I would get more often screenings for, you know, skin cancer or something. Or if I was very fair skinned or I was of a certain descent, then there would be other things that you would add into your repertoire. But fixating on not eating a bag of chips or fixating on a single food coloring or fixating on the miniscule levels of pesticides that are not posing a risk is doing way more harm than good because those things aren't actually linked to cancer in people. But the big picture stuff can be. Yeah, I think that is so helpful. And you and I obviously we share similar views

in terms of kind of managing the stress of worrying about all these minuscule little components that really could eat away at you and therefore reduce your actual health outcomes versus just thinking about the big picture. Really, I'm always about, I'm all about the long-term game here. I think nutrition, wellness, health has to focus on the big picture. And unfortunately, wellness culture and diet culture loves to zone in on those miniscule little things that ultimately just don't move the needle. So this was so amazing. Yeah, absolutely. And one last thing I will add, because it's not about the preventing of the cancer, but science and scientific research has gotten really good at treating cancers when they've

appeared that mortality and outcomes are better than they ever were. So, you know, cancer isn't, yes, it's a scary diagnosis, absolutely. Yeah, it's super stressful, but we have so many more treatments than we used to have. Cancers that were previously always or nearly always fatal are now almost always survivable and curative. So, you know, I think it's good to do the big picture stuff,

but also, you know, approach it where, okay, I don't wanna run away from a diagnosis because now there are better ways to treat it too. And that's also because of science and research and all the data that we've recruited. Right, 100%. And back to the Bell-Gibson thing, trust science. Science is so incredible.

We've come so far, like, you know, we shouldn't be ignoring this. We shouldn't be running away from this. And I think it's, you know, again, that Apple Cider Vanger was really a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when we when we turn away from the amazing advances that we have made in this space. So this was so incredibly amazing. And even though of course, we focused

on cancer specifically, I think the teachings here are easily applied to basically anything else you read or see online. Absolutely. So I will be leaving links to your content below, which are so useful and definitely, I also recommend everyone checks out our RFK Junior episode as well. So thank you again, Andrea. Thanks Abby. Honestly, I could do 10 million interviews with Andrea

and not run out of questions to ask, but I think that this discussion on cancer misinformation speaks to the problems that arise when the media doesn't actually understand the science or the data that it's reporting on. Whether it's equating eating a hot dog to smoking, aspartame to diesel fuel, or glyphs in your cereal to formaldehyde, there's some major knowledge gaps in forming these clickbaity associations. Putting aside the role of wellness scripters who will try to convince you that anything that they

don't sell is cancer-causing, I honestly think we could prevent a lot of cancer communication confusion just by choosing a different word than carcinogen. Because to any reasonable layperson, carcinogen is translated to mean causes cancer. So when we see a news article pop up in our feed claiming that processed meats are probable carcinogens, we think, holy shit, if I eat a single hot dog, I'm probably going to get cancer right after, when that isn't anything close to what the data suggests. These classifications like probable carcinogen or possible carcinogen come from the International Agency

for Research on Cancer or the IARC's carcinogen classification system. Basically, the IARC analyzes all the existing research on a particular substance and cancer and creates a monograph of the hazard of a particular substance as it pertains to cancer. The word hazard is really the key here. A carcinogen or cancer hazard

is simply any hypothetical situation where in some very specific circumstance, even if super rare, that it could potentially lead to cancer. That's nice to know, of course, but it tells us nothing about a person's actual risk. Risk is the combination of a hazard plus exposure. Risk is far more important when it comes to cancer because it tells us the likelihood

that cancer will occur when you're exposed to a hazard, or in this case, a carcinogen. The most famous way of explaining this is the shark analogy. A shark swimming around near a resort beach is, of course, a hazard. But if you're sitting up at the hotel bar sipping a pina colada, the chances of you getting attacked are virtually zero, so there's no actual risk. But if you go into the water, where you now have a realistic exposure to the hazard, you have put yourself at risk of an attack. Now, if you just dip your toes in, the risk would be lower than if you decide to go 30 feet into the water to get a close look at the big fish while you're on your period. This is

why when we're talking about a substance or chemical and not being attacked by like a great white, we always say that the dose makes the poison. So now that we understand what these classifications even mean, let's apply this to a carcinogen that recently made a big splash online, aspartame. In the summer of 2023, the IRC announced that aspartame was a group 2b possible carcinogen, which really sent diet coke lovers into a real tizzy online. A group 2b carcinogen is defined as having only mechanistic evidence or limited evidence of possible carcinogenicity in humans or only sufficient evidence in animal models. Now in case you're wondering, other carcinogens in the same category include aloe vera, pickled

vegetables, progesterone contraceptives, and electromagnetic fields, which your cell phones emit all around you all day, every day. And yet, despite the controversy, there is an overwhelming amount of research to support the safety of aspartame in a dose anywhere close to what a human can reasonably consume. Don't believe me? Let's do some math! Based on a review of over 100 studies, the FDA has set an ADA, or acceptable daily intake, of 50 mg per kilogram of body weight, which is the amount a human could consume

every day for the rest of their lives without harm. And that number includes a 100-fold safety margin already built in. But let's say you've been convinced by wellness grifters online that the FDA is corrupt and not strict enough with food safety. I'm going to have to debunk that in another episode, but let's just use the European ADA of 40 milligrams per kilogram, just to be extra conservative.

A 60 kilogram or 130 pound woman would need to consume 1200 cans of diet coke every day for life to see a single potential negative effect. And believe it or not, you would die from water toxicity less than 10% of your way there. In other words, aspartame is only a cancer risk if you're drinking over 400 litres of it, and likely even more than that since the ADA is based on any adverse event, not just cancer. So bottom line, as Andrea has discussed on many of her platforms, no one food, substance, exposure, experience or toxin causes cancer. Cancer risk is based on

multiple factors for which diet is only one consideration. So as with all other aspects of our health, we need to think big picture because a hot dog on the 4th of July is not going to be anyone's demise. But folks, that is all that I have for you guys today. A big thank you to Dr Andrea Love for this incredibly insightful episode. I'm going to be leaving links to her social media and sub stack and all of her incredible content in the show notes, and I highly recommend you check that out. And also, don't forget to listen to our previous episode on RFK Jr. and the Maha Lies. I would also love if you would give ByteBack a follow and 5-star

review and also if you could leave me a little message, it would be so amazing, it really does make my day. But signing off with Science and Sass, I'm Abby Sharp, thanks for listening. you