Keep it stupid, simple

I can't help but think sometimes that we have a habit of over-complicating things. Take for instance this natty little device - the SmartFork. For the low, low price of $100 (plus shipping, plus a $10 yearly protection plan), you can get hold of the latest innovation in food-mouth-interface devices. Have you ever looked at your fork and thought, "well, it does poke food and let me cram it into my gaping maw - but it doesn't have bluetooth"? Well then this is the device for you! Okay, so the idea is that it is used to aid in weight loss, and allows you to track what you eat and how fast you eat it. In particular, it encourages you to slow down to allow your body's natural "I'm full" message to actually reach your brain, before you pile in another pie.

I'm sure that conceptually it is a useful product. I just can't help but think that it's massively over-complicating a relatively simple (although obviously very important) issue. For $99 less you could just buy a smaller plate so that you don't overdo the serving sizes. Or just, y'know, slow down when you eat. Do you need a glowing fork to do that?

But this got me thinking about how we, as a species, like to over-complicate things. "There's an app for that" - there's a worrying verisimilitude to that statement these days. Despite what old people might tell you, kids these days probably aren't dumber than in the good 'ol days. A well-supported phenomenon known as the Flynn Effect (after it's main proponent James Flynn) suggests that our overall intelligence is actually increasing by about 3 points a decade. When people from different generations take older version of IQ tests (as well as tests in semantics, cognition, memory, etc), they always do better than previous generations. The most plausible reason for this effect is the increase in complexity in our lives since the dawn of the industrial age - kidz [sic] today need to be aware of much more stuff (even useless stuff like Twitter) than people from past generations. There's a good TED talk on the subject from James Flynn last year here.

Hoax email and website on "how to avoid cancer"

This is nothing to do with running, but I feel like the following is worth highlighting.

I was a bit disappointed yesterday to see this blog post being posted around Facebook from some of my friends. The blog purports to discuss new research from Johns Hopkins that essentially says that eating healthily and exercising is an effective alternative treatment for cancer than chemotherapy and radiotherapy. To quote:

"AFTER YEARS OF TELLING PEOPLE CHEMOTHERAPY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TRY AND ELIMINATE CANCER, JOHNS HOPKINS IS FINALLY STARTING TO TELL YOU THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY…"

There then follows a point by point description of why cutting out sugar, milk and meat from your diet and exercising can replace nasty cancer treatments like surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. 

Now believe me - I hate cancer. Like many of you out there, it has touched my life on a personal level, so much so that I actually moved fields while studying for my PhD to enter into the field of cancer genetics to try and help find a solution. And that is why articles like this really piss me off.

To be clear - this article IS A HOAX.

It is not just wrong advice. It is dangerous advice. Your first point of call, and the advice that should trump all others, is that from a medical professional. However, it is inevitably an incredibly difficult time, and of course anything that you can do to help is obviously encouraged. Complementary treatments are used by many people. But these should always be in addition to and never instead of medical treatment. 

One thing to remember is that a lot of research and testing has gone into chemotherapy drugs and the like, whereas alternative medicines have essentially zero regulation, and sometimes no credible research either. Research that is published in some back-woods journal that nobody has heard of might cut it in a relatively underfunded field like sports science, but I'm afraid that in this field any radical conclusions had better be based on research in a high impact journal.

This particular article is based on a hoax email that has been doing the rounds, and Johns Hopkins have released a press release specifically to combat the false claims made in this article. This rebuttal is very clear and succinct, so if you want a full run-down on everything that is wrong with this article (almost every single one of the "facts" is incorrect), then please read it. 

But I found myself making my own list of corrections for one of my friends when he was genuinely interested to find out what was wrong. I have copied and pasted my post below, which was written in haste to just cover some of the basic points to clearly show why you should not trust this information. There are probably some errors here, but I haven't bothered to correct it because I feel like there is a good lesson to be learnt here:

Please do not take medical advice from a blog!!!

First of all their interpretation of what a cancer cell is is very naive. Cells show mutations all the time, due to mistakes in the DNA replication machinery, or brought on by environmental factors like UV radiation, smoking, etc. But the body has an amazing system in place to check for errors and either correct them or remove them. If something happens that prevents these checkpoints from working correctly, cells can grow unchecked which leads to tumours. What we call "cancer" typically is a tumour which has also developed the ability to spread to other sites in the body by a process known as metastasis, where cells break away into the blood stream or lymphatic system. This is why it is so difficult to fight because they are not localised to one place, so chemotherapy is used to attack the cells throughout the blood/lymph system. So this idea that "cancer cells occur 6-10 times in your life" is erroneous. Mutations occur millions of times but generally don't do anything. This article follows the very basic idea that cancer is a thing. Cancer is a catch-all term for many, many diseases that result in uncontrolled proliferation of cells. 

The immune system is not really involved in fighting cancer - it's nothing to do with how strong it is. Cancer cells are not detected by the immune system because they are not invading cells. That's kind of the point - they bypass the intrinsic checkpoints so the body can't detect that there is a problem. 

Whilst diet is a risk factor for cancer, and obviously eating healthily is a good idea, there's no evidence that "when a person has cancer it indicates multiple nutritional deficiencies". 

Whilst it's true that chemo and radiotherapy can also damage healthy cells (that's why you feel terrible and have issues like hair falling out), they are actually incredibly specific in their action. But improving recognition of the malignant cells in one of many areas of research in the field. 

I've never heard of surgery causing cancer to spread - I believe that this is entirely untrue. 

The idea that cancer cells respond in any way to the foods that you eat is ridiculous. What you eat can act as a risk factor to whether you get cancer in the first place, but the micro-environment of the cells themselves is not dependent on how much sugar you put into your body. 

Addendum: Whilst the idea of generally eating healthier having an effect on the micro-environment for cancer growth (as seems to be the point of the email) is largely bunk, a few studies that do show how diet can be used as effective cancer treatments have been brought to my attention by Andrew Jordan in the comments below. Whilst these are much more extreme dietary changes than simply not eating cakes, they are very interesting. A couple of examples are the works of Valter Longo et al who show that fasting can lead to cellular changes that protect them from the damaging effects of chemotherapy, and the work of Adrienne Scheck et al who show that switching to a ketogenic diet (almost cutting out carbs entirely and increasing fat intake so that ketones are utilised instead) can be used to treat some neurological conditions (e.g. epilepsy and brain cancers) since ketones are not metabolised as efficiently as carbs in the aberrant cells. 

Cancer does not "feed on mucus". 

It's "Johns Hopkins", not John Hopkins. 

It's "dimensions" not dimmentions. 

Again, exercise is good for you, but not because it makes you breathe more. You can breathe as much as you like but you're not going to create an oxygenated environment that will prevent growth of cancer cells. 

Believe me, I hate cancer as much as the next person, and it was my mother being diagnosed with breast cancer that made me focus my research on cancer research. I now work in one of the top epigenetics labs in the world trying to do what I can to help in the fight against cancer. But articles like this are not just unhelpful, they are downright dangerous. This is very very bad advice, that will unfortunately be taken at face value by some people.

Critical thinking

I think that most of us are savvy enough to realise that we shouldn't take stories in the media at face value, but it occasionally strikes me that not enough people critically evaluate the things that they read. In the running world there are many areas where people hold quite fervent views on what is the "best" way to do something; be it relating to diet (e.g. high carb vs. high fat), running style (e.g. forefoot vs. heel striking), shoe choice (barefoot, minimalist, Hokas, et al.), training methods (speed work or not for ultras?), training aids (does compression gear work?), etc. But one of the big problems that I see cropping up time and again, particularly with social media like Facebook and Twitter, are cases of what is termed confirmation bias - the tendency for people to take more notice of evidence that supports a view that they already hold. How often have you seen an advocate of barefoot running Tweet about the latest paper showing that barefoot running is more efficient? But how often do they Tweet about the latest research showing that no difference was found, or even that heel striking was shown to be preferable?

Let me just be clear; I am in no way commenting on the views themselves. I have my own opinions on all of these facets of running that have been borne out of experience (which is limited in terms of time, but extensive in other ways), as well as reading the limited scientific literature that exists. But I in no way claim that these opinions are correct. If I see compelling evidence that convinces me otherwise, I try things out, use what works for me, and change my opinions (as everybody should). To be honest, my view on a lot of these questions in sports science is that there is no right answer. You do what works for you. 

No; what I am commenting on in this post is the use of dodgy evidence to support these views.