Dylan Scott
speaker
698 appearances
10 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 16 Sep
Dylan Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Colorectal cancer, I think, is the big one. It is the, like, if you look at the incident rates in some of these studies, besides breast cancer, it is the type of cancer that has the highest incidence among young adults. But it's not just colorectal cancer. It's Uterine cancers, gallbladder, kidney cancers. People might have heard about Dwayne Wade, who is like by this definition, a young adult.
It seems to be sort of up and down the digestive track where this seems to be happening, with the one exception is breast cancer, which we've continued to see a higher rate of breast cancer among young people over the same period. But if we set that aside, which is obviously like a big exception, it seems to be a lot happening, yeah, up and down the digestive track.
That's where we're seeing in particular these big increases over time among young people.
So this is maybe the most interesting thing that I learned in reporting out this study and talking to a bunch of these cancer researchers who are as befuddled by all of this as we are. So it seems that your individual risk of many different types of cancers actually depends on something that's totally out of your control, which is when you were born.
Like somebody who was born in 1975 had nearly twice the chance of developing like an intestinal cancer compared to somebody who was born in 1955, 20 years earlier. And likewise, if we look like at younger people, people born in 1990, they're at even a higher risk of developing cancers than those people born in 1955 or even 1975. a couple of things likely at work here.
One does seem to be like the the changes in food production and the proliferation of processed foods, which is obviously something that like basically if you eat in the modern world, you're consuming more processed foods than people used to. And so there have been like systematic reviews of the available literature, including one that was published just in 2022.
that have said, like, if you eat more deep fried fruits, if you eat more processed foods, if you eat foods high in fat, sugary drinks and desserts, and if you're really bad about eating fiber and things that are really good for your digestive system, you are more likely to develop cancer.
And so that tracks, when we think about the obesity crisis, we know that our diets have been getting worse and they've been contributing to all kinds of negative health outcomes like diabetes and heart disease. And it seems like cancer is another example of how these changes in our diet and our food production may be leading to adverse outcomes. There's also been a lot of focus on microplastics.
And we've likewise seen that those just have proliferated in the environment over the period from the 70s to today, where we've seen this big increase in cancer incidents among young people. And there was actually a specific paper published by a research team based in New Zealand that basically tracked the timeline of...
the multiplication of microplastics in the environment and the cancer rates among young people. And they basically found that they seem to be happening in parallel. It's an alchemy of all these things. It's a combination of we're eating worse. We're getting exposed to the stuff in our environment. We're still drinking a lot. We're not getting enough sleep.
We're probably not exercising enough either. And when you stir all of those things together, you have more young people developing cancer.
Look, it's really scary to be confronting these trends, but there is a lot of promising activity when it comes to both cancer diagnostics and cancer treatment. We are starting to make it easier for people to administer tests at home that might give them an idea of...
Either whether they, you know, there's something in their blood or their stool that indicates they may be developing cancer right now, or they can get tested for like their genetic background. And maybe they have just like those sort of built in risks because of their genes. And like, you know, there's blood tests that have been developed that are like really good at catching late stage cancers.
And now so the next, you know, the next frontier for them is trying to catch early cancers or like pre-cancerous growths. And so I think as those consumer products keep developing, that should allow us to screen more people, screen younger people, and hopefully catch some of these cancers earlier so that we can have better outcomes. And so that's on the diagnostic side.
In terms of treatment, I've been writing about this for 10 years now. There's been a ton of progress with what are called immunotherapies, which is the old way of treating cancer has been We're going to just blast this shit with as much radiation as we can find and hope that that kills the cancer because otherwise we don't know how to do it.
But it obviously has all of these really terrible side effects. People feel horrible, they lose their hair, whatever. And what we're trying to do now with these immunotherapies is like, let's remove radiation and all this chemical nastiness from the equation. Let's like train the body's immune system to fight these cancers on its own.
A lot of the improvements that we have seen to cancer prognoses, especially among older people, has been because we're developing these immunotherapies that are teaching the body how to fight the cancer by itself. And then when you combine things like
Genetic sequencing, like cancer, we talk about cancer as like one thing, but it's actually like, you know, thousands upon thousands of different diseases and being able to identify like, okay, we know you have like a tumor in your colon, but if we can test it genetically and figure out exactly what type of colon cancer it is, then we can get you, make sure we get you the exact right therapy that, you know, has these proteins or whatever that can better target that cancer.
So I don't know fully what's in the hearts of the Trump administration. But what I can say is that the last time around, they proposed very serious cuts to foreign aid. None of them passed Congress, but this was a very consistent proposal during Trump's first term.
I think also it's an easy target. Strong people coming in and finding the weakest part of the federal government and throwing it against a wall to make an example out of it.
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