2 thoughts on “Kenneth K. Carroll

  1. shinichi Post author

    Fat in the diet and cancer. In countries where people eat lots of fat like the United States rates of breast cancer and colon cancer are high. See figure 8 (above). This correlation is often used to argue that fat in the diet causes cancer. How good is the evidence?

    Discussion. If fat in the diet causes cancer, then the points in the diagram should slope up, other things being equal. So the diagram is some evidence for the theory. But the evidence is quite weak, because other things aren’t equal. For example, the countries with lots of fat in the diet also have lots of sugar. A plot of colon cancer rates against sugar consumption would look just like figure 8, and nobody thinks that sugar causes colon cancer. As it turns out, fat and sugar are relatively expensive. In rich countries, people can afford to eat fat and sugar rather than starchier grain products. Some aspects of the diet in these countries, or other factors in the life-style, probably do cause certain kinds of cancer and protect against other kinds. So far, epidemiologists can identify only a few of these factors with any real confidence. Fat is not among them.

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