Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases. It's a class of diseases characterized by the inability of your cells to regulate reproduction. Typically caused by cells that had errors in reproduction. Caused by various mutations. Those mutations are more likely with the introduction of certain things.
All of those things, smoking, alcohol, high BMI, are things that cause more mutations. Either through more reproduction or affecting that reproduction.
We kind of "get" cancer all the time. You could have cancer right now. But usually our body is good at getting rid of it by itself. It's when it can't that it becomes a problem.
Right, and for some more detail, recent studies on cellular energy metabolism and epigenetics suggests that DNA damage may happen more often when you're eating or metabolizing. This is because, your cells tend to reproduce when it has available food, and in order to reproduce, they need to make a copy of your DNA, and so it must open up structures and read your DNA to make a copy of the DNA. However, DNA is at greater risk of being damaged/corrupted (from chemicals like those in smoking, or food itself) when this process is occurring because the DNA is open for access, rather than being in an otherwise mostly packaged/protected state.
I’m not clear what the takeaway from this is as a human on the macro scale. Is this just support for time restricted eating?
Presumably most adult humans have, all else equal, roughly the same number of cells that live on average X days and then must copy themselves at some point during their lifespan. If I space my eating out to small amounts over the whole day but don’t increase calories am I going to get more DNA damage without more net cell growth in numbers?
Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases. It's a class of diseases characterized by the inability of your cells to regulate reproduction. Typically caused by cells that had errors in reproduction. Caused by various mutations. Those mutations are more likely with the introduction of certain things.
All of those things, smoking, alcohol, high BMI, are things that cause more mutations. Either through more reproduction or affecting that reproduction.
We kind of "get" cancer all the time. You could have cancer right now. But usually our body is good at getting rid of it by itself. It's when it can't that it becomes a problem.