[ad_1]
The Happy Pear twins Stephen and David Flynn are facing a backlash after posting a video online suggesting ways to reduce the risk of developing breast cancer through diet.
he video, which has since been deleted from their Instagram account, made claims about breast cancer rates in women in the UK and other high income countries, and put forward ways people can reduce their risk of breast cancer.
The video was today branded “factually wrong” by scientist Dr David Robert Grimes, whose work has included research on cancer and tumors and who says diet is just a small contributing factor to developing the disease.
The vegan brothers run a successful café and shop in Greystones, Co Wicklow, and are well known for their cookbooks and courses and espousal of healthy lifestyles.
However, the short video posted to the pair’s Instagram promoting their most recent podcast episode, came in for heavy criticism online, with many commenters urging them to remove the video.
Over video footage, a voiceover on the clip said: “One in seven women in the UK and other high income countries will get a diagnosis of breast cancer in their lifetime, versus one in a hundred in Hong Kong and one in a thousand in China .
“Some of the possible factors are excessive saturated fat intake, excessive dairy intake and excessive animal products intake.
“Here’s five things to reduce your risk; aim for a healthy body weight, eat mostly whole food, plant-based. Aim for eight to 13 fruit and veg portions per day; reduce alcohol consumption, avoid smoking and move regularly; eat mushrooms – reduces your risk of breast cancer, east soy products two to three times per day.”
An image from the video posted on the Happy Pear Instagram
However, Dr. Grimes told Independent.ie that even if someone did everything ‘right’, the amount of modifiable risk – the ability of a person to affect their chances of getting the disease – is only 30pc. The WHO echoes this, saying it’s “at most 30pc”.
“There comes a line where you have patients and people that get cancer essentially blaming themselves and feeling ashamed about it,” he said.
“I’m sure that’s not the intention, but that’s the actuality of that kind of stuff. It’s also factually wrong. It’s one thing if it was correct but it is not.
“The amount of modifiable risk from breast cancer is only about 30pc. Even if you did everything ‘right’ – I hate using that term – but if you had the healthiest lifestyle in the world…cancer is still just cancer. It’s not a moral failing, it is a disease,” the writer and broadcaster said.
He said there is no clear evidence to back up the claim that reducing dairy will impact a person’s risk of getting cancer.
“Most cancer research groups, charities and institutes in the world will tell you that the evidence does not support that at all,” he said.
“In some cancers like bowel cancers, it can decrease risk.
David Robert Grimes, a Dublin-based cancer researcher and author of The Irrational Ape
“In the video they also tried to make an inference about the population about parts of Asia versus the population of Europe and there are massive differences in a lot of things there.
You can’t just pin it down to diet – it gets very hard to figure out exactly what diet is doing – but the truth of the matter is that it’s probably not doing that much.”
Dr Grimes added: “Ideally, you avoid obesity as it is 100pc a cancer risk, but everything else is too nebulous to make a strong conclusion on.”
The Dublin-based author of The Irrational Ape says that cancer is largely to do with aging, is “usually random” and “there’s no justice in it”.
“I have lost people in their 20s that I loved to cancer who did everything ‘right’,” he said.
Dr. Grimes says people often lean on something called ‘Just World theory’ to try and explain the outcomes we experience in life. This theory asserts that there’s a reason for everything.
“It’s reassuring to people because they can say: I won’t do X because then y won’t happen to me but it goes into horrible, dark places,” he said.
“So the people who really aspire to this, they really want to believe it, because they believe it’ll stop them from getting cancer.
“The reality is there is a little bit of modifiable risk but it’s not that big and diet will not play as big apart as some would have you believe.”
He said that while he understands why people conflate medicine and food, he says they should never be mistaken for one in the same and are “actually completely different things”.
“Food is incredibly important and people are passionate about it but the problem is sometimes that passion spills over into an emotional judgment with different food types,” he said.
“Diet is not a panacea. Eating well is important for living but it’s not the be all and end all of cancer and actually its role in modifiable risk is way smaller than most people would think.
“One of the most horrible things to see after a patient is diagnosed with cancer is when, with the best of intentions, people give them dietary advice that can seriously harm patients.
“I’ve heard of patients being told to cut out carbs or sugar or go on ketogenic diets.
“Restrictive diets often result in patients losing weight as they are by nature restrictive and often maintaining weight through cancer treatment. These tidbits, although well-meaning, are often harmful.”
Dr. Grimes says this episode highlights one basic lesson from all of this that everyone should adhere to.
“None of us should ever be taking our health advice from social media. Absolutely none of us.
“We’ve seen through the pandemic and we are still living with the consequences of that. People with very bad ideas before gurus and starting dispensing Covid advice and people died. People definitely died unnecessarily.”
The video had been removed from the Happy Pear’s Instagram account by Saturday afternoon.
David and Stephen Flynn have been contacted for comment by Independent.ie.
|
Sources 2/ https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/backlash-against-happy-pear-twins-over-factually-wrong-video-on-reducing-breast-cancer-risk-41580554.html The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article |
[ad_2]