Turkey tail grows here like a weed…go for a walk in the woods and the top 3 mushrooms you will find are Turkey tail and the 2 fake turkey tails. I just throw the whole thing into a mug of tea.
Reishi is hard to grow here and my friend that grows mushrooms for a living won’t do it because it takes too long to fruit. That one you have to buy/ import.
Bicep, I was inspired by you to finally buy some lion’s mane mushrooms (they look intimidating!).
They were incredibly easy to cook and I LOVED them… so thank you. My latest expensive habit.
I started growing them after my son in law bought a block and I watched this huge mushroom grow out of it. Easy to eat, easy to cook. Turning 25 cents worth of wood into food seemed brilliant.
I grew the mycelium in petri dishes, moved to pressure cooked corn in half gallon jars, moved to wood pellets like you would put in a stove to heat the house. They’re sterile from the process.
I got pretty good at growing them but didn’t find a market. I live in the sticks. Also they need to be finished outside in a certain kind of building here that I didn’t want to invest in. So I’ve switched to mushrooms that work well outside here. I may do it in a few years still. Too busy at this time.
Yesterday I asked GPT5 to rank all parameters influencing cancer onset. What surprised me is that he listed first insulin sensitivity and metabolic health. Does that seem correct to you? I mean ranking this parameter as absolute first, with a strong consensus and high probability of benefit.
The whole answer with the whole ranking is in this other thread.
A higher intake of food preservatives, widely used in industrially processed foods and beverages to extend shelf-life, is associated with a modestly increased risk of cancer, finds a study from France published in The BMJ .
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-higher-intake-food-linked-cancer.html
Sounds plausible to me since metabolism influences both tumour growth and immune system function. However I’m not sure it’s the outright “number one”. I would assume that viral infections would be the number one in terms of influencing cancer onset - HPV, HBV, HCV etc. With vaccination, rates of those related cancers plummet, but your LLM ranked it much lower. I believe UK data shows almost a 90% decrease in cervical cancer with vaccination now. That’s a bigger return than you’ll get from controlling blood sugar, I think.
Bad news for the new Dietary guidelines…
One of the biggest risk factors for developing liver cancer is a high-fat diet. A new study from MIT reveals how a fatty diet rewires liver cells and makes them more prone to becoming cancerous.
The researchers found that in response to a high-fat diet, mature hepatocytes in the liver revert to an immature, stem-cell-like state. This helps them to survive the stressful conditions created by the high-fat diet, but in the long term, it makes them more likely to become cancerous.
“If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis,” says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Combine that with no Hepatitis B vaccines and you’ll have the perfect storm for liver health! Maybe then they can say, “See! Alcohol didn’t cause all these liver problems!”
Very interesting results from this mouse study. Meanwhile, we know that a diet high in refined carbs is a major risk factor for fatty liver and NASH in humans. I think the key takeaway is that caloric excess is bad for us.
Eating some common food preservatives is linked to a slightly higher risk of eventually developing cancer and diabetes, according to two large French studies published Thursday.
However, outside experts called for more research and emphasized that these kinds of observational studies cannot demonstrate a direct cause-and-effect relationship.
The first study, published in the journal BMJ, said it observed “multiple associations between preservatives that are widely used in industrial foods and beverages on the European market… and higher incidences of overall, breast and prostate cancers.”
The preservatives included nitrites and nitrates, which are often used to cure ham, bacon and sausages.
The second study, published in Nature Communications, also found a link between eating some food additives and developing type 2 diabetes.
Both studies were based on an ongoing research project in which more than 100,000 French people fill out regular questionnaires about their diet.
French epidemiologist Mathilde Touvier, who supervised both studies, told AFP that “consuming products with preservatives does not mean you will immediately develop cancer”.
“But we need to limit how much we are exposed to these products,” she said.
“The message for the general public is to choose the least processed foods when shopping in the supermarket.”
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-01-food-linked-higher-cancer-diabetes.html
It may also interest you to know that in epidemiological studies, statin use is strongly correlated with reduced liver cancer rates, with the biggest benefits in chronic HBV/HCV carriers. It’s likely because statins have anti-inflammatory properties and reduce overall oxidative stress in the liver.
There’s no RCT for this, but the signal is quite good, and there’s no real risk/downside for taking statins.
Unfortunately my family has recently had a run-in with cancer and that’s motivated me to put together a convenient table with guidelines for cancer screenings to share with people. I used some AI models for research and brainstorming, fact-checked by reading publications, consulted national guidelines from different countries (e.g. Japan, Korea for liver and stomach cancer, where it’s more prevalent). I also took into consideration the recommendations of people like Peter Attia who advocate very aggressive screening.
Obviously for anybody here we are much more concerned about individual benefits, rather than whether a test is sensible at a population-level, so I’ve taken that into account. At the same time, excess screening can cause false positives, biopsies, surgeries, even therapy for things that were never harmful. I also factored in how “actionable” the results are: for example, early detection of glioblastoma isn’t particularly helpful, but detecting colorectal polyps are curative, so a colonoscopy can potentially save your life but a routine brain MRI most likely won’t.
I basically have almost all of them starting at 40, but you could start younger for many of them.
The summarised version would be:
Everybody:
Colonoscopy at 40, then every 3-5 years.
FIT/FOB (stool blood test), every 1 year
AFP tests (for liver cancer), every 1 year
H/pylori test at some point
Gastroscopy at 40, then every 10 years.
Low-dose chest CT at 40, then every 2-3 years
Skin self-examinations, every 3-6 months
Skin dermatologist, every year
Oral self-observation, dental check every 6 months
AFP/PIVKA blood test, every year
Men:
PSA blood test, every year
Testicular self-checks, monthly, following a basic checklist
Women:
HPV + Pap, every 5 years
Mammography every year from 40, every 6 months from 50
And young people should get vaccinated for HBV and HPV which simply massively reduce rates of a ton of cancers - hepatocellular carcinomas, anal cancer, cervical cancer, penile (yep) cancer, oral cancer, throat cancer… the list goes on.
I think the jury is still out on the blood markers like CEA, CA-125 etc. I haven’t had time to properly research those.
Something like Galleri I am also not sure how to integrate. Do we feel confident enough that it can replace the colonoscopy or mammogram? I don’t. And if you’re going to do those tests anyway, it seems to lessen the value of Galleri. Blood-based detection is a very cool idea, but there’s still a massive value in somebody actually inspecting the walls of the colon, looking at cysts and lesions and polyps etc.
If you want the full table, with explanations, notes and cancer facts, it’s attached here. 2026-01_Health-screenings.PDF (69.4 KB)
Highly dependent on the individual. FWIW, in the US the new guidelines are that if you get zero polyps with a colonoscopy after 50, you don’t need to have another one until 10 years later. Skin derma exam, depends, do you easily sunburn, are you fair-skinned blue-green-gray eyed, a redhead, Irish, Scottish, Celtic, experienced sunburn especially as a child, live in high UV places like Australia, have already had some skin cancer etc., get derma exams every three months (plus these days there are some nifty AI powered phone camera apps). And so on. Very individual (genetic testing for obvious stuff like brca). You really need to tailor the tests to your individual situation - that’s why population stats have limitations when dealing with individual patients.
Yes, absolutely it’s highly dependent on the individual. A lot of guidelines are born out of practicality, cost and demands on the medical system, not what is the most beneficial for one single patient.
To be clear, these recommendations are not just a re-statement of standard guidelines. They are aiming to be a sensible starting point for myself, my friends and family. I have my own biases, and I tried to balance something “perfect” and something feasible. I tended a bit towards additional screening where it could be beneficial and where the risks are low, and I tended away where I thought it wouldn’t be worth it. You can see more detail in the PDF.
For example with colonoscopy, I know a guy who had colon polyps at 41, which may have turned into cancer if he’d waited until 50 for his first colonoscopy. So that kinda biases me towards doing one early. I took into account that the progression of CRC from polyp → early tumour → deadly tumour is quite slow (10 years or more). But I also took into account that colonoscopy isn’t perfect and it does miss some polyps and even tumours. Therefore, a scan every 3-5y is a reasonable middle ground where you’re very unlikely to miss something twice in a row, but you’re also unlikely to suddenly discover a stage 4 death sentence. If you want to almost guarantee you won’t die from CRC, you could scan every year, but there is some risk and cost etc etc.
Similar for mammography, where guidelines actually vary a lot by country. Annual seems to be a sweet compromise spot, and biannual if you have higher risk. However, the benefits of mammography are not so clear-cut as colonoscopy. We’re decent at treating more advanced breast cancer now, and you generate a lot of false positives with small lesions, unnecessary testing, biopsies, and maybe even surgery or chemo for tumours that were never really dangerous. So the overall survival benefit doesn’t seem to be that great for mammography. But it’s also quick and safe, and has a fairly high miss rate, so repeated screenings are a good counter for that.
For derma, I think it’s very cultural, because in some countries doctors will think you’re insane for asking them to check moles every 3 months! I did look at apps, but couldn’t find good authoritative recommendations from societies or national guidelines, though I’m sure that some of them are great. Do you know any good ones?
I also reckoned there are less common ones in there. I haven’t seen people talk much about H.pylori testing or gastroscopy on this forum. But that’s a screening test basically as good as colonoscopy, and it’s another slow growing cancer which is extremely nasty once it’s spread. I’m doing my first H.pylori test and gastroscopy next month!
For cervical cancer, things have really moved on since I worked in a cytology lab 20 years ago. Now there’s HPV testing, automated cell examination etc. It’s another slow growing cancer, so this screening test is an absolute no brainer with very low risk and potentially huge reward.
I figure most people won’t have genetic testing done, so I didn’t go down that road. But one of the biggest factors is family history for sure. If you have strong family history, or something like Lynch syndrome, you’d probably want to move your testing earlier and increase the frequency. I totally agree. But that’s way beyond the pay grade of my little single-page recommendation PDF 
What I would really like to know is if people had perfect adherence to screening tests, how much cancer would we be able to cure. I guarantee you there are women reading this who haven’t done their cervical test for a few years, or men who haven’t attentively fondled their balls for years.
For $100 you can have your genome sequenced at AncestryDNA and receive info on 700 K SNP’S. Sequencing.com offers WGS for $399: https://sequencing.com/
I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use this output file and calculate polygenic risk scores for different cancers from mendelian randomization, GWAS, with Codex or Claude Code in a short time.
That’s really cool. However, I’m not confident (yet) about whether that output would be validated. I assume someone will make it a service at some point.
My other question is that I don’t feel confident that it would be useful or actionable. For example, if you have 7 SNPs with links to increased prostate cancer, and 4 linked to decreased prostate cancer, I’m not sure how you’d integrate that, decide the weights etc. And what would the end decision be? Do PSA every 6 months instead of every 12? And if you have SNPs associated with being protected from cancers, would we screen less often? I really don’t know.
I suppose there are a few obvious ones like BRCA which are well worth knowing. But I reckon the boring average people among us can gain a lot from family history, and looking at your other risk factors.
You could ask it to search for and replicate a few papers then use the same methodology on your own SNP’s with the same code. In so far as the papers are correct, it’s for you. Services have legal issues. I wouldn’t rely on any of this to assume lower risk to be on the safe side i.e not reduce screening, nor assume that it captured all of the high risk (there are a lot of papers and not done studies yet after all!).
I read on wikipedia that BRCA increases risk of other cancers. Polygenicity captures more of the genetic variance, I presume.
49% reduction in cancer risk with mRNA cancer vaccine
(In August, RFK Jr announced $500M in cuts to mRNA vaccine research)
Merck and Moderna’s mRNA neoantigen therapy reduced the risk of recurrence or death in patients with advanced melanoma by nearly half at the five-year mark of a mid-stage trial when paired with Keytruda. The latest results build on the companies’ efforts to develop a long-term solution to the intractable skin cancer that often recurs even after complete removal via surgery.
The data come from an analysis of the Phase IIb KEYNOTE-942/mRNA-4157-P201 study, an open label trial that paired the therapy, called intismeran autogene, with Merck’s immuno-oncology juggernaut. Patients had high-risk stage three or four melanoma and underwent complete resection prior to receiving the treatment combo or Keytruda alone for a year.
In a readout at the three-year mark in December 2023, the combo reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% compared to Keytruda alone.
In Tuesday’s release, the companies said that number was the same at the five-year mark. They did not report what Keytruda alone achieved. The study originally reached the primary endpoint in December 2022, achieving a risk reduction of 44%.
Moderna and Merck said in a statement that the data builds on the analyses performed at two years and three years. Safety was consistent with previous readouts.
“While incremental,” William Blair analysts wrote in a note Tuesday morning, “we view today’s 5-year data update on intismeran as positive maintenance of an impressive effect over Keytruda monotherapy, the first therapy, to our knowledge, to show added benefit in this post-surgical setting.”
Prior Reporting:
Based on the Medscape commentary “Pancreatic Cancer: Top 10 Triggers for an Often-Silent Disease” (February 2026), the 10 factors commonly identified as primary triggers or risk factors are:
Story on Medscape: