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TimS comments on Open thread, Dec. 15 - Dec. 21, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Cancer and heart disease are diseases of longevity. Why expect paleo to help with them when there's every reason to believe longevity wasn't a part of that environment?
I don't have data at hand, but I think that's true only partially. Yes, the prevalence of cancer and CVD is a function of the age of the population, but as far as I remember, even after you control for age, they still show up as diseases of civilization with the "primitive" societies having considerably lesser age-adjusted rates.
At least one causal pathway for that is visible: diabetes and the metabolic syndrome in general are clearly diseases of civilization and they are strong risk factors for CVD (I don't know about cancer).
Interesting - I've modeled all cancer in my mind as vaguely similar to testicular cancer - one is likely to get it, but unlikely to die of it unless you survive many other potential causes of death.
In other words, I'm not sure if the data we care about is prevalence-of-cancer or prevalence-of-cancer-deaths.
On reflection, I think the assertion under question is essentially "Paleo diet creates more QUALYs." Which should be answered in part by how much prevalence of cancer effects quality of life even if the cancer was not a causal factor in death.
Cancer is really cancers -- it's a class of diseases which are pretty diverse. Some are slow and rarely actually kill people (e.g. prostate cancer), some are fast and highly lethal.
I think we care about prevalence of cancer (morbidity) because the prevalence of cancer deaths (mortality) heavily depends on the progress in medicine and availability of medical services.
My impression is that the answer is "a lot".
While I don't have the stats, I think that 50,000 years ago if you lived to 30, you had a reasonable chance of living to 70, and cancer and heart disease kill lots of people under 70.
"Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination", Gurven & Kaplan 2007; might be helpful.
Good article. Quotes: