[edit] found this with a quick search, seems relevant: Exposure to Cooking Oil Fumes and Oxidative Damages: A Longitudinal Study in Chinese Military Cooks https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4029104/
[edit 2] and indeed the article mentions it, although just in passing, still my hunch would go towards this as it seems a more specific factor than the others that are mentioned
>For example, a 2019 study found that Asian Americans breathe in 73% more tiny pollution particles than white Americans, most likely because of greater exposure to construction, industry and vehicle emissions where they live.
As you mention, there is some preliminary research which suggests cooking oil smoke could be related, but this is far from enough to definitively point towards it as the root cause, or even enough to justify your hunch I would argue. Also keep in mind there could be multiple causes of which cooking oil is just one part.
Mustard Oil is critical for South Asian cooking and is labeled as "not for consumption" in the US.
I also wonder how much is because of immigration and the pollution in the old country (even countries like South Korea and SG have horrid AQIs)
From: https://www.seriouseats.com/mustard-oil-guide (there's a lot more and it's worth a read)
Then you come here and you start to look at apartments and there is no hood at all. Weird.
Or you see a microwave with a vent that vents inside.
Makes you wonder whether a mandatory range hood that vents outside is better than a gas range ban...
[edit] seed oils r bad skeptics can just double check - the top 3 highest smoke point oils are all fruit oils, with seed oils at a distance - with the exception of peanut oil, which is closer.
The smoke point is also not the only relevant factor, the fatty acid makeup is also important, high omega-6 oils are more likely to oxidize, coconut oil for instance is high in saturated fat, olive oil is mainly monounsaturated.
https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/impact-of-to...
(This source doesn't quantify "use," so there are confounding factors: prevalence of smoking at home, chain smoking vs. social smoking, etc.)
[1]: https://smokingcessationleadership.ucsf.edu/racialethnic-min...
"What’s behind this rise in lung cancer in women who have never smoked compared with men, and particularly in Asian American women? One possibility: While Chinese American women may never smoke themselves, they frequently live with partners or family members who do. (About 28% of Chinese American men smoke heavily, Dr. Li said.) “We think secondhand smoke might be one of the key risk factors, because they’re living with people who smoke,” Dr. Li said." [1]
[1] https://www.chestnet.org/newsroom/blog/2024/03/secondhand-sm...
I could see a possible scenario where a first generation (i.e. immigrant, English as a second language) Asian father/husband smoking at home in the 1990-2010 timeframe and not getting the second hand smoking messages/ads (that were primarily in English as quickly) as the rest of Americans and it's is just now that the statistics are showing up.
Infact majority of people that smoke don't get Cancer (only about 30% in a group of smokers get lung cancer)
Edit: I don't mean it's comforting I prefer to have it at 0/10
I am just trying to say that things that cause cancer are not as deterministic as we think.
Around 80% of lung cancers are found in smokers and another 10% with heavy exposure to second-hand smoke. Smoking is the single largest risk factor for lung cancer.
[0] All numbers are based on general population of US, so heavily white-skewed, I dunno about asian americans specifically.
However, COPD, once established, is irreversible.
My dad was a long time smoker and it was COPD that eventually got him. He battled it for years after he quit.
Radon is the #2 cause of lung cancer in the US. There are high levels of radon in about 1/15 US homes.
I don't immediately see Asian American women being exposed to additional regional air pollution, asbestos, coal soot, or radon more than others.
There could be a race-linked genetic factor, but I'm not aware of Asian women that are non-American having a higher rate. So I don't see why it would be something like... aspirated cooking oils fumes or natural gas fumes while cooking. Do Asian American households have a significantly higher likelihood of natural gas stoves? Do they have cultural histories of certain kinds of make-up or body treatments like talc?
Cancer itself isn’t deterministic. This isn’t news. There is virtually nothing that is 100% guaranteed to produce cancer, but there are things that massively increase risk. Tobacco is one of them.
An estimated 72% of lung cancers in Canada are caused by tobacco (https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-conce...) Smokers are 25x more likely to die of lung cancer as nonsmokers. The US CDC estimates that smoking is linked to 80-90% of lung cancer deaths (https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm).
Saying “tobacco causes lung cancer” isn’t guaranteeing that smoking leads to lung cancer, but it sure as hell is the leading cause.
Sidenote but I haven't missed my father since I left home. Traditional old Asian men are possibly the worst humans ever.
That's, uh, quite a strong statement. What makes them worse than all the other humans?
My parents aren't saints. They're no less human then I am. Like my wife and my kid they're people that are so easy to forgive. It's so easy to rationalize away anything they do. It's just tiny bit easier to forgive myself then them and I don't see how it could be otherwise.
My hypothesis would be environmental plus genetic, given that our east Asian phenotype population is small and consolidated to small areas of the country. NYC, Socal
Maybe we should look at increase in lung cancers in those areas specifically
- small amounts of nicotine occsaionnaly are excellent for the brain
- the innoculatory effects of small occasional acute exposure to toxins and carcinogens preemptively activates and trains your body and its immune system to respond to the types of things that cause damage. Basically by activating the damage repair systems occasionally under a mild stressor you keep yourself inoculated against seemingly damage-associated conditions.
I'll let y'all know how it's going in 200 years or so :)
Slightly more seriously, I hope your cigarette plan works out for you.
I do wanna try Zyn tho. I think nicotine is worth exploring a little bit, 100%
In reality of course, no amount of cleanliness could possibly be too clean.
I mean, if you told me you were doing a defensive driving course i’d be like hell yeah!
You know that would keep your skills sharp, and the accidents would be a result of those stressors.
Haha. I suppose the obvious difference is a car “accident” depending on how controlled it is could kill you. Whereas a handful of cigarettes is not going to kill you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37923037
(Ignore the downvotes this will likely get. People seem to knee-jerk have an issue with me saying anything at all about health. It's meaningless noise.)
Does it make them less depressed?
As an aside on the downvotes: i mean, whatever works for you! People downvote but they're not you, and your body is gonna be unique. Everything can work differently for different people.
> A study of nearly 4,000 non-smoking women found that the share of Asian American women who developed lung cancer was more than twice that of white women.
And then proceeds to list "53.4%" for Asian.
Are we to believe that in a sample of "nearly 4,000 non-smoking women", over half of the Asian American women developed lung cancer?
Elsewhere in the article it is said that
> Among Asian American women who have lung cancer, more than 50% have never smoked"
Those seem like completely different things to me...
It is a dumb stat to chart without contextualizing that Asians were 15.92% of the entire study population.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8530225/table/T...
But I think what NBC wrote on the graph is pretty unambiguous, that 53.4% of nonsmoking asian women in the study developed cancer. They titled the graph "Lung cancer among nonsmokers, by race" when it should really be "Nonsmoking among Lung Cancers, by race".
Or do you think between the title, caption, and data, their chart is presented in a way that can be argued is correct? It doesn't seem like it to me.
It's P(non-smoking | lung cancer, ethnicity)
Is this really that surprising, considering that only 2.6%[1] of Asian American women smoke? If 0% of Asian American women smoked, then 100% of the lung cancer cases would come from non-smokers. As it is, the group with the lowest percentage of smokers should have the highest percentage of lung cancer cases in non-smokers.
The article gives no absolute rates to compare, and I can't easily find the article they quote for the rising rates of lung cancer in Asian American women. Given the poor interpretation of the subheading, I wouldn't be surprised if it was entirely explained by aging, or was a reversion to the mean from a very low baseline.
[1] From another comment on this article: https://www.lung.org/quit-smoking/smoking-facts/impact-of-to...
It’s sad to see this kind of stuff published.
The whole "they're coming to steal your stoves" thing started for a reason, without proper ventilation to the outside (which just isn't that common in the US), cooking can destroy your lungs, even today.
Back in Thailand she and her mother often used coal for cooking (which is listed in the article as a possible cause) but after moving to Australia, she no longer used it because it is impractical (the coal is hard to find, the type of stove used for cooking with coal is not readily available, neighbours would complain about the smoke, etc etc).
I imagine that most other Asian women who migrated to Western countries face a similar situation and no longer use coal on a daily basis.
Also, I am sceptical that cooking oils could be a factor, it seems to me that, at least in the parts of Asia where I have lived, the types of cooking oils used are similar to the ones used in the West. I have seen the comments about mustard oil but its usage seems to be limited to certain countries or regions and not widespread everywhere in Asia, whereas according to the article, the issue affects women from various countries from India to China.
EDIT - however some of the comments indicate that other oils, not just mustard oil, also present similar health challenges and they are widely used in several Asian cooking traditions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_health_in_the_United_...
Among the most Covid-vaccinated demographic in the nation?
Wonder what it could be???
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/178355979028893705...
Start doing autopsies on them - oh wait that's forbidden in their culture.
It would help if we had a clearer idea of what cancer is. Some cancers are known to be caused by viruses. Maybe someday they will have clearer distinctions between viral cancers and other cancers and that will help solve mysteries like this one.
I'm frankly surprised by this. The only thing I had ever heard of was the Japanese smoking paradox where Japanese people smoke at higher rates and have lower rates of lung cancer. How or if that relates to this, I don't know.
