Where Does Cancer Come From? 20 Years of Thinking About a Disease That Keeps Growing More Common

On the poisons in our food, the rewritten genome, the business of fear, and the simple fact that no supplement on earth ever undid a single cigarette or glass of wine

On a Thursday in May a good friend of mine, a physician from Lower Bavaria, sends me an article from the German magazine Der Spiegel. 5 pages, issue 22, the title a question I have been asking myself for more than twenty years, almost daily. Where does it come from, the cancer? In the photographs a woman, bald, marked by chemotherapy, shouting down from the visitors' gallery of the French National Assembly at the deputies below, calling them the allies of cancer. A reportage about the wine regions of France, about pesticides, about people who live quite literally among the vine rows and fall ill young. I read it to the end and set the magazine aside. Then something happens that I have known for two decades and still witness each time with a kind of astonishment. An image I have carried in my head for years turns ninety degrees, and suddenly everything fits together.

I am not a man who believes in coincidence when the numbers say otherwise. And the numbers have been saying something for a long time that most people would rather not hear. Cancer has always existed. That is documented, in bones, in mummies, in ancient texts, the disease is no child of the modern age. What is a child of the modern age is its frequency. In France, the country from the reportage, the number of new cases per year doubled between 1990 and 2023, to 433,136 cases, a rise of 98 percent in men and 104 percent in women (Santé publique France, 2023). Before anyone waves a triumphant finger: yes, the largest part of this doubling is plain demography, there are more of us and we grow older, and the share that truly traces back to an increased risk of disease sits at 20 percent in men and 47 percent in women. But that remainder is exactly the point. A near halving of the risk increase in women across 3 decades is not noise. That is a signal.

That cancer is ancient can be read from bones that lay in the earth for thousands of years. Paleopathologists have found tumor traces on Egyptian mummies, the Greek physician Hippocrates coined the term karkinos, the crab, because the ulcers with their outrunners reminded him of the legs of a crab. Cancer was already there when no one yet knew a pesticide, when sugar was a luxury for kings, when the air held nothing but the smoke of wood fires. Whoever claims cancer to be a pure invention of modernity is wrong, and I will not feed that error. What has changed is not the whether, but the how often. A disease that was once a rare companion of old age has become a mass phenomenon that strikes the young too, children too, and those who live exemplary lives by every rule. It is precisely this shift from rare to common that demands an explanation, and age alone does not supply it.

This piece gathers what I have collected over more than twenty years in various folders, well ordered, scientific publication beside scientific publication. It is not medical advice and replaces no visit to a doctor. It pursues above all the origin of cancer and barely its treatment, and that has a reason I will come to later, a reason bound up with my deep aversion to a certain business model. What follows is the most honest stocktaking I can give. What did Homo Sapiens have 50,000 years ago that we no longer have today? And what does he have today that he did not have then? The answer to both questions is the same, and it is uncomfortable.

I approach this the way I have approached every case I ever worked. Not from the headline, but from the trace. Der Spiegel has an activist and a wine region, that is the headline. What interests me is the trace beneath it, the chain of evidence one can follow backward from the sick person to the cause, and the precise place where that chain snaps because the data run out. I proceed point by point, from the field across the plate, the skin, the lung, and on into the cell and finally into the genome we hand on. At each point I separate, as well as I can, the proven from the suspected, because nothing is more dangerous than a scientist who mistakes his hypothesis for a proof.

What the Strawberry Keeps Quiet About While It Looks So Healthy

Let us begin where Der Spiegel begins, with food. The reportage describes the extreme scenario, people at the edge of the vineyards, hundredfold raised active-ingredient concentrations in the indoor air during spraying, DDT in the soil half a century after the ban. That is an exposure on a scale not comparable to what lies in the supermarket. And yet this very reportage leads to the right question for the rest of us, who do not live in Margaux among the vines. What exactly is in what we eat every day?

The reassuring answer first, because it is half true. The European food authority examines thousands of samples each year, most recently 13,246 in the coordinated program, and 70 percent of them were free of detectable residues, 28 percent lay within the permitted limits, only 2 percent above. For glyphosate even 97.9 percent were below the detection threshold (European Food Safety Authority, 2025). That sounds like the all clear. It is an all clear too, as long as one asks the question the testing system answers. That question reads: does a single substance exceed its single limit? It does not read: what does the sum of 8 different residues do, each one dutifully below its threshold, across decades, every day, in a single body?

This second effect is called the cocktail effect, and it is no fever dream of agitated citizens' groups. European legislation itself has for years demanded that cumulative effects be taken into account, as soon as the methods for it are ripe. Translated that means: the problem is known to exist, it has been written into law, and to this day it has not been solved. The limits, the maximum residue levels, are set substance by substance. A bell pepper can carry 8 different active ingredients, each of them legal, and no one has ever tested what those 8 together do inside you. That is the crux, and it is an enormous one.

Here is where the dog lies buried, deep. There are maximum amounts, how much and which pesticides may be in our food. But even a little, even well below that limit, is already too much when it comes daily, lifelong, in the mixture. The limit is a political and technical quantity, it says what is feasible without crippling agriculture. It does not say what is safe. These two things are constantly confused, mostly on purpose.

One must understand how such a limit even comes about, and the last shred of reassurance evaporates. The authorities determine in animal trials the dose at which no harm is yet visible, and then divide it by a safety factor, usually a hundred. That sounds careful, and for a single substance it is. Only the whole calculation rests on two assumptions that do not hold in reality. The first assumption says the human being always takes in only one substance at a time. The second says the effect rises obediently with the dose, so that a small dose yields a small effect. Both assumptions are false for hormonally active substances, because some unfold an effect precisely at low doses that vanishes again at high ones, since the body's hormone receptors simply do not work in a straight line. A limit system that assumes linearity and single substances is blind to exactly the substances that should worry us most. That is no conspiracy, it is simply the boundary of a method built for a simpler world.

And then there is the matter of washing, which grants so many a clear conscience. There are two fundamentally different kinds of pesticide. The one sits outside on the skin, you wash part of that away, and peeling helps more. The other is systemic, the plant takes it up through root and leaf and transports it into every single cell. Glyphosate belongs to this group, many modern fungicides too. Those do not sit on the strawberry, they sit in the strawberry. No jet of water in the world reaches them. And of all things the strawberry has no skin, it is entirely porous and absorbs these agents with particular willingness. That is why it has stood reliably for years at the top of every contamination list, together with grapes, peppers, peaches and leafy greens, exactly the things we eat raw, because they are so healthy.

Even the much-praised baking-soda bath that haunts social media does not solve the underlying problem. It is true, a mildly basic solution speeds the breakdown of some surface residues, and a study from Massachusetts showed this on apples, with thiabendazole and phosmet (Yang et al., 2017). But it works only on the surface, and it needs 12 to 15 minutes, not the 5 every guide recommends. What sits inside, no bath fetches out. In the strawberry the problem sits inside.

Now comes the thought that struck me yesterday in the supermarket, in front of a vast refrigerated shelf full of smoothies. My first thought, entirely Otto-like: oh, how healthy. My second thought, one second later: leave the fructose aside for a moment, what kind of fruit gets processed in here? You can guess the result of that thought. Into a smoothie goes not the flawless showcase strawberry from the commercial. Into a smoothie goes the mass, the rejected, the cheaply bought, and in compressed form, 5 fruits in one gulp. Whoever drinks themselves healthy may be drinking a concentrate of exactly what they thought they were avoiding, garnished with a quantity of sugar I will come to shortly.

And the glyphosate, says the attentive reader, is that not now banned before harvest? Correct. Since the reauthorization at the end of 2023, treatment of the plant shortly before harvest, that killing-off to steer ripening, is no longer permitted in the EU. Only the substance has long been in the system. It is in the soil, in the soil life, in the cycle, and it turns up reliably in flour, in bread, in pasta, measured, documented, mostly below the limit, but there. The spaghetti you buy comes from durum wheat semolina, and wheat is one of the most intensively treated crops there is. The tinned fish in the tomato sauce, the origin printed on the can, the growing conditions not. The restaurant that cooks with fresh vegetables buys from the wholesaler, who buys where it is cheap. You have no complete control. No one has it, who does not grow their own.

The Poison Knows No Profession, and the Vines Are the Proof

To anyone who now objects that this is all scaremongering, I hold up the people who stand closest to it. If the thesis of poison in food were false, then of all groups the producers should show nothing. The opposite is the case.

The French PestiRiv study, published in September 2025, is the first of its kind on this scale. 265 sites across 6 wine regions, 2,688 participants, of them 1,946 adults and 742 children, 56 different substances measured (ANSES, 2025), in urine, in hair, in indoor air, in house dust, in homegrown vegetables. The result is as sober as it is clear. Whoever lives within 500 meters of the vines carries significantly higher pesticide levels in the body than people who live more than a kilometer away. In adults as in children, and the children between 3 and 6 years were hit hardest during the spraying season. The fungicide folpet was found in roughly 62 percent of the air samples. The study says explicitly it did not set out to measure the health consequences, only the exposure. It thus supplies one half of the equation, the dose. The other half, the effect, is supplied by the large cohort studies of farmers, and those have for years shown elevated rates of certain lymphomas, of multiple myeloma, of prostate cancer. The link between pesticide exposure and elevated cancer risk among farmers and winegrowers may by now count as established.

That is the logic of the sentinel, the watchman in the mine. People once took a canary down the shaft, because it reacted to poisonous gas before the human noticed anything. The producers are our canaries. What appears early and clearly in them arrives in us later and more diluted, but it comes from the same source.

The woman from Der Spiegel, whose story carries the issue, experienced precisely that in her own body. Breast cancer twice, the second shortly before her 50th birthday, surgery, radiation, 7 months of chemotherapy. Afterward she began to research, she dug through statistics, through the national childhood cancer registry, which in France records 1,800 children under 15 and 450 adolescents anew each year. She watched friends die of brain tumors, saw teenagers in her circle fall ill with leukemia, and she asked the same question I have been asking for twenty years. In July 2025 she sat in the visitors' gallery of the Paris parliament, fresh out of chemo, her brain as if in fog, as she put it herself. A vote was being held on the reauthorization of an insecticide that had been banned in France for years, a law that on top of that was meant to clip the independent oversight authority. More than 1,200 researchers had protested against it, 2 million people had signed a petition. The parliament voted for it anyway. Then she rose, bald, marked, and shouted down that the deputies were the allies of cancer. Then the parliamentary business carried on as usual. From her anger grew a movement with a name as cold as it is fitting, Cancer Colère, cancer anger. I do not share this anger in its hot form, as you will see, but I understand where it comes from.

Glucose, the Oldest Hunger, and the Fuel the Cell Loves

So much for what enters us from outside. Now to what we pour in voluntarily, and here it gets metabolically interesting. A cancer cell needs two things above all to grow, and one of them is sugar.

In 1924 Otto Warburg described something strange (Warburg, 1924). Cancer cells burn glucose and excrete lactic acid, and they do so even when oxygen is plentiful, although the oxygen pathway actually delivers energy far more efficiently. Warburg's own explanation, that the mitochondria were broken, was wrong, we know that today. Most cancer cells have functioning power plants. The true reason is subtler and more uncanny. The frantic burning of sugar supplies the cell not primarily with energy, it supplies it with building blocks, building blocks for new genetic material, for cell walls, for everything a cell needs that wants to divide without pause (Vander Heiden et al., 2009). The tumor burns sugar not because it needs energy, but because it needs material to proliferate. This hunger is so reliable that modern cancer diagnostics uses it directly, in the PET scan the patient is injected with radioactively labeled sugar, and the tumor lights up, because it gulps more greedily than anything else in the body.

Beside this stands insulin. Whoever keeps pushing in sugar holds the insulin level chronically high, and insulin, together with its relative the growth factor IGF-1, is one of the strongest growth commands the body knows. This signaling pathway, from insulin across several stations to a central switch called mTOR, is anabolism in its purest form, the command to build, to multiply, to grow. Chronically elevated insulin levels are linked with an increased risk for cancer of the colon, the uterus, the breast, the pancreas and the liver. One need not be a biochemist to sense that a standing command to grow, for a cell that is already growing wrongly, is no good news.

Now the evolution. Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago knew sugar as a rare windfall, a wild berry in late summer, once a year a beehive, sweetness wrapped in fibers and only at the right season. His metabolism is tuned over millions of years to exactly this scarcity. Refined sugar was a luxury until a few centuries ago, around 1700 per-capita consumption sat in the order of barely 2 kilograms a year. In the year 2000 it reached over 68 kilograms in the United States (Stanhope, 2016), and corn syrup, that especially cheap liquid sugar, only joined in the 1970s (Goncalves et al., 2019). We feed a stone-age metabolism the sugar quantity of an industrial age. It is as if one ran an oven built for a single log in the evening around the clock on gasoline, and then wondered that something burns through.

Homo Sapiens knew no refined sugar. But he also knew no synthetic poisons. Each on its own is already a problem. Both together, that is the real story.

And here I must clear away an error so widespread that almost everyone takes it for settled knowledge. Science says, the higher the body mass index, the higher the cancer risk, and that is even true, for thirteen cancers the link with overweight is well documented, from the esophagus across the colon to the uterus (Lauby-Secretan et al., 2016). Sounds simple, sounds logical. Only this simple equation thinks one step too short. To reach a high BMI I must eat a great deal, and if what passes for food today is riddled with poisons, then with every kilo of excess weight I take in more of those poisons too. The high BMI is then not only a risk through its hormones and its inflammatory messengers, it is also a marker that someone has simply shoveled more of the contaminated industrial food into themselves. What by contrast demonstrably protects is the opposite of this gluttony. Whoever eats seldom and irregularly, who grants the body pauses, switches on an ancient cleaning mechanism, autophagy, in which the cell breaks down and recycles its own garbage. About fasting and this self-cleaning I have written at length elsewhere. Here it suffices to note that the constant eater sets his mTOR switch permanently to growth, while the one who fasts powers it down and gives the cell time to tidy up. The stone-age human had these pauses not by choice, but because the mammoth did not come by every day. We have abolished them and call it progress.

The Stress That Quietly Switches Off the Immune System

Everyone talks about food and sugar. Fewer talk about the next factor, and I hold it to be underrated, precisely because it works so invisibly. Chronic stress.

Acute stress is nothing bad, on the contrary, it saved the stone-age human from the saber-toothed tiger. The problem is the duration. When the body stays for years in a state of alarm, something insidious happens with the stress hormone cortisol. In the short term cortisol dampens inflammation, that is its job. In the long term, though, the immune cells go deaf to its signal, they develop a resistance, and the result is paradoxical, high cortisol levels and at the same time a smoldering, chronic inflammation throughout the body. This silent inflammation is one of the most reliable pavers of the way to cancer, it activates circuits in the cell that promote growth and brake programmed cell death.

At the same time chronic stress presses down that troop actually responsible for cancer defense, the natural killer cells. These cells patrol through the body and recognize degenerate cells before they become a tumor, they are the immune police against cancer. Stress hormones put this police on short rations. In metastatic breast cancer, for instance, a flattened daily rhythm of cortisol predicts a shorter survival time. That is no esoterics, that is measurable immunology.

And it reaches far back, into childhood. Studies on adverse childhood experiences, on abuse, neglect, the early loss of a parent, show a link with cancer risk in adulthood, with a risk surcharge in the order of 16 to 30 percent for the severest burdens (Hu et al., 2021). The mechanism runs again through epigenetics, early trauma writes markers onto stress genes that echo for a lifetime. The consoling part, and this belongs to honesty, these markers are partly reversible. Movement, nutrition, social bonding, all of it shifts the switches measurably back, within weeks to months. The body is no unalterable fate. It is a learning system.

Which brings me to the beautiful human being we all know.

The Beautiful Human in the Solarium and the Question No One Dodges

Let me tell you of a human being we all know. He lives exemplarily, drinks supposedly only water from the bottle, eats plenty of fruit and berries, does sport, and then he develops cancer, and everyone shakes their head in disbelief. How can that be, he did everything right. Right here sits the error, and it is a double one.

First the fruit and the berries we just spoke of. Whoever lives predominantly on plant-based freshness may take in more of the systemic load, not less, simply because the quantity of contaminated material rises. That is no call to avoid vegetables, that would be absurd. It is a call to dissolve the pious equation by which much fruit automatically means much health. Steve Jobs, one of the most famous vegans in the world, died of pancreatic cancer. To be vegan does not mean cancer spares you. It sometimes means only that you get a larger portion of what is poisonous in our food today.

A former neighbor of mine, not yet fifty, liked to drink and smoke. From the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to her death 3 months passed. Of her one would say she had risk factors, alcohol is an established carcinogen of the highest category, tobacco smoke likewise. Of the vegan Jobs one would say, pure bad luck. And exactly this reflex, to seek the blame first in the individual's way of life, is what made the activist from Der Spiegel so furious. She says one should stop seeking the blame first in the sick person, and instead see the larger pattern. There she is right. There is too much poison in the world, that is unambiguous.

With alcohol a closer look is worthwhile, because here sits a comfortable lie our society tells itself. For decades the word was that a little glass of red wine in the evening was good for the heart, and millions took this message gratefully as a free pass. Newer research has shattered that thesis. There is no safe amount of alcohol where the cancer danger is concerned, the risk curve begins to climb with the first sip. Alcohol is co-responsible for at least 7 different cancers, from the mouth across the esophagus and the liver to the breast. The mechanism is well understood, in the breakdown arises acetaldehyde, a substance that damages the genome directly. I have not drunk a drop for years, and that is a conscious decision, no asceticism. Alcohol keeps the modern human functional in his hamster wheel, it is the socially prescribed anesthetic after the workday, and that is precisely why it is tolerated while other substances are banned. That is a topic of its own, but it belongs in any honest list of the things we do to ourselves voluntarily.

At this point a personal matter, and I write it as personal perception, not as study data. More than twenty years ago I watched my father fall ill with prostate cancer for the first time. And I read something back then that seemed logical to me, namely that the frequency of prostate cancer rises with age, while at the same time the testosterone level falls with age. If testosterone were the accelerant everyone took it for, then this relationship should not exist. So I began to substitute, against the express advice of my friends and my doctors, who all prophesied an elevated prostate cancer risk for me. I did it anyway, because the numbers spoke a different language to me. Today I am 56, my PSA value sits at 0.4, and I do not even have an enlarged prostate. I know inwardly that I was right. Prove it in the strict sense I cannot, and I expressly do not claim that testosterone protects against cancer.

What I may say is that the old fear stood on astonishingly thin ice. It goes back to a paper from 1941, on a handful of men with already metastatic cancer (Huggins & Hodges, 1941), awarded the Nobel Prize and inflated over decades into a certainty the data never supported. Newer work paints a different picture, the so-called saturation model holds that the receptor in the prostate is already saturated at low testosterone quantities (Morgentaler & Traish, 2009) and that more testosterone on top barely does anything more. The large TRAVERSE study of 2023, with over 5,000 men, found in the treatment arm 5 malignant prostate findings against 3 under placebo (Bhasin et al., 2023), a statistically meaningless difference. A pooled analysis of 18 studies found no link at all between the body's own testosterone level and the risk of disease (Roddam et al., 2008). Honest I remain: no one has studied a man who starts in his early thirties and runs 25 years, that is my case, and it lies outside the studied data. And the familial risk through my father doubles my probability anyway, quite independent of testosterone. So I keep observing myself. But I regret not a single day.

And the beautiful, grilled human in the solarium? With him, honestly, I have no pity, and I say it that plainly because I mean it that way. Whoever lies under the tube several times a week or roasts in the sun because they think they look better that way is making a choice. Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago did not grill himself to look like an overripe tomato. I avoid the sun, and when I go out I take the highest protection factor, a preparation from my friend's pharmacy. Which brings us to the next point, because this cream too is not what it pretends to be.

What We Smear on Our Skin, and Why Europe Bans 1,700 Substances and America Eleven

We cream, we spray, we perfume. Deodorant, eau de toilette, day cream, sunscreen, every morning, for decades, onto the largest surface we have, the skin. What do you think is in there, and above all, where do you think that goes?

It goes in. The American drug authority examined it itself and found that the organic filters from sunscreen turn up in the blood within hours, and well above that threshold at which one must look more closely toxicologically. Oxybenzone reached peaks of 258 nanograms per milliliter, more than five hundred times the threshold of concern (Matta et al., 2020), and remained detectable for days. Make that clear to yourself for a moment. You cream yourself to protect yourself from skin cancer, and in doing so apply a substance that wanders through the skin, goes into the blood and circulates there for days, a substance whose long-term effect no one really knows. The European oversight reacted to this and drastically lowered the permitted concentration. Whether it causes cancer is open, the data here are expressly thin. What is not open is the sheer omnipresence, this substance is detectable in the urine of nearly 97 percent of the people examined. I do not say leave the sunscreen off, that would be reckless. I say choose mineral filters that stay on the skin, instead of the organic ones that wander in, and do not be surprised that even the protective measure would deserve its own package insert.

With hair straighteners the signal is sharper. A large American long-term study of nearly 34,000 women found in frequent users of chemical straightening agents a doubling of the uterine cancer risk, cleanly figured as a ratio of 1.80 (Chang et al., 2022). The reason probably lies in the fact that these agents release formaldehyde when heated, and formaldehyde is an established carcinogen of the highest category. Picture it, a beauty ritual that exhales a carcinogen while blow-drying, right under the nose and onto the scalp. With talcum powder the international cancer research agency tightened the classification in 2024, to probably carcinogenic to humans (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2024), a powder that generations of mothers patted onto their babies' bottoms. With parabens and aluminum by contrast, the two bogeymen of social media, the evidence is astonishingly thin and contradictory, that belongs to honesty. Here, by the way, the whole misery of the debate shows itself, the substances with the sharpest signal are the unknown ones, while the outrage works itself out on two suspects where little is to be found.

The real scandal is not the single substance, the real scandal is the gap. The European cosmetics regulation bans roughly 1,700 substances. The American authority bans, depending on how you count, about 11. One thousand seven hundred against 11. That is no typo. And no one has ever shown that the Americans fare more healthily with their 11, it is simply a different ratio of industry to regulation. Whoever after all this still wonders that the cancer figures are rising, I cannot help either. I do not wonder.

The Cleanest People of All Time, Freshly Lacquered and Thoroughly Poisoned

Now comes my favorite subject, because it shows so nicely how a good intention tips into its opposite. We are the cleanest people who have ever lived. Only clean, unfortunately, does not mean that any of it is right. I have friends in my circle who shower morning and evening, every day, summer and winter, and they do it in the firm belief that they are doing something good. The eternal washing and showering ruins the skin, that thin, living barrier that has sealed us against the world since time immemorial. I stress it once more, because it is the red thread: we are stuck in a body designed more than 50,000 years ago, and this body is not built to be rinsed out twice a day with lukewarm water and then smeared over with cheap moisturizer.

And then it really gets going. The women shave, the men shave, first the shaving foam, then afterward the alcohol with all sorts of substances against the razor burn, that is, against exactly the irritation the shaving itself caused in the first place. You inflict a small damage on the skin and treat it with a second, chemical one. The whole cleaning mania then piles up into a ritual that would do honor to an ancient temple service. First three different shampoos, depending on the mood of the day, then the conditioner, then the anti-wrinkle salve, then the treatment mask, and the whole thing best left to soak for an hour, ideally under red light, so that all the blessing really burns its way deep into the organism. I like to picture it, modern man glazing himself under the heat lamp like a Sunday roast, in the firm conviction that he is being especially healthy.

Our organism works around the clock, 24 hours, 7 days a week, the whole year, across decades, by now for many people almost a whole century. And in all that time we expose it without pause to a mixture of all of it, from outside through the skin, from inside through mouth and lung. Then people wonder when they get cancer. I do not wonder.

The Dirty Air on the Ring Road and the Gas from the Bavarian Granite

It is not only the food and not only the cream. It is the air too, and here it becomes concrete for anyone who has ever lived in a big city on a main traffic artery. Whoever lives in Munich on the Mittlerer Ring and breathes in the fine dust day after day breathes in a carcinogen of the highest category, that is no exaggeration but the classification of the international cancer research.

The fine dust, the tiny particles below two and a half micrometers, raises the lung cancer risk measurably, and that in people too who never smoked, by around 18 percent per 10 micrograms of additional exposure (Hamra et al., 2014). For a long time it was thought this worked through directly triggering mutations. A remarkable paper in Nature showed in 2023 that the mechanism is subtler, the fine dust wakes, by way of an inflammatory messenger, slumbering, already pre-damaged cells (Swanton et al., 2023). It is not the spark, it is the wind that fans the embers. And the European environment agency found in 2024 that 95 percent of the measuring stations lie above the health-based guideline of the World Health Organization. Almost everywhere it is measured, we breathe too much.

Then there is something few have on their radar, especially here in Bavaria. Radon, a radioactive noble gas that rises from the ground, odorless and invisible, and gathers in cellars and ground floors. It is, after smoking, the second most common cause of lung cancer and the most common in people who never smoked. In Germany an estimated 2,800 lung cancer deaths a year trace back to radon (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, 2024), and 19 percent of those fall on non-smokers. Bavaria, with its granitic subsoil in the east, belongs to the country's hotspots. The treacherous part: a radon test for one's own four walls costs little, and whoever finds an elevated value can counteract it with comparatively simple structural means. It is one of the few cancer causes you can tackle with a screwdriver and some ventilation. Hardly anyone does it.

I spare you the full list of invisible housemates, but two deserve their own paragraph, because they are so new and so omnipresent. The PFAS, in common speech the forever chemicals, are a family of several thousand industrial substances that sit in coated pans, in water-repellent clothing, in pizza boxes, in firefighting foams. They are called forever chemicals because their chemical bond is so stable that nature barely breaks them down over centuries. One of them, PFOA, has since 2023 been classified by the international cancer research as established carcinogenic to humans (International Agency for Research on Cancer, 2023). The treacherous part is the penetration, these substances are detectable in the blood of nearly every human on this planet, in European drinking water limits had to be introduced because they have long arrived everywhere in the water cycle. Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago had not a single molecule of them in the body. We all have them.

Microplastic is the second newcomer, and here I must be especially honest, because the study data on cancer are still thin. What is known is unsettling enough. In 2024 Italian researchers found microplastic in the calcified vessel deposits of patients in over half the cases, above all polyethylene, and these patients had in the following years a more than fourfold raised risk of heart attack and stroke (Marfella et al., 2024). That is a finding about the cardiovascular system, not about cancer, and I do not sell it as a cancer study, that would be exactly the selective presentation I detest. But that plastic particles are by now found in our blood vessels, in the placenta, in the testicle, should not leave us cold. Where a foreign body triggers chronic inflammation, the road to cancer is, by experience, not far. The picture is unsettling enough even without hard proof. We live in a chemical soup that did not exist 50,000 years ago.

The Animals Do Not Lie, and They Do Not Worry Either

Now comes the argument that convinces me most after all these years, and it is one that disposes of the whole litany about the stressful lifestyle in a single stroke. If stress and way of life were the main cause, then why do more and more animals fall ill with cancer, and that at a young age?

A dog that grows older than 10 years dies with a probability of roughly 50 percent of cancer (Adams et al., 2010). In some breeds, the golden retriever for instance, the share in a large American study sits at 65 percent (Kent et al., 2018). An animal has no nine-to-five hamster-wheel job, no fear for its existence, no tax return, no broken relationship with its mother-in-law. What it has is the same air, the same water and the same industrially produced food from the same contaminated supply chain as we do. You do not seriously believe that organic apples from an idyllic farm land in this food. There lands what is left over, carrots, apples, grain, the stuff that just barely meets the norm.

It gets clearer still in the wild, because there industry involuntarily supplies the cleanest experiments imaginable. In the Black River in Ohio bottom fish, the brown bullhead catfish, carried liver tumors in 39 percent of cases before the closure of a coking plant. After the plant shut down and the pollutants in the sediment fell by 99 percent, the tumor rate sank to 10 percent (Baumann & Harshbarger, 1995). The beluga whales in the St. Lawrence, for decades one of the waterways most heavily burdened with industrial poisons, carried cancer in roughly 27 percent of the adult animals examined, the highest value ever reported for a whale species (Martineau et al., 2002). These animals have no burnout. They have poison in the water. In the Hudson River, pumped full of industrial chemicals discharged over decades, a small fish named tomcod even developed a genetic change that makes it resistant to the poison (Wirgin et al., 2011), an evolution in fast forward, triggered by pure chemical pressure. When a fish rewrites its blueprint within a few generations to survive a man-made poison, that should give us pause about what these poisons do to blueprints, ours included.

And the dog closes the circle back to us, because it shares our home, our lawn, our air, our water. In one study, dogs whose owners treated their lawn with certain weed killers had a markedly raised risk of a malignant lymphoma (Hayes et al., 1991), and the active ingredient was detectable in the animals' urine days later. In one particular breed the bladder cancer risk on breed-typical, herbicide-treated lawns rose to more than fourfold (Glickman et al., 2004). The dog is the canary in the living room. When it falls ill young, we should not talk about its stress, but about its surroundings, because they are ours.

My Thesis, and I Call It a Thesis, Because I Do Not Want to Be an Otto

Now I come to the point where I think further than the data carry me, and I say so expressly, because precisely this honesty makes the difference between a scientist and an Otto Sapiens. My conviction, ripened over twenty years, reads: the genetic code of Homo Sapiens has changed. It has been rewritten, toward more susceptibility, and we pass that on to our children.

I am convinced of it. I hold it to be the only explanation that holds the whole picture together, the human of 50,000 years ago placed beside the one of today, the animals, the children who fall ill young. We grow more sensitive from generation to generation, and not only from human to human, but from animal to animal. Something in our blueprint has given way under the load of radiation, poisons and an environment we were never built for.

What convinces me most are the children. An adult may have bred his cancer himself through decades of smoking, drinking, poor eating, there one can still speak of way of life. A child has no way of life. A child that falls ill with leukemia at 5 years had no time to do anything wrong. And yet the childhood cancer rates rise, worldwide, by a slim order of about 1 percent a year, in France the registry records thousands of new cases among minors year after year. Among the under-fifties as a whole, the number of early-onset cancers rose worldwide by 79 percent between 1990 and 2019 (Zhao et al., 2023). If way of life were the main cause, that should not happen in children. But it happens. That for me is the pointing finger that something lies before the way of life, something already in the blueprint with which the child comes into the world.

The official data, and this is the short footnote I owe to honesty, go a stretch with me and then stand still. That environmental poisons rewrite epigenetic markers, the switches that determine which genes are on and which off, without changing the letter code itself, is documented in animal trials across several generations. In humans such an imprint across one generation is secured, the Dutch hunger winter showed it (Heijmans et al., 2008), and for the grandchild generation it is suggested, a large Swedish analysis even found a link between a grandfather's nutrition and the cancer mortality of the grandchildren (Vågerö et al., 2018). What does not stand in studies is the cumulative part of my thesis, that each generation comes into the world measurably more susceptible than the one before. For that there is no methylome data set. There I am the observer who thinks further, and I stand by it.

Is Cancer Curable, and Why I Would Rather Go Out for a Decent Meal

So to treatment, and here my stance turns harsh, as everyone who knows me knows. My aversion to the pharmaceutical industry is no secret. For me that is in large part commerce, and the bad thing is that our medicine and our health insurance systems take it on and threaten to choke on it. Someone says, take this, and then, hold on tight, you may live a few days, weeks, with luck months longer. At what price?

I have seen too many friends go who in my firm conviction died not of the cancer but of its treatment. And yes, I say openly, when I get this diagnosis, then I finish my affairs here, go out for a decent meal one more time, and that is that. That is my stance, for me, for no one else. This sentence is written by the human George, not the scientist, and it replaces no medical advice.

Do not misunderstand me, I do not demonize the researchers who work on a cure, and I least of all demonize the doctors who give their best at the bedside. What sticks in my throat is the machinery behind it, a system in which a drug is approved because it extends life on the statistical average by a few weeks, and in which those few weeks are then declared a breakthrough, while over the price of those weeks, the vomiting, the hair loss, the destroyed mucous membranes, the bedriddenness, a genteel silence is kept. A business that makes its margins from the desperation of the sick and drives the solidarity-financed insurance funds to the edge of ruin. About this forgotten side of medicine, about what healing ought really to mean, I have written elsewhere, and I will do so again. Here the hint should suffice that I distinguish very precisely between the science I love and the business that has fastened itself to it.

What truly drives me up the wall is the mechanics of fear behind it. In Germany there is now a lung cancer screening by low-dose computer tomography for long-term smokers. Sounds caring. I only shake my head, laughing and bewildered, because this will blow up in our faces. Whoever searches long enough and closely enough finds something in almost everyone's lung, a shadow, a nodule, an irregularity. A New York forensic pathologist once told me that in practically every eighty-year-old he has on the table he finds cancer in the prostate. The man did not die of it, he died at eighty of something else, and the cancer simply sat there. Homo Sapiens is not designed to grow that old at all. When the cell divides often enough, it makes mistakes, and at some point there is always somewhere a tumor that would never have harmed anyone.

Whoever seeks, finds. This old truth is a double-edged sword in cancer prevention. Do your colonoscopy, do your blood test every year, best of all a complete body scan, and then all is well. Only all is not well, because every finding leads at once to the machinery, to surgery, to chemo, to radiation, even when the tumor would have outlived you. Medicine even has a term for it, overdiagnosis, the detecting and treating of tumors that would never have caused complaints. With prostate cancer that is a known problem, many men die with their prostate cancer and not of it, but as soon as it is found, treatment begins with all its side effects, incontinence, impotence, and that for a tumor that perhaps would never have done anything. The lung screening by low-dose CT now coming in Germany for long-term smokers will repeat the same pattern, of that I am sure, every second person will have some shadow, and then the spiral begins of follow-up examination, biopsy, fear.

And who pays for this madness, year after year? The radiation comes free on top, in the physical sense. A single one of these low-dose CTs brings you to about 1 to 2 millisieverts (Rampinelli et al., 2017), which corresponds roughly to the cosmic radiation of 15 round-trip flights across the Atlantic. After 10 years of annual screening you have accumulated, depending on sex, 9 to 13 millisieverts, the dose of well over a hundred such flights, voluntarily, for the mere search for something that might never have done anything to you. And then the money. Suppose such an examination costs only 500 euros, as a private patient I put down rather double that, and multiply that by millions of smokers and ex-smokers, year after year, in a time when our solidarity-financed system is already cracking at every seam. You search for a tumor that might have outlived you, and you pay for the search twice over, with money and with radiation.

And the psychological boomerang comes on top. The human who fears cancer daily, who rushes from check-up to check-up, may fuel, by way of exactly that stress pathway which dampens the immune system, the very thing he is running from. Chronic stress presses down the natural cancer defense of the killer cells, I described it above, and it closes the circle here. Fear is not only quality-of-life devouring. It is possibly part of the problem.

A word more on pancreatic cancer, which struck twice in my circle, with my neighbor and with the distant Steve Jobs. This cancer is especially treacherous, because it holds to none of the pretty rules. It strikes the fat and the thin, athletes and couch dwellers, it cares nothing for the BMI and nothing for the dietary philosophy. It is driven by things against which discipline avails nothing, by chronic silent inflammation, by accumulated cell damage, by genetic predisposition and by exactly the kind of metabolic stress that arises in a permanently overloaded body. This cancer of all cancers is the best witness against the self-blame narrative, because on it the claim founders that everyone is the smith of their own cancer.

What use to me are eighty years with lousy quality of life, because I drive myself crazy day and night? This question I ask in earnest, and I have answered it for myself.

The Water, the Lithium, and the Great Supplement Lie

Before I come to the close, two more things that belong together, the water and the pills. About both I have written more fully on rauscher.xyz, the water and the lithium in my long essay on forgetting, the fasting in a piece of its own. Here only the bridge to cancer.

You do not seriously believe that the mineral water for 39 cents from the discount market is anything other than tap water, often worse, bottled in plastic that gives off its own compounds. And even the most expensive bottles are not what Homo Sapiens drank from the spring. With water, in fact, he had it really good. There were minerals in it, lithium in tiny, natural traces, magnesium, calcium, all of it that he got from the stream, from the stone, from the spring, without knowing it. We purify our water so thoroughly today that we remove the good along with it.

With lithium that is especially remarkable, and I have written more fully about it in my long essay on forgetting. There is a growing body of studies showing that in regions with higher natural lithium content in the drinking water certain neurological diseases occur more rarely and even the suicide rates lie lower. We are talking here of traces, of a fraction of what is given as medication, but of a trace the human got daily over millennia and that today has vanished from our treated water. That is no direct cancer factor, but it belongs in the same chapter, the chapter about the things modern man has lost without noticing the loss. We made the water clean and in doing so took its soul.

I myself take a detour that looks contradictory at first glance. I drink only water that I filter by reverse osmosis, pressing it through a membrane that holds back nearly everything, pollutants, residues, but also the minerals. What comes out is a water of almost insulting purity, blank, empty, dead. And precisely for that reason I pour myself a small glass of it once a day with a pinch of a special sea sand that brings back the minerals and salts I filtered out for good reason just before. That sounds like madness, first everything out, then the good back in, and in a way it is. But it is exactly the movement that carries this whole text, staged in miniature. I take out the poison and give back to nature what it had intended anyway. Modern man mostly does only the first half and wonders that something is missing.

Which brings me to the actual pattern that runs through this whole piece. Homo Sapiens has, over millennia, lost a whole series of protective factors, the natural trace substances in the water, the eating pauses through scarcity, the movement that survival compelled, the sunlight in sensible measure. And he has in the same move gained a whole series of burdens he never before knew, the poisons, the sugar, the radiation, the chronic stress, the plastic particles. It is this double movement, the taking away of the good while simultaneously adding the bad, that explains the modern cancer event, far better than any single cause on its own.

And now the pills, at this point I have to laugh, every time. I am rarely on social media, but when I am, I see these legions of people who swallow supplements, sell them, advertise them, a whole industry. And do you know who takes these agents most eagerly? Often exactly those who drink and smoke. They think to themselves, oh dear, if I now also take this little powder, then I make my vice good again. The finest are those who have a truly dangerous profession or pursue the riskiest sport in the world, and then talk big about supplements while they drink and smoke. That is Otto Sapiens in his purest form. Otto Sapiens, that is my term for the variant of the human who believes he knows everything because he listened to an audiobook, and who with maximal self-conviction does not notice his own contradiction.

There is no pill that undoes a cigarette. There is no little powder that neutralizes the poison from the food, as long as you do not change the food. The whole supplement orgy is the modern form of the sale of indulgences, you buy yourself a clear conscience and go on sinning. And I say that as someone who substitutes testosterone, so no dogmatic pill-refuser, but one who distinguishes a targeted, reasoned decision from an aimless consumer stance.

The funniest, in the bitterest sense, are for me the people with the truly dangerous professions and the riskiest hobbies in the world. The one hangs on the cliff face without a rope on the weekend or races his motorcycle along the country road, the other works daily with substances next to which a glass of wine seems harmless, and both dutifully swallow their vitamins in the morning and post the photo of it. They optimize the second decimal place of their health while working the first over with a sledgehammer. That is no prevention, that is self-deception with a receipt from the health-food store. Otto Sapiens never recognizes his own contradiction, that is his trademark, he has after all heard an audiobook about it and therefore knows.

Polemical Forewarning, Before I Release You into Your Own Responsibility

Now the part where I warn you, and indeed of me and my own text. You have just read an enumeration of horror images, poison in the food, poison in the air, poison in the cream, poison in the water, a rewritten genome. If you now get panic, then I have done everything wrong, and you are on the verge of becoming the next Otto who frightens himself to death and then buys out a shelf of vitamins.

For that is the trap into which I expressly do not want to let you run. Fear is itself a carcinogen, in the figurative and perhaps even in the literal sense, by way of the stress pathway. Whoever draws from this text the lesson to now make 3 new check-up appointments a day and to fear every strawberry has understood the opposite of what I wanted to say. There is out there a whole industry that lives off your fear, the one sells you the screening, the other the little powder against it, and both earn from the same feeling. External, manufactured fear must not govern your judgment. That is perhaps the single piece of advice in this whole text I give without a footnote.

Do You Have Any Idea How Brilliantly You Are Built?

And now allow me a swipe that is meant for you, for all of you, for the whole of humanity. Do you actually have any idea how brilliant Homo Sapiens is? Do you have a notion of how unbelievable this whole system is that you live in? No. You do not have it. You have no clue. You get up in the morning, do your lap in the hamster wheel, and have no idea what your liver is achieving at this very moment, what your kidneys are filtering, what the pancreas, the gallbladder and the thousand other silent workers inside you are accomplishing right now, without you wasting a single thought on it.

The liver alone detoxifies, rebuilds, stores, secretes, keeps the blood sugar on track and repairs itself, all at the same time, all without an instruction manual. The kidney clears your blood hundreds of times a day and holds the salts accurate to the third decimal place. The immune system recognizes degenerate cells before you even suspect their existence. That is the most brilliant machine the known universe has brought forth, and it runs inside you, free of charge, without complaint, for a lifetime. But how your phone works, which swipe opens which app, that you all know. Almost everyone knows that today. And that, exactly that, I find profoundly sad.

This piece here, this writing about the world, that is me, that was me and that is what I will be. I write it because I must, and I will write it until I drop into the box. That it is read I see from the reactions, whether approving or furious, both are dearer to me than indifference. The writing itself comes easy to me, because I do it daily, and where the spelling or the grammar slips through, a tool named LanguageTool looks over my shoulder, catching not only typos but also the crooked sentence. Which brings me straight to a second swipe. We send our children to school for over a decade, so that they can read, write and do arithmetic. Good. But hand on heart, who among you still does mental arithmetic when the phone sits in your pocket? Who still writes a sentence without the spell checker correcting along in the background? We outsource the thinking and call it progress, while we understand less of our own body, the one we live in, than of the software we will replace again tomorrow.

Back in the Pizzeria, with Bandit and a Glass of Water

Evening has come while I write this, and I sit where I often sit, in the pizzeria of my home town somewhere in Bavaria, the same pizza as always, an alcohol-free wheat beer, beside it a glass of water. At home I drink my filtered water, but here I take what comes, because I am no hypocrite and not one of those who make a scene in a restaurant. Bandit lies under the table, my Malinois, and watches the neighboring tables with me, I with the rest of my pizza, he with the hope of a piece of crust. At the next table a young couple, she films the meal for the network with the one letter, he tells of his new supplement, over a glass of wine.

I think of the woman from Der Spiegel, of her anger, of her sentence that there is too much poison in the world. She is right, and at the same time I would call down to her from my observation post, do not let the anger eat you, for that eats too. My friend from Lower Bavaria sent me this article a few days ago, and without him I would not be sitting here now, having poured twenty years of thought into a text. Homo Sapiens 50,000 years ago drank from the spring, ate what the season gave, avoided the midday sun because it was uncomfortable, and knew neither refined sugar nor glyphosate nor oxybenzone. He died earlier, certainly, of wounds, of infections, of hunger. But he seldom died of what we today die of in this frequency.

I have offered no cure in this text, because I have none. I have shown you the origin, as honestly as I could, the proven as proven, the suspected as suspicion, my conviction as my conviction. What I give you to take along is no little powder and no check-up plan. It is a single request. Come out of the panic. Come out of the supplement orgy, as long as you still smoke and drink and grill yourselves. Stop seeking the blame first in yourselves, and stop at the same time seeking it only in the others. The truth lies in the poison we all share, with the dogs, with the whales, with our children.

And so that no one thinks I place myself above you, here is my own confession, unembellished. I drink almost only my purified water, and once a month I treat myself to an energy drink from the can, of which I know full well that it goes onto the liver, because I too am a human being and no monk. But cola, lemonade, the sweet stuff with the cola-orange mix, that I spare myself, and for a very concrete reason. All the sugar from it gets rebuilt in the liver into fat, and that is the road on which half the West now walks around with a fatty liver without knowing it. A fatty liver is a problem precisely when the body is already fighting against poisons, because of all organs it is the liver that would have to wage that fight, and a fat-laden liver wages it poorly. That is why I hold back massively on sugar and sweets, drink now and then an alcohol-free wheat beer, not a drop of alcohol, and leave the sweet water on the shelves where it belongs.

Bandit has got his crust. The young couple at the next table has ordered its second round of wine and now posts a photo of its supplements with it, the one hand on the glass, the other on the little powder, and neither of the two sees the contradiction. I wave to the server, pay, and think that tomorrow I write on, at the next piece of this puzzle. For the picture is not yet finished. It will, I fear, never be quite finished.

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