Over the past 10 years, rates of colorectal cancer among 25 to 49 year olds have increased in 24 different countries, including the UK, US, France, Australia, Canada, Norway and Argentina.
The investigation’s early findings, presented by an international team at the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) congress in Geneva in September 2024, were as eye-catching as they are concerning.
The researchers, from the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) International Agency for Research on Cancer, surveyed data from 50 countries to understand the trend. In 14 of these countries, the rising trend was only seen in younger adults, with older adult rates remaining stable.
Based on epidemiological investigations, it seems that this trend first began in the 1990s. One study found that the global incidence of early-onset cancer had increased by 79% between 1990 and 2019, with the number of cancer-related deaths in younger people rising by 29%. Another report in The Lancet Public Health described how cancer incidence rates in the US have steadily risen between the generations across 17 different cancers, particularly in Generation Xers and Millennials.
Does anybody cook anymore? I have started cooking again for my girlfriend and honestly it’s like having another job, it takes fucking ages every day. When I lived on my own I would sometimes go months without a hot meal, because realistically, how can you work full time and attend to the daily tasks of living? Genuinely, where is the time? I’m out for twelve hours of every day.
Easily: leftovers. Literally just cook on sunday. Takes like 1.5-2hrs. Make 10-12 servings. Dinner for 2 for 5-6 days. Eat it all week.
I have done this every week for my entire adult life and have never spent more than like 2hrs per week cooking unless I wanted to make something particularly difficult for fun.
Also, you can make big batches of stuff to freeze or can. Canning is easy: get a pressure cooker, buy some big mason jars - they’re cheap and reusable, look up the pressure and time requirements (especially if the dish contains meat), and boom. Shelf stable food you can store in the pantry and eat whenever.
Meal prep ideas:
Spend like 3hrs making 10 dozen pierogies (potato & cheese and pork & mushroom & sauerkraut are my favorites), freeze half & boil/pan fry whenever. Eat the rest for the week with some sauerkraut or cucumber dill salad (umborksalat) as a side. Costs maybe 30 bucks for everything and makes food for 2 weeks (6 pierogies per serving). Make more if you want - it doesn’t take much extra time.
Chinese style dumplings are the same as pierogies but with square wrappers and more ingredients. Buy wonton wrappers. Make filling with ground pork, garlic, green onion, msg, ginger, salt, pepper, soy sauce, vinegar. Add napa cabbage if you want to stretch the filling. Fill wonton wrappers. Make however many you want. Takes a few hours if you’re gonna make a shitload, but it is easy - pop on a movie and make hundreds if you want. Freeze and boil whenever. Or make potstickers by heating oil in a pan, putting in fresh or frozen dumplings, cooking for a bit before adding some water before immediately covering with a lid. Cook a bit and they should release from the pan - scrape them up with a spatula if they don’t.
Get a very large pot. Make a full pot of gumbo, red beans and sausage for red beans & rice, or split pea soup. You can make gallons of these very cheaply in the same time it’d take to make a smaller quantity. Freeze or can most of it. Cook rice for the week for gumbo or red beans and rice (20mins on the stove, 2mins of prep). Serve over rice (don’t serve split pea soup over rice unless you’re a psychopath). Done.
Make west african peanut soup. Made of sweet potatoes, peanut butter, chicken if you want, collard greens, tomatoes. Fucking delicious. Very filling and calorie dense. Like 25 bucks for a week of delicious soup. I make like 2kg when I do this. Could double batch and freeze/can half as well.
Jambalaya/jollof rice/other similar rice dishes. Make 10-12 servings for the week or double it and freeze half.
Lasagna or other pasta bake dishes. Make one dish for the week. Make another to freeze and pop in the oven to cook whenever. Serve with a quick salad.
Enchiladas. Same as pasta dishes (can freeze and cook later). Cook meat/other filling. Heat up a bunch of corn torrillas. Fill with filling. Put into a rectangular casserole dish with some enchilada sauce. Top with enchilada sauce and some cheese. Boom. 12 enchiladas - enough for a week. Especially if you make some cilantro-lime or ‘spanish’ rice to go with it (rice, boullion, onion, tomato paste, diced tomato, garlic, little oil, water) - throw it all in a pot, simmer 20mins, refrigerate, eat all week as a side dish. Maybe use canned refried beans as a side too.
Tacos. Shred up a rotisserie chicken. Pan fry with onions, garlic, peppers if you want (chipotles in adobo are my favorite. You could use salsa instead or jalapenos or whatever). Boom. Freeze or refrigerate. Heat up and put in tortillas whenever with some fresh cilantro/onion/hot sauce. Make rice as with enchiladas. Can serve with beans, too.
Thanks for the suggestions! Will definitely do the wonton dumplings this week.
Definitely recommended! There are tons of recipes online - but that’s the basic formula.
Yeah — I maybe cook 1-2 meals a week, and that usually involves some prepackaged ingredient that saves me time. The rest is quick like oatmeal, toast, etc, or I’m just ordering takeout. I don’t have the energy to cook a lot, nor do I want to spend my free time doing it after work.
My wife and I have a system that works for us. I do the food shopping and clean up, and she does the cooking (the woman is a sauceress).
Shopping happens on saturday (sometimes pre-cooking prep too), cooking on sunday. We cook two meals and have it throughout the week. Sometimes we’ll freeze some of what we cook using souper cubes (for soups, stews, and chili).
You can do it! You just have to get into the routine of it.
I once read a quote that said meal prepping is the perfect method to ensure that you always have food that is cold, old, and not what you’re in the mood for. And although my love goes out to everyone who does meal prep (it’s great!) this quote put into words a feeling that I always failed to grasp.
I love cooking and I have tried meal prepping in different forms so often. But 90% of the evenings I end up cooking something from scratch that I am actually in the mood for. It feels - whatever the opposite of empowering is. My spouse is happy to eat the same meal 5 times in a row, I have a hard time even with 2 different meals in between. My freezer is full of “prepared” food that we could just dethaw and eat and it ends up being eaten by my spouse or trashed after months of me not unfreezing it.
Like, pumpkin soup the other day! So easy to make a big batch! Efficient and fun! I make enough for 6 portions and we have delicious soup and I am so proud that I made enough to last for a couple of meals but I hate to see that soup in the fridge the next day.
That’s a fair stance to have. I guess it’s not for everyone.
I agree, but it is possible to prep ingredients without cooking them ahead of time, that can help. Soup is different because it’s literally better tasting reheated, portion it and freeze it! But for other foods, you can (for example ) make chicken one day and quesadillas with chicken the next day and a quick soup or stir fry with the rest of it the following day, planning like that can save both time & money.
I do work, exercise, and cook supper every day, and yeah it is sometimes exhausting, I just like to eat things that I like, so I do the cooking.
Prepping as already suggested helps a lot. But make use of appliances too.
A fish fillet can cook in the oven in 40 minutes but does not require care while cooking.
A slow cooker is a god send. You can start your ribs the night before and they’ll be ready for lunch.
Then pasta takes 10 minute to cook and you can just prep some veggies/souces in advance.