Hah, I've counted 10+ different intelligent(?) guesses in the replies.

I lean toward "people got better at not dying from everything else." It's plausible to me that it just enabled existing factors to unfold on the time scales they unfold on for more people.

My handy heuristic for headlines like this: Is it a scary new trend that means something or did other factors suppressing its natural emergence decline? Or is it a matter of observation?

A recent real-world example was the detection of two different objects entering the solar system. The naive speculation was "they came on the same plane, so they must be alien!" But the reality is more mundane: the new detection method that found them, while flexible, started by looking at that plane. So of course both objects it detected were on that plane.

▲

everdrive 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>I lean toward "people got better at not dying from everything else."

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem the be the case here, and the article goes into this. Deaths due to colorectal cancer under 50 simply used to be incredibly uncommon. Younger people were simply not screened for it. The rise is not solely relative to other forms of death, but in absolute terms has increased.

	▲	Kye an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There could still be another factor other than lifestyle or chemicals in the food, the dominant opinions as of posting. Point (which I realize I forgot to make) is we don't know and latching on to pet theories, even really smart ones, has never done anyone any good in general, but especially when it comes to health.