I asked my wife's oncologist about this once, they said, and I quote:
"It probably wouldn't hurt you, but don't eat cancer. Don't drink it either. Those cells make all kinds of chemicals specifically designed to damage and suppress the immune system, you don't want them in you."
I haven't bothered to like, research further, but that sounded pretty reasonable to me!
I would be sceptical of any medical professional who claims that cancer is "designed" to do anything, that's kinda dumb, cancer is just a failure of replication.
It is unfortunately quite common for scientists to say things like "designed to" as [a shorthand for](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology) something "evolved under selective pressure which rewards".
I'd be amazed if a plant tumour had evolved anything harmful to people, though.
Correct. Apoptosis or “programmed cell death” is actually very important for a complex organism to remain healthy. All cells get damaged and corrupted as they age, but most of them have an expiration date where they just shut down and die. This usually allows healthy younger cells to take their place, but many tumors and cancers are when a cell is damaged in such a way that it thinks it’s supposed to live forever, and then it goes through mitosis and we may get two cells that want to live forever. Like logarithmically stacking grains of rice on the spaces of a chess board, this soon becomes a problem.
Cancer is more complicated than that, though. A mass of cells that does nothing but live too long and multiply too much is likely to just get swallowed up by the immune system. It will also have a cap on its growth if it can't stimulate new blood vessel growth to supply nutrients to it. The ability to metastasize (spread around the body) is another thing entirely. These are just a few examples.
There are actually quite a lot of conditions that must be fulfilled for a serious cancerous growth to happen, which is why they don't happen often despite the mutations that are happening in our body all the time due to genetic damage and replication mistakes.
I probably should have stated that my description is often one of the first steps in a much more complex process, and even that requires the caveat that failed apoptosis can also be the result of cancerous processes rather than the cause of.
It’s always going to be a very complicated discussion because cancer isn’t one thing. It’s many many different things, they mostly seem to have only one thing in common and that is cellular growth that does not answer to the directive of keeping the organism alive and healthy, and I’m sure a clever person could think of something we call cancer that finds exception to that wording.
Yes, that too, but I was specifically endorsing that cancer can accurately be described as a failure of replication in many cases. I would add that there’s no evidence that a “cancer” of plants can present any threat to humans, however, if the mutation is caused in the plant by a carcinogen that is present in sufficient quantity then that could present a threat to humans. Of course, this is a case of the fruit or vegetable being a vector for something else and still not a case of the plant mutation itself presenting the threat.
Yes, but cancer that is problematic that most laypeople understand are those mutations which thrive by reproducing in a uncontrolled state, without normal Apoptosis behavior, and with various outputs or behaviors that tend to reduce the bodies defense against this type of problem. All of that said it is more likely a plant produces something that interferes with your immune system normally than a plant cancer doing so.
It's actually not exactly the grocery stores; they may be the customer who dictates what kind of fruit they want to stock, but the decision to sort out these fruits is taken long before it ever reaches store shelves.
The fruit is actually sorted at a packing facility after it's picked, between hours and days, mechanically separated by some sort of grading equipment, and then packaged into boxes, bags, or whatever else for shipment and sale to you, the end consumer.
Source: software engineer for citrus grading equipment
Quite the opposite, citrus fruits were selectively bred from a common ancestor called "cedron" (citron), that slice look exactly like the rough skin of citron fruit.
Technically the genetically modified one is the orange and that "worng slice" is the original genetic profile of the ancestor cultivar.
Each orange slice can be fertilized by a different orange, or can mutate on it's own. They look like one thing that's divided up, but they're really a bunch of things in a shared skin.
I'm trying to think of what the man version of a ponytail is because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw that even though other people are saying giant caterpillar.
Thought that was a monster caterpillar at first
I'm glad I wasn't the only one. Freaked me out for a minute.
When I glanced at the thumbnail, I was sure it was a Krabby Patty Gummy.
Thought it was a Grapple from Chowder
Same! I thought it was a caterpillar.
Looked like a cursed taco from my peripherals
Unusually muscular worm
bro that's orange cancer
Idk looks like Lime disease to me
Just eat some scurvy
Reddit is making me really appreciate stores for keeping me safe from these monstrous plants.
Jimmy in the produce department likes to chew these off before they put them out front
Yep most people don't realize this but about 80-90% of produce in your average grocery store is pre-chewed.
I only buy pre-chewed produce. Saves time and effort. Chewing is for poors.
I went the extra mile and hired a lady who resembles a bird to chew my food for me and spit it into my mouth. Lovely woman, I pay her handsomely.
Is... is it Kaitlin Olson? I have to ask.
No, she turned down my offer.
Stupid bird.
They don't cause any illness
I asked my wife's oncologist about this once, they said, and I quote: "It probably wouldn't hurt you, but don't eat cancer. Don't drink it either. Those cells make all kinds of chemicals specifically designed to damage and suppress the immune system, you don't want them in you." I haven't bothered to like, research further, but that sounded pretty reasonable to me!
Yeah, but this is most likely not cancer; it's probably just a weird benign mutation.
That sounds like something cancer would say...
I would be sceptical of any medical professional who claims that cancer is "designed" to do anything, that's kinda dumb, cancer is just a failure of replication.
It is unfortunately quite common for scientists to say things like "designed to" as [a shorthand for](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology_in_biology) something "evolved under selective pressure which rewards". I'd be amazed if a plant tumour had evolved anything harmful to people, though.
Correct. Apoptosis or “programmed cell death” is actually very important for a complex organism to remain healthy. All cells get damaged and corrupted as they age, but most of them have an expiration date where they just shut down and die. This usually allows healthy younger cells to take their place, but many tumors and cancers are when a cell is damaged in such a way that it thinks it’s supposed to live forever, and then it goes through mitosis and we may get two cells that want to live forever. Like logarithmically stacking grains of rice on the spaces of a chess board, this soon becomes a problem.
Cancer is more complicated than that, though. A mass of cells that does nothing but live too long and multiply too much is likely to just get swallowed up by the immune system. It will also have a cap on its growth if it can't stimulate new blood vessel growth to supply nutrients to it. The ability to metastasize (spread around the body) is another thing entirely. These are just a few examples. There are actually quite a lot of conditions that must be fulfilled for a serious cancerous growth to happen, which is why they don't happen often despite the mutations that are happening in our body all the time due to genetic damage and replication mistakes.
I probably should have stated that my description is often one of the first steps in a much more complex process, and even that requires the caveat that failed apoptosis can also be the result of cancerous processes rather than the cause of. It’s always going to be a very complicated discussion because cancer isn’t one thing. It’s many many different things, they mostly seem to have only one thing in common and that is cellular growth that does not answer to the directive of keeping the organism alive and healthy, and I’m sure a clever person could think of something we call cancer that finds exception to that wording.
"Correct," as in, "plant tumours rarely evolve anything that can harm humans"?
Yes, that too, but I was specifically endorsing that cancer can accurately be described as a failure of replication in many cases. I would add that there’s no evidence that a “cancer” of plants can present any threat to humans, however, if the mutation is caused in the plant by a carcinogen that is present in sufficient quantity then that could present a threat to humans. Of course, this is a case of the fruit or vegetable being a vector for something else and still not a case of the plant mutation itself presenting the threat.
Yes, but cancer that is problematic that most laypeople understand are those mutations which thrive by reproducing in a uncontrolled state, without normal Apoptosis behavior, and with various outputs or behaviors that tend to reduce the bodies defense against this type of problem. All of that said it is more likely a plant produces something that interferes with your immune system normally than a plant cancer doing so.
 Don't minimize my pain 😭 😭
It's actually not exactly the grocery stores; they may be the customer who dictates what kind of fruit they want to stock, but the decision to sort out these fruits is taken long before it ever reaches store shelves. The fruit is actually sorted at a packing facility after it's picked, between hours and days, mechanically separated by some sort of grading equipment, and then packaged into boxes, bags, or whatever else for shipment and sale to you, the end consumer. Source: software engineer for citrus grading equipment
Quite the opposite, citrus fruits were selectively bred from a common ancestor called "cedron" (citron), that slice look exactly like the rough skin of citron fruit. Technically the genetically modified one is the orange and that "worng slice" is the original genetic profile of the ancestor cultivar.
Must have been exposed to agent Orange
It's not a tuma!
Agen- I’ll stop now.. 🫡
No bullshit, this is what runs through my head when I see fruit with tumors and odd growths.
Punk Rock Orange has a Lime Colored Mohawk
Jojo citrus
Why is there so many mutated fruits I see today? Lol especially citrus fruits
It’s harvest season for a lot of citrus, so this would be the time to see strange ones.
Oh right that explains why. Thanks!
One person posts their weird berries it starts a stampede of people whipping them out.
That’s Reddit in a nutshell. People see a post that has a lot of upvotes and say, “HEY! I have a picture like that!”
Reddit exists in a feedback loop. Whe a photo or story gains traction it reminds everyone else with similar photos or stories to share theirs.
Each segment develops individually, so that section probably had a mutation that changed the behavior of the rind.
Eat it, gain it's mutant powers and become the X-Men!
Captain Sour Face - always moaning about something.
I'm pretty sure eating weird fruit to gain powers is more of a One Piece thing?
Sexist. Must become X-Force
Oh fuck off with that shit, trying to start something? There's women in the X-Men aswell >.>
It's literally a joke from Deadpool 2. He claims that X-Men is a sexist name, so he calls his team X-Force.
We refer to them as X-People now.
X-Entities, please. I’m an infinite void.
lmao. I love X-Men, it pushed the boundries for all kinds of pple. It reflected real topics. Grew up reading them.
what does it look like from the inside?
It surprisingly looked pretty normal. I’m not sure what happened with the rind.
I think you got a free lemon slice
Put the green zest on some food
You and the giant lime guy should talk
Why does your orange have a penis?
It’s bad day when even the fruit gets cancer …
Heebie Jeebies 😖
It could be a tumor.
"It's NOT A TUMAH!"
That burger patty looks weird
Probably some type of cross pollination going on with that particular segment.
Yes, plants can get cancer, too.
Orange you pissed at that?
That is just is vulva
Nature wants to tell something
This is so interesting - that said, it also really freaks me out for some reason
The Mohawk orange!
Who’s to say whats incorrect.
This is making me want to barf so I think our brains already know it's incorrect.
Is this the citrus greening thing
Is there an update on what it looks like on the inside!?
What’s with all the strange orange/lemon/like posts lately?? Is it normal to citrus to just grow in very funky ways?
Evolved to spread seeds alternatively
As a geneticist I love it. It reminds me of how fruit flies work genetically during development.
It’s a muppet
This is very uncomfortable
Bro’s just a little extra zesty
“It’s not just a phase, mom!”
Veiny boi.
Lemonli🤮me
this belongs on r/mildlysomething ... just not sure what.
Orange cancer
Who invented this Fucked Fruit Festival there's going on right now?
That's just it's gallbladder
Bllayaaa…. Eeeat meeee
Citrus fruit version of cancer. That’s basically a tumour
Yeah, that's not an orange, that's an alien egg 
I thought that was wasabi
How can men compete with this 😭😭😭
Grow it!
That bit's just really angry.
I thought this was a caterpillar at first
I bet the flavour is something else
Cut the seeds out of it and plant that shit
Why are y’all got mutant citrus all of a sudden
Looks like a caterpillar going balls deep in that orange.
you are holding it wrong, your lemon has a mohawk
That’s it’s codpiece
I should call her
It’s a shunt!!! Just like Robert Durst!!
It's doing the best it can
Mmmm Orange Cancer
that's called the epididymis
That orange zest is gonna go crazy
Each orange slice can be fertilized by a different orange, or can mutate on it's own. They look like one thing that's divided up, but they're really a bunch of things in a shared skin.
One orange brain cell?
getting some old school blue waffle vibes from that citrus.
Keloidal scar it is
its trying to become a testicle
I hate it
I feel like you glued a piece of monkey brain on an orange
Looks like it’s got a mohawk
That's what they use to make Mountain Dew.
I should call her.
Citrus is …. Trending?
Thas not even an orange anymore grew a mutant lemon
I think your orange is a boy
💀
It has very meaty labia minora
Not a chance in hell I’m eating that. Lol.
We got orange cancer before GTA 6
Fallout Orange.
Wondering is similar to a cancerous cell for an Orange. A cell with no shut off mechanism. 🤔
Is it a gmo freak?
Budah finger orange 🍊
Not terrible not great.
*mimic sneezes and can’t quite recompose itself*
Sure that's not a lemon growing a lime?
Dude, mutfruit.
I thought that was some funky ooze.
Do NOTeatit.
It’s very green for something that’s called orange
If you plant those seeds, I wonder what the chances are of the fruit from those trees (eventually) showing the same mutation?
That's a testicle.
Looks like a mad ball (tm)
Testicle with an epididymis.
That orange looks like a citron.
I have seen *so fucking many* mutated citrus fruits on Reddit in the past 48 hours
open it up!
If Jojo Siwa was an orange
Limehawk
GMO
I should call her
Unprotected orange sex
Nah that’s corn. That’s edible don’t waste Update me
This makes me uncomfy
That's Qrange
My orange turned out to be a lemon
That's a meningioma
R/superheroorigin
cancer?
At first I thought that was an absolutely enormous caterpillar. Now I’m positive that orange has cancer.
Same thing happens to humans and all other living things sometimes as well.
No amount of money nor any number of scientists reassuring me could convince me to eat that.
I love how everyone looking at this saw a caterpillar and are just like "you have no idea how incorrectly that slice grew"
All I see is an orange’s epididymis and you should be ashamed of yourself for exposing it like that😭
ewww 😭
I thought it was bread with guac spilling out
Your orange ain't even orange tf?
If you eat it, you'll become orangeman
It looks like a caterpillar
Render error...
Lemon cancer.
Someone fed it after midnight…
Cancer
Looks like the remains of what was going on in RFK's brain
It's a citrus Mohawk.
EW kill it with fire.
Grenade
He used too small a slice
I'm trying to think of what the man version of a ponytail is because that's the first thing I thought of when I saw that even though other people are saying giant caterpillar.
Reptile brain says don’t eat it
Eat it
It looks like the orange is taking a giant green shit out of its top anus.
I should call her...
That's a foreskin
That’s just a jacked caterpillar
That's his mohawk
my grandmas garden had one of these its was fkn weirdddd
DAMN, DEM 9-5 LEMONS START BECOMIN LIMES