eli5: Why does it seem like everything is carcinogenic and does that mean if it is, it causes cancer?

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I feel like I am always hearing about how things are carcinogenic, like red meat or air conditioners or aspartame. Why does it seem like *so* many things are carcinogenic and does that mean they cause cancer? Because it’s starting to feel like everything causes cancer…

This is the type of thing that gets my anxiety going so I’d love if someone who understands this better than I do can explain it.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Sometimes researchers will do animal studies where they inject a chemical into rats and find out some of them develop cancer. This will get out in the news as “Researchers discover a chemical found in [common product] may cause cancer.” The headline on that story will be “Does [common product] give you cancer?” The implication being that yes, it absolutely does.

At the very bottom of that article, after everyone has stopped reading, will be a sentence about how rats are not humans, so you really can’t conclude anything, and often left out entirely is that for a human to come in contact with the same relative amount of chemical X they would have to do something absurd like eat 20,000 apples a day every day for 50 years.

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