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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>I feel like I am always hearing about how things are carcinogenic
That’s down to a couple of things.
1. Media is for profit. It’s easier to get clicks, reads, etc. if you have a clickbait title about something being carcinogenic.
2. Most media’s ability to report on scientific research is extremely lacking. I’ll get to this later on.
3. Scientists aren’t necessarily the best at communicating their findings. That’s not their jobs, so that doesn’t help with point 2.
Regarding media’s poor (I would personally call it terrible a lot of the time) scientific reporting. One is that the journalists are not often scientifically literate. That’s not their primary job and having a journalist that is scientifically literate also means that they’ll have some kind of scientific background to boot. That makes these people rare. Then, a good scientific journalist also has to have the humility required to recognize when they’re outside of their own areas of scientific knowledge. Note that this doesn’t mean that they can’t report on things they don’t know about, just that they know what they don’t know. They should still be able to determine with some amount of accuracy what is good science and what isn’t by looking at who the respected scientists are in their fields, where the study comes from and also importantly be able to tell if the results are preliminary or if there is a very good body of evidence for it.
Now, add to that the fact that news outlets have the annoying tendency of trying to contact researchers for interviews the day of or a day in advance. That means they get turned down a lot. It’s rare that a scientist would be ready for any kind of interview on short notice. It’s something I have seen often enough in academia that colleagues and I used to joke about it.
Add all that together and you get headlines about anything causing cancer the moment there is any kind of possible link between something and cancer. The news also often don’t report when further research shows there wasn’t a link or that as u/ColSurge mentioned, the probabilities are very low.
Finally, I will add that there are scientists who are good at communicating science to the general public and there are also journalistic outlets that are good at communicating science too. As an example, Arstechnica doesn’t cover everything, but what they do cover, they usually do well. It also helps that the readership can be pretty harsh if they make errors. They’re mostly tech with some science related news (weather, space, some health articles). A lot of their writers also hold degrees in related fields and are former scientists.
ETA: Another thing is the dose you’re exposed to. Some things when exposed to in large quantities can be carcinogenic (think ridiculously high doses), others are particularly nasty and you should avoid at all costs, and finally some fall in between. For example, I would be much more worried about smoking than nitrites in charcuterie unless I were to eat the latter every day for every meal.
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