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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Unlike a lot of the answers that seem to treat cancer as ultra rare and nothing to worry about: Let’s be crystal clear. It’s a REAL thing, and more often than not, it’s going to kill you if you get it. What’s more, the treatment can almost be like dying itself, and you may well bankrupt your family in the process. So, seriously: you really don’t want it.
Anyway: Every now and then a senior cancer researcher gets asked something along the lines of: “OK, so what are things that YOU avoid to lessen your chances of cancer, knowing what you know?” The things that they say fall into two categories:
1. Those they absolutely avoid: smoking and basically anything to do with tobacco. Never spending any time in the sun without sunscreen. Avoid consuming foods with a lot or artificial flavors/colors or sweetners. These are things that are simple and you won’t be missing anything either.
2. Things they avoid, but don’t lose sleep over if it’s in moderation: Red meats, moderate alcohol consumption, foods with sugar, and… burnt toast. Turns out, really burnt “anything” is actually pretty bad to ingest. But a burnt marshmallow or two once a summer is not going to be a big deal.
The thing is, stress, anger and general continuous exposure to plastics is probably worse than most of category 2, so there’s an area most modern humans could really work on.
Your body is made up of a lot of cells, and your body is constantly replacing them by making new ones. Now imagine a dice, every time your body makes a new cell, the dice gets rolled, and if the wrong number comes up, the cell that’s made is wrong, possibly being a cancer cell. Thankfully, the dice isn’t a d6, closer to like a d10000, and even if one cell does occasionally turn out bad, your body is pretty good at getting rid of them before they’re a problem. Still, every once in a while one will pop up, make more cells like it faster than your body gets rid of them and then become cancer.
Now, when something is a carcinogen, that means that it’s coating a few extra sides of that dice to be the wrong number, so it’s more likely to come up and become a bad cell. However, there’s a big difference between something that’ll coat a few extra spaces on that dice and something that’ll coat half the dice.
So, a lot of things are carcinogenic, but some just increase the risk you’ll get cancer by a little, some by a lot, but they’re both increasing the risk so it gets talked about the same sometimes.
Speaking as a hypochondriac: Cancer happens as a result of some combination of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors. You have no control over your genes, and you have very limited control over your environment. Sure, you should endeavor to avoid asbestos exposure, but you were probably already doing that to the best of your ability. In other words, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about what a carcinogen is, but what do you need to specificity avoid to minimize your risk of cancer?
The third category is what you have the most control over, so focus on that and forget the rest. Eat a balanced diet, maintain a healthy weight, be active, don’t smoke, keep alcohol to a minimum, go for your regular checkups and screenings, and you will most likely be ok. Of course some people do all these things and still get cancer, but it’s rare. There is so much sensationalism around cancer that it’s easy to lose sight if the fact that most people actually never develop it. Your body is a remarkable machine and generally does a pretty good job of shutting down all kinds of things that can kill you, cancerous cells included. It happens all the time, every minute of every day without you knowing it. Respect your body and you’ll grow to trust in its ability to protect you.
Being alive causes cancer. Your immune system is continually finding and killing problematic cells. So many things can affect your body in different ways. The reality is that we don’t always know exactly what risks or links there are, so it’s easier just to slap labels on everything. Unless you are causing widespread irreversible damage to your DNA, you’re probably going to be alright. Just stay out of nuclear reactors, don’t eat 4 million bananas at once, and use sunscreen!
In short, “the dose makes the poison”.
If you have limited exposure to a dangerous substance, you have lower risk. If you have repeated/high exposure, you have a higher risk.
For many substances, the threshold for acute risk is pretty high. Like, you could probably get cancer from a rubber duck, but you would have to chew on that rubber duck for eight hours a day, every day, for forty years straight. And by that point, you would have a higher (but not guaranteed) cancer risk. So realistically, you don’t need to avoid rubber ducks.
Being alive is also carcinogenic because the longer you live and more times your cells divide the more chance there is for a cancer to develop.
Once I realized that fucking browned potatoes are carcinogenic I stopped paying attention.
You can’t fucking tell me hash browns tater tots and french fries cause cancer and expect that not to ruin my fucking life. French fries are literally everything. I quit smoking, I will NEVER stop eating french fries.
Its all about doses. Besides, if you have a 0.000000001% of developing a specific cancer, a 1% increase in the risk of getting that cancer just bumps it to 0.00000000101%, not to 1.000000001
Because dose and or dose over time matter. Dose A of medicine X saves your life, dose B kills you
Just about everything is. Heck, you don’t even have to do anything bad like smoking to get cancer. Your body is made up of cells that undergoes DNA replication constantly and the proteins involved in this process can make mistakes. When we’re younger, we have good mechanisms to manage these errors. But as we grow older, we are more prone to errors and cells can become cancerous spontaneously. This is how some people who are chronic smokers may never end up with cancer while others who, on paper, are eating and have a healthier lifestyle, can still end up with cancer in their life.
Of course, carcinogens up your probability of causing significant DNA damage, but it is by no means causation unless it’s something really concentrated, like prolonged exposure to radiation to a nuclear bomb, which significantly increases your probability.
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