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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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.
Some additional comments:
40% of people will develop cancer in their lives. [(link)](https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-cancer-risk/lifetime-probability-of-developing-or-dying-from-cancer.html) That’s a lot, so it makes sense to do what we can to avoid it.
However, cancer in some sense is just a risk of aging. The older you get, the dramatically more likely to develop it.
In addition, in these studies, we don’t know what the additional risk of cancer is, or how serious those cancers are.
There is a cost in taking cancer too seriously. If you decrease your risk of cancer by 1% by never eating red meat or going to the beach, that might not be worth the cost.
Simply growing old increases your chances for cancer. If a heart attack, stroke, or neurodegenerative disease dont take you out first, then cancer steps in to do what the others couldnt. In a most agonizing way.
Essentially being overly safe in life in your daily work and home life, plus going for checkups to keep yourself in optimal health, will in the end, not only dramatically increase your odds of becoming cancerous, but making cancer the thing that ends your life. Thats the prize you win for being super safe all your life and making it to a grand old age!! Congratulations!!
The sun gives vitamin D but it’s also causes cancer.
Eat, sleep and exercise well and it will help your cells
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