Every time I see someone touch oil or breathe in fumes or dust( or other dirty things), I always see “hes gonna get cancer” in comments. I always kind of just accepted it as truth, but do they actually give you cancer? like how can breathing in some dust make your cells divide weirdly and give you cancer?
In: 93
They damage your dna. Anything that can generate free radicals can damage your dna. Your body repairs most of it, but once in a while a deadly mutation sneaks through. Radiation, petrochemicals like benzene, irritants like asbestos,all do the job. And oddly, obesity.
Depends what you’re breathing. For example fumes (depending on the source) can have “carcinogens” or toxic substances that can mutate the DNA in your cells and turn them into cancerous cells
Some kinds of dust, like powdered quartz fragments or asbestos, are highly irritating to the tissue of the lungs. But they can’t be effectively removed by coughing, and they can’t be attacked and destroyed by white blood cells like organic debris. They just stick around, causing inflammation and inducing cells to divide in an attempt to repair the damage.
These kinds of dust can have varying negative effects, including an increased risk of lung cancer.
Usually it’s because it either directly damages the DNA of cells in the body, or it inhibits the mechanisms that the body uses to kill off cells that got corrupted. This might be because it’s radioactive to some degree, or it has a chemical that reacts with our body chemistry.
It’s a widely known fact that some products only give you cancer when you’re in California /s
The cause of cancer at its root is damage to your DNA. specifically, a cell was damaged in a way where it no longer checks to make sure its ready to divide and is healthy enough to divide, and it no longer checks if the body needs it to divide. Normally the immune system catches these cells if these two safeguards fail, but if the immune system misses it, you have the beginning of cancer, or at least a tumor.
A lot of stuff in our everyday life can cause damage to our DNA, but in moderation, the odds of getting cancer are extremely low as most damaged cells simply die off or are killed off. The more exposure the higher the risk, and a few things pose a much higher risk of damaging our DNA.
Take your example of dust. Some types of dust particles may be sharp or irritating to the lungs, like asbestos for example. When it gets lodged in your lungs, it continually pricks and damages cells, and then your immune system gets involved and inflames the area, further causing damage. And often times these prickly dust particles stay in your lungs for a while. Or if the dust has active chemicals on it, those chemicals will then damage the sensitive inside of your lungs and throat, again posing a risk of cancer.
Your cells make new copies of themselves all the time, generally this goes just fine and your cell makes an identical copy of itself. But sometimes this goes wrong and there’s something wrong with the new cell, when this happens your immune system attacks the mutated cell and kills it. But sometimes it doesn’t, and the mutated cell starts making more mutated copies of itself, a *lot* more mutated copies of itself, way way more copies than a healthy cell would make. This is cancer. DNA is the instructions that tell your cells how to make copies of themselves, anything that damages your DNA makes it more likely that your cells will make mutated copies and the more mutated copies you have the more likely one is to slip past your immune system’s notice and start replicating out of control. Some chemicals like dioxin (the main ingredient in Agent Orange that the US used in Vietnam to kill plants) or things like radiation (even radiation from the sun!) damage your DNA and thus make you more likely to get cancer.
In addition to others excellent comments about DNA damage, a slight clarification on the “randomness” of carcinogens. It’s not really that random.
There are entire classes of chemicals that are likely to be carcinogenic – for instance, chemicals containing benzene rings. Benzene and its derivatives are extremely chemically active due to the chemical properties of the benzene ring and exposure to benzene can cause damage to bone marrow, resulting in leukemia or other cancers. Other carcinogenic substances cause cancer in different ways, but they tend to fall into classes. Lung irritants, such as asbestos, cause cancer by injuring the villi in the lungs and continuously creating new wounds, which causes lots of cells to get created and creates more opportunities for a cancerous mutation to occur during cell reproduction.
Some carcinogens are complete surprises found during testing, but many of them are similar to other carcinogens in ways that make regulators and testers give them extra scrutiny.
Pretty simply, the human body evolved to eat and drink natural substances, or at least naturally derived food, like an egg. Substitutes and artificial food and beverages are human made, and much of the time made of varying chemicals and substances deemed to be safe to eat. But, what is deemed “safe to eat” isn’t always so. Take aspartame, an artificial sugar substitute. The World Health Organization is putting this on a list of probable human carcinogens meNing it causes cancer. Aspartame is found is many sugar free diet foods like Diet Coke. You can’t just remove the sugar without replacing it with something, and aspartame is one of those somethings. And it’s like this for many foods that are diet, fat free, or sugar free. Something was removed, so they came up with something to add that flavor back.
Of course the same applies to smoking too. That first drag you take and literally coughing your lungs up is your body telling you, “Don’t do that.” But as you can see from the rapidly declining IQ’s in this nation how well people listen to anything that’s not thier own mouth talking. Cigarettes are full of bad chemicals, and nicotine is actually a poision with addictive properties. Cigarettes are literally designed to get you addicted, keep you buying more and supporting thier incom stream, and give you health issues so they can milk you with medical bills. And pot really isn’t any better. There is an actual study that say’s it can cause stunted Braun development and cognitive growth issues in people with still developing brains, or basically anyone under the age of 25.
In very simple terms, Think of getting cancer as rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. Each time something causes damage to your DNA, you roll the dice. Most of the time, you probably won’t role double ones, and your DNA can repair it self with no issues. sometimes, due to completely random chance, your DNA repairs incorrectly which causes the “directions” for cell growth to go bad and the cells start replicating when they aren’t supposed to.
When people say something causes cancer, it most scenarios it doesn’t “cause” cancer, it just damages your DNA thus forcing you to roll the dice again. (The one exception off the top of my head is virus forcing specific mutations that cause cancer). Smoking for example causes lots of damage to your lungs and forces you to roll those dice a lot more than a non smoker. But it’s all random chance, it’s why you have kids that have never smoked before getting cancer, and people who smoke a pack a day for decades not get cancer. Just because you are rolling dice a lot, doesn’t mean you will ever roll snake eyes, and conversely, you can only roll the dice once and get snake eyes on your one roll.
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