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by TeMPOraL 3813 days ago
I didn't imply I was using actual numbers. I was trying to clarify an issue. But since you ask.

The last study that made people panic about meat[0][1] estimated an increase of 18% of the chance you'll get colorectal cancer. Using your data, it means the rate of getting that cancer rises from 5% to 5.9% and the risk of dying from it rises from 2% to 2.36%. That is not a significant increase.

> The total risk of getting any cancer is about 40% and dying from a cancer - 20%. Many of the cancers are significantly affected by healthy (or not) lifestyle/eating/drinking/etc..

Well, it's important to qualify precisely. The list you provided shows that the dominant part of the 40%/20% stat is prostate (15%/2.7%) and breast cancer (12%/3%), followed by lung cancer (7%/6%). That's about 1/2 of your the risk of developing and dying from cancer accounted for in stuff not directly related to food and beverages. The rest is spread among other cancer types (turns out there's quite a lot of them) with most of them having rates below 3%/1%, so still, even 2-fold increase in risk of getting a particular type of cancer doesn't mean much.

[0] - http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/10/26/451950828/pro...

[1] - http://mashable.com/2015/10/31/processed-meat-cancer-risk/