[GRBLDeveloped]

Posted this on the other thread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_2B I read through this list before when I was talking to a conspiracy theorist about 5G. Radio frequencies are on this list. As are caffeic acid (found in coffee, wine, mint), aloe vera and pickled vegetables.

Wouldnt be too scared by its admission to this list

[dang]

Please don't copy-paste comments on HN. It adds noise rather than signal, and makes it a real pain to merge duplicate threads.

[gmiller123456]

Reminds me of when the WHO declared meat as a carcinogen. Pretty useless information. If you actually follow their advice, you'll likely just be switching to something that hasn't been studied as much.

[justinator]

No they didn't - they classified PROCESSED meat as a carcinogen. And they also have a FAQ to tell you what that means:

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

But if you would like to own the vegans, you're more than welcome to eat hot dogs all day, every day, exclusively and we'll see what happens.

[likpok]

From your link they call out both processed meat and red meat. They do distinguish that processed meat "causes" and red meat "probably causes" cancer.

[justinator]

With granularity, both explained in the FAQ and how they're classified (and classified differently).

[gmiller123456]

You seem to have taken my comment personally. There's a lot of options between eating red meat and being vegan that don't consist of "eating hot dogs all day every day".

To my point, the FAQ you linked has the question about whether eating fish or poultry is better to which their answer is : "The cancer risks associated with consumption of poultry and fish were not evaluated."

As I remember the announcement it was "meat", though it's totally possible it was "red meat" and I just remembered it wrong. Though I specifically tried to find more information about why they classified it as such, and which studies they relied on, and there was no information to be had, certainly not the FAQ you linked. The only thing they had was about a two sentence announcement declaring it as a carcinogen.

[mikestew]

Reminds me of when the WHO declared meat as a carcinogen. Pretty useless information.

Well, it's useless if you don't read past the headline. But the link between eating red meat and colorectal cancer has been established for what, decades? So I fail to see what you're arguing against. If I were to "follow their advice", I'd be eating a vegetarian diet, which I'm pretty sure has been studied plenty.

[jcutrell]

The problem is, it's _not advice._

People take different imperatives away from the same information.

What does it mean that red meat causes cancer? Does that mean that all things being equal, high quality red meat should be avoided? Does it mean that red meat is associated with other lifestyle factors that cause cancer? How well controlled are the variables? How was the meat cooked? All red meat, or just certain levels of leanness? Did the diet of the animal matter? What about their location? Was the meat itself tested for contaminants?

In most nutrition studies, the controls are extremely difficult to put in place, especially for things like cancer, because the tail is so long. Studies are almost exclusively observational in nature, relying on recall and cohorts that do or don't eat red meat, which has SO much selection bias associated with it.

Even if you got to the end and could say definitively that high quality sourced red meat is still carcinogenic in all of its possible cooked forms, that still isn't "advice." There are still benefits, and those benefits carried by something like red meat, and those benefits might outweigh the risks.

[asfgidonhio]

I don't understand what you're complaining about. The finding that red meat is probably carcinogenic isn't advice and doesn't pretend to be. The evidence isn't that strong and the WHO goes out of its way to acknowledge that. They have done everything they can to put their findings in context so people can understand them. Would you have preferred they not publish at all?

You ask a number of questions which the WHO has already answered. I don't think you tried very hard to find information. You can read the original monograph:

https://monographs.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...

Or if you want a more approachable layman's explanation:

https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/can...

In some cases the answer will be "we don't know". You had best get used to that.

[belval]

Which ties in to a larger topic in nutrition science, which is that ultimately the research quality is so poor that health risks from deviating from the more historical diet are likely higher than the benefits from jumping on every superfood and banning "bad" foods from your diet.

Eat a bit of everything in moderation, drink water and exercise. Be vegetarian if it's an ethics thing. No need to overthink it.

[mort96]

Huh? Foods like beans or rice or potato or whatever hasn't been studied a lot? That strikes me as surprising.

[Solvency]

Why does HN support and believe everything the WHO says when it comes to transmissible viruses but not anything else? Honest question.

[mikestew]

Not that parent needs me to defend them, but they didn't say that they didn't believe the WHO. They just said the information wasn't helpful.

And as a public service reminder: HN is not a single hive mind.

[beebeepka]

Because many of them are "struggling with obesity"

[denverllc]

Not sure what your point is. Pickled vegetables contain nitrosamines [1] which are definite carcinogens. It’s the same reason that processed meats are associated with increased rates of colon cancer.

Regarding caffeic acid, it’s possible that it may have different effects based on concentration and other conditions. In small doses it may be protective, in high doses it may be carcinogenic. From the Wikipedia article:

“ Some studies have shown that it inhibits carcinogenesis, and other experiments show carcinogenic effects.[22] Oral administration of high doses of caffeic acid in rats has caused stomach papillomas.[22]“

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1831733/

[CamperBob2]

Aspartame is interesting in that unlike caffeic acid, it's a newly-introduced substance that saw rapid, widespread adoption in the mass market. So, where's the statistical increase in cancer rates among aspartame consumers that would have accompanied such a trend, if aspartame were carcinogenic to humans? Is there one? No? Well, what made them even ask the question, then?

When everything causes cancer, nothing does. Like Proposition 65, actions like this ultimately leave us all less aware, less informed, and less safe.

[DropInIn]

One issue in cancer stats is the frequent misattribution of cancers to smoking.

You smoked for 4 years 20 years ago? Then that's what is put as the "cause" for damn near any cancer, which totally destroys the value of the stats.

What we can see though is that rates have generally gone up, either due to increased detection or due to actualized rate increases (most likely a combination of both).

[georgeg23]

The study on aloe seems compelling.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537128/

[mock-possum]

Aw man but I like aloe jellies in my boba tea :(

[coolhand2120]

There are dangers with radio signals. People have been cooked to death by radio before. If you want to have more bandwidth so people can watch videos on their phones etc, you need to have higher frequency. Higher frequency needs to be higher power. You don't want to fry your customer so you can't crank the power too high, so they have to make more base stations.

There is the trade off. The higher the power the fewer the base stations. You don't want to make it so high that it will cause harm, but you also don't want to spend more money installing base stations. So there should obviously be a study done on how much power we can push into living tissue from 5G sites before it causes harm to the tissue. But there isn't such a study. And that's the real crime.

There could be potential harm but we're not looking into it _because there could be potential harm_. Such a finding would really upset the whole 5G rollout. Now anyone near 5G is unwittingly involved in the experiment to find out if it does or does not cause harm. Wonder how many years before we know the results. Wonder if people with financial interests would want to let that info out. But mostly I wonder what the harms might present themselves as.

[mc32]

Reminds me of Prop 65. The list or warning has become useless.

[jstarfish]

Not true. I (for one) had no idea acrylamide was a thing until a stop at McDonald's a few years ago.