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by adamredwoods 569 days ago
Your DNA is not guaranteed to mutate into something cancerous that spreads and mutates. I do think there are things humans can do to avoid carcinogens, but remember, bananas give off radionuclides.
3 comments

Avoiding alcohol is gonna be a whole lot better to avoid cancer than not eating bananas
Bananas don’t actually linearly increase your radiation risks because the body maintains homogeneous with relation to potassium. Banana equivalent dose is a misleading analogy not medical advice.

Critically, risks are cumulative so the chances of cancer depend not on individual events taken in isolation but multiple events combined, and many of them are under your control.

If we're getting critical here...

>> and many of them are under your control

This is the societal problem with cancer. If someone gets cancer I'm guessing it might be an incorrect reaction for one to think it was the person's "fault", but the reality is cancer just happens, and it's not a modern phenomena. No one can control the type of cancer they get and no one can control the (unaided) outcome.

My banana comment was partly in jest, but as an example that ionized radiation is found everywhere, and our body is set up to protect, remove, and repair broken DNA on a regular basis.

Nothing is 100% under your control.

But there’s a great number of things that increase risks of cancer to the point where you can be well below average cancer risks.

Agreed, but if you do healthy habit X, Y, and Z, can you formulate and rely on those risks assessments? What was the risk of the person who smoked cigarettes all their lives yet didn't die of cancer? Should we calculate the risk score of a child with leukemia?

Cancer is scary, because there always looms the unknown causes. Heart disease, less scary, because people have much more control through healthy habits. Cancer, not as much.

There are certain mutations like MSH6 which pretty much guarantee that you are going to die of cancer unless you are extremely proactive.