• sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
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    7 hours ago

    “Eating salami increases your cancer risk by 25%!” When it went from 0.3% to 0.375% over your lifetime or something.

    Eating 50g of cured meats every day raises the risk from about 5% to about 6% chance of getting certain gastrointestinal/colorectal cancers, compared to someone who never eats cured meats. A couple different ways to state this:

    • 1% of cured meat eaters will develop cancer that they wouldn’t have otherwise developed, by eating cured meat.
    • There is a 20% increase in risk of cancer from eating cured meat.
    • Cured meat eaters who have cancer have approximately a 16% chance of having gotten the cancer from the meat they eat.

    But it’s not negligible. And the causal connection is pretty strongly proven.

    • frongt@lemmy.zip
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      5 hours ago

      Never eat sausage or pepperoni, or have a slight increase in cancer risk? I’ll take the meats.

      I’m sure it’s cumulative, so of course I’ll not eat like a stick of pepperoni every day, but once in a while won’t appreciably increase my risk. (I had one sausage and one pepperoni piece of pizza today for lunch, in fact.)

      • iocase@lemmy.zip
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        4 hours ago

        Yeah I bet its both dose and consistency that do it. I can’t live without cured meat, cheese, and campfire bread while backpacking or camping…

    • iocase@lemmy.zip
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      7 hours ago

      I know its just I have a 50/50 shot of getting cancer if I live like a monk and avoid carcinogenic foods, or i can eat what I enjoy and makes my life fulfilling knowing my risk is probably like 10% higher overall.

      I think the fact that I don’t drink or smoke at all makes up for it. I can enjoy cured and smoked meats to my hearts content.