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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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So I'm getting the sense this is about as meaningful as "Known to the state of California to possibly cause cancer".
I'm really not a fan of this extreme level of caution when it comes to public health warnings. There comes a point when people will simply stop listening to you entirely if you constantly tell them that everything they do has some 0.00001% chance of harming them. Then, when you try to warn people about genuinely concerning risks, people will simply ignore you.
Its the way its reported.
A few years back there seemed to be a plethora of studies which were "Consuning <insert hot liquid> increases chance of throat cancer".
You would have to go to the source report (if lucky the bottom of the article) to find out it increased the risk by 0.1% - 0.5%.
When you factor in only 2,300 people in the UK (70 million) get throat cancer each year and the biggest risk factor was smoking and non smokers are pretty much within statistical error bars.
It makes the report uninteresting and only useful in a "someone already looked into this" way and yet a month would go buy and there would be a new article .. who knew chicken soup causes cancer...
I discovered that California cancer thing recently when I bought a keyring tool. Crazy.