> There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.
To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.
See. You've actually fallen for it. The whole 80% of people with lung cancer are smokers means that if you smoke, you will get lung cancer.
Truth is, you will likely not get lung cancer if you smoke.
Only 6% of smokers will get lung cancer. You have a slightly worse than 19 in 20 chance of going through your whole life smoking and not getting lung cancer.
Now, in your statement itself, you move the goalpost. You start with cancer and end with "a deadly disease". Because, yeah, smoking is also linked to several other bad outcomes, not just cancer.
And it is fair to compare those other diseases when talking about why we demonize smoking way more than other things. But we can't do that by focusing on cancer. That's disingenuous.
And it is fair to say that the correct number of cigarettes to smoke is 0. The correct amount of alcohol to consume is none. And the correct BMI to be at is between 18 to 24.
As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients.
They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking.
What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on.
But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group.
The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.
I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol.
They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.
This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer
Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer.
Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;)
To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.