> My rule of thumb is: if the common food category was really as bad as they say, you'd see people eating it dropping like flies, and the nasty-sounding stuff would become a public health emergency.

Sounds convenient but IMHO somewhat beside "the point" of all these pontifications: your rule of thumb we as a species had already figured out for 100s of millenia+. That's why we don't eat grass and are told to be cautious around unknown wild berries or mushrooms. All these ponderations like OP OTOH are about "insidious, long-term-unnoticable-until-too-late health scares". An ongoing search for insights comparable in spirit to past "long-term damage" findings about lead or how some trichinosis parasites have an incubation period of ~30 years.

> Sounds convenient but IMHO somewhat beside "the point" of all these pontifications

It is until it isn't; most of the time when I deal with "normal people", they seem to expect getting sick from "bad" food almost immediately, and are confused why I haven't died of cancer already because I'm using artificial sweeteners with my tea. My rule of thumb applies primarily to that kind of situations.

Not denying the importance of long-term considerations, but given the amount of nonsense media publish (c.f. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-...), I just ignore the topic altogether until some entity like WHO or FDA starts making noises.

A bit of historical study should teach you that only happens in extreme cases, and even then it takes a long damned time. See: Arsenic and mercury as coloring agents.

The problem is that if the background noise is loud enough, you can't identify causes. Do you get cancers because of one of the things you're exposed to? A combination? All of them? Is one the real culprit while the others are not? We live in a soup of thousands of poorly studied compounds, and as a result it's very hard or impossible to even study the problem in a human population.

So, maybe it is shaving years off our lives, or causing something we are aware of, but we're not aware of a causal link.

>So, maybe it is shaving years off our lives, or causing something we are aware of, but we're not aware of a causal link.

Especially considering that the effects might take a really long time to be actually measurable.

Sure, older generations might get pretty old right now, but these generations also grew up in a vastly different world compared to generations being born right now. At this rate, I can easily fathom a future where people have never seen a somewhat clean beach, like in The Expanse.

With this kind of stuff tetraethyllead always comes to my mind. Even at its introduction, there had been warnings about the dangers, lead poisoning was something that was already established as something bad. That still didn't stop us from using TEL in all kinds of gasoline for decades. It took us, again, decades to phase this stuff out but the damage is already done and large swaths of land will remain heavily lead-polluted for decades to come.

That's pretty much what I worry about too, and "we're all living longer," only helps if we're able to sort the signal from the noise of the end of life. Plus, and this goes to TEL (great example!) too often people just don't care or lack imagination. You get a lot of "Oh the planet is vast, you can't poison it silly boy!" (the worst form of which is "God will protect us"), and then "Ah yes well, some poor children do eat lead paint chips, but my Billy never would!"

Finally... people only seem to find science believable when it comes to them in CSI form, unless they're actually scientists, in which case it's precisely the opposite. I've tried to explain to people that good science takes time, especially with something as varied as human beings and mortality. Most people can't be bothered, are ideologically opposed, or can't really understand. Plenty of the people who would agree with you and I about this would be nodding and saying, "Yep, that's why I don't vaccinate my kids!" smh There is this tiny sliver aware of the potential risks, between two vast gulfs of ignorance. Worse, plenty within that tiny slice have ideologies which don't allow for giving a rat's ass about this issue, or have some personal gain in mind.

It's hard not to conclude that should future historians be in a position to study us, they'll be chuckling and shaking their heads in the same we do studying the Victorians.

Well, cancer incidents have been rising for decades now, so all that stuff might just be killing us slowly.

People also live longer on average, thus increasing chances of getting cancer. Sure, young people get it and there are stories of tumors through time - but age is a defining risk factor.

People really need to stop regurgitating this red herring argument (pun intended): cancer rates are increasing by age group.

Colorectal cancers in young people have increased 40% in just 16 years. Melanoma rates in young people have increased 250% in four decades.

Skin cancer has risen. It started about the 20's when vacationing and getting tan on vacation (to show off money) became popular - and rose more with the popularity of tanning beds. The conspiracy theory states it jumped upon the introduction of the FM band, but I'm guessing that is just coincidence.

Colorectal cancers would increase because detection has increased. It became fairly popular to get a probe done at a certain age. I seriously can't give these sorts of numbers credit, just like having a percieved increase in autism after including more folks in it and having better screening and awareness.

Incorrect, the rates are rising among young people: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/well/live/colon-and-recta...

Why do some people insist on rationalizing these trends away?

I do stand corrected on colon cancer.

However, I stand by my general stance. Many cancers simply wouldn't show up in a population with a much shorter life expectancy. I'm not about to say it isn't partially environment or lifestyle (other things do cause cancer), just that we notice because of our life span and ability to detect these. I get this from articles like the one listed at the end, which states: The main reason cancer risk overall is rising is because of our increasing lifespan. And the researchers behind these new statistics reckon that about two-thirds of the increase is due to longevity. Colon cancer seems to be an outlier, and there are a couple of these. Cervical cancer is caused by a very common virus and often affects younger women, just to give another example.

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-c...

And incidents of polio, TB, scurvy, measles are all declining. Something has to kill us.