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Comment by mymacbook | Hacker News Reader

Are you referring to alcohol or something else?

Check out the ingredients on your favorite soft drink. There's probably all sorts of stuff listed that has been shown to cause cancer in rats.

What about in humans at normal doses?

We're running a half-assed trial on the general public right now, only without a defined "normal dose", control group, compensation, or informed consent.

It’s odd how that goes. We are never going to subject as many monkeys to coke as people drinking the stuff. So we need to compromise, but rats are not a great model resulting in some false positives. However, presumably some false negatives exist that are silently killing hundreds of thousands of people.

I would like to think that any scientist who dared propose giving to monkeys the equivalent by body mass of the amount of Coca-Cola many humans consume per day would get publicly crucified by an ethics board.

Oranges, Mangos, Black Pepper, and lots of other natural things cause cancer in rats

I don't know about you, but I find it easier to consume massive quantities of Coca-Cola than I do black pepper.

Oranges and mangoes, on the other hand...

I've never been able to eat an entire orange or an entire mango. But drinking an entire two-liter bottle of Coke over the course of a couple of hours while coding or writing?

That's easy. That's why I'm fat.

Drinking the same amount of OJ will also make you fat. If OJ is too tart choose another type of orange like mandarin oranges. They're just as cancerous to rats and you can drink them like fruit punch as they are not tart.

The point is "gives rats cancer" bascially has no meaning. As another example chocolate is poison to dogs. Does that mean humans shouldn't eat chocolate foods or drink chocolate drinks?

Humans also eat plently of things that are toxic. Most spicy peppers are toxic if eaten in the quantities needed to induce by other substances in rats. So is vinegar, wine, cheese, pickles, ...

Ever heard of that super toxic dihydrogen oxide. About 360,000 people die every year from it, some with as little 120grams (1/2 a cup)

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