I'm on your side here, but by what you are saying, doesn't that amount to an additional 600,000 cancer cases just in the USA. Is my math wrong?
That's nothing to sneeze at.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
"In adequately designed studies we can be reasonably confident about BIG relative risks, sometimes; we can be only guardedly confident about relative risk estimates of the order of 2.0, occasionally; we can hardly ever be confident about estimates of less than 2.0, and when estimates are much below 2.0, we are quite simply out of business." [1]
The estimate of 1.18 would probably be regarded as low. While the numbers we calculated may be nothing to sneeze at, I think we should be extremely cautious about our confidence in interpreting those values to real-world conclusions.
An example I can off the top of my head remember is related to how much risk there is for women to have children post 40. It is a 100% increase in birth defects. From 0.5% to 1.0%, sounds bad right? Well its out of like 100 000 people and was based off of 1600’s era French women. Always take studies like this with a grain of salt and look at the numbers to assess personal risk.
Making lifestyle changes purely off of these studies is premature in my opinion. But you do you.