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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It's probably more likely that it'll turn out to be the same as the old scares about microwave ovens and cellphone radiation causing cancer, except there are now a lot more $$$ to be made in various industries from exploiting anti-science paranoia.

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> On 31 May 2011, the World Health Organization stated that mobile phone use may possibly represent a long-term health risk, classifying mobile phone radiation as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" after a team of scientists reviewed studies on mobile phone safety. The mobile phone is in category 2B, which ranks it alongside coffee and other possibly carcinogenic substances.

> Some recent studies have found an association between mobile phone use and certain kinds of brain and salivary gland tumors. Lennart Hardell and other authors of a 2009 meta-analysis of 11 studies from peer-reviewed journals concluded that cell phone usage for at least ten years "approximately doubles the risk of being diagnosed with a brain tumor on the same ('ipsilateral') side of the head as that preferred for cell phone use".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#Health_effects

And they just declared aspartame, the most widely studied food additive in the last 40 years, as possibly carcinogenic. When you declare essentially everything to be carcinogenic, then you lose credibility, as WHO has done several times now.

This comment and the one above it glossed right past the second quote where 11 peer reviewed studies were examined and it was concluded that 10 years of cell phone use results in you being twice as likely to develop brain tumors on whichever side you hold the phone against. That doesn’t seem “possibly carcinogenic” to me but maybe I have brain cancer and don’t understand what those words meant.

As that article pointed out, 2B includes a lot of other things which are possibly carcinogenic but have very little evidence.

Incidentally, this item was just here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37160651

As it so happens, microwaving a plastic container is about the worst thing you could possibly do with your food

Heating food in a lead pot over wood fire is probably lot more hazardous than microwaving plastic container. It's useful to have a sense of scale here

Who on earth cooks over fire with a LEAD pot? Pretty sure that has never been a thing…

The impact and use of lead by romans has has been debated, but there is indication that they used lead cookware, although admittedly more for wine than food.

They also used it for their water piping which wasn’t too good. Then again, looking at what’s going on, it is an interesting question if we can rule out some similar effect for the weird decline of previously sane people like the former Mayor of New York. They may have been assholes all along, but it’s also clear that so thing changed.

Ya we stopped that a while back, so why would this matter now?

Because "worst thing you could possibly do with your food" is such ridiculous hyperbole

In the south it’s cooking indoors with wood fires and breathing in smog which causes high rates of lung cancer.

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