Syobon wrote:
Quote:
I drink Diet Coke pretty much 24/7, and have since I was a kid.
If I drink a normal soda the sugar in it makes me throw up, so I'm not really missing out on anything
Besides, cancer is caused by everything according to every study ever.
Everything but tomatoes, those somehow prevent cancer?
A very basic rundown on how chemicals cause or inhibit cancer: cells in your body die and regenerate each second. The process through which cells multiply is called mitosis: they basically split in 2 identical cells. Cancer is basically this process going haywire, cells multiply way to fast and errors are made, creating malfunctioning useless or even harmful cells. Chemicals called mitotics promote mitosis, it causes cells to multiply more. Ingesting too much mitotics can cause errors during multiplication, which can develop into cancer. Chemicals called antimitotics inhibit mitosis from happening and can balance out against mitotics, keeping the mitosis process at a steady rate.
Feel free to correct me if I botched anything up in that.
I'll just add that the human body has ways of keeping errant cells in check - the immune system not only kills bacteria and virus-infected cells, but also a lot of cancerous cells.
All the cells in a body have 'identity tags' that identify them as 'normal' or 'rogue' to the host's immune system; Bacteria lack the 'markers' that identify them as 'normal' and cells infected by viruses give off signals that identify them as 'rogue'. A lot of cancer cells also give off signals that identify them as 'rogue', but because cancer cells are formed from the host's own tissues, they sometimes retain the markers which identify them as 'normal'.
It's when the cancer cells identify as 'normal' to the host's immune system that it becomes a problem.