Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time.
Is there really evidence that someone that slowly builds up a tan during spring has a higher risk of skin cancer than someone who doesn't?
I can't really imagine how you could study that in a controlled way.
> Our bodies deal with some form of damage all the time.
Yet in the frequent “leaded gasoline” threads here, the “no amount of lead exposure is acceptable” meme gets trotted out every time. No spectrum, no trade offs, no caveats. As if the minute you eat a paint chip as a toddler, you’re hopelessly contaminated! When dealing with hazards to health, it’s important to frame things in terms of higher/lower probability and higher/lower risk rather than these zero tolerance simplifications.
I’m not saying we should go out and drink a pint of airplane gasoline but entire generations grew up with lead paint and regular gasoline and are still here—just statistically worse off health wise than the generation that grew up without them.
Everybody is exposed to the sun in a greater or lesser degree and in fact we have evolved to depend on it.
The necessary consumption of lead by your average kid or adult is zero.
And to be honest the lack of spectrum and caveats in science communication is much more common than it should be. Like "food X is bad for the heart" or "Y causes cancer" and then you see the studies and you give rats 10x the dose per weight for an adult for a long time and they get cancer, well, no crap sherlock!
It's maybe technically true, but 99% of the time it is used to scare people into unreasonable levels of compliance.
Some doctor actually managed to make it into the news in the UK recently highlighting how dumb it is - in that case for drinking during pregnancy. There's no safe level of alcohol during pregnancy, but somehow that has distorted into you can't drink at all whereas in reality a glass of wine occasionally is going to have absolutely no effect.