@drcopp unfortunately, most of the things in our environment can be carcinogenic in the right setting: amount of exposure, initiator of carcinogenesis and genetic predisposition.
As far as your ‘medical expert’ is concerned, his studies are somewhat narrow if he is selecting very small populations (Seventh Day Adventists) which are usually closed off to outsiders for his conclusions. There are regions in France where the entire diet is based on poultry - especially the fat which is used in cooking. Rates for all forms of cancer are LOWER here than in most parts of the country…but wait, doesn’t poultry contain those deadly heterocyclic amines?? Shouldn’t the men be riddled with metastatic PCa? But Again, we have a very limited, close knit genetic enclave on which natural selection may have bestowed a benefit.
As an even smaller study let’s consider a population of just one…my mother.
She started smoking at age EIGHT (no lie!) and smoked 3 packs of cigarettes every day until age 88; I took them away from her since her gradual dementia made it possible for her to accidentally light her house on fire.
For the last 20 years of her life she stopped cooking (she lived alone after all) and loved to eat a plate of cured sausage and various cheeses on salted crackers for dinner - all the while puffing away and at times sipping a highball. I wasn’t happy about any of it and she acknowledged my displeasure by blowing smoke rings in my direction😖.
She finally passed at age 98, from Covid of all things…
Now please have your medical expert - who has his own biases by the way - explain why this woman wasn’t dead by age 50; she should have been and, in fact, she buried SIX of her closest friends - all smokers dead from lung cancer.
So Mom was definitely unique - a definite outlier, a total exception. But imagine if she had married a man with similar genetics - a man whose body could take whatever abuse was thrown at it; while not definite, there’s a good chance that their offspring would have similar advantages.
Now imagine hundreds of years and many generations later with no intrusion from the outside, an entire group of people - many of them intermarried - routinely living to 100 years or more…0h, and they happen to eat a mostly vegetarian diet.
Some would say - ‘See?? They live a long time because of what they eat!’ But they would be dead wrong; they live a long time because over time their genetics protected them from the ravages of disease.
Again, not disagreeing that a ‘healthy’ diet isn’t something to be pursued, but as @northoftheborder says, a little bacon now and then won’t kill you, carcinogenic or not.
BTW, Mom obviously did NOT marry a man of similar genetics, as my presence on this forum would clearly indicate😆
Phil