I think this is one of those areas where the translation from research to the public ends up too precise on the details, beyond the cognitive load most people are willing to commit to it day to day.

In the same spirit of upāya from Buddhism, I like to compress this type of topic into a simpler model, even if imperfect.

Here's how I model cancer, and how I judge whether something is likely to give me cancer, without trying (and failing) to memorize a million risk factors individually:

You are a collective of cooperating cells. When cells rebel, the order that holds your body together collapses, and you get cancer. Cells generally don't want to rebel. They're content as long as they get their energy, their paycheck.

But what about activities that cause frequent cell death? A sunburn, smoke in your lungs, alcohol in your bloodstream, radiation (essentially atomic shrapnel flying through your tissue). Anything that causes inflammation, especially chronically. When cells die before their expiration date, the survivors have to keep dividing to replace them, and they start to get pretty mad about it. Maybe even rebellious.

With every round of division, they are in essence "evolving" away from their cooperative nature to cope with a hostile environment. A cell doesn't care whether the collective lives or dies, and it doesn't have the capacity to reason about that in the first place.

So the question becomes: are you keeping your cells safe? Are your activities hurting them? If they're not happy, they'll rebel, and you'll die.

This is where the model earns its keep. Take obesity. It's on every risk list, but excess fat isn't what makes cells rebel. The real culprits are the conditions obesity creates: chronic inflammation, more cells that need to be maintained and replaced, a body that is generally harder to live in.

Weight loss is on the list because it's the easiest way to fix those conditions, not because thinness is protective in itself. Once you see that, you don't need the list. Anything that makes your cells' lives harder, day after day, is raising your odds, whether or not anyone has published a paper on it yet.

The math is real, but a model like this tells you which variables you actually control.