> To identify a “safe” level of alcohol consumption, valid scientific evidence would need to demonstrate that at and below a certain level, there is no risk of illness or injury associated with alcohol consumption. The new WHO statement clarifies: currently available evidence cannot indicate the existence of a threshold at which the carcinogenic effects of alcohol “switch on” and start to manifest in the human body.
The headline is not accurate it looks like. The article states that we don’t know if occasional drinking is harmful. And it makes sense we don’t know, because you can’t do an effective longitudinal study where you compare very light drinking to no drinking because the expected effect size is small and all the confounders will muddy the water.
Toasted bread and cinnamon are carcinogenic but I can’t imagine a WHO headline asserting that “no amount of cinnamon is safe for your health”.
""no amount of cinnamon is safe for your health"".
This is the point I was making when I posted my earlier facetious point about life being fatal.
If we'd studied the effects of many other common day-to-day chemicals or foodstuffs that we take for granted in our lives to the extent we'd studied ethanol then we'd likely find them equally or even more dangerous.
Keep in mind we all produce small amounts of ethanol as the result of digestion, similarly so methanol which is far more dangerous than ethanol. These are a part of the life cycle whether we like it or not.
It would be much more helpful if WHO would accept the fact that all humans process small amounts of alcohol and likely always will and instead concentrate on minimizing the harmful consumption thereof.
PS: spare a thought for those comparatively rare but unfortunate individuals who fail breathalyzer tests when they've not been drinking because their gut microbes produce sufficient ethanol to trigger tests. Phrases like 'no amount' aren't helpful.
The proportion of cancers attributable to alcohol is 4.1% of all cases, from [1]. Of that, the ‘Light to Moderate’ alcohol category (<=1.5L of wine per week or <=3.5L of beer per week) had 13.3% of cases for alcohol-attributable cancers and 2.3% of alcohol-related cancer cases.
There's a video of a journalist asking a Russian official "Why do cigarettes say 'Smoking kills' on the pack, but vodka has no such label on the bottle?" to which the official replies "Why would vodka say 'Smoking kills' on the bottle?!?".
I think the fact that smoking forces others around you to smoke, whereas drinking doesn't is a big part of it. Along with the fact that drinking occasionally is far more common than smoking occasionally. Nicotine is far more adictive.
I guess it's cultural.
Human consumption of alcoholic beverages goes back to thousands of years while tobacco has been used in Europe since the 15th century when it was brought back from America.
Wine is present in the Bible and used in Christian churches during mass.
It is also used in Jewish celebrations and holidays.
Tobacco doesn't have the same history and cultural impact. From what I understand it is/was mainly "spiritually" used by American Natives for shamanic celebrations. (I can clearly be wrong on that)
> The lists describe the level of evidence that something can cause cancer, not how likely it is that something will cause cancer in any person (or how much it might raise your risk). For example, IARC considers there to be strong evidence that both tobacco smoking and eating processed meat can cause cancer, so both are listed as “carcinogenic to humans.” But smoking is much more likely to cause cancer than eating processed meat, even though both are in the same category.
in the same group you'll find solar radiation (yes, literally the Sun light), UVs (A,B and C), X-ray and many other substances and/or radiations we are exposed to on a daily basis.
It’s a matter of proportion. A normal smoking habit puts somebody at (if I remember correctly) something like a 50% chance of dying early from a smoking-caused disease. As another reply to your commenter said, as much as 90% of lung cancers are cause by smoking. In comparison, this study is talking about an estimated 4.1% of cancer cases being attributable to alcohol, and only 13.3% of that for the ‘light to moderate’ category, which many would consider still a fairly substantial consumption.
It’s not nothing, and yes, there needs to be stronger messaging about the dangers of heavy drinking, binge drinking etc., but having a couple (2-4) of beers or glasses of wine a week is not massively increasing your risk of cancer, much more than just living somewhere with high UV or a lot of roads.
the story is that cigarettes are well researched and documented to cause agressive lung cancers, heart disease and many other problems. the story on alcohol is much less clear and even if true, much lower risk
I understand that the statement "only no alcohol is really safe" is correct. But it is not helpful in my everyday life. Exactly the same problem exists with gasoline. It is simply not possible (or extremely costly) to completely avoid the substance or their effects. To refuse a beer in Germany is an affront that I would like to weigh against the risk of cancer.
In fact, I have found information on the question:
The daily consumption of 50 grams of pure alcohol - equivalent to about 1.5 liters of beer or 0.5 liters of wine - increases the risk of cancer two- to threefold.
Continuously high alcohol consumption is also one of the main causes of liver cancer. Consuming more than 80 grams of alcohol (about 2 liters of beer) per day increases the risk of liver cancer by a factor of four to seven. Women have a significantly higher alcohol-related liver cancer risk than men.
Increased risk of cancer of the colon and rectum begins at four glasses per day. Compared to people living abstinent from alcohol, this increases the risk of cancer by 1.4 times.
The risk of breast cancer in women increases from just one daily glass of an alcoholic beverage (e.g. 0.3 liters of beer). Each additional glass increases the risk by about seven percent.
> To refuse a beer in Germany is an affront that I would like to weigh against the risk of cancer.
Really? I'm from Germany and I don't think that's the case in most places. In the worst case, just say "sorry, my doctor said I can't drink alcohol for a while - you've got one without alc, pal?" and you should be good.
What's fascinating about this isn't the study itself - it's the reactions people here are having.
From "I guess that means fruit juice should be illegal since it can contain alcohol!" to "Life leads to death too!". Just any justification to call the WHO's point bunk.
Denial, in a word.
This is the world's leading body on science health giving a result that I'm guessing most of us don't want to hear. Because we like alcohol and want to be told we're right for liking it.
I think the result is completely true. Just the same, I plan to keep occasionally drinking a beer, the same as I occasionally consume horrendously unhealthy food or spend too long in front of a computer screen. It's okay to do unhealthy things in moderation.
But if being told it would be best to drink only in moderation, if at all, triggers an angry response and denial, maybe you should have a sit down and think about what that means.
I think it's more like: yeah, we know, but people are able of being responsible too.
So don't assume that living a week more in a lifetime should be a goal, I assume these studies are published to get some funding for the team who publish them, not because they are useful for the public debate.
Because they are not.
Alcohol is much less dangerous than the car tyres, moderate alcohol consumption is also associated in many studies to health benefits, just like drugs are not good for your health but without them the chances of dying of common disease increase two fold, so they're not as bad as they look.
Maybe people should care about important stuff, not the sensationalistic stuff.
Meanwhile:
The car tyre particles pollute air, water and soil and contain a wide range of toxic organic compounds, including known carcinogens, the analysts say, suggesting tyre pollution could rapidly become a major issue for regulators. Air pollution causes millions of early deaths a year globally
> Because we like alcohol and want to be told we're right for liking it.
That works the other way too. It's all too easy for people who don't like alcohol anyway to jump on studies like these, but the fact that their personal preference aligns with health advice doesn't justify their expressions of moral superiority. There's no moral dimension to it. It's little more than happenstance.
"Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes" still applies.
I'm sure many folks here will be familiar with Andrew Huberman. If not, I highly recommend listing to his podcast, The Huberman Lab Podcast. Relevant to this discussion is his brilliant episode on alcohol [1]: "What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health". Boy, was this episode a life-changing listen for me. The conclusion is the same as the linked study, that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.
Reading through the comments here there seems to be much negative sentiment against this study. But what they are right? What if alcohol is actually just bad for you full stop. Would this really be that shocking or controversial that a known poison is poisonous?
> What if alcohol is actually just bad for you full stop
It is.
The point is it is not so bad that you should worry so much about it, just use moderation.
Like everything else in your life, especially past 40, you should use common sense: don't eat hamburgers every day, it's bad for your health. You should walk more, a sedentary lifestyle is really bad for your health. You should reduce the amount of sports you do and prefer moderate physical activity to playing football with your friends (see Hulk Hogan current health status), etc. etc.
It's not like tobacco, processed food or driving, those are really dangerous things for your health and will reduce your life span considerably.
Anyway, they tried prohibitionism in USA, it didn't work, so I guess alcohol is here to stay with us, till the end of time.
I guess people can make their own deductions as to good or bad. Alcohol is mostly detoxified in the body by two enzymes. Alcohol dehydrogenase breaks down alcohol to acetaldehyde which is a highly toxic substance and a known carcinogen. Acetaldehyde is then thankfully further metabolized to acetate (harmless) and thence to water and carbon dioxide. Neither alcohol or acetaldehyde are exactly friendly to cells to put it mildly. As we know, the former is an excellent preservative once the cells are dead.
As with the rest of life, it's a balance of risks. Having the right genes may be helpful. Jeanne Calment lived to 111 and apparently enjoyed a daily spot of port.
it's neither shocking or controversial to say that excess alcohol (for example, falling-down drunk) is bad for the majority of people. what is irritating to people of a logical/scientific bent is saying that ANY alcohol at all is going to lead to a a bad result, with minimal or no evidence.
for example, the bottle of gin that i have beside me has a label on it that says i should not exceed 2 small glasses a day. where did this figure come from? somebody made it up!
So basically direct exposure to Sun light should be avoided.
edit: UV do cause DNA damage, so following the same logic, no amount of Sun light can be considered safe. Which is true, but the effects are usually negligible, so, as usual, common sense is your best friend.
It would be very useful to rate all sorts of things in terms of the effect on life expectancy so people could make educated decisions. Is one serving of beer/wine better or worse than being say 5kg over weight? Or 2 portions of red meat? Or living next to a main road?
Without the ability to actually measure these numbers and compare them we don't actually know anything. This is data but not information...
I’ve not had drink in 15 years and I’m 35. I stopped for a number of reasons but the main one was that when I had a drink I became a fairly unpleasant person. Seeing friends around me evolve their relationship with alcohol has been interesting. Many have reduced their intake over years, some have drifted it up and without a doubt those who drink less are healthier and happier.
None have been able to go tea total for more than a few months but are happy I am as always being sober comes in handy sometimes (dealing with emergencies primarily when out/away from home)
Time to start treating it as any other drug then. Bring back the prohibition, throw the users, producers, sellers and so on to jail. It is least we can do to protect the young from it.
We know that banning alcohol doesn’t work. We should do what we did for tobacco. Ban advertisements for alcohol. Do the same for other vice. If consenting adults want to engage in vice that doesn’t hurt other people such as gambling, alcohol, etc. then allow it. Just don’t allow it to be advertised.
Can’t deny that as someone who has abstained from alcohol my entire life, feeling pretty smart every time more of these studies come out.
And after that we could put age restrictions to any media that markets alcoholic drinks in positive light. Just make them R rated, and add suitable warnings before any old programs. This should direct producers of such programs to steer clear.
I bet sugar is even more harmful, yet I doubt there will be any raising of awareness on that front (from the health industry). I think removing sugar from most foods in the grocery store would have much more impact than banning all alcohol. It just seems the priorities on harmful substances are not in order, from a perspective of a healthy society.
I mean this comes not as surprise to anyone who’s had a drink or a few.
I enjoy a drink on occasion but the after effects are noticeable. I mean your body tells you the next day.
Though an occasional drink reduces stress, which is a positive effect, though it’s not advised to use as medicine.
Alcohol's ill effects have been known for awhile, but alcohol companies continuously undermined studies that would conclusively demonstrate it. Basically, unless you're older and have a certain type of heart disease that alcohol may help, the costs of alcohol are always greater than the benefits. Then again, this is up for the individual to decide, whether they believe their perceived benefits outweigh the potential health costs. At least now, they can make a more informed choice knowing the risks involved.
There is more solid evidence for alcohol causing cancer than for RoundUp(glyphosate). Yet people will happily have a beer while discussing how evil Monsanto is.
[+] [-] gizmo|3 years ago|reply
The headline is not accurate it looks like. The article states that we don’t know if occasional drinking is harmful. And it makes sense we don’t know, because you can’t do an effective longitudinal study where you compare very light drinking to no drinking because the expected effect size is small and all the confounders will muddy the water.
Toasted bread and cinnamon are carcinogenic but I can’t imagine a WHO headline asserting that “no amount of cinnamon is safe for your health”.
[+] [-] hilbert42|3 years ago|reply
This is the point I was making when I posted my earlier facetious point about life being fatal.
If we'd studied the effects of many other common day-to-day chemicals or foodstuffs that we take for granted in our lives to the extent we'd studied ethanol then we'd likely find them equally or even more dangerous.
Keep in mind we all produce small amounts of ethanol as the result of digestion, similarly so methanol which is far more dangerous than ethanol. These are a part of the life cycle whether we like it or not.
It would be much more helpful if WHO would accept the fact that all humans process small amounts of alcohol and likely always will and instead concentrate on minimizing the harmful consumption thereof.
PS: spare a thought for those comparatively rare but unfortunate individuals who fail breathalyzer tests when they've not been drinking because their gut microbes produce sufficient ethanol to trigger tests. Phrases like 'no amount' aren't helpful.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephen_g|3 years ago|reply
The proportion of cancers attributable to alcohol is 4.1% of all cases, from [1]. Of that, the ‘Light to Moderate’ alcohol category (<=1.5L of wine per week or <=3.5L of beer per week) had 13.3% of cases for alcohol-attributable cancers and 2.3% of alcohol-related cancer cases.
1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
[+] [-] ascotan|3 years ago|reply
There probably a story somewhere as to why cigarettes get big labels and beer cans don't.
[+] [-] JBiserkov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aflag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whynotmaybe|3 years ago|reply
Wine is present in the Bible and used in Christian churches during mass. It is also used in Jewish celebrations and holidays.
Tobacco doesn't have the same history and cultural impact. From what I understand it is/was mainly "spiritually" used by American Natives for shamanic celebrations. (I can clearly be wrong on that)
[+] [-] josefx|3 years ago|reply
> The lists describe the level of evidence that something can cause cancer, not how likely it is that something will cause cancer in any person (or how much it might raise your risk). For example, IARC considers there to be strong evidence that both tobacco smoking and eating processed meat can cause cancer, so both are listed as “carcinogenic to humans.” But smoking is much more likely to cause cancer than eating processed meat, even though both are in the same category.
[+] [-] peoplefromibiza|3 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_1_Carcinogens
[+] [-] stephen_g|3 years ago|reply
It’s not nothing, and yes, there needs to be stronger messaging about the dangers of heavy drinking, binge drinking etc., but having a couple (2-4) of beers or glasses of wine a week is not massively increasing your risk of cancer, much more than just living somewhere with high UV or a lot of roads.
[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwirbl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahofmann|3 years ago|reply
In fact, I have found information on the question: The daily consumption of 50 grams of pure alcohol - equivalent to about 1.5 liters of beer or 0.5 liters of wine - increases the risk of cancer two- to threefold.
Continuously high alcohol consumption is also one of the main causes of liver cancer. Consuming more than 80 grams of alcohol (about 2 liters of beer) per day increases the risk of liver cancer by a factor of four to seven. Women have a significantly higher alcohol-related liver cancer risk than men.
Increased risk of cancer of the colon and rectum begins at four glasses per day. Compared to people living abstinent from alcohol, this increases the risk of cancer by 1.4 times.
The risk of breast cancer in women increases from just one daily glass of an alcoholic beverage (e.g. 0.3 liters of beer). Each additional glass increases the risk by about seven percent.
Source: https://www.kenn-dein-limit.de/alkoholkonsum/folgen-von-alko... (the website is from a German authority that provides information about addiction, etc.)
[+] [-] TedDoesntTalk|3 years ago|reply
Refusing a cigarette used to have a similar insult; and also you weren’t cool if you refused
That’s changed after decades of press and cancer warning labels on tobacco.
Let’s hope the same happens with alcohol.
[+] [-] valenterry|3 years ago|reply
Really? I'm from Germany and I don't think that's the case in most places. In the worst case, just say "sorry, my doctor said I can't drink alcohol for a while - you've got one without alc, pal?" and you should be good.
[+] [-] B8MGHCBekDuRi|3 years ago|reply
I don't think that stereotypes add anything to any discussion.
[+] [-] mabbo|3 years ago|reply
From "I guess that means fruit juice should be illegal since it can contain alcohol!" to "Life leads to death too!". Just any justification to call the WHO's point bunk.
Denial, in a word.
This is the world's leading body on science health giving a result that I'm guessing most of us don't want to hear. Because we like alcohol and want to be told we're right for liking it.
I think the result is completely true. Just the same, I plan to keep occasionally drinking a beer, the same as I occasionally consume horrendously unhealthy food or spend too long in front of a computer screen. It's okay to do unhealthy things in moderation.
But if being told it would be best to drink only in moderation, if at all, triggers an angry response and denial, maybe you should have a sit down and think about what that means.
[+] [-] B8MGHCBekDuRi|3 years ago|reply
I think it's more like: yeah, we know, but people are able of being responsible too.
So don't assume that living a week more in a lifetime should be a goal, I assume these studies are published to get some funding for the team who publish them, not because they are useful for the public debate.
Because they are not.
Alcohol is much less dangerous than the car tyres, moderate alcohol consumption is also associated in many studies to health benefits, just like drugs are not good for your health but without them the chances of dying of common disease increase two fold, so they're not as bad as they look.
Maybe people should care about important stuff, not the sensationalistic stuff.
Meanwhile:
The car tyre particles pollute air, water and soil and contain a wide range of toxic organic compounds, including known carcinogens, the analysts say, suggesting tyre pollution could rapidly become a major issue for regulators. Air pollution causes millions of early deaths a year globally
[+] [-] notacoward|3 years ago|reply
That works the other way too. It's all too easy for people who don't like alcohol anyway to jump on studies like these, but the fact that their personal preference aligns with health advice doesn't justify their expressions of moral superiority. There's no moral dimension to it. It's little more than happenstance.
"Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes" still applies.
[+] [-] fumblebee|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain...
[+] [-] Eddy_Viscosity2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B8MGHCBekDuRi|3 years ago|reply
It is.
The point is it is not so bad that you should worry so much about it, just use moderation.
Like everything else in your life, especially past 40, you should use common sense: don't eat hamburgers every day, it's bad for your health. You should walk more, a sedentary lifestyle is really bad for your health. You should reduce the amount of sports you do and prefer moderate physical activity to playing football with your friends (see Hulk Hogan current health status), etc. etc.
It's not like tobacco, processed food or driving, those are really dangerous things for your health and will reduce your life span considerably.
Anyway, they tried prohibitionism in USA, it didn't work, so I guess alcohol is here to stay with us, till the end of time.
[+] [-] vixen99|3 years ago|reply
As with the rest of life, it's a balance of risks. Having the right genes may be helpful. Jeanne Calment lived to 111 and apparently enjoyed a daily spot of port.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
for example, the bottle of gin that i have beside me has a label on it that says i should not exceed 2 small glasses a day. where did this figure come from? somebody made it up!
[+] [-] pfdietz|3 years ago|reply
Acetaldehyde causes DNA damage.
https://academic.oup.com/carcin/article/43/1/52/6373372
[+] [-] peoplefromibiza|3 years ago|reply
So basically direct exposure to Sun light should be avoided.
edit: UV do cause DNA damage, so following the same logic, no amount of Sun light can be considered safe. Which is true, but the effects are usually negligible, so, as usual, common sense is your best friend.
[+] [-] zabzonk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LatteLazy|3 years ago|reply
Without the ability to actually measure these numbers and compare them we don't actually know anything. This is data but not information...
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jeroen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonbarker87|3 years ago|reply
None have been able to go tea total for more than a few months but are happy I am as always being sober comes in handy sometimes (dealing with emergencies primarily when out/away from home)
[+] [-] k__|3 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I probably would have developed better social skills, if I didn't start drinking socially earlier in my life.
[+] [-] hilbert42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gpvos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jansan|3 years ago|reply
Could by the same logic be argued that no kilometer traveled by car/bus/plane is safe for your health?
In other words, isn't this totally useless?
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apreche|3 years ago|reply
Can’t deny that as someone who has abstained from alcohol my entire life, feeling pretty smart every time more of these studies come out.
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] proc0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|3 years ago|reply
Though an occasional drink reduces stress, which is a positive effect, though it’s not advised to use as medicine.
[+] [-] tyjen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|3 years ago|reply