Cancer risks increase with alcohol use, leading to over 740k cases last year
npr.org
npr.org
I would not be terribly surprised if most of the issues with moderate drinkers concerned users were on the heavy side of "moderate"
15 drinks per week is actually the limit here for commercial drivers. If you admit to drinking more than that during your annual/semi-annual DMV physical, you have essentially just admitted to alcoholism and can't keep driving class A/B vehicles unless you enter a substance abuse program.
That is intellectual dishonesty at its prime.
Throwing around accusations like intellectual dishonesty sorta doesn’t help conversation.
I agree with you that many people like to drink to suppress or bring forth their emotions. This could be generalized: many people like to heavily alter their state of consciousness.
Now, mostly because of Big Booze and government corruption, we are stuck in a system where the only legal way to heavily alter one’s consciousness is alcohol.
Culture revolves around this. Counterculture then naturally involves illegal ways to alter one’s consciousness. Since counterculture exists defined through culture as an avantgarde-like necessity - a forefront of cultural innovation - it is again natural that the makers of mainstream culture are actually counterculturalists. It is also why mainstream art - music, books, movies, TV - contains so many examples of ”promoting” drug use.
It is thus obvious that the legality of alcohol and illegality of drugs are more significant drivers of behaviour than ”alcohol culture”.
We have hundreds of mainstream idols from Willie Nelson to Snoop Dogg openly promoting cannabis use, yet cannabis culture is literally cracked down on wherever it is illegal.
Ultimately, the law trumps culture.
Were there cultures that didn’t produce as much demand for altered states of consciousness, those might be seen as better addressing the needs of its people (in theory, not making this argument as I’m not a Puritan but just for the sake of conversation).
It’s obvious that original cultures have their own traditional substances, from fly agaric to psilocybe shrooms to cava to ayahuasca. They would be taken as a part of a prosocial setting, an initiation or a healing ceremony, and the inebriation would be seen as a transformative process: something that enables living fully. Alcohol, on the other hand, tends to only disable and provide a means to escape stress.
What happens to the aforementioned shaman culture once western values and substances are introduced?
I would assume the increase in ego-centric stress drives the population into escape mode, and the imperialist offers alcohol.
I don't drink at all anymore but when I was younger 15 beers in a week wasn't some magic alcoholism line.
If the gap between 14 and 15 is linear and not somehow logarithmic then you're telling me that consuming exactly two drinks a day will be fine, but that extra scotch you have on friday makes you an alcoholic. This term is thrown around loosely by people who have never actually met an alcoholic. Even a high functioning "weekend warrior" is noticeable.
The total risk for serious liver damage drinking a 6 pack a day for over 10 years is only 18%. Of these people, around 13% develop into cirrhosis. No one has been able to explain why. For some people, especially women, the effects of alcohol are far more damaging. Much like BMI, population statistics are not as useful as what actually matters. Body mass per unit alcohol consumed. A smaller person drinking 15 drinks a week may develop health problems. A 180 pound male may or may not.
Am I encouraging drinking that heavily because the risk is 18%? No not at all. I am simply stating that these "drink limits" are arbitrary and completely and entirely made up. Mediterraneans, regularly cited for their longevity, consume more than 15 drinks a week on a regular basis.
HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers who rag on alcohol but promote the uninhibited abuse of THC and other dangerous mind altering drugs. It's an absurd bizzaro world.
Exactly! People have been drinking for millenia, and while alcohol doesn't make you healthier, it's also clear that drinking "normally" doesn't cause major health issues (unlike, smoking cigarettes for example). Sure, if you drink 2 bottles of wine a day, you're going to have a problem. Not so much with 2 glasses of wine a day.
THC, microdosing and all that other stuff is relatively new and the long-term effecs are not well researched. Shorter term, it's clear that THC can cause issues like schizophrenia, especially with teenagers. I would expect much more long-term negative effects of mind altering drugs, just because they fuck with your brain.
While I generally agree about arbitrary cutoffs, 2 glasses of wine a day is a good indicator that you have alcohol in your system at least 1/3rd of your life! There are people who don’t get phased by this, but more likely people are just used to it and adapt (much like with coffee)
The concept of a line being arbitrary is a thing but it’s not a crazy line (especially if you’re only drinking every other day that’s 4 glasses a day).
My comment is specifically about people saying alcohol is bad but then smoking weed all day or taking LSD and other drugs and think it's good for them.
I think this claim is unjustified, and that's what your parent comment is trying to point out. Is 14 drinks a week too much? Maybe not, but you aren't likely to find documentary proof of that by looking to the "millennia" of people who did it during an era where those who survived childhood could expect to live to be 60 or so and there was little to no understanding of modern medicine.
If we were able to say with some certainty that 14 drinks a week will give you a 15% chance of getting a serious liver disease, possibly dying from it, I think most people would agree that 14 drinks a week is "dangerous". It's also dangerous at a level that would be near-impossible to discern for generations past.
What? The standard, conservative 'party line' quoted by national health authorities is that people process around 1 standard drink per hour. A standard glass of wine is 2 standard drinks, so 2 glasses would take 4 hours max to process, or 1/6 of a day. Unless you're using one of those giant glasses and filling it to the brim so your 'two glasses' is actually a bottle or more.
These people drank 14 or less drinks a week.
They didn't test one glass or half a glass or a sip per week.
Today's study said 15 is heavy drinking. Where does 14 fit in?
The biggest detriment is opportunity cost, time you'd spend doing something exciting or productive is spent on watching your Netflix queue instead. Some people claim to get a lot of creative work done while stoned but those people probably haven't tried doing it sober for too long.
If you're rolling an after lunch joint while out with friends that's substance abuse even if it's, like, not harmful at all, dude.
I figured out at some point during the last decade that the only stimulant that works for me is THC. Caffeine won't do it. It doesn't matter what I do, if I eat healthy get 8 hours of sleep, exercise, etc, I can wake up and within 30 minutes of work feel so mentally and physically wiped that I have to sleep...rinse and repeat. I've managed to force myself to get through that repeatedly (it didn't really happen to the same extent as a kid - I guess life was more fun).
But weed? Scared the hell out of me the first few times (over years, I'm in an illegal state, but of course it's as easy to get as donuts). You know the usual introspection, whoa dude thoughts, the slightly different perspective you see yourself and the world, and on the high, every time...incredible anxiety. But once I got past that, I could work for 8 hours like I used to, and like most people can.
I was high 24/7 for about 4 or 5 years. I care about my health so I took different precautions (dealers, vapes, etc). However, I don't begin to smoke like some people (I'm not into pot culture), can't physically take those amounts.
Changed my life. I was able to work through major issues like OCD, etc. Guess what? Nobody at work or school nor my family or friends that I've only told recently know that I was high. Couldn't tell at all, entirely functional (more functional than the past).
The real save lately has been delta-8 (the way of the future). It (THC, drugs) is not for everyone and you should not abuse it too young (psychosis). Don't go buy weed off the street and get really high your first time, you might have the worst panic attack in your life.
I agree we shouldn't just rave about drugs like they don't have an impact, but some of you guys don't obviously have that much experience with what you are talking about (not you). No offense, but that's part of the issue. How many decades have we lost and how many tens of thousands of lives have been lost because we are too prudish to test this stuff as it should be?
The geniuses in my state, instead of grabbing the new industry were ready to ban delta-8 to protect the non-existent cannabis industry, or god, or something. It'll all be legal in 10 years anyway, why waste our time? I can't tell you how many small businesses I've visited in the last few months that would have out of business, and how many customers that might have been put in really bad mental spots.
There's a Cowboys player, Randy Gregory, that's lost 4 or 5 years of his career to bans because he smokes pot because it helps his anxiety and bipolar issues. That's criminal.
I drink, sometimes, too.
edit:
To save the Google, delta-8 is just a different form of THC, extracted from hemp produce federally legally due to the 2018 farm bill (magic). Of course there's also CBD from that (the original big industry) and lots of other things coming out Delta-10, etc.
Most people don't get extreme anxiety on THC, but some do... someone is going to correct me if I'm wrong, but THC is psychoactive (CBD is not), so when people are microdosing this or shrooms or whatever they're getting different effects but similar end results. It plays with your perspective and chemistry in a way that alcohol does not, especially at higher doses.
People can mock it all they want, but I really do get very creative on weed. There's a reason creative companies don't test for it...
It's not something I've shared, but it always surprises me how often I smell weed on the street (again, "illegal"), how easy it is to get, and how many people I wouldn't expect "abused" it at one point or another. I was scared of telling my parents for a long time but came to find out they were both drug using hippies, anyway.
Thanks for adding the caveat. Most people on this thread are pretty ignorant about drugs, except for me, you and the person reading this comment.
I say that because we're going full on reefer madness with stuff like:
"uninhibited abuse of THC and other dangerous mind altering drugs"
After smoking every single day for about 5 years I decided to test this hypothesis about a year ago (I had my first kid on the way and didn’t want to be one of those parents that smoked weed.) I also surmised that maybe I really needed to get it all out of my system - by not smoking for months - to know how much an improvement it would be to stop smoking. In the past 11 months I’ve smoked exactly twice (both times around Christmas.)
I can’t honestly say stopping smoking has increased my productivity much. I’m so mentally exhausted from work at the end of each day that the idea of doing anything involving my brain is stressful. Weed helped with that, now I seem to lay on the couch and watch YouTube more. Before I at least used to sit and contemplate work-related stuff a lot more since I was able to relax.
Back when I was getting high every day I used to use voice memos a lot on my phone to record the random “brilliant ideas” I’d have each evening. The next morning I’d listen through them, and they actually led to some of my best answers to technical problems. Stuff I was stuck on at work, I’d be able to find solutions to while high. (Implementing them was another story, I had to wait for the next day for that.)
I’m still not going to go back to smoking weed because of the new kiddo, but I honestly think weed was a net positive for my life.
My official saying is, "because it works for me doesn't mean it will work for you."
Additionally, alcohol absolutely feels like it destroys my body. Like, two drinks kills my productivity the next day, guaranteed.
I found that indeed I am able to concentrate more deeply with it. Without it, I find myself far more tempted to drink to relax -- which breaks my personal rule for alcohol use: never for stress relief, only for celebration.
While I enjoy a drink, booze gives me splitting headaches within 15-20 minutes of drinking anything more than a small (40-50ml) amount.
I rarely smoke weed, maybe a few times a year (typically as a joint on a summer day after lunch with friends, actually) and I can say I am much more likely to sit around and watch Netflix sober.
I live in the Netherlands, so maybe things are more relaxed around here. I rarely if ever run into someone throwing their life away to it.
I also know two people with PhDs who smoke, they are the kind that limit themselves to smoking in the evening. But then I also know at least 4 people in their late twenties who prefer weed and gaming over getting a job. Both groups are the exception.
Most of my friends still smoke so I'm fine with it, but I'm 100% convinced that people who try to legitimize it as some sort of productivity thing, and try to sell weed usage as anything other than "I like how it makes me feel", are lying.
Though judging from the other comments here maybe I'm just wrong. Maybe it's because I like to do stuff like maths and programming in my free time which is absolutely impossible while high.
I can't do the stuff you're talking about when I'm not high (or couldn't) because I couldn't stop anxiety and other issues from getting in the way. Weed liberates me from that.
I have friends that hate weed, friends that become different people while high. It's just how it is, not for everyone, though I do prefer delta-8 way more than regular cannabis, not as intense of a high, much more about the focus.
Medical issues are a big exception yeah. I wasn't able to focus at all while high, at least not for a prolonged period of time... I guess it's just different for me. Mostly I stayed up way too late doing nonsense and got very little sleep as a result which impacted my day-to-day activities. It wasn't a good time.
It definitely hits different people differently. My wife doesn't get high. I've seen her smoke good weed and she didn't change in demeanor at all and claimed it didn't do anything.
Personally all it makes me do is think about how shitty my life is for hours (hint: my life is fine..it's just the weed) although some indica stuff will make me giggle for an hour before I pass out. I'm worse than useless when high.
There's a huge range in response.
I find this kind of phrasing confusing. I think most people would prefer their substance and activity of choice over getting a job, most people just don't have that option. I'm guessing these kids are being supported by their parents or partners?
I really miss one guy in particular, none of our group ever see him anymore. The only way I can know what's happening in his life is to talk to the dealer who I hang out with occasionally. Hope he wisens up soon. Used to be a pretty smart guy too but all the doing nothing for years made him dumb.
Many people love math and can do it while high at a higher level.
But the people I know who smoke do if in the evening or on weekends, and are nothing like what you describe.
I've never seen this. Do you have an example article or comment that supports this? It should be easy to find since "HN is filled with these pop-sci teetotalers".
In the absence of concrete evidence showing explicitly why your drug of choice is superior to someone else drug of choice, it's hypocritical to shit on their preferences as moral weakness while you happily indulge your own substances.
Pretty sure we have nothing of the sort for alcohol. Just the opposite, in fact, like this article.
I can’t speak for THC.
I wouldn’t say that this evidence makes any substance more morally “superior” to any other, it all depends on the context of use.
They think the ones who are gullible are the ones that hear something on the news and repeat it as fact without ever thinking about it.
Anti-science is anti-politics around science not anti-evidence. Things like questioning the Covid bat theory. Glad to see the news is coming around on the lab theory.
I'd expect it also depends on how you drink it. One restaurant-pour glass of wine with dinner every day adds up to 14 drinks a week but no reasonable person would call it "heavy drinking". (Yes, plenty of people here are saying that it is. No, they're not being reasonable.) I'd expect drinking 14 drinks in one night once a week would absolutely count as heavy drinking, though.
What's the difference between a glass of wine after dinner and 700ml of beer (which is what GP's calculations work out to)? They both have the same amount of alcohol.
Disclaimer : former 'functioning' alcoholic.
Based on the Netflix documentary I watched, it seems like they’re starting to standardize the labels of alcoholic drinks in the UK to inform consumers how many units of alcohol it represents, and also encouraging people to keep their consumption below X/Y units a day and week.
This is interesting. In the US a standard drink [1] is often considered roughly equivalent to one can of 5% ABV beer, or a 1.5 fl oz shot of 80 proof liquor. That comes out to about ~17.5 ml of alcohol.
I not-infrequently have beers that are 9% ABV. Maybe I should rethink how many servings of alcohol I have a week by international standards...
This layout seems to point towards smaller units, with the smallest British unit being 10ml of ethanol (25ml at 40ABV), while the smallest possible American equivalent would be 17.6ml for a 1.5 oz shot. Thus if we’re using a single shot as our measure of a “standard drink”, then Americans will be consuming about 70% more pure ethanol than their British equivalent per drink.
Also, health authorities have begun rethinking how much drinking is too much, hence the downward deviation of what the international standards say.
That are two crates of beer a month.
I drink 1-2 times a month and 4-5 beer a night is as much as it gets.
This is not a helpful statistic because it doesn't say what percent of people are in this category. I skimmed the actual paper [1] and it appears that there is no designation below "moderate drinking" so this literally captures everyone who drinks 2 drinks or less per day.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Exactly. I came here to ask whether anyone had read the paper carefully enough to say whether this information is actually missing or just absent from the summary.
I get the impression that there is a sort of culture war going on. Some seem to be so keen on stressing that there is no safe level of drinking that they avoid saying anything about where the risk curve really starts to bend upward more steeply, which is what most people will want to know.
This is absolutely what's happening. Messaging from some official sources is so ideologically driven that they happily publish wrong and misleading information if they think it will further their goal.
The measure has become the target and so ceased to become a good measure.
"relatively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I'm always amazed when filling out health surveys where it considers one alcoholic drink every single day a "low level".
I don't recall if this was precovid or postcovid, but there was a 60 minutes where they were talking about the impact that understanding the genome has had on health research, but specifically curing some cancers and longevity. They had a harvard prof on there that firmly believed that within 7 years that we'll be seeing real advances (that the public will have access to) on that.
7 years is nothing. You know it's not going to take 7 years, it's going to take 25, but stop pickling yourselves so you can make it that far. I have 45 year old friends that act like they are going to die tomorrow.
edit:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/harvard-geneticist-george-churc...
This is the 60 minutes in question. Keep in mind academic timelines. It's longer than seven years, money quote, among other interesting stuff:
> Scott Pelley: What's the time horizon on age reversal in humans?
George Church: That's in clinical trials right now in dogs. And so, that veterinary product might be a couple years away and then that takes another ten years to get through the human clinical trials.
Pretty sure the boomers are the ones that came after WW2, the aforementioned "boom" of their namesake being progeny of those that didn't die during the blitz, Normandy, Stalingrad, and everywhere in between.
I recall reading that the day WW1 was declared over, people were copulating in the streets of London.
People have an urge to rebuild the population.
Boomers had parents suffering from post ww2 problems, problems likely dealt with by alcohol.
One beer to celebrate sitting in your garden at the end of the work day, one glass of wine at dinner, one scotch before bed.
Alcohol is a poisson and there is no "safe" level.
Now, it's a personal decision how much risk is acceptable to you, but don't lie to yourself how "one glass a day is not going to make a difference".
If one glass a day only slightly increases your risk (Say a few % points), then it will effectively make no difference.
I mean, you could say the same about riding a motorcycle. Riding a motorcycle only slightly increases your risk of dying in a horrible traffic accident, but for a lot of people the risk is big enough that they stop riding once they have kids.
You're constantly scanning for that one car that won't see you and plow into the side of you, and if you're in the hills a lapse in concentration or patch of gravel can throw you off.
What I mean by that is it's much easier to identify it as a high risk activity compared to alcohol or cigarettes since the risk is an in your face might end you today, rather than an abstract idea of this will hurt you in the long run
Alcohol isn't like that. Alcohol is more akin to something like going up stairs or showering or heck, a little similar to smoking. None of these things seem all that dangerous while you do them. But as it turns out, showers are pretty dangerous. Stairs make for horrible accidents, which is why it is so important to have the angle and height right (and even). Smoking, at first, does't seem like it'll give you cancer in 30 years, and may neve "feel" dangerous if you do it sporadically.
And the poster is correct: It doesn't matter much if you have a 3% more chance of dying of something if your chances are properly low in the first place - even after the increase, your chances are still low.
Most people I know have someone in their family or friends who has died because of alcohol related diseases or accidents.
The risks become overlooked because of familiarity and it makes it easier to minimize the risks. It doesn't help that the downsides often aren't immediate: It takes some years to develop disease from it, after all. In general, it takes hours for you to wind up in the hospital or harm someone else - but most of the time, much like showering or walking up the stairs, nothing of note happens.
I know it’s a typo, and it doesn’t invalidate anything you wrote; but it’s also the French word for "fish", which makes the whole thing quite hilarious to read.
Industry funded studies told us smoking was safe for a long time. In the case of alcohol we absolutely know that high doses are very dangerous. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, after all.
Maybe there's a safe dose of alcohol. Maybe the risk of low doses is small enough to be accepted. But we've been lied to buy poison vendors enough times that I'll take any of their proclamations of safety with a mountain of salt.
For the other it is not replacement in any meaningful sense. The equivalent amount wont stop your thirst and one cup of grapefruit juice feels like you have drunk nothing.
Helps with relaxation, anxiety and even acts as a short term antidepressant.
With that in mind, there is a safe level, just as there is with paracetamol.
Of course, having better medication is, well, better. But not everyone has access to it.
That said I have been struggling with it ever since I can remember and I wish I never tried it. It's very hard to stop once I start drinking.
There’s a chart we were shown in Med school with DALYs of different drugs and while alcohol had a big negative side it also had a positive side which was the only one
https://www.insider.com/dry-january-drinking-alcohol-could-h...
That's not true.
Part of the harm caused by alcohol comes from the way that your body metabolizes it...into sugars. The whole "a glass of red wine with dinner is heart-healthy" thing has also been pretty thoroughly debunked.
Even if that were true, it does orders of magnitude more harm than good, and should be considered a poison.
We absolutely do not want to propagate the idea that it can be heathy if consumed responsibly.
If I give that up, how much extra lifespan should I expect on average? A week? A month? A year?
I'm just saying that there is a risk, and people should be aware of that fact.
Someone out there is going to be unlucky and get colon cancer from their daily glass of wine. And they probably think it's just bad luck, it can't be from alcohol because they drink just one glass a day.
(Reminds me of a relative who likes talking about how his daily glass of red wine made him live to 90. I think it's the successful chemo treatment for his throat cancer that made him live to 90, but I'm not a doctor)
If it's part of your routine you might have a glass or two of wine with dinner most nights. Or a couple of pints in the pub after work. Maybe you never really get drunk, but you're drinking a lot of alcohol.
I used to drink pretty infrequently. Sure, I'd have a six pack a party every now and then but most of the time I was busy with other things.
Now that there's not so many 'other things' to do I do find myself drinking more and more regularly.
Maybe our ancestors who did not have this repair enzymes died while those people whose body mutated to make this enzyme survived?
This is far more relevant and the answer is likely to be 'depends' due to an average human life being a colossal confluence of many 'stuff'. This 'average' reporting can be dangerously misleading.
- How valid is the assumption "assuming a 10-year latency period between alcohol consumption and cancer diagnosis"?
- Why would not one attempt to find correlation between yearly reported cases (or PAF if applicable) and yearly alcohol consumption instead? As it stands, some points in the discussion read like assertions. One example is this:
> Our estimated global PAF was lower than the previous global estimates of 5·5% of cancer cases in 2012, 4·8% of cancer deaths in 2016, and 4·9% of cancer deaths in 2019. This difference could be due to genuine decreases in consumption of alcohol in several world regions, such as in southern Europe and central and eastern Europe, as Shield and colleagues reported a 5·5% decrease in the global alcohol-attributable age-standardised rate of death from cancer between 2000 and 2016.
And this:
> On the other end of the spectrum, alcohol consumption in central and eastern Europe has historically outranked that of other world regions, but has decreased in recent years, whereas increases in alcohol consumption, linked with countries' economic development, are projected in Asian countries such as China and India.
The statements above seem to be at odds with each other according to the number of alcohol-attributed cases from each country in the appendix.[2]
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S1470-2045(21)00279-5/...
Edit: formatting, removed part of a sentence for a better tone. Edit 2: removed irrelevant part in the second quote.
No kids/grandkids for me so I don't see much value in old age.
I have to live now and only have 15-20 good years left. Once that time comes it is time to party. Cigars, weed and rum. A broken down physical body with an even more broken down mind is a fate worse than death to me.
They assume this causal relationship based on decades of randomised controlled trials (the only ethical way to get this information in humans). Their estimate for the risk of cancer based on alcohol consumption comes from previous work which would have carefully summarised the data from these trials and conservatively estimated the risk.
As for the counter that alcohol may reduce cancer risk. Sure, that is true. You can also demonstrate that sunscreen causes cancer. But does the increased cancer risk from sunscreen outweigh the risk of getting too much sun exposure? Probably not (keep wearing sunscreen!). It is easy to imagine a similar equation for alcohol.
What else would 'controlled' mean in this context?
Not sure, honestly. They seem to pull this data from a WHO database on health statistics [0]. In stricter terms, you are asking if their estimate of what people drink reflects what they really drink in real life. That is, is the estimate biased? I would expect it to be biased in this case.
I am not sure how much it really matters unless you are in charge of large sums of money for public health policy. The best evidence we have suggests alcohol does increase the risk of cancer. Faulty population level alcohol consumption data is not being used for that observation, so it won't matter. Although it would impact the quality of this particular paper.
"Controlled" doesn't appear in the original paper so not sure what you mean there.
0. https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/global-information-...
The data for this study comes from the GLOBOCAN database, which seems to be an aggregator of cancer data [0]. This database must be massive in it's scale. The abstract states an estimated 750,000 cases attributable to alcohol consumption. That's a lot of people. But the actual data they are using contains several million participants at a minimum! You can take a look at some of the numbers here [1]. "19.3 million cases and 10 million cancer deaths in 2020" are huge numbers, even if they are staying with just 2020 registered cancer cases. How do they get these numbers? It looks like they have aggregated together cancer registries from multiple countries. Some of these will be super accurate (e.g Nordic countries, New Zealand etc) and some more sparse and less complete.
The estimates of cancer risk come from about the most authoritative scholary source possible today: "World Cancer Research Fund International’s Continuous Update Project" which appears to be a kind of set of mega systematic reviews on the links between diet/nutrition/exerice on cancer risk. This project has massive amounts of scholarship, data, and experience behind it [2].
You may think the paper is still crap. But maybe think for a moment before rejecting it out of hand. This isn't a single biased study of 30 white college students at Harvard. This is a model based on data from whole nation's cancer registries combined with parameters estimated from the best, hopefully least biased, human trial studies we can manage with the resources available to us.
0. https://www.uicc.org/who-we-are/about-us 1. https://www.uicc.org/news/globocan-2020-new-global-cancer-da... 2. https://www.wcrf.org/dietandcancer/a-summary-of-the-third-ex...
The repo is here: https://github.com/archagon/good-spirits
I've set the default to 10 standard (US) drinks per week for men, which (at the time the app was developed) seemed to be the upper bound for low-ish risk drinking as established by a large number of health ministries around the world. (Obviously, it's best to drink as little as possible, but I made this app with myself as the target audience: a craft beer enthusiast who doesn't want to get too carried away.)
That’s not all that surprising to me.
> Globally, an estimated 741 300 (95% UI 558 500–951 200), or 4.1% (3.1–5.3), of all new cases of cancer in 2020 were attributable to alcohol consumption. Males accounted for 568 700 (76.7%; 95% UI 422 500–731 100) of total alcohol-attributable cancer cases, and cancers of the oesophagus (189 700 cases [110 900–274 600]), liver (154 700 cases [43 700–281 500]), and breast (98 300 cases [68 200–130 500]) contributed the most cases.
So ~4 out of 100 cancer cases can be attributed to alcohol consumption. I'm not sure if that's a _ton_ or how to contextualize it, but that seems like the more appropriate framing.
> What's the connection?
> There are a few biological pathways that lead from alcohol consumption to a cancer diagnosis, according to the study. Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage.
> Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alcohol also reduces the body's ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate.
> What's more, the combination of drinking and smoking might indirectly increase the risk of cancer, with alcohol acting as a kind of solvent for the carcinogenic chemicals in tobacco.
When you consider how many people are regular drinkers (and how low the bar is set - only 2 drinks per day) vs how many people get cancer (39.5%), then if only 4% of cancer occurred in regular drinkers, then you would naturally draw the conclusion that regular drinking appears to prevent cancer.
But that goes against the narrative that they're selling.
True, that's just a way to question it from a different angle and try to understand it. But if they don't address that angle, then it doesn't really say much.
Lots of people drink and smoke and will not ever get cancer. The authors are not disputing this. They do however suggest that drinking might increase your risk of getting cancer.
No, that's just bullshit. 4% of cases being attributed to alcohol does not mean that only 4% of cancer patients are drinkers.
You don't even understand how risk attribution works, but are happy to spin your own narrative.
As presented it literally makes claim sound like a wide-eyes, self-righteous temperance fanatic claiming liquor will "send you to hell!"
Not much on science and more on religious fervor! We went down the road once before and it made things worse.
What do you make of studies such as this? Their baseline was strictly lifetime abstainers, absolutely no people who stopped drinking for medical reasons. Still, moderate drinking results in lower all-cause mortality.
There are way more possible explanations better than "some amount of ethyl alcohol is actually a little bit beneficial".
Interestingly, (wrt. https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2017.06.054) the 15 drink-a-week threshold that's often quoted as a kind of limit to safe drinking puts your all-cause-mortality risk right at that of lifetime teetotalers. The utilitarian implication is that, after 15 drinks a week, you really are causing harm relative to not drinking at all. So its costs outweigh any benefits. But that implies that there are benefits. These may be very subtle.
Perhaps alcohol is part of a balanced diet. It arises during digestion. You find it in ripe fruit, a significant part of many primate diets. It also appears to be part of the typical diet in many of the regions of the world that have the highest life expectancy. Would they live even longer if they could shake the habit? Maybe we could study that genetically. Are these cultures just healthier for other reasons, and thus more tolerant of alcohol? It would be like the entire society has shifted along the curve shown here https://www.jacc.org/cms/asset/f6fb55ac-3d9d-4e40-8128-ec785....
Since we mostly don't really understand what cancer actually is, it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol. I can readily think of other possible reasons for a correlation.
But they don't mention any other adjustments (age, other dietary factors, BMI...).
Some cancers are known to be caused by viruses. Maybe people drink because they caught a virus that causes cancer, either to self medicate or because the virus makes them crave alcohol.
Who will accept a researcher-imposed dietary restriction for years? Who will follow it without requiring supervision?
These cohort studies are the next best thing. The correlation is with alcohol consumption 10 years earlier, and they looked at the changes in countries' alcohol consumption.
I'm trying to walk away from a completely ridiculous pile on from an excessive number of people here. This is not a productive conversation at all and I have no idea why it went so wildly sideways.
I believe people reacted because you downplayed the importance of the study (at least I did). Just because it doesn't outright prove causation, doesn't mean we should not pay attention.
In the past decades, public health suffered immensely due to "benefit of the doubt" given to smoking.
Cigarette companies used the same arguments as you: “Sure there are statistics associating lung cancer and cigarettes. There are statistics associating lung cancer with divorce, and even with lack of sleep. But no scientist has produced clinical or biological proof that cigarettes cause the diseases they are accused of causing.”
https://nutritionfacts.org/2019/04/04/the-disconnect-between...
Also your logic doesn't hold. In cause and effect, you don't need to understand the effect to know the cause.
> it's a bit of a stretch to break down percent supposedly caused by alcohol
eh, I think we know quite a lot about cancers and quite a lot about alcohol's effects on the human body. The fact that it is complex doesn't mean that we don't understand it at all.
They completely forgot that many people who don't drink do so because of other confounding health complications that may increase mortality.
Talk about not controlling for variables, yeesh :|
I once read if humans were biologically immortal, everyone would basically get cancer if they lived to be 2,000 years old.
It's just inevitable.
Hopefully it comes later in life, rather than sooner.
Species such as whales and elephants, who have a lot more cells than humans do, have much stronger anti-cancer mechanisms than humans and rarely get cancer.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/elephants-rarely-get...
Multiply up enough of those chances over time, and the limit approaches a 100% chance. It's almost surprising that so few people die of cancer.
Of course, it's always happening, and our bodies are fighting it off all the time. But each time they try, there's a chance that it won't be effective. So it still over time approaches 100%, if something else doesn't get you first.
I'm not saying this is a bad study, or article. I'm just commenting on the sheer amount of crap circulating is leading to a general skepticism that seems to be filtering out people like me from even clicking the title/link to these studies.
> Ethanol, the form of alcohol present in beer, wine and liquor, breaks down to form a known carcinogen called acetaldehyde, which damages DNA and interferes with cells' ability to repair the damage.
> Alcohol can also increase levels of hormones, including estrogen. Hormones signal cells to grow and divide. With more cell division, there are more opportunities for cancer to develop. Alcohol also reduces the body's ability to absorb certain cancer-protective nutrients, including vitamins A, C, D, E and folate.