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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

What are the relative risk increases for each?

The American Cancer Society claims that smoking accounts for 30% of cancer deaths in the United States (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/stay-away-from-tobacco/health...) while alcohol accounts for 4% (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/diet-physical-a...)

I wonder how that aligns with the percentage of people are heavy drinkers.

I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol.

They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.

This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer

Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer.

Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;)

[0]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

[1]: https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-07/how-does-smoking-increas...

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