WHO: No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health
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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”.
> However, a large number of epidemiologic studies (both case-control and cohort studies) in humans have found no consistent evidence that dietary acrylamide exposure is associated with the risk of any type of cancer (9, 14).
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 production of endogenous ethanol occurs in minute quantities as part of normal digestion, but when fermenting yeast or bacteria become pathogenic, extreme blood alcohol levels may result. Auto-brewery syndrome is more prevalent in patients with co-morbidities such as diabetes, obesity, and Crohn disease [2][3] but can occur in otherwise healthy individuals.[4] [...] While auto-brewery syndrome is rarely diagnosed, it is probably underdiagnosed.
Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513346/
Imagine your physician snitching on you to the state for illegal alcohol brewing and you might pay taxes on it.
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...
Terms like 'light', 'moderate' or 'heavy' drinking are relative and must be taken in context.
For instance, historically it has been customary in many countries to drink wine with every meal. So 2 bottles per week is indeed moderate as it's about 1-2 glasses per meal. Likewise, 3.5l a beer per week is one beer at dinner, which is considered quite moderate, indeed.
Basically, if your drinking is moderate during meals only and no hard liquor this is considerate 'moderate' to normal in traditional terms.
A small glass of wine is also definitely less than the 200ml you'd need to get anywhere near 1.5 liters a week.
I'm very much open to complete drug legalisation but when I see the stupidity with which we treat the drug ethanol it makes me wonder.
But anyway, I always take such research with a grain of salt (or maybe with a glass of wine) because alcohol consumption has personal relationship benefits
Also not discounting the possibility that it's another "fat is bad" craze
The least shocking thing is for new research to come out claiming no amount of poison is good for you.
I quite enjoy drinking a few times a year but pushing 50 there is nothing that makes me feel as bad as even a few beers the night before compared to getting up and going for my morning 60 min walk without.
That "poison" is present in fruits, and there is even evidence that we have evolved to eat fermented foods, containing said substance (which doesn't get metabolized in the best way, sure, but not in the worse way neither).
UV rays are also "poison" and also essential to normal life. Oxygen is literally toxic to several life forms on earth.
Other "poisons" present in food are cyanide for example. Vitamin A is also very damaging at high quantities.
I think they even see the protective effect of light drinking on things like cardio outcomes in younger individuals, it's just outweighed by accidents etc.
Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt though because this is based on recent memory of from reading it before.
But if so, I think it changes the nature of the message a bit — although it's literally true there is no safe level of alcohol consumption in a population mortality risk sense, what that means is sort of complex and age-dependent, and might be something you can counteract, or might not.
There probably a story somewhere as to why cigarettes get big labels and beer cans don't.
What? Afaik alcohol is pretty well known to increase risks of several cancers in population. Individual response to alcohol is of course a much more complex topic with genetics affecting a large palette of physiological and neurological responses to alcohol. For populations - alcohol is a health risk. For individual - the narrative is far more nuanced (more risk for some than others etc).
Compare this to ~5% of cancer related death attributable to alcohol use.
It's just not even an accurate comparison.
To be honest though? I am willing to bet that cost to healthcare system for alcohol related illness is outpacing that of smoking related illness. Cirrhosis of the liver is a very costly disease when it gets close to end stage.
but of course the vast majority of people that drink on saturday night do NOT end up in A&E.
There is a reason nicotine is addictive and popular. It's mildly enjoyable.
UK's old drug czar, David Nutt, got in trouble for calling alcohol Britain's most dangerous drug.
I'd be curious if cooking with wine falls into this category of affecting others. For example, at a restaurant if a meal has a little bit of wine in its sauce will that be listed on the menu or would it be added behind the scenes sort of like you wouldn't expect to see "garlic powder" or "pepper" listed on the menu for what's on a steak.
"Meats and baked goods that are cooked for 25 minutes without being stirred retain 45 percent of alcohol."
https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-bu...
I guess I can update towards "most of it will probably be cooked off" but 45% is still non negligible for a lot of scenarios. And even 5% remaining after 2.5 hours of boiling means that I should probably expect some alcohol no matter what.
these are all very different kinds of alcohol.
for example "beef with wine sauce" it's cooked using one small glass of wine (usually red) at around 10% (so not a good one to drink, typically more like 12% and up, but one specifically used for cooking) for 4 people.
One glass of wine at 10% contains ~10 grams of pure alcohol. Even if the dish retained 45% of it it would mean 4 grams of alcohol for 4 persons, while eating, which is a well known fact, considerably reduces the amount of alcohol absorbed and its potential dangers.
Even though based on my research cooking the meat for 2 hours, like you usually do for "beef with wine sauce" retains at max 5% of the alcohol.
So it's more like zero.
edit: I guess people are downvoting because in USA people are obsessed by the 12 steps or whatever they are called and cannot use moderation, they either drink to death or do not drink at all, because they are "clean" now and their body is a tremple.
So here it is the data
Meats and baked goods that are cooked for 25 minutes without being stirred retain 45 percent of alcohol. Stews and other dishes that simmer for two and one-half hours tend to have the lowest amounts, but they retain about five percent of the alcohol
By the way, I'm pretty sure alcohol evaporates before the water. That's the reason you evaporate and collect the alcohol in distillation instead of evaporating the water and keeping the alcohol.
alcohol evaporates very rapidly at very low temperatures.
if you go out with people who love drinking, it's going to be very hard to stick to coca-cola
A lot of people that die of cancer never drank a sip of alcohol or smoked a cigarette.
Alcohol increases the risk factor, but it's not like tobacco, alcohol is correlated to an increase of breast cancer and oral cavity cancer at maximum 20-25% more. 20-25% means 1.2-1.25 times, tobacco increases the risk 2,000-2,500% which means 20-25 times.
If you look at the stats in my country for oral cavity tumor, men risk (of getting it, survival rate after 5 years is over 60%) is 6 / 100,000, women risk is at 2.2/100,000. So a woman drinking heavily will see her risk go up to 2.75, which is still half the risk of men.
That's the kind of risk we are talking about here.
In perspective, if it was about tobacco the risk would go up from 2.2 to 55. A bit different, isn't it?
People react to these headlines in the wrong way: they confuse "risk increases" with "certain death". It's not like that, still a lot of cancer patients had a completely normal almost risk free life and we don't know why they got it, the only thing for sure is that it ran into their families. That's the biggest risk of them all.
And do not forget that age is a big risk factor too, one of the biggest.
Back to oral cavity cancer: in my Country average age of the diagnosis is 64, 95% of them are diagnosed after the age of 40.
Something to take into account, I think.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Why? You have all the required information to make an educated decision for yourself. Others do too. Allow them to decide without harassment.
I quit smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol years ago now. As the calculus changed, my habits followed suit. Everyone should be allowed to choose how they live.
This is precisely what I was referring to. If peer pressure to use [insert substance here] is wrong; the antithesis is wrong too.
They want to be able to choose whether to engage with alcohol without the attached stigma.
vs
> To refuse a beer in Germany is an affront that I would like to weigh against the risk of cancer.
Who is harassing who if someone feels that their choice of not drinking beer will cause affront? Hoping that cultural norms will change and it will cease to be an affront to refuse a drink is not harassing. People exerting social pressure on others who refuse a beer is. That is why I'm hoping any such practices disappear.
Exactly for the reason you state, to allow each to decide without harassment.
The responsibility of "feeling" belongs to the individual.
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.
I don't think that stereotypes add anything to any discussion.
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
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.
[1] https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain...
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!
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 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.
The WHO is saying its bad for you and that's fine. And as you've said, once people have the information they can choose the risk profiles that suit them.
One of the biggest killers is loneliness. Have a look at the Harvard life study.
Acetaldehyde causes DNA damage.
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.
Literally the light from the Sun is in the same group of tobacco and asbestos
So unless you live in a cave, you're exposed to it constantly.
Paracelsus knew it already a long time ago: dosis sola facit venenum (only the dose makes the poison)
the sun shines even when you are not at the beach though.
So you accept some of the risks involved, but get some precautions, because it's not smart to risk without any benefit.
People do the same thing with alcoholic beverages, they drink them, but they are not trying to kill themselves when they do it, usually.
So, for example, it they have to drive, they do not drink.
If they are good, they stop drinking.
They do not, in other words, abuse of it.
because people take care of themselves, there's no kind A people who live and prosper and kind B who are suicidal and do not care at all.
We are all mostly self preserving animals.
Also, risk of cancer before and after the 40s, it's a completely different beast.
We can safely say that at 19 the risk of getting a cancer on average is almost zero.
So age plays a big role too, much bigger than people imagine.
Does it help that I also wear long sleeves everywhere else too?
some studies have concluded that
Regular moderate drinkers are less likely to get kidney stones -- 41% less likely for those who drink beer, 33% for wine drinkers
Alcohol consumption is associated with reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes and autoimmune diabetes in adults: results from the Nord-Trøndelag health study (one of the leading causes of death in USA, for example)
It's not black and white, we can't keep going to "war" with stuff, like the "war on drugs", it's not smart.
Absolutism is the enemy of good reasoning.
There are many other factors involved in people drinking or eating things that aren't completely safe long term, it doesn't mean people are suicidal, it means people like to enjoy good things in life even though some of them are not completely risk free.
Going on a hike is not risk free, no amount of hiking has zero risks associated with it.
Hell, the fireplace emits carcinogens similar to those found in tobacco and burnt pizza crust is associated to higher risk of getting cancer!
So let's not be hysterical.
Without the ability to actually measure these numbers and compare them we don't actually know anything. This is data but not information...
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)
On the other hand, I probably would have developed better social skills, if I didn't start drinking socially earlier in my life.
Now, I see them as another year survived.
Life isn't always roses, but I got through it.
Are you saying you've none left?
;-)
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?
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.
Though an occasional drink reduces stress, which is a positive effect, though it’s not advised to use as medicine.
“All alcohol consumption appears to be harmful” can be stated without “OMG CANCER UR GONNA DIE” equivalents if you are serious and responsible.
Small doses of harms are typically beneficial. Not all harm is bad, and safety is not always desirable.
Benefits: reduced stress, increased social interactions, improved mood
Costs: reduced lifespan, liver issues, addiction
I’ll bet the benefits outway the costs over an entire population. Maybe not by much, but i bet its a net benefit.
~30% of car crashes involve a driver with alcohol in their system. In the US alone that's approximately 11,000 deaths a year.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving#:~:text=Ab...).
said it before, this one is not true.
Epidemiological studies indicate that moderate drinkers live longer than non-drinkers and heavy drinkers.
Epidemiological studies indicate that moderate drinkers live longer than non-drinkers and heavy drinkers.
https://www.med.unc.edu/alcohol/education-prevention/alcohol...
Since it’s apparently not bleedingly obvious which way it is moderate drinking is clearly not as bad as, say. a heroin addiction. So go ahead, be a moderate drinker but don’t fool yourself by delusions of better health outcomes.
Edit: 6500 light years away, so quite expensive. Also, it's mostly methyl so it would still need distillation.
that's such a broken premise that everything that comes after that must be broken as well.
We could prove, using the same logic, that "no level of life consumption is safe for our health"
It is impossible to prove that everyone's injuries over the course of an entire life are not associated with being alive.
edit: meanwhile car accidents in my country are responsible for 12 deaths every 100,000 people every year. Avoidable deaths. Please WHO go back to being a reliable source of good information and not an "ora et labora" kind of publication.
No.
Or, if you accept that definition, the air you breathe is even more dangerous for your health.
Food is even more dangerous than air. [1]
> The statement "alcohol is not bad for my health" is
somewhat true.
The kind of food popular in USA average diet is killing a lot more people.
The solution is not to stop eating altogether, but to eat less and better.
It's exactly the same for alcohol.
Because I can assure you that working is not good for your health too.
[1] edit: number 1 cause of death in USA is heart diseases, for both men and women.
There are a lot of studies that associated processed food with an increase of heart related disease, it's also not news anymore at this point.
an excerpt from this NYT article, among many of the same kind
More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/opinion/food-nutrition-he...
Alcohol may be fun, and moderate drinkers may reach old age, but statistically speaking it’s not a) necessary or b) healthy.
Claims otherwise are delutional (unless one has some really unique response to alcohol consumption).
Alcohol is fun in moderate amounts just like cake but neither are good for you. This does not mean one should not drink or eat cake - just don’t delude yourself
I don’t know how to write the following compassionately so I’m going to just write it - my intention is not to insult. I’m not sure why you are equating drug use with physiological necessities but if you feel you need to be defensive of your or someone elses drinking habits that’s a red flag for alcoholism.
Usually alcoholics - typical of addiction- get pretty defensive of their habit. ”This is good for me”, ”I know what I’m doing”, ”This is nobodys business but my own”. So if one is drinking - well, even moderately by their standards thoughts like these should give a pause and instigate a moment of self reflection.
Again.
NO!
Such plot does not exists, or you would show it to us.
A very recent Lancet study show that up to 2 standard units of alcohol a day, there's no measurable difference with non drinking people.
Two standard units is more than a pint of beer.
And above that, the difference is barely noticeable until some serious quantity of alcohol (4 units and above a day)
Do you have some more reliable data than Lancet by any chance?
> but statistically speaking it’s not a) necessary or b) healthy
statistically speaking you don't need hotdogs or coffee and they are not exactly healthy. Am I right?
statistically speaking you don't need opioids and yet
deaths involving opioids increased from an estimated 70,029 in 2020 to 80,816 in 2021
and it's even worse
an average of 44 people died each day from overdoses involving prescription opioids, totaling more than 16,000 deaths
so there's also that.
Maybe in US you have a moderation problem.
Maybe is a social problem, not an health issue.
> I’m not sure why you are equating drug use with physiological necessities but if you feel you need to be defensive of your or someone elses drinking habits that’s a red flag for alcoholism.
because the benefits are higher than the risks associated with them.
Biking is associated with a number of benefits, but biking is also very dangerous.
there is no amount of biking that can be considered risk free!
So, please, stop being Malachia from "The name of the rose"
> Usually alcoholics - typical of addiction- get pretty defensive of their habit
This is getting pathetic.
My family makes their own wine, from our own grapes, for family consumption, we've been doing it for centuries.
We love doing it together and then consume it together, as a family.
It makes our collective life better.
My grandparents, gran-grand parents and grand-grand-grand parents died on average after 90.
I would argue that usually the more pedantic anti-something are former addicts.
My dad was a heavy smoker, he is the most annoying anti-smoke person in the World.
You sound exactly like one of those "sober" people.
I'm a the only one sensing something here?
Yes, this is the study: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
For individuals the stats are as you referred.
This is different thing than consumption in a population - if you increase the consumption in population only slightly it means some people will increase their consumption more and some less - and for those who increase their consumption more the mortality effects likely get worse.
However, as an additional data point, Canada updated just their recommendation of safe levels to two drinks per week or less https://ccsa.ca/canadas-guidance-alcohol-and-health.
If we observe the statistics of global alcohol deaths by country, there is a ridiculously high variance of death from alcohol https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/b...
If you are from one of the low-drink-mortality countries then statistically I'm pretty sure alcohol in your reference population is far less mortality inducing than for example in my reference population (Finland) and I guess if the lancet type stats were collected from each country the number of "safe drinks per week" as a function of excess mortality would be quite different.
I guess your family is quite good at handling their drinking, but globally alcohol is quite lethal - according to WHO 3 million deaths per year (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/alcohol). This is in same range as reported covid deaths in 2020 (3M) https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covi.... So alcohol roughly kills as many people per year as a global pandemic that just locked down half of the world for two years. But as we perceived from the above mortality-per-country chart, this is not evenly distributed by a long shot.
My intention was not to moralize, just to be clear headed about the stats. But the stats for an individual are quite different depending where you drink, I guess.
I've never met anyone so passionate about drinking who was not addicted to it. It's fun to realize a person can be passionate about it as a cultural and family tradition as well. Yes, I've met many an alcoholic, sadly. High mortality alcohol death country. In my reference population alcohol is quite lethal. That does not stop me from enjoying my drink now and then but I'm pretty coolheaded about the stats.
I realize you zeal came from a family tradition and this was a huge cultural misunderstanding - I wish well to your tradition and hope a plentiful next harvest :)
So WHO should publish a paper where it says "no amount of smartphone usage is safe for your health, you better drink a beer after a walk in the woods"
Sent from my iPhone.