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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

> 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”.

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""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.

For anyone else wondering about this DIY ethanol production, it is aptly named "Auto-brewery Syndrome".

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.

you don't need the cinnamon, just the toast [studies say]

Link? I thought cinnamon was good for blood pressure?

Interestingly enough, moderate alcohol consumption can lower blood pressure too.

cinnamon may be - don't know. i was talking about browned/burnt toast, in which several carcinogens have been identified, as they are in just about everything, if you look hard enough.

Apparently, this is a myth: https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-canc...

not entirely, just not too well researched; https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/d...

Your own link says:

> 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).

not "no evidence" though. my general point over all of my comments on this question is that many "studies" are of doubtful significance - including burnt toast.

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