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Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen

108 points by acjohnson55 6y ago

CadellFastro 6y ago
What percentage of Americans even know that alcohol is a drug? As a Wisconsin native, I've seen first hand the toxic culture surrounding drinking in America, including having a relative die of alcoholism. Still, we don't seem to look at it like other drugs, even though it ruins lives just as effectively as something like heroin.
- msk-lywenn 6y ago
  I'd like to see a study on alcohol addiction that shows that all or some specific alcoholic drinks are as addictive as heroin.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    The comment said that it ruins lives just as effectively, not that it's as addictive. Two things don't need to be equally strong or powerful to each get the job done.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      That's an interesting distinction. Many people drink in moderation quite successfully without ever being addicted and without ruining their life. How many people successfully maintain a moderate heroin habit?
      - CadellFastro 6y ago
        The distinction, at least to me, comes from the fact that alcohol is more prevalent, and even though the rate of addiction may be lower, still harms more lives given the much larger population of people who consume alcohol.
    - CadellFastro 6y ago
      That is exactly my point. Additionally, if you do want to look at things statistically, alcoholism is far more prevalent, at least in the United States, than heroin. In terms of raw number, alcoholism affects are larger range of people and arguably therefore destroys more lives.
      - Miraste 6y ago
        That's hardly a correct comparison. Alcohol is far more readily available and accepted than heroin.
        CadellFastro 6y ago
        Hence, if you consider the effect on the entire using population, alcohol has a greater potential for damage considering its greater availability. Heroin is a bomb. Alcohol is fireworks. One is legal, and arguably less dangerous, but there are far more fireworks injuries in the ER than bomb injuries.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    "addictive" is not exactly the same as "effectively ruins lives". cigarettes are highly addictive, but they don't really ruin people's lives in the same way as alcohol/heroin.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - RickS 6y ago
    Not about addictiveness, but about overall social harm: alcohol beats out heroin. > MCDA modelling showed that heroin, crack cocaine, and metamfetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals (part scores 34, 37, and 32, respectively), whereas alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine were the most harmful to others (46, 21, and 17, respectively). Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72), with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) in second and third places. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2961462-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Of the myriad drugs I've taken, alcohol is the least deserving of ready availability IMO. I suspect that if it were invented post 1950, and not so ancient and ingrained in our culture, there's no way we would let people buy the stuff.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    Depends on the definition. E.g. alcohol withdrawal can kill you, heroin withdrawal can't.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Narcotics Anonymous was founded largely due to Alcoholics Anonymous treating alcohol as different from other drugs. That cultural delineation exists to this day. I'd ask... what percentage of patients and workers in addiction recovery agree with the assertion that alcohol is a drug?
- choward 6y ago
  There are many drugs with many different properties. Some are medicinal, some are addictive, some are illegal, etc. They all effect people in varying negative and positive ways. The word "drugs" typically has a negative connotation since people tend to use the term "drugs" to refer to "illegal drugs". You don't really hear people calling "medicinal drugs" just "drugs"; well at least in everyday conversation. Legal drugs are usually pushed by huge corporations with big budgets. They have heavy marketing and a lot of advertising that manipulates public opinion. All of this advertising of course portrays the "drug" in a positive way. You don't ever hear the word "drug" used in alcohol or pharmaceutical commercials. Also, whenever a study comes out saying anything good about alcohol the media picks it up since that's what people like to hear. I'm not sure I've ever seen the news feature a study on the negative effects of alcohol. Another reason the media may focus on positive stories is that big alcohol is such a huge customer. Any advertisement mentioning illegal drugs portrays them in a negative way since they are put out by groups that are against the drug since you can't promote a product that's illegal. So in conclusion, it's because alcohol is legal and the loads of advertising that give people such a positive view of alcohol.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Curious abut the Wisconsin specificness you added. Does WI have a larger percentage of alcoholics than other places?
  - nickysielicki 6y ago
    Yes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/29/wisconsins-bar-to-grocery-store-ratio-puts-the-rest-of-the-country-to-shame/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/29/wisco...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
PenisBanana 6y ago
Well, I didn't know, so I guess I'm half American. TIL.
xyzzyz 6y ago
I think people are already well aware that drinking alcohol is unhealthy, and I don’t think that anyone, who consumes it despite that, will stop after learning it is a “carcinogen”.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  It was surprising to me to learn that its harmful to your health and carcinogenic at every measured level (even low amounts)
- recursive 6y ago
  I very well might. I honestly had no idea there was anything unhealthy about moderate drinking. Every so often we even see dubious headlines about "daily red wine has health benefits". I'm not aware of specific, nor do I particularly believe it's good for you, but I really had no idea that it's unhealthy.
  - cujo 6y ago
    I call bullshit.
    - recursive 6y ago
      And for what it's worth, I can believe that you genuinely don't believe me.
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    You had no idea there was anything unhealthy about consuming a neurotoxin until you heard "cancer"? : p
    - recursive 6y ago
      Some people get hammered. I know that's bad. So, yes, I had that idea. I'm talking about moderate drinking. Like 1 per day or less. Yes. I didn't know it was unhealthy. Every substance has a harmful dose. Some of them have safe doses. I didn't know that alcohol (apparently) has no safe dose.
arkitaip 6y ago
The alcohol industries have done an amazing job with their propaganda. Many people genuinely believe that a glass of wine every day is actually healthy for you.
- jiofih 6y ago
  The alcohol industry you’re thinking of is more of beer and spirits. There are ton of studies showing benefits from wine, it’s not quite the same.
  - throwawayay02 6y ago
    No, the more recent articles do show that the optimal amount of wine is zero. The one glass per day common wisdom was marketing.
  - gvfdabgea 6y ago
    The propaganda runs deep.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
  That strikes me as a bad-faith interpretation of the history of this issue. The reason for belief in the protective effect of alcohol consumption comes from data, not corporate propaganda. Many observational studies, conducted by a wide variety of institutions and government agencies, and consistently arrived at the conclusion that alcohol's effects on all-cause mortality (ACM) are dose-dependent, but these effects do not necessarily converge on the origin. That is, as dosage is reduced, eventually ACM dips >1 for low levels of consumption, before returning to the abstinence baseline. I.e., mild drinking is protective. There is no plausible or coherent way to suggest that these observations were due to industry influence given the wide variety of data sources, investigators, and institutions involved. The problem with this data is one that is common to wide variety of health issues; it's very hard to observe small effects. Most of our data and understanding actually comes from relatively extreme effects; the worst smokers and drinkers, large radiation exposure, major occupational health risks like asbestos, etc. That gives us great information about the what effects these onslaughts have, but only for these extreme populations. The next logical step is to observe less dosage/exposure and try to establish the nature of dose-dependence e.g. linear vs. some power law. The problem, however, is that experimentation is unethical, so you have to continue to rely on observational studies. But observational studies necessarily have confounding factors that can be extremely tricky to address. Furthermore, there is no authoritative way to determine whether these factors have been addressed or not. So, despite the best and most sincere efforts of investigators, the data 'near the origin', i.e. the effects of low dosage/exposure to a potentially harmful thing, is extrapolation, not interpolation as one might believe intuitively. Even small errors - the kind that are endemic to observational studies - are amplified when considering these ranges. The result of this is persistent controversy about issues broadly related to hormesis. The true impact of radiation releases from events like Chernobyl and famously uncertain for this same reason. Specifically regarding alcohol, the most recent attempts to control the confounds has lead some to declare that the protective observation has been eliminated. I certainly agree that, as a health recommendation, this is the conservative interpretation and should be taken used to make health decisions. But as far as the data itself is concerned, I'm not so convinced. I still think the "J" shaped dose-response has not been adequately explained, and there are valid mechanistic hypotheses that warrant continued consideration. But if you would like to carry on a cynical world view that neatly blames all that ails on evil corporations, by all means.
slowhand09 6y ago
Those of us that do DON'T CARE! Also, half of Americans are below average.
recursive 6y ago
I didn't know this. I'm honestly shocked. Is there any information about what different levels of alcohol consumption do to cancer risk?
- Ovah 6y ago
  Here's a good start. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
- randlet 6y ago
  Yes it's a well studied area in cancer research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=alcohol+cancer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=alcohol+cancer
pkd 6y ago
I hope alcohol gets the same treatment as cigarettes and other tobacco products in a couple of decades. People should be allowed to drink it if they chose to after being made aware of all the risks with every purchase. But hopefully the tremendous peer pressure to consume alcohol, especially for young adults, is no longer a thing.
gok 6y ago
Few Americans know that sunlight is a carcinogen. Big Outdoors wants to keep it that way.
idoh 6y ago
This is a frustrating article, because it does not say how dangerous alcohol is. Maybe alcohol raises the risk of certain types of cancers, but only by a very tiny amount. Relative to other risks, even other risks from alcohol, do we really need to care about that?
- weRnotU 6y ago
  Do we need to care about your strawman? No.
- csours 6y ago
  > "A public health analysis published last year estimated that the cancer risk posed by drinking one bottle of wine a week was comparable to smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 for women in the same time span." I'd like to have better statistics than this, but they did try to communicate something about the risk. The problem with comparing the cancer risk to cigarettes is that tobacco does a lot of other bad stuff besides just the cancer - tar, nicotine affect your heart and lungs pretty strongly.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    Alcohol does a lot of bad stuff besides cause cancer as well. Primarily damage to the liver, but other effects as well.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  There are some indications on there: > A public health analysis published last year estimated that the cancer risk posed by drinking one bottle of wine a week was comparable to smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 for women in the same time span.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  from the national cancer institute: >"Pooled data from 118 individual studies indicates that light drinkers have a slightly increased (1.04-fold higher) risk of breast cancer, compared with nondrinkers. The risk increase is greater in moderate drinkers (1.23-fold higher) and heavy drinkers (1.6-fold higher" Heavy and moderate drinking at the very least seems to be quite significant. Esophageal cancer is one that also came to my mind because I know of quite a few heavy drinkers who suffered from it, Christopher Hitchens for example.
TylerE 6y ago
Everything has risks. Oxygen is a carcinogen.
- dpoochieni 6y ago
  Yeah this is more of "why can't mommy protect us from the world?"
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    This article isn’t arguing for protection measures. It just says that “Big Booze” is working to prevent studies showing that alcohol is bad. Not much different that “Big Tobacco” decades ago.
    - dpoochieni 6y ago
      Suppose the studies showing alcohol is bad were not suppressed? (Not even caring whether it is actually true or not.) Then what is the next step?
acomjean 6y ago
I don't think there are many that consider alcohol healthy at this point. Plus most people are pretty moderate consumers of the stuff. burnt foods also increase cancer. But its kinda marginal. https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/warning-over-burnt-toast-chemical-acrylamides-cancer-risk/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/warning-over-burnt-toast-chem...
- rriepe 6y ago
  Everyone I know who drinks considers one or two a day to be healthy.
  - rcoveson 6y ago
    The CDC defines "moderate alcohol consumption" as one drink per day for females and two drinks per day for males. That's probably what they're referring to. It also states: "This definition refers to the amount consumed on any single day and is not intended as an average over several days."[0] I don't see any info about weekly consumption. 0. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm
    - rriepe 6y ago
      Nah they're referring to the media meme that a drink or two per day is good for you. Not not bad for you, but actively good for you. Alcohol's poison at worst, empty calories at best.
csours 6y ago
I bought a large mixing bowl, and it had a California Cancer label on the bottom. It's a regular metal bowl. If you put cancer labels on everything, people will quickly ignore them. Maybe it would be better if there was a scale on it, like this is a 1 banana equivalent risk or something, but then how do you determine my exposure to the cancer in the metal bowl.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  I think that was the idea. If the warnings were effective, then business processes are affected. If consumers can be trained to ignore them, then the state looks like it's doing something for people without changing anything materially.
  - aphextron 6y ago
    > then the state looks like it's doing something for people without changing anything materially. You've just described California politics perfectly.
    - BitwiseFool 6y ago
      This is anecdotal, but one thing I have noticed about Californians is that there is a sense that government inaction is worse than government action. In other words, if there is some problem (real or perceived), the state can't simply do nothing about it. And, the politicians of California are enthusiastic about creating new bureaucracy to enforce the newly minted laws. Which they usually pay for by creating some specific tax/fee on some specific transaction or type of product, which then creates more complexity and bureaucracy.
      - tehjoker 6y ago
        That's the legacy of Reganomics and the collapse of the New Deal coalition. Sucks, but we'll do better soon hopefully.
    - trav4225 6y ago
potiuper 6y ago
This would have more novel potential by switching the word ethanol for alcohol in the title, i.e. methanol, which is an alcohol, is known to metabolise to formic acid (which is present as the formate ion) via formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen, in a process initiated by the alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver. "More than half" likely do not know of the carcinogenicity of acetaldehyde (systematic name ethanal). > potiup
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  "Ethanol is not carcinogenic, but is metabolised to acetaldehyde, which is carcinogenic." The WHO specifies that it is ethanol in alcoholic beverages that is carcinogenic, i.e. what most people would call alcohol.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bitdotdash 6y ago
What percentage of Americans even know what a carcinogen is?
hx2a 6y ago
Wait, what? Alcohol is a carcinogen? I didn't know this. Here's link to the CDC's website, referenced in that article: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.htm https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.ht... This part from the CDC's website is also interesting: Although past studies have indicated that moderate alcohol consumption has protective health benefits (e.g., reducing risk of heart disease), recent studies show this may not be true. I didn't know that either. I always thought a glass of wine was healthy.
- throwaway09223 6y ago
  It is unlikely that a glass of wine is healthy. Studies that show a correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and health are likely measuring the fact that unhealthy people are often unable to drink. This is a "wet sidewalks cause rain" or "hospital beds are dangerous" type of conclusion.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  It wasn't the alcohol in the wine that was conveying the benefits. Iirc, people were pointing to https://www.drugs.com/resveratrol.html https://www.drugs.com/resveratrol.html
- antognini 6y ago
  The health benefits of wine (if they exist) seem to stem from chemicals in the grape skin (e.g., resveratrol and other phenols). The alcohol is likely a net negative. Because of this a glass of white wine is unlikely to provide the same health benefits as a glass of red wine.
- jcampbell1 6y ago
  People that drink one glass of wine have very low propensity to over indulge. The latter trait has all sorts of benefits including health and income. It is the adult marshmallow test.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Or, possibly, their drug is just different. My grandfather was an alcoholic. I have zero problem controlling my alcohol consumption and the older I get, the less I drink. I am currently somewhere in the proximity of 2-3 glasses of wine a week, it was even less in the summer. And there is no urge to consume more. But I definitely overindulge on HN or Reddit.
adamhowell 6y ago
I've personally found, when people ask why I'm not drinking, that "Well, did you realize Alcohol is right above Arsenic on the carcinogen list?" is by far – compared to "Oh, I just don't drink" or the other reasons I've given in the past – the fastest way to move onto other topics.
- snazz 6y ago
  Does arsenic usually cause cancer or is it toxic in another way? While you can also get alcohol poisoning, this seems like an imperfect comparison.
  - adamhowell 6y ago
    I wasn't being facetious, I was just referencing the American Cancer Society's list: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/kno... Arsenic is considered a carcinogen: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/arsenic.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/arsenic.html
    - snazz 6y ago
      I understand that arsenic is a carcinogen, but my one minute of research suggests that it's usually/often more of a poison. There's also some difference between organic and inorganic variants that I don't quite understand.
ogre_codes 6y ago
It's amazing that alcohol gets such a free pass. Weed, cigarettes, heck even vaping somehow have a worse rap than alcohol in many people's eyes. Thankfully, I'm a very light drinker only occasionally indulging and then in small quantities.
nikolay 6y ago
It's all about the dose. Drink too much water and you will die. Most people will under report the amount of alcohol they drink. With 50ml per day, alcohol has a great hormetic effect. Wine, for example, is not just alcohol. Just like natural beer - it's full of nutrients.
- rriepe 6y ago
  This is true for its well-known other health risks. Cancer risk doesn't care if you spread your seven drinks out over a week or over a night. Moderation might even be a riskier strategy from a cancer risk standpoint, if the imbibed amounts are otherwise the same.
  - nikolay 6y ago
    Actually it does care about spreading over time. That's why plant toxins are good in small amounts and bad in large at once. It's always about weighing benefits and negative effects, not looking at things one-sidedly! I would never have vodka, cocktails, and other pure poison products, but I will have a glass of good red wine or a bottle of real beer! Pure ethanol is bad! Ethanol is metabolised as fructose! Sugary alcoholic drinks are the worst! So, let's not put all types of "alcohol" in the same bucket! With red wine and beer, you get benefits, which might outweigh the negative sides - even when not considering the hormetic effect of small amounts of ethanol!
    - snazz 6y ago
      We're talking about cancer risk here, not toxicity or effects on blood sugar. As far as I understand (as someone with no medical background), exposure is exposure. I'd love to be proven wrong if someone has some information to the contrary.
      - nikolay 6y ago
        Well, I wonder how many of these studies have found a cause or just associations. I can tell you that most drinkers greatly underestimate how much they actually drink and even further if they have to report it to another person, so, a survey will always show people as moderate drinkers! Also, most regular drinkers have other unhealthy habits! Toxicity and cancer risks are also both about the dose. We all have cancerous cells in us, but they become a problem if they survive and grow (and by growing they get a bigger chance of mutating to the level they can trick the immune system). A cancer developers over the course of many years, except certain types, of course. Definitely alcohol is not an immediate killer - there are much worse things, but here we want to vilify one millenniums-old habit as the root of all evils!
shimonabi 6y ago
What a coincidence. I drink maybe twice a year, because my father died of alcoholism, but I just poured myself a glass of wine I received as a gift before reading this article.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
It's worth noting, but effect size is also an important bit. The Wikipedia page links to a study suggesting that around 4% of cancers are attributable to alcohol consumption [1]. In some sense, that's a lot, but in another sense, it isn't really? It's also not clear to me how much of that burden is borne by heavy drinkers vs. moderate drinkers. The studies I saw seemed to suggest a very clear causal association between alcohol consumption and cancer, and with no threshold (i.e. any consumption increases your risk). However, although the evidence was strong, the effect sizes were mild, especially at mild levels of consumption. I would love to be better informed on this, but my current stance is that alcohol is super fun, and the number of life-years you lose on average from consuming it aren't too numerous. You have to die of something. [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.21903 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.21903
- acjohnson55 6y ago
  It what sense is 4% of all cancer cases not a lot?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    This sense: giving up a cherished vice to reduce your risk of dying of cancer by 1/25 might not be considered a good trade, depending on one's preferences.
corty 6y ago
I thought everything is known to cause cancer in the state of California. Jokes aside, things that "cause cancer" do this to a varying degree, there are substances where minimal doses cause cancer within your lifetime with certainty. Like plutonium. And there are substances, where a lifetime of heavy consumption increases your risk by just a measurable amount, like red meat. And then there is stuff that is known to cause cancer in mice, if you inject enough mice with multiples of their own bodyweight so they only just don't explode and maybe one of your 10k mice will test positive for a cancer marker. Reporting should find a way to distinguish those properly and understandably, for experts as well as laymen.
eddof13 6y ago
I assumed everything is a carcinogen, as you can tell if you travel to CA and look at the warnings on everything
advisedwang 6y ago
Source for all the folks asking specifically about risks: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a... > an estimated 3.5% of cancer deaths in the United States (about 19,500 deaths) were alcohol related > Moderate drinkers have 1.8-fold higher risks of oral cavity (excluding the lips) and pharynx (throat) cancers and 1.4-fold higher risks of larynx (voice box) cancers than non-drinkers, and heavy drinkers have 5-fold higher risks of oral cavity and pharynx cancers and 2.6-fold higher risks of larynx cancers > esophageal cancer ... range from 1.3-fold higher for light drinking to nearly 5-fold higher for heavy drinking > Heavy alcohol consumption is associated with approximately 2-fold increased risks of two types of liver cancer > light drinkers have a slightly increased (1.04-fold higher) risk of breast cancer, compared with nondrinkers. The risk increase is greater in moderate drinkers (1.23-fold higher) and heavy drinkers (1.6-fold higher) > Moderate to heavy alcohol consumption is associated with 1.2- to 1.5-fold increased risks of cancers of the colon and rectum
- lordnacho 6y ago
  My gripe with cancer stats presented in this way is that they tend to only give relative risks. It matters what the risk was in the first place. What's the oral cavity cancer risk that I'm increasing by 80% if I drink? If it's 10% without alcohol I'll be teetotal. If it's 1/10000 I'm going to ignore the cancer risk.
- frereubu 6y ago
  The crucial data that's missing from those figures (although they're probably buried in the references somewhere) is what the initial risk of cancer is. If the risk of cancer of the larynx in non-drinkers is 0.0001%, then a 1.4-fold increase means that a moderate drinker has a risk of 0.00014%, an absolute increase of 0.00004%. Instead if it's 20%, then a 1.4-fold increase is 28%, an absolute increase of 8%. You could potentially extrapolate back from the 3.5% of cancer deaths being "alcohol related", but that gives no context around the related risks of light / moderate / heavy drinking.
  - srg0 6y ago
echelon 6y ago
Rule of thumb: if your food, beverage, dye, or aromatic scent readily undergoes chemical reactions, it might not be safe. Alcohol is quite chemically reactive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol#Reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol#Reactions Burnt or charred food has loads of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) that have lots of potential for chemistry (delocalized electrons = very reactive). They pose extreme cancer risk, and might be one of the most important things you frequently encounter that you can remove from your diet! Don't eat burnt food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbon#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbo... If reactive substances reach your DNA, they could cause mutation. DNA mutation brings you closer to developing cancer. Even if these substances don't reach your DNA, they could cause other deleterious effects to your cellular biochemistry that might have downstream impact. Proteins, fats, and carbs are much less dangerous than some of the other things we ingest, inhale, and apply. It helps to know some basic chemistry and biochemistry. It's all about the chemistry. Cancer is a disease state caused by biochemical phenomena. (Fun fact: Oxygen is one of the most reactive things you put in your body. But there isn't any escaping that. The reaction is how we sustain life.)
- jrwoodruff 6y ago
  I've never thought about it this way. Being very much not a chemist or biologist, are there any decent sources for reactivity of... commonly ingested things? Or any articles with more on this?
  - Balgair 6y ago
    Reactivity is really hard to measure. You'd have to specify the pressure and temperature first. Fine enough, human body fever temps to freezing, and then maybe a few atm to vacuum. Then the really hard part comes in: you have to specify the reagents. Water, saline, air, ok. But the carcinogens really come in on all the ways the human body mixes with everything. You got all the enzymes, the buffers, the solutions, the biles and secretions, the hyper complex bio-chem that is a single pancreatic cell, etc. I don't think such a matrix would be possible to report out without having a complete understanding of every human's biology in all it's strange wonderful forms.
maxlamb 6y ago
I thought the main carcinogen were the liver byproducts of alcohol, mainly acetaldehyde.
thrill 6y ago
Increased oxygen correlates also nicely to increased cancer. Reduce it enough and cancer will no longer be a concern.
beckler 6y ago
Story time! My mom worked at a gas station convenience story in an rough part of Atlanta (Bankhead) in the late 1970s/early 80s. Alcohol sales in Georgia used to be prohibited on Sundays, so the most addicted alcoholics would come into her store and buy pretty much anything that had any type of alcohol in it. She said every Sunday that they would almost always sell out of mouthwash, cough syrup, rubbing alcohol, vanilla extract, nail polish remover, and even windshield wiper fluid.
virmundi 6y ago
Here is an interesting break down on why booze went from good to bad. https://www.popsci.com/moderate-drinking-benefits-risks/ https://www.popsci.com/moderate-drinking-benefits-risks/
rogermedia 6y ago
Here is an informative video on the health effects of alcohol: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-any-benefits-of-alcohol-outweigh-the-risks/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-any-benefits-of-alcohol-...
umvi 6y ago
I learned this from my brother who is a dentist. He said not to use mouthwash with alcohol in it, because there is a link with mouth cancer. But yeah, also doesn't help that alcohol is blatantly advertised and the health benefits loudly promoted (e.g. glass of wine a day).
m1117 6y ago
Maybe the benefit of alcohol has more value than the risk it imposes. For example, forgetting what happened yesterday, forgetting about covid and feeling great.
- snazz 6y ago
  Uhh.... If you're getting that effect, you're drinking a lot of alcohol, and that is not healthy for you for a variety of reasons, cancer being the least of them.
bunje 6y ago
I checked some of the references at CDC web page and seems that I won't die any time soon drinking one beer a day (male, non-smoker). E.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286216/
aimor 6y ago
My experience is that I have to proactively educate myself as best I can about the physical risks of daily living. This includes a staggering amount of items: food, clothes, containers, cookware, makeup, cleaning supplies, paint, home goods, medicine, electronics. It's an impossible task, but I see a lot of people doing the same: building a personalized set of things to watch out for. (Buy organic, wash produce/grains/beans, avoid anything scented, avoid homeopathic, avoid styrofoam, avoid hydrogenated oil, avoid Teflon/PTFEs, avoid perc, avoid food dyes, avoid plastic fabrics, on and on) Government has a role in making this information accessible at the time of purchase or use. I can read the food ingredients, the fabric material, the cancer warning, the VOC rating. And I can make a simple decision about what to buy if I so desire. But there are untold cases where the information is not easily accessible, where it's difficult to identify a trustworthy source, and where we are advertised products that actively hide their harm. I would like to have more confidence that I'm buying safe products. I don't know what the solution is, so I just keep adding to my list.
- aleclarsoniv 6y ago
  Well put! I feel like the media is supposed to be doing a better job at warning people about these things. I have a hard time believing it's not profitable enough for them to do. Are they as in the dark about it all as everyone else?
trav4225 6y ago
Recently, I opened the packaging of a new product I had purchased (I actually don't even remember what it was), and a small paper tag fell out that said, simply "WARNING: CANCER". Oh, okay... thanks. :)
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  > I actually don't even remember what it was It was cancer, obviously.
wtmt 6y ago
Not related to the carcinogenic effect or to Americans but to the “life ruining” effect and the general association of alcohol as a bad thing: in India, the movies allowed for public screening are required by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC, also known commonly as the Censor Board), in scenes showing the smoking of cigarettes or the consumption of alcohol, a ticker with messages that they’re dangerous to health. This is shown in the language of the movie (India has 22 official languages). Cable broadcasts and streaming service providers sometimes include this message ticker or blur the bottle or glass in such scenes (or remove them outright). Socially, women and children bear the brunt of alcoholism by the men in the house. So there have been long time protests favoring prohibition in many states. Some states have also officially prohibited alcohol (resulting in smuggling and also the preparation of bootleg liquor that tends to kill people often) while some other states have state run liquor shops. The governments do earn a lot of money from tax revenues, and wouldn’t want to completely give up alcohol.
archagon 6y ago
If anyone is interested in tempering their consumption based on this information (as I was), I made a free and open source iOS app a while ago that allows you to track your drinks and stay under a weekly limit of your choice. Features Untappd and HealthKit integration! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439
sunstone 6y ago
Not to mention sugar.

108 points by acjohnson55 6y ago

What percentage of Americans even know that alcohol is a drug? As a Wisconsin native, I've seen first hand the toxic culture surrounding drinking in America, including having a relative die of alcoholism. Still, we don't seem to look at it like other drugs, even though it ruins lives just as effectively as something like heroin.

msk-lywenn 6y ago
I'd like to see a study on alcohol addiction that shows that all or some specific alcoholic drinks are as addictive as heroin.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  The comment said that it ruins lives just as effectively, not that it's as addictive. Two things don't need to be equally strong or powerful to each get the job done.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    That's an interesting distinction. Many people drink in moderation quite successfully without ever being addicted and without ruining their life. How many people successfully maintain a moderate heroin habit?
    - CadellFastro 6y ago
      The distinction, at least to me, comes from the fact that alcohol is more prevalent, and even though the rate of addiction may be lower, still harms more lives given the much larger population of people who consume alcohol.
  - CadellFastro 6y ago
    That is exactly my point. Additionally, if you do want to look at things statistically, alcoholism is far more prevalent, at least in the United States, than heroin. In terms of raw number, alcoholism affects are larger range of people and arguably therefore destroys more lives.
    - Miraste 6y ago
      That's hardly a correct comparison. Alcohol is far more readily available and accepted than heroin.
      - CadellFastro 6y ago
        Hence, if you consider the effect on the entire using population, alcohol has a greater potential for damage considering its greater availability. Heroin is a bomb. Alcohol is fireworks. One is legal, and arguably less dangerous, but there are far more fireworks injuries in the ER than bomb injuries.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  "addictive" is not exactly the same as "effectively ruins lives". cigarettes are highly addictive, but they don't really ruin people's lives in the same way as alcohol/heroin.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- RickS 6y ago
  Not about addictiveness, but about overall social harm: alcohol beats out heroin. > MCDA modelling showed that heroin, crack cocaine, and metamfetamine were the most harmful drugs to individuals (part scores 34, 37, and 32, respectively), whereas alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine were the most harmful to others (46, 21, and 17, respectively). Overall, alcohol was the most harmful drug (overall harm score 72), with heroin (55) and crack cocaine (54) in second and third places. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2961462-6/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Of the myriad drugs I've taken, alcohol is the least deserving of ready availability IMO. I suspect that if it were invented post 1950, and not so ancient and ingrained in our culture, there's no way we would let people buy the stuff.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Depends on the definition. E.g. alcohol withdrawal can kill you, heroin withdrawal can't.
klyrs 6y ago
Narcotics Anonymous was founded largely due to Alcoholics Anonymous treating alcohol as different from other drugs. That cultural delineation exists to this day. I'd ask... what percentage of patients and workers in addiction recovery agree with the assertion that alcohol is a drug?
choward 6y ago
There are many drugs with many different properties. Some are medicinal, some are addictive, some are illegal, etc. They all effect people in varying negative and positive ways. The word "drugs" typically has a negative connotation since people tend to use the term "drugs" to refer to "illegal drugs". You don't really hear people calling "medicinal drugs" just "drugs"; well at least in everyday conversation. Legal drugs are usually pushed by huge corporations with big budgets. They have heavy marketing and a lot of advertising that manipulates public opinion. All of this advertising of course portrays the "drug" in a positive way. You don't ever hear the word "drug" used in alcohol or pharmaceutical commercials. Also, whenever a study comes out saying anything good about alcohol the media picks it up since that's what people like to hear. I'm not sure I've ever seen the news feature a study on the negative effects of alcohol. Another reason the media may focus on positive stories is that big alcohol is such a huge customer. Any advertisement mentioning illegal drugs portrays them in a negative way since they are put out by groups that are against the drug since you can't promote a product that's illegal. So in conclusion, it's because alcohol is legal and the loads of advertising that give people such a positive view of alcohol.
dylan604 6y ago
Curious abut the Wisconsin specificness you added. Does WI have a larger percentage of alcoholics than other places?
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  Yes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/29/wisconsins-bar-to-grocery-store-ratio-puts-the-rest-of-the-country-to-shame/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/29/wisco...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

PenisBanana 6y ago

Well, I didn't know, so I guess I'm half American. TIL.

xyzzyz 6y ago

I think people are already well aware that drinking alcohol is unhealthy, and I don’t think that anyone, who consumes it despite that, will stop after learning it is a “carcinogen”.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
It was surprising to me to learn that its harmful to your health and carcinogenic at every measured level (even low amounts)
recursive 6y ago
I very well might. I honestly had no idea there was anything unhealthy about moderate drinking. Every so often we even see dubious headlines about "daily red wine has health benefits". I'm not aware of specific, nor do I particularly believe it's good for you, but I really had no idea that it's unhealthy.
- cujo 6y ago
  I call bullshit.
  - recursive 6y ago
    And for what it's worth, I can believe that you genuinely don't believe me.
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  You had no idea there was anything unhealthy about consuming a neurotoxin until you heard "cancer"? : p
  - recursive 6y ago
    Some people get hammered. I know that's bad. So, yes, I had that idea. I'm talking about moderate drinking. Like 1 per day or less. Yes. I didn't know it was unhealthy. Every substance has a harmful dose. Some of them have safe doses. I didn't know that alcohol (apparently) has no safe dose.

arkitaip 6y ago

The alcohol industries have done an amazing job with their propaganda. Many people genuinely believe that a glass of wine every day is actually healthy for you.

jiofih 6y ago
The alcohol industry you’re thinking of is more of beer and spirits. There are ton of studies showing benefits from wine, it’s not quite the same.
- throwawayay02 6y ago
  No, the more recent articles do show that the optimal amount of wine is zero. The one glass per day common wisdom was marketing.
- gvfdabgea 6y ago
  The propaganda runs deep.
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y ago
That strikes me as a bad-faith interpretation of the history of this issue. The reason for belief in the protective effect of alcohol consumption comes from data, not corporate propaganda. Many observational studies, conducted by a wide variety of institutions and government agencies, and consistently arrived at the conclusion that alcohol's effects on all-cause mortality (ACM) are dose-dependent, but these effects do not necessarily converge on the origin. That is, as dosage is reduced, eventually ACM dips >1 for low levels of consumption, before returning to the abstinence baseline. I.e., mild drinking is protective. There is no plausible or coherent way to suggest that these observations were due to industry influence given the wide variety of data sources, investigators, and institutions involved. The problem with this data is one that is common to wide variety of health issues; it's very hard to observe small effects. Most of our data and understanding actually comes from relatively extreme effects; the worst smokers and drinkers, large radiation exposure, major occupational health risks like asbestos, etc. That gives us great information about the what effects these onslaughts have, but only for these extreme populations. The next logical step is to observe less dosage/exposure and try to establish the nature of dose-dependence e.g. linear vs. some power law. The problem, however, is that experimentation is unethical, so you have to continue to rely on observational studies. But observational studies necessarily have confounding factors that can be extremely tricky to address. Furthermore, there is no authoritative way to determine whether these factors have been addressed or not. So, despite the best and most sincere efforts of investigators, the data 'near the origin', i.e. the effects of low dosage/exposure to a potentially harmful thing, is extrapolation, not interpolation as one might believe intuitively. Even small errors - the kind that are endemic to observational studies - are amplified when considering these ranges. The result of this is persistent controversy about issues broadly related to hormesis. The true impact of radiation releases from events like Chernobyl and famously uncertain for this same reason. Specifically regarding alcohol, the most recent attempts to control the confounds has lead some to declare that the protective observation has been eliminated. I certainly agree that, as a health recommendation, this is the conservative interpretation and should be taken used to make health decisions. But as far as the data itself is concerned, I'm not so convinced. I still think the "J" shaped dose-response has not been adequately explained, and there are valid mechanistic hypotheses that warrant continued consideration. But if you would like to carry on a cynical world view that neatly blames all that ails on evil corporations, by all means.

slowhand09 6y ago

Those of us that do DON'T CARE! Also, half of Americans are below average.

recursive 6y ago

I didn't know this. I'm honestly shocked. Is there any information about what different levels of alcohol consumption do to cancer risk?

Ovah 6y ago
Here's a good start. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...
randlet 6y ago
Yes it's a well studied area in cancer research: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=alcohol+cancer https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=alcohol+cancer

pkd 6y ago

I hope alcohol gets the same treatment as cigarettes and other tobacco products in a couple of decades. People should be allowed to drink it if they chose to after being made aware of all the risks with every purchase. But hopefully the tremendous peer pressure to consume alcohol, especially for young adults, is no longer a thing.

gok 6y ago

Few Americans know that sunlight is a carcinogen. Big Outdoors wants to keep it that way.

idoh 6y ago

This is a frustrating article, because it does not say how dangerous alcohol is. Maybe alcohol raises the risk of certain types of cancers, but only by a very tiny amount. Relative to other risks, even other risks from alcohol, do we really need to care about that?

weRnotU 6y ago
Do we need to care about your strawman? No.
csours 6y ago
> "A public health analysis published last year estimated that the cancer risk posed by drinking one bottle of wine a week was comparable to smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 for women in the same time span." I'd like to have better statistics than this, but they did try to communicate something about the risk. The problem with comparing the cancer risk to cigarettes is that tobacco does a lot of other bad stuff besides just the cancer - tar, nicotine affect your heart and lungs pretty strongly.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Alcohol does a lot of bad stuff besides cause cancer as well. Primarily damage to the liver, but other effects as well.
ogre_codes 6y ago
There are some indications on there: > A public health analysis published last year estimated that the cancer risk posed by drinking one bottle of wine a week was comparable to smoking five cigarettes for men and 10 for women in the same time span.
Barrin92 6y ago
from the national cancer institute: >"Pooled data from 118 individual studies indicates that light drinkers have a slightly increased (1.04-fold higher) risk of breast cancer, compared with nondrinkers. The risk increase is greater in moderate drinkers (1.23-fold higher) and heavy drinkers (1.6-fold higher" Heavy and moderate drinking at the very least seems to be quite significant. Esophageal cancer is one that also came to my mind because I know of quite a few heavy drinkers who suffered from it, Christopher Hitchens for example.

TylerE 6y ago

Everything has risks. Oxygen is a carcinogen.

dpoochieni 6y ago
Yeah this is more of "why can't mommy protect us from the world?"
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  This article isn’t arguing for protection measures. It just says that “Big Booze” is working to prevent studies showing that alcohol is bad. Not much different that “Big Tobacco” decades ago.
  - dpoochieni 6y ago
    Suppose the studies showing alcohol is bad were not suppressed? (Not even caring whether it is actually true or not.) Then what is the next step?

acomjean 6y ago

I don't think there are many that consider alcohol healthy at this point. Plus most people are pretty moderate consumers of the stuff. burnt foods also increase cancer. But its kinda marginal. https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/warning-over-burnt-toast-chemical-acrylamides-cancer-risk/ https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/warning-over-burnt-toast-chem...

rriepe 6y ago
Everyone I know who drinks considers one or two a day to be healthy.
- rcoveson 6y ago
  The CDC defines "moderate alcohol consumption" as one drink per day for females and two drinks per day for males. That's probably what they're referring to. It also states: "This definition refers to the amount consumed on any single day and is not intended as an average over several days."[0] I don't see any info about weekly consumption. 0. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm
  - rriepe 6y ago
    Nah they're referring to the media meme that a drink or two per day is good for you. Not not bad for you, but actively good for you. Alcohol's poison at worst, empty calories at best.

csours 6y ago

I bought a large mixing bowl, and it had a California Cancer label on the bottom. It's a regular metal bowl. If you put cancer labels on everything, people will quickly ignore them. Maybe it would be better if there was a scale on it, like this is a 1 banana equivalent risk or something, but then how do you determine my exposure to the cancer in the metal bowl.

tehjoker 6y ago
I think that was the idea. If the warnings were effective, then business processes are affected. If consumers can be trained to ignore them, then the state looks like it's doing something for people without changing anything materially.
- aphextron 6y ago
  > then the state looks like it's doing something for people without changing anything materially. You've just described California politics perfectly.
  - BitwiseFool 6y ago
    This is anecdotal, but one thing I have noticed about Californians is that there is a sense that government inaction is worse than government action. In other words, if there is some problem (real or perceived), the state can't simply do nothing about it. And, the politicians of California are enthusiastic about creating new bureaucracy to enforce the newly minted laws. Which they usually pay for by creating some specific tax/fee on some specific transaction or type of product, which then creates more complexity and bureaucracy.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      That's the legacy of Reganomics and the collapse of the New Deal coalition. Sucks, but we'll do better soon hopefully.
  - trav4225 6y ago

potiuper 6y ago

This would have more novel potential by switching the word ethanol for alcohol in the title, i.e. methanol, which is an alcohol, is known to metabolise to formic acid (which is present as the formate ion) via formaldehyde, which is a known carcinogen, in a process initiated by the alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver. "More than half" likely do not know of the carcinogenicity of acetaldehyde (systematic name ethanal). > potiup

throwaway2245 6y ago
"Ethanol is not carcinogenic, but is metabolised to acetaldehyde, which is carcinogenic." The WHO specifies that it is ethanol in alcoholic beverages that is carcinogenic, i.e. what most people would call alcohol.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bitdotdash 6y ago

What percentage of Americans even know what a carcinogen is?

hx2a 6y ago

Wait, what? Alcohol is a carcinogen? I didn't know this. Here's link to the CDC's website, referenced in that article: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.htm https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/moderate-drinking.ht... This part from the CDC's website is also interesting: Although past studies have indicated that moderate alcohol consumption has protective health benefits (e.g., reducing risk of heart disease), recent studies show this may not be true. I didn't know that either. I always thought a glass of wine was healthy.

throwaway09223 6y ago
It is unlikely that a glass of wine is healthy. Studies that show a correlation between moderate alcohol consumption and health are likely measuring the fact that unhealthy people are often unable to drink. This is a "wet sidewalks cause rain" or "hospital beds are dangerous" type of conclusion.
tehjoker 6y ago
It wasn't the alcohol in the wine that was conveying the benefits. Iirc, people were pointing to https://www.drugs.com/resveratrol.html https://www.drugs.com/resveratrol.html
antognini 6y ago
The health benefits of wine (if they exist) seem to stem from chemicals in the grape skin (e.g., resveratrol and other phenols). The alcohol is likely a net negative. Because of this a glass of white wine is unlikely to provide the same health benefits as a glass of red wine.
jcampbell1 6y ago
People that drink one glass of wine have very low propensity to over indulge. The latter trait has all sorts of benefits including health and income. It is the adult marshmallow test.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Or, possibly, their drug is just different. My grandfather was an alcoholic. I have zero problem controlling my alcohol consumption and the older I get, the less I drink. I am currently somewhere in the proximity of 2-3 glasses of wine a week, it was even less in the summer. And there is no urge to consume more. But I definitely overindulge on HN or Reddit.

adamhowell 6y ago

I've personally found, when people ask why I'm not drinking, that "Well, did you realize Alcohol is right above Arsenic on the carcinogen list?" is by far – compared to "Oh, I just don't drink" or the other reasons I've given in the past – the fastest way to move onto other topics.

snazz 6y ago
Does arsenic usually cause cancer or is it toxic in another way? While you can also get alcohol poisoning, this seems like an imperfect comparison.
- adamhowell 6y ago
  I wasn't being facetious, I was just referencing the American Cancer Society's list: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/general-info/kno... Arsenic is considered a carcinogen: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/arsenic.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/arsenic.html
  - snazz 6y ago
    I understand that arsenic is a carcinogen, but my one minute of research suggests that it's usually/often more of a poison. There's also some difference between organic and inorganic variants that I don't quite understand.

ogre_codes 6y ago

It's amazing that alcohol gets such a free pass. Weed, cigarettes, heck even vaping somehow have a worse rap than alcohol in many people's eyes. Thankfully, I'm a very light drinker only occasionally indulging and then in small quantities.

nikolay 6y ago

It's all about the dose. Drink too much water and you will die. Most people will under report the amount of alcohol they drink. With 50ml per day, alcohol has a great hormetic effect. Wine, for example, is not just alcohol. Just like natural beer - it's full of nutrients.

rriepe 6y ago
This is true for its well-known other health risks. Cancer risk doesn't care if you spread your seven drinks out over a week or over a night. Moderation might even be a riskier strategy from a cancer risk standpoint, if the imbibed amounts are otherwise the same.
- nikolay 6y ago
  Actually it does care about spreading over time. That's why plant toxins are good in small amounts and bad in large at once. It's always about weighing benefits and negative effects, not looking at things one-sidedly! I would never have vodka, cocktails, and other pure poison products, but I will have a glass of good red wine or a bottle of real beer! Pure ethanol is bad! Ethanol is metabolised as fructose! Sugary alcoholic drinks are the worst! So, let's not put all types of "alcohol" in the same bucket! With red wine and beer, you get benefits, which might outweigh the negative sides - even when not considering the hormetic effect of small amounts of ethanol!
  - snazz 6y ago
    We're talking about cancer risk here, not toxicity or effects on blood sugar. As far as I understand (as someone with no medical background), exposure is exposure. I'd love to be proven wrong if someone has some information to the contrary.
    - nikolay 6y ago
      Well, I wonder how many of these studies have found a cause or just associations. I can tell you that most drinkers greatly underestimate how much they actually drink and even further if they have to report it to another person, so, a survey will always show people as moderate drinkers! Also, most regular drinkers have other unhealthy habits! Toxicity and cancer risks are also both about the dose. We all have cancerous cells in us, but they become a problem if they survive and grow (and by growing they get a bigger chance of mutating to the level they can trick the immune system). A cancer developers over the course of many years, except certain types, of course. Definitely alcohol is not an immediate killer - there are much worse things, but here we want to vilify one millenniums-old habit as the root of all evils!

shimonabi 6y ago

What a coincidence. I drink maybe twice a year, because my father died of alcoholism, but I just poured myself a glass of wine I received as a gift before reading this article.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

It's worth noting, but effect size is also an important bit. The Wikipedia page links to a study suggesting that around 4% of cancers are attributable to alcohol consumption [1]. In some sense, that's a lot, but in another sense, it isn't really? It's also not clear to me how much of that burden is borne by heavy drinkers vs. moderate drinkers. The studies I saw seemed to suggest a very clear causal association between alcohol consumption and cancer, and with no threshold (i.e. any consumption increases your risk). However, although the evidence was strong, the effect sizes were mild, especially at mild levels of consumption. I would love to be better informed on this, but my current stance is that alcohol is super fun, and the number of life-years you lose on average from consuming it aren't too numerous. You have to die of something. [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.21903 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.21903

acjohnson55 6y ago
It what sense is 4% of all cancer cases not a lot?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  This sense: giving up a cherished vice to reduce your risk of dying of cancer by 1/25 might not be considered a good trade, depending on one's preferences.

corty 6y ago

I thought everything is known to cause cancer in the state of California. Jokes aside, things that "cause cancer" do this to a varying degree, there are substances where minimal doses cause cancer within your lifetime with certainty. Like plutonium. And there are substances, where a lifetime of heavy consumption increases your risk by just a measurable amount, like red meat. And then there is stuff that is known to cause cancer in mice, if you inject enough mice with multiples of their own bodyweight so they only just don't explode and maybe one of your 10k mice will test positive for a cancer marker. Reporting should find a way to distinguish those properly and understandably, for experts as well as laymen.

eddof13 6y ago

I assumed everything is a carcinogen, as you can tell if you travel to CA and look at the warnings on everything

advisedwang 6y ago

Source for all the folks asking specifically about risks: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a... > an estimated 3.5% of cancer deaths in the United States (about 19,500 deaths) were alcohol related > Moderate drinkers have 1.8-fold higher risks of oral cavity (excluding the lips) and pharynx (throat) cancers and 1.4-fold higher risks of larynx (voice box) cancers than non-drinkers, and heavy drinkers have 5-fold higher risks of oral cavity and pharynx cancers and 2.6-fold higher risks of larynx cancers > esophageal cancer ... range from 1.3-fold higher for light drinking to nearly 5-fold higher for heavy drinking > Heavy alcohol consumption is associated with approximately 2-fold increased risks of two types of liver cancer > light drinkers have a slightly increased (1.04-fold higher) risk of breast cancer, compared with nondrinkers. The risk increase is greater in moderate drinkers (1.23-fold higher) and heavy drinkers (1.6-fold higher) > Moderate to heavy alcohol consumption is associated with 1.2- to 1.5-fold increased risks of cancers of the colon and rectum

lordnacho 6y ago
My gripe with cancer stats presented in this way is that they tend to only give relative risks. It matters what the risk was in the first place. What's the oral cavity cancer risk that I'm increasing by 80% if I drink? If it's 10% without alcohol I'll be teetotal. If it's 1/10000 I'm going to ignore the cancer risk.
frereubu 6y ago
The crucial data that's missing from those figures (although they're probably buried in the references somewhere) is what the initial risk of cancer is. If the risk of cancer of the larynx in non-drinkers is 0.0001%, then a 1.4-fold increase means that a moderate drinker has a risk of 0.00014%, an absolute increase of 0.00004%. Instead if it's 20%, then a 1.4-fold increase is 28%, an absolute increase of 8%. You could potentially extrapolate back from the 3.5% of cancer deaths being "alcohol related", but that gives no context around the related risks of light / moderate / heavy drinking.
- srg0 6y ago

echelon 6y ago

Rule of thumb: if your food, beverage, dye, or aromatic scent readily undergoes chemical reactions, it might not be safe. Alcohol is quite chemically reactive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol#Reactions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol#Reactions Burnt or charred food has loads of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) that have lots of potential for chemistry (delocalized electrons = very reactive). They pose extreme cancer risk, and might be one of the most important things you frequently encounter that you can remove from your diet! Don't eat burnt food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbon#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycyclic_aromatic_hydrocarbo... If reactive substances reach your DNA, they could cause mutation. DNA mutation brings you closer to developing cancer. Even if these substances don't reach your DNA, they could cause other deleterious effects to your cellular biochemistry that might have downstream impact. Proteins, fats, and carbs are much less dangerous than some of the other things we ingest, inhale, and apply. It helps to know some basic chemistry and biochemistry. It's all about the chemistry. Cancer is a disease state caused by biochemical phenomena. (Fun fact: Oxygen is one of the most reactive things you put in your body. But there isn't any escaping that. The reaction is how we sustain life.)

jrwoodruff 6y ago
I've never thought about it this way. Being very much not a chemist or biologist, are there any decent sources for reactivity of... commonly ingested things? Or any articles with more on this?
- Balgair 6y ago
  Reactivity is really hard to measure. You'd have to specify the pressure and temperature first. Fine enough, human body fever temps to freezing, and then maybe a few atm to vacuum. Then the really hard part comes in: you have to specify the reagents. Water, saline, air, ok. But the carcinogens really come in on all the ways the human body mixes with everything. You got all the enzymes, the buffers, the solutions, the biles and secretions, the hyper complex bio-chem that is a single pancreatic cell, etc. I don't think such a matrix would be possible to report out without having a complete understanding of every human's biology in all it's strange wonderful forms.

maxlamb 6y ago

I thought the main carcinogen were the liver byproducts of alcohol, mainly acetaldehyde.

thrill 6y ago

Increased oxygen correlates also nicely to increased cancer. Reduce it enough and cancer will no longer be a concern.

beckler 6y ago

Story time! My mom worked at a gas station convenience story in an rough part of Atlanta (Bankhead) in the late 1970s/early 80s. Alcohol sales in Georgia used to be prohibited on Sundays, so the most addicted alcoholics would come into her store and buy pretty much anything that had any type of alcohol in it. She said every Sunday that they would almost always sell out of mouthwash, cough syrup, rubbing alcohol, vanilla extract, nail polish remover, and even windshield wiper fluid.

virmundi 6y ago

Here is an interesting break down on why booze went from good to bad. https://www.popsci.com/moderate-drinking-benefits-risks/ https://www.popsci.com/moderate-drinking-benefits-risks/

rogermedia 6y ago

Here is an informative video on the health effects of alcohol: https://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-any-benefits-of-alcohol-outweigh-the-risks/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/do-any-benefits-of-alcohol-...

umvi 6y ago

I learned this from my brother who is a dentist. He said not to use mouthwash with alcohol in it, because there is a link with mouth cancer. But yeah, also doesn't help that alcohol is blatantly advertised and the health benefits loudly promoted (e.g. glass of wine a day).

m1117 6y ago

Maybe the benefit of alcohol has more value than the risk it imposes. For example, forgetting what happened yesterday, forgetting about covid and feeling great.

snazz 6y ago
Uhh.... If you're getting that effect, you're drinking a lot of alcohol, and that is not healthy for you for a variety of reasons, cancer being the least of them.

bunje 6y ago

I checked some of the references at CDC web page and seems that I won't die any time soon drinking one beer a day (male, non-smoker). E.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286216/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26286216/

aimor 6y ago

My experience is that I have to proactively educate myself as best I can about the physical risks of daily living. This includes a staggering amount of items: food, clothes, containers, cookware, makeup, cleaning supplies, paint, home goods, medicine, electronics. It's an impossible task, but I see a lot of people doing the same: building a personalized set of things to watch out for. (Buy organic, wash produce/grains/beans, avoid anything scented, avoid homeopathic, avoid styrofoam, avoid hydrogenated oil, avoid Teflon/PTFEs, avoid perc, avoid food dyes, avoid plastic fabrics, on and on) Government has a role in making this information accessible at the time of purchase or use. I can read the food ingredients, the fabric material, the cancer warning, the VOC rating. And I can make a simple decision about what to buy if I so desire. But there are untold cases where the information is not easily accessible, where it's difficult to identify a trustworthy source, and where we are advertised products that actively hide their harm. I would like to have more confidence that I'm buying safe products. I don't know what the solution is, so I just keep adding to my list.

aleclarsoniv 6y ago
Well put! I feel like the media is supposed to be doing a better job at warning people about these things. I have a hard time believing it's not profitable enough for them to do. Are they as in the dark about it all as everyone else?

trav4225 6y ago

Recently, I opened the packaging of a new product I had purchased (I actually don't even remember what it was), and a small paper tag fell out that said, simply "WARNING: CANCER". Oh, okay... thanks. :)

0-_-0 6y ago
> I actually don't even remember what it was It was cancer, obviously.

wtmt 6y ago

Not related to the carcinogenic effect or to Americans but to the “life ruining” effect and the general association of alcohol as a bad thing: in India, the movies allowed for public screening are required by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC, also known commonly as the Censor Board), in scenes showing the smoking of cigarettes or the consumption of alcohol, a ticker with messages that they’re dangerous to health. This is shown in the language of the movie (India has 22 official languages). Cable broadcasts and streaming service providers sometimes include this message ticker or blur the bottle or glass in such scenes (or remove them outright). Socially, women and children bear the brunt of alcoholism by the men in the house. So there have been long time protests favoring prohibition in many states. Some states have also officially prohibited alcohol (resulting in smuggling and also the preparation of bootleg liquor that tends to kill people often) while some other states have state run liquor shops. The governments do earn a lot of money from tax revenues, and wouldn’t want to completely give up alcohol.

archagon 6y ago

If anyone is interested in tempering their consumption based on this information (as I was), I made a free and open source iOS app a while ago that allows you to track your drinks and stay under a weekly limit of your choice. Features Untappd and HealthKit integration! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/good-spirits/id1434237439

sunstone 6y ago

Not to mention sugar.