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All of these are well known carcinogens but it is crazy the lengths people will go to defend alcohol especially in this regard. Alcohol, in any amount, is a poi

All of these are well known carcinogens but it is crazy the lengths people will go to defend alcohol especially in this regard. Alcohol, in any amount, is a poison and is treated as so by the body. It breaks down into acetaldehyde and damages DNA. I'm all for people making informed decisions on what they want to put into their bodies but informed is the operative word. There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.

Test0129 4y ago
> There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes. To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.
- cgb223 4y ago
  What are the relative risk increases for each?
  - khuey 4y ago
    The American Cancer Society claims that smoking accounts for 30% of cancer deaths in the United States (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/stay-away-from-tobacco/health-risks-of-tobacco/health-risks-of-smoking-tobacco.html https://www.cancer.org/healthy/stay-away-from-tobacco/health...) while alcohol accounts for 4% (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/diet-physical-activity/alcohol-use-and-cancer.html https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/diet-physical-a...)
    - hooverd 4y ago
      I wonder how that aligns with the percentage of people are heavy drinkers.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol. They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer. Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;) [0]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a... [1]: https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-07/how-does-smoking-increase-your-cancer-risk-expert-qa https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-07/how-does-smoking-increas...
- bena 4y ago
  See. You've actually fallen for it. The whole 80% of people with lung cancer are smokers means that if you smoke, you will get lung cancer. Truth is, you will likely not get lung cancer if you smoke. Only 6% of smokers will get lung cancer. You have a slightly worse than 19 in 20 chance of going through your whole life smoking and not getting lung cancer. Now, in your statement itself, you move the goalpost. You start with cancer and end with "a deadly disease". Because, yeah, smoking is also linked to several other bad outcomes, not just cancer. And it is fair to compare those other diseases when talking about why we demonize smoking way more than other things. But we can't do that by focusing on cancer. That's disingenuous. And it is fair to say that the correct number of cigarettes to smoke is 0. The correct amount of alcohol to consume is none. And the correct BMI to be at is between 18 to 24.
  - freeflight 4y ago
    As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients. They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking. What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on. But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group. The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.
galangalalgol 4y ago
Agreed, I didn't even know it was a carcinogen until this year. I'm really old. Growing up it was always about it causing brain damage, no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree. Can we make the "may cause health problems" warning made a bit more specific perhaps? The education on alcohol could be a lot better and it shouldn't be hard. Obesity is a much harder problem to solve and I suspect we don't know all the reasons it is on the rise yet.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  > no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree That's because it doesn't. For the kind of light social/dinner drinking most people do, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it increases your cancer risk (on the contrary, there is some evidence of protective benefits, but epidemiological studies on diet are always full of confounders, so who knows). The reason it appears on lists like these is that alcohol abuse is quite common and leads to liver cancer, among other things, and is associated with other unhealthy choices.
  - cantSpellSober 4y ago
    Not according to emerging research. Long term abuse is linked to liver cancer, but even light and moderate alcohol use generally increases the risks of other types of cancers (and diseases) too. https://www.wcrf.org/diet-activity-and-cancer/risk-factors/alcoholic-drinks-and-cancer-risk/ https://www.wcrf.org/diet-activity-and-cancer/risk-factors/a...
foolfoolz 4y ago
sunlight also damages DNA i think most people know drinking isn’t good for you. people aren’t defending alcohol they’re defending the social value they receive from drinking; and it brings a lot. most people don’t drink that much anyway because it’s not great for you. alcohol usage is highly concentrated on alcoholics who drink like 90% of all alcohol produced id say of these 3 the one people go to crazy lengths to avoid doing anything about is BMI. everyone knows it’s one of the biggest if they not biggest co-morbidities identified yet a good portion of the world has high BMI and does nothing about it
- nradov 4y ago
  Regular sunlight exposure is correlated with lower all-cause mortality. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12251 https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12251
  - oaktrout 4y ago
    True in women according to that study. Also they didn't ask specifically about sun exposure avoidance, they asked things like "Do you go abroad on holiday to swim and sunbathe". People on dialysis don't go abroad and people who can't swim secondary to poor health don't go swimming abroad. A poorly designed study with too many confounders imo.
    - nradov 4y ago
      The point is that for individual lifestyle decisions you can't take a reductionist approach and look at individual factors in isolation. Maybe moderate sunlight exposure causes DNA damage, but so what? Does it actually reduce lifespan (or healthspan)? Probably not, or at least we don't have any reliable evidence that it does.
      - oaktrout 4y ago
        I agree. I think it's also reductionist to say sun avoidance increases mortality, at least based on the evidence we have.
ls612 4y ago
These sorts of arguments just make people immediately think of Prohibition and the excesses of that era. No conspiracy required, just a knowledge of history.
- ehnto 4y ago
  We still have prohibition, it's just not for alcohol, so it's not that strange to consider. Prohibition wasn't about those kinds of health effects anyway, it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking as I understand it. I don't agree with it, but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation and for different reasons.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking Wikipedia says it was mostly about religious moralists.
    - Auracle 4y ago
      What wasn’t framed through religion back then?
      - muttled 4y ago
        Clean-shaven faces were pretty prevalent despite being technically against the bible (source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Trimming-Facial-Hair https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Trimming-Facial-Hair )
  - messe 4y ago
    > but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation Yes, because the last few decades of drug prohibition have shown how differently it works nowadays.
    - ehnto 4y ago
burke 4y ago
Eh, maybe. Lots of "poisons" have hormetic effects. Intuition isn't always a great guide here, and studies seem significantly conflicted in the "modest intake" range.
feet 4y ago
The fact that a bunch of commenters immediately came out to defend alcohol here is actually hilarious. The damage to DNA caused by acetaldehyde is very well studied, yet here we have people who likely aren't involved in biological research nor have any formal exposure to it coming out to defend their intoxicant of choice. Nobody was saying make it illegal, yet that's what people jump to. We need to increase educational awareness of the harms of these compounds because prohibition just makes things worse. Prohibition is why there is fentanyl in the heroin supply for example.
- abrouwers 4y ago
  Reading the HN comments, I didn't get the same "defending alcohol" feel you did. I think many (most?) people understand there is some risk. But, there's also risk in driving a car, eating red meat, or not sleeping enough - some just choose that the benefits they receive outweigh the risks. Life's short, eh?
  - feet 4y ago
    Exactly life is short so why are people knowingly making it shorter? I think you don't see them as defending alcohol because your comment is doing the exact same thing.
    - abrouwers 4y ago
      I mean, no offense, but your tone comes off as an "I told you so" anti-alcohol comment, so I'd be careful criticizing others for their decisions. As other comments have mentioned, there are often plenty of enjoyable, social side effects that come from drinking alcohol with others in a common setting. Obviously alcohol isn't required (though, obviously people enjoy it - the taste, the side effect, whatever), but that's the way a fairly huge industry is setup in many countries. Also, to clarify, drinking alcohol does NOT equate to making one's life shorter - that's not at all what the article discusses. Moderate drinking may have no effect, or even a positive effect, on life span.
      - 4y ago
TaupeRanger 4y ago
I'm sorry to say that you are just plain wrong. Alcohol "in any amount" is not at all a poison, any more than formaldehyde (present in, for example, apples) is. At normal amounts (such as social drinking, and an occasional drink at home, or a regular glass of wine at dinner) it has never been strongly associated with increased cancer risk - in fact some studies show the the opposite. The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer, and if one is abusing alcohol they are often doing other things in their life that are unhealthy and may lead to other cancers. It is simply an easy flag to tease out of health data - more a signpost than anything else.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  I can remember a HN post not so long ago, linking a study, in which the result was alcohol in any amount being unhealthy. Now I don't know, if that includes carcinogenic, but you might want to look that up, before caps locking that "never". People associate all kinds of things with all kinds of other things. It seems highly unlikely, that "normal" (what is normal?) amounts have never been even associated with cancer risk.
- animal_spirits 4y ago
  Here is a study suggesting the opposite to your claim: Light alcohol drinking and cancer: a meta-analysis Abstract Background: There is convincing evidence that alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx. Most of the data derive from studies that focused on the effect of moderate/high alcohol intakes, while little is known about light alcohol drinking (up to 1 drink/day). Patients and methods: We evaluated the association between light drinking and cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx, through a meta-analytic approach. We searched epidemiological studies using PubMed, ISI Web of Science and EMBASE, published before December 2010. Results: We included 222 articles comprising ∼92 000 light drinkers and 60 000 non-drinkers with cancer. Light drinking was associated with the risk of oropharyngeal cancer [relative risk, RR = 1.17; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-1.29], esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (RR = 1.30; 95% CI 1.09-1.56) and female breast cancer (RR = 1.05; 95% CI 1.02-1.08). We estimated that ∼5000 deaths from oropharyngeal cancer, 24 000 from esophageal SCC and 5000 from breast cancer were attributable to light drinking in 2004 worldwide. No association was found for colorectum, liver and larynx tumors. Conclusions: Light drinking increases the risk of cancer of oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus and female breast. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22910838/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22910838/
francisofascii 4y ago
> acetaldehyde Interesting. A common fruity off flavor (or desired flavor depending on what you want) of craft beer is caused by acetaldehyde being produced in the fermentation process. I wonder if certain craft beers are worse than regular beers because it contains acetaldehyde to begin with.
- fswd 4y ago
  I'm guessing pear beer? Gave me the worst headache. You can flush out acetaldehyde with 2 grams of Taurine before going to bed. It's probably why a big egg breakfast feels good after a long night. This isn't going to make alcohol safer, but you won't have a hang over the next day...
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Craft beers are generally just higher in alcohol content. You consume more alcohol, and have a worse hangover.
sebow 4y ago
> Alcohol, in any amount, is a poison That's a big of a stretch. The DNA is "damaged", or better said changed, by everything. And not all alcohol beverages are equivalent. I'm all up for raising awareness at alcoholism especially due to experience in my family in the past, but this is a piss-poor job of doing so. Being alarmist about things has often the opposite effect, especially today.
refurb 4y ago
I mean, frying foods creates acrylamide, which is a known carcinogen. Eating seafood exposes you to mercury. Sun exposure damages DNA. Yes, alcohol is harmful, but in moderation, the harm is not that different than other toxins people are exposed to.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  So we choose low-mercury fish and wear sunscreen. The harm is different depending on toxin (mercury vs ethanol for ex).
  - fuckHNtho 4y ago
cantSpellSober 4y ago
Cannabis as well. Is it a kneejerk reaction from the days of Prohibition? Confirmation bias on the part of drinkers? The ways alcohol is woven into social gatherings that smoking tobacco is not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde#Carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde#Carcinogenicity
vr46 4y ago
And 3…2…1… cue the defence of drinking alcohol
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  why do you think it's bad? people who do not drink alcohol die too and usually not at older age. 5 millions deaths worldwide is a drop in the bucket, considering things that could be prevented and are not related to people behavior (10 million people die every year of hunger, many are kids) and, most of all, even if we can correlate alcohol to those deaths (it's mostly smocking and BMI) that doesn't imply that if they did not drink they would have lived longer. People who abuse of substances find a way to abuse of anything legal or illegal. Car accidents cause around 1.4 million deaths and 50 million non fatal injuries (difference with alcohol being it doesn't need people to abuse of it). Pollution is responsible for 9 million deaths/year. Should we ban road transport?
  - vr46 4y ago
    Personally, I quit heavy boozing about five years ago and totally quit about two years ago. And personally, I can feel the difference in my mood, my behaviour, my thinking, and the effects on other around me. This applied to very light drinking, like half a pint, as well as heavy drinking - maybe six or seven pints plus extras. I tracked these things in an app so I can look back and correlate moods and drinking. Low sample size, but hey, you work with what you’ve got. I also still spend a lot of time around heavy boozers and see how a variety of drunk people behave. So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues. I’m not concerned with how alcohol causes death, I am concerned with how alcohol affects life. On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear and global studies also conclude that no amount of drinking alcohol is safe for you. On the basis that drinking alcohol is a pretty binary choice under the direct control of a human, peer pressure aside, this probably explains why people get defensive because it’s an attack - if you like - on their personal choices. I cannot personally have an impact on whether my personal pollution emissions - cue gags - affect my health, and improvements in my own driving skills have a ceiling limit on my own safety. But booze is easy, not drinking has a disproportionate impact on me personally. There’s a difference between banning things to improve public health and personally not partaking in them. Me observing that people are quick to get defensive over alcohol consumption in general is poking fun at a thing called denial. I get that it’s a defence mechanism to defer anxiety, and the moment I quietly mentioned to friends I wasn’t drinking anymore I received the same defensive reaction from a few of them.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
it's important to separate what is a threat (urban pollution) from what's a choice (abuse of substances) One causes at least the same amount of damage of the other, but there's virtually no way to protect yourself from the former, while you can chose to quit the latter. Another important distinction is that most people who drink (almost all of them) don't abuse of it, they consume a moderate amount of it in specific circumstances. But they can't limit the amount of oxygen they need to survive and are forced to inhale venom from the air regardless.
jonahbenton 4y ago
Appreciate the discussion with lots of study references, with evidence on both sides of the alcohol issue- healthy in small amounts, unhealthy in any amount, etc- with usual issues of fuzziness around categories of consumption and accuracy of surveys and variations in age and background and so forth. Will just add that since acquiring a rather sensitive personal wearable that continuously captures various quantitative measures about my body- heart rate, temperature, heart rate variability, spo2, and others- that even with the uncertainty that stems from having a single data source- it is VERY clear quantitatively to me how much even small amounts of alcohol affect MY body. I had a semi serious sickness earlier this year that had me entirely out of commission for a day and at reduced capability for several days. Looking just at the data, a minimal amount of alcohol (for my definition of minimal) is roughly 1/10th the negative impact of that illness. It doesn't feel that way to me, but that's what the data says. That's amazing and terrifying to me. I am not going to make a specific wearable endorsement but do highly recommend those who have opinions on this matter to collect their own data about their own bodies. Cheers.

Test0129 4y ago

> There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes. To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.

cgb223 4y ago
What are the relative risk increases for each?
- khuey 4y ago
  The American Cancer Society claims that smoking accounts for 30% of cancer deaths in the United States (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/stay-away-from-tobacco/health-risks-of-tobacco/health-risks-of-smoking-tobacco.html https://www.cancer.org/healthy/stay-away-from-tobacco/health...) while alcohol accounts for 4% (https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/diet-physical-activity/alcohol-use-and-cancer.html https://www.cancer.org/healthy/cancer-causes/diet-physical-a...)
  - hooverd 4y ago
    I wonder how that aligns with the percentage of people are heavy drinkers.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol. They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer. Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;) [0]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a... [1]: https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-07/how-does-smoking-increase-your-cancer-risk-expert-qa https://www.cancer.net/blog/2021-07/how-does-smoking-increas...
bena 4y ago
See. You've actually fallen for it. The whole 80% of people with lung cancer are smokers means that if you smoke, you will get lung cancer. Truth is, you will likely not get lung cancer if you smoke. Only 6% of smokers will get lung cancer. You have a slightly worse than 19 in 20 chance of going through your whole life smoking and not getting lung cancer. Now, in your statement itself, you move the goalpost. You start with cancer and end with "a deadly disease". Because, yeah, smoking is also linked to several other bad outcomes, not just cancer. And it is fair to compare those other diseases when talking about why we demonize smoking way more than other things. But we can't do that by focusing on cancer. That's disingenuous. And it is fair to say that the correct number of cigarettes to smoke is 0. The correct amount of alcohol to consume is none. And the correct BMI to be at is between 18 to 24.
- freeflight 4y ago
  As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients. They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking. What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on. But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group. The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.

galangalalgol 4y ago

Agreed, I didn't even know it was a carcinogen until this year. I'm really old. Growing up it was always about it causing brain damage, no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree. Can we make the "may cause health problems" warning made a bit more specific perhaps? The education on alcohol could be a lot better and it shouldn't be hard. Obesity is a much harder problem to solve and I suspect we don't know all the reasons it is on the rise yet.

TaupeRanger 4y ago
> no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree That's because it doesn't. For the kind of light social/dinner drinking most people do, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it increases your cancer risk (on the contrary, there is some evidence of protective benefits, but epidemiological studies on diet are always full of confounders, so who knows). The reason it appears on lists like these is that alcohol abuse is quite common and leads to liver cancer, among other things, and is associated with other unhealthy choices.
- cantSpellSober 4y ago
  Not according to emerging research. Long term abuse is linked to liver cancer, but even light and moderate alcohol use generally increases the risks of other types of cancers (and diseases) too. https://www.wcrf.org/diet-activity-and-cancer/risk-factors/alcoholic-drinks-and-cancer-risk/ https://www.wcrf.org/diet-activity-and-cancer/risk-factors/a...

foolfoolz 4y ago

sunlight also damages DNA i think most people know drinking isn’t good for you. people aren’t defending alcohol they’re defending the social value they receive from drinking; and it brings a lot. most people don’t drink that much anyway because it’s not great for you. alcohol usage is highly concentrated on alcoholics who drink like 90% of all alcohol produced id say of these 3 the one people go to crazy lengths to avoid doing anything about is BMI. everyone knows it’s one of the biggest if they not biggest co-morbidities identified yet a good portion of the world has high BMI and does nothing about it

nradov 4y ago
Regular sunlight exposure is correlated with lower all-cause mortality. https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12251 https://doi.org/10.1111/joim.12251
- oaktrout 4y ago
  True in women according to that study. Also they didn't ask specifically about sun exposure avoidance, they asked things like "Do you go abroad on holiday to swim and sunbathe". People on dialysis don't go abroad and people who can't swim secondary to poor health don't go swimming abroad. A poorly designed study with too many confounders imo.
  - nradov 4y ago
    The point is that for individual lifestyle decisions you can't take a reductionist approach and look at individual factors in isolation. Maybe moderate sunlight exposure causes DNA damage, but so what? Does it actually reduce lifespan (or healthspan)? Probably not, or at least we don't have any reliable evidence that it does.
    - oaktrout 4y ago
      I agree. I think it's also reductionist to say sun avoidance increases mortality, at least based on the evidence we have.

ls612 4y ago

These sorts of arguments just make people immediately think of Prohibition and the excesses of that era. No conspiracy required, just a knowledge of history.

ehnto 4y ago
We still have prohibition, it's just not for alcohol, so it's not that strange to consider. Prohibition wasn't about those kinds of health effects anyway, it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking as I understand it. I don't agree with it, but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation and for different reasons.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking Wikipedia says it was mostly about religious moralists.
  - Auracle 4y ago
    What wasn’t framed through religion back then?
    - muttled 4y ago
      Clean-shaven faces were pretty prevalent despite being technically against the bible (source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Trimming-Facial-Hair https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Trimming-Facial-Hair )
- messe 4y ago
  > but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation Yes, because the last few decades of drug prohibition have shown how differently it works nowadays.
  - ehnto 4y ago

burke 4y ago

Eh, maybe. Lots of "poisons" have hormetic effects. Intuition isn't always a great guide here, and studies seem significantly conflicted in the "modest intake" range.

feet 4y ago

The fact that a bunch of commenters immediately came out to defend alcohol here is actually hilarious. The damage to DNA caused by acetaldehyde is very well studied, yet here we have people who likely aren't involved in biological research nor have any formal exposure to it coming out to defend their intoxicant of choice. Nobody was saying make it illegal, yet that's what people jump to. We need to increase educational awareness of the harms of these compounds because prohibition just makes things worse. Prohibition is why there is fentanyl in the heroin supply for example.

abrouwers 4y ago
Reading the HN comments, I didn't get the same "defending alcohol" feel you did. I think many (most?) people understand there is some risk. But, there's also risk in driving a car, eating red meat, or not sleeping enough - some just choose that the benefits they receive outweigh the risks. Life's short, eh?
- feet 4y ago
  Exactly life is short so why are people knowingly making it shorter? I think you don't see them as defending alcohol because your comment is doing the exact same thing.
  - abrouwers 4y ago
    I mean, no offense, but your tone comes off as an "I told you so" anti-alcohol comment, so I'd be careful criticizing others for their decisions. As other comments have mentioned, there are often plenty of enjoyable, social side effects that come from drinking alcohol with others in a common setting. Obviously alcohol isn't required (though, obviously people enjoy it - the taste, the side effect, whatever), but that's the way a fairly huge industry is setup in many countries. Also, to clarify, drinking alcohol does NOT equate to making one's life shorter - that's not at all what the article discusses. Moderate drinking may have no effect, or even a positive effect, on life span.
    - 4y ago

TaupeRanger 4y ago

I'm sorry to say that you are just plain wrong. Alcohol "in any amount" is not at all a poison, any more than formaldehyde (present in, for example, apples) is. At normal amounts (such as social drinking, and an occasional drink at home, or a regular glass of wine at dinner) it has never been strongly associated with increased cancer risk - in fact some studies show the the opposite. The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer, and if one is abusing alcohol they are often doing other things in their life that are unhealthy and may lead to other cancers. It is simply an easy flag to tease out of health data - more a signpost than anything else.

zelphirkalt 4y ago
I can remember a HN post not so long ago, linking a study, in which the result was alcohol in any amount being unhealthy. Now I don't know, if that includes carcinogenic, but you might want to look that up, before caps locking that "never". People associate all kinds of things with all kinds of other things. It seems highly unlikely, that "normal" (what is normal?) amounts have never been even associated with cancer risk.
animal_spirits 4y ago
Here is a study suggesting the opposite to your claim: Light alcohol drinking and cancer: a meta-analysis Abstract Background: There is convincing evidence that alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx. Most of the data derive from studies that focused on the effect of moderate/high alcohol intakes, while little is known about light alcohol drinking (up to 1 drink/day). Patients and methods: We evaluated the association between light drinking and cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx, through a meta-analytic approach. We searched epidemiological studies using PubMed, ISI Web of Science and EMBASE, published before December 2010. Results: We included 222 articles comprising ∼92 000 light drinkers and 60 000 non-drinkers with cancer. Light drinking was associated with the risk of oropharyngeal cancer [relative risk, RR = 1.17; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-1.29], esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (RR = 1.30; 95% CI 1.09-1.56) and female breast cancer (RR = 1.05; 95% CI 1.02-1.08). We estimated that ∼5000 deaths from oropharyngeal cancer, 24 000 from esophageal SCC and 5000 from breast cancer were attributable to light drinking in 2004 worldwide. No association was found for colorectum, liver and larynx tumors. Conclusions: Light drinking increases the risk of cancer of oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus and female breast. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22910838/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22910838/

francisofascii 4y ago

> acetaldehyde Interesting. A common fruity off flavor (or desired flavor depending on what you want) of craft beer is caused by acetaldehyde being produced in the fermentation process. I wonder if certain craft beers are worse than regular beers because it contains acetaldehyde to begin with.

fswd 4y ago
I'm guessing pear beer? Gave me the worst headache. You can flush out acetaldehyde with 2 grams of Taurine before going to bed. It's probably why a big egg breakfast feels good after a long night. This isn't going to make alcohol safer, but you won't have a hang over the next day...
SoftTalker 4y ago
Craft beers are generally just higher in alcohol content. You consume more alcohol, and have a worse hangover.

sebow 4y ago

> Alcohol, in any amount, is a poison That's a big of a stretch. The DNA is "damaged", or better said changed, by everything. And not all alcohol beverages are equivalent. I'm all up for raising awareness at alcoholism especially due to experience in my family in the past, but this is a piss-poor job of doing so. Being alarmist about things has often the opposite effect, especially today.

refurb 4y ago

I mean, frying foods creates acrylamide, which is a known carcinogen. Eating seafood exposes you to mercury. Sun exposure damages DNA. Yes, alcohol is harmful, but in moderation, the harm is not that different than other toxins people are exposed to.

cantSpellSober 4y ago
So we choose low-mercury fish and wear sunscreen. The harm is different depending on toxin (mercury vs ethanol for ex).
- fuckHNtho 4y ago

cantSpellSober 4y ago

Cannabis as well. Is it a kneejerk reaction from the days of Prohibition? Confirmation bias on the part of drinkers? The ways alcohol is woven into social gatherings that smoking tobacco is not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde#Carcinogenicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetaldehyde#Carcinogenicity

vr46 4y ago

And 3…2…1… cue the defence of drinking alcohol

peoplefromibiza 4y ago
why do you think it's bad? people who do not drink alcohol die too and usually not at older age. 5 millions deaths worldwide is a drop in the bucket, considering things that could be prevented and are not related to people behavior (10 million people die every year of hunger, many are kids) and, most of all, even if we can correlate alcohol to those deaths (it's mostly smocking and BMI) that doesn't imply that if they did not drink they would have lived longer. People who abuse of substances find a way to abuse of anything legal or illegal. Car accidents cause around 1.4 million deaths and 50 million non fatal injuries (difference with alcohol being it doesn't need people to abuse of it). Pollution is responsible for 9 million deaths/year. Should we ban road transport?
- vr46 4y ago
  Personally, I quit heavy boozing about five years ago and totally quit about two years ago. And personally, I can feel the difference in my mood, my behaviour, my thinking, and the effects on other around me. This applied to very light drinking, like half a pint, as well as heavy drinking - maybe six or seven pints plus extras. I tracked these things in an app so I can look back and correlate moods and drinking. Low sample size, but hey, you work with what you’ve got. I also still spend a lot of time around heavy boozers and see how a variety of drunk people behave. So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues. I’m not concerned with how alcohol causes death, I am concerned with how alcohol affects life. On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear and global studies also conclude that no amount of drinking alcohol is safe for you. On the basis that drinking alcohol is a pretty binary choice under the direct control of a human, peer pressure aside, this probably explains why people get defensive because it’s an attack - if you like - on their personal choices. I cannot personally have an impact on whether my personal pollution emissions - cue gags - affect my health, and improvements in my own driving skills have a ceiling limit on my own safety. But booze is easy, not drinking has a disproportionate impact on me personally. There’s a difference between banning things to improve public health and personally not partaking in them. Me observing that people are quick to get defensive over alcohol consumption in general is poking fun at a thing called denial. I get that it’s a defence mechanism to defer anxiety, and the moment I quietly mentioned to friends I wasn’t drinking anymore I received the same defensive reaction from a few of them.

peoplefromibiza 4y ago

it's important to separate what is a threat (urban pollution) from what's a choice (abuse of substances) One causes at least the same amount of damage of the other, but there's virtually no way to protect yourself from the former, while you can chose to quit the latter. Another important distinction is that most people who drink (almost all of them) don't abuse of it, they consume a moderate amount of it in specific circumstances. But they can't limit the amount of oxygen they need to survive and are forced to inhale venom from the air regardless.

jonahbenton 4y ago

Appreciate the discussion with lots of study references, with evidence on both sides of the alcohol issue- healthy in small amounts, unhealthy in any amount, etc- with usual issues of fuzziness around categories of consumption and accuracy of surveys and variations in age and background and so forth. Will just add that since acquiring a rather sensitive personal wearable that continuously captures various quantitative measures about my body- heart rate, temperature, heart rate variability, spo2, and others- that even with the uncertainty that stems from having a single data source- it is VERY clear quantitatively to me how much even small amounts of alcohol affect MY body. I had a semi serious sickness earlier this year that had me entirely out of commission for a day and at reduced capability for several days. Looking just at the data, a minimal amount of alcohol (for my definition of minimal) is roughly 1/10th the negative impact of that illness. It doesn't feel that way to me, but that's what the data says. That's amazing and terrifying to me. I am not going to make a specific wearable endorsement but do highly recommend those who have opinions on this matter to collect their own data about their own bodies. Cheers.