This really hits close to home. My SO passed in september and she not only had a problem with alcohol off and on. She also had very high levels of estrogen causing other minor issues during her lifetime.
Her breast cancer fed on estrogen. Depriving her of that hormone in an attempt to starve the cancer was awful. Like sucking a persons life blood out of them. Her sparkling and childish personality vanished with the hormone.
Just like the author she was fit and loved exercise, ate all the right things in a balanced diet. And she was relatively young.
"Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Conflicts of interest and prejudice may increase bias. Conflicts of interest are very common in biomedical research, and typically they are inadequately and sparsely reported."
The base of research on alcohol is inherently biased due to both financial conflicts of interest and the general desire to see something enjoyable as healthy (alcohol, chocolate, sex, etc.) In addition, even when reliable research is performed, its results are inconvenient and thus discarded by journalists, health professionals, and the general public. It's an uphill battle to get to the truth of the matter and make it stick. But it seems we're making some progress, if articles such as these are any indication.
The underlying "cause" of cancer is the cells reverting back to their ancient state of independence and non-cooperation, and all the fail-safes that keep this from happening failing.
The reason for this happening is stress on the cells. And there are more and more things that can cause us cellular stress.
It is a bit of information overload, but if you separate things into "my great-great-grandparents were exposed to this in their daily lives" and "my great-great-grandparents were not exposed to this in their daily lives", you may begin go see a pattern.
And by "exposed to this", I mean looking closely at the exposure type and limits. They might have had wine, and even hard liquor, but probably not available every day.
There's history to suggest that alcohol was used as currency to pay workers in ancient times [1].
Alcohol has been with us for the long haul and has been available to our ancestors in large quantities for most of our history. It's almost engrained in our history.
Not that it makes alcohol healthy but, I don't agree it's safe to just look back and say, "Yo, great-grand-papa could only afford to get wasted once a week - maybe that's the secret?"
All it means is that they survived long enough to reproduce to have your parents etc.. So look at the age they had them and how old they are when they died (or now). There is probably a selection event but also availability and potency have increased recently.
This subject needs far more attention than it's getting.
It's funny how the psychoactive compound we have the least reliable data on is legal and the most abused while safer and better understood drugs remain illegal.
One of the more easily interpreted statistics given is that American women on average have a lifetime risk of developing breast cancer of about 12%, while women that consume 2-3 drinks per day have a lifetime risk of about 15%.
It's a huge lever for public health to pull on, I guess individuals may not give much thought to moderate consumption.
> One of the more easily interpreted statistics given is that American women on average have a lifetime risk of developing breast cancer of about 12%, while women that consume 2-3 drinks per day have a lifetime risk of about 15%.
I find this interesting. By all means, people should be entitled to informed consent and allowed to make their own choices. But only a 3% increase? And that's if you're consuming 2-3 drinks a day? Doesn't seem all that significant.
Meanwhile, being obese increases the chance of a myriad of cancers (including breast), yet talk of addressing the obesity epidemic (35% and climbing of the adult population is obese in America) is shouted down as nanny-state hysteria and "it's impossible to lose weight anyway."
Hormone based contraception apparently increases the risk of breast cancer by about 25% too.
>And that's if you're consuming 2-3 drinks a day? Doesn't seem all that significant. //
That was my take away, that's pretty heavy drinking, surely?
Per your last para though, we can address more than one health situation at a time, and need to, it's not just USA with an obesity crisis; UK is deep in to that as well, and probably a lot of other countries.
> That was my take away, that's pretty heavy drinking, surely?
Yes, that is the impression I received.
> Per your last para though, we can address more than one health situation at a time
My main point with my last paragraph is that people all too often focus inordinate effort on things that don't have the highest payback. Willpower, time, etc are all finite, so it's best to try to tackle the things with the greatest ROI first. As an analogy, if someone is paying 25% interest on a revolving balance (credit card) a month, it's best to focus on paying that off before making a second monthly payment on their 2.9% mortgage. Getting to a healthy weight reduces so many health risks, it's the logical first step in any health improvement plan. Although I don't have numbers to hand, I would not be surprised in the slightest if being obese increased the risk of breast cancer much much more than heavy drinking. Of course, one of the first things to do to lose weight is to cut back on alcohol consumption.
On the whole it seems a good article in raising awareness that alcohol doesn't just cause the almost universally known issues of mouth/throat cancers and liver cirrhosis but also is linked to greater risk of breast cancer [and presumably other not mentioned cancers]. However, it harps on around the suggestion that moderate drinking might be beneficial, and scathes that some studies included ex-drinkers in the "non-drinker" group and so were corrupted. But the best conclusion appears to be this:
>"Stockwell and Fillmore analyzed decades’ worth of studies on alcohol and heart disease. Once they excluded studies with ex-drinkers—which was most of them—the heart benefits of alcohol largely disappeared. Since then, a host of other studies have found that drinking does not provide any heart benefits. (Some studies have found that drinking small amounts of alcohol—sometimes less than one drink per day—can be beneficial for certain people at risk of heart disease.) Robert Brewer, who runs an alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says, “Studies do not support that there are benefits of moderate drinking.” The Agriculture Department removed language suggesting that alcohol may lower the risk of heart disease in the most recent US Dietary Guidelines." //
Which quietly concedes that moderate alcohol use can be beneficial according to some studies [that it doesn't discount, so are presumably sound enough they can't fling mud at them easily]. The point it was heavily scathing against.
Good balance, kinda. But then the next paragraph goes stupid:
>"Jennie Connor, a preventive- and social-medicine professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand who wrote one of the landmark papers linking alcohol to cancer [says] “It’s addictive, like opioids. If you give medication to people that could affect their unborn child or make them aggressive and hit their wife, what kind of medicine is that? [...]" //
Yeah, right, now you lost me completely by trying to cast moderate alcohol use as something that will _make_ me hit my wife and talking of it as a bad medication. Currently I have a colon problem that makes tomatoes potentially fatal, so now no-one can eat tomatoes because they're killers??
25% increase, 25% increase, the article screams but we're talking about heavy use (3 drinks every day) and that increasing the likelihood of getting breast cancer from 12% to 15%. Now that's a significant increase; reducing use will be a good thing for most users; but I can't stand the twisting and turning, the spin, to magnify the issue.
>Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health. “How is it going to change policy or practice? It’s not. Even if it turns out that there are true benefits, we’re not going to start recommending that people who have never had alcohol before start drinking.” //
Wow, great, a professor in public health would not recommend something with true benefits???
>There are far safer ways than drinking to reduce the risk of heart disease—walking, for instance—that also won’t give you cancer. That’s why the American Heart Association strongly warns people not to start drinking if they don’t already. //
You can't walk and have a glass of wine at the weekend?
I'm afraid if there's something good at the end then you'll have to point it out to me, this piece just went of the deep end in lacking perspective and I can no longer trust that it will give me useful advice on keeping alcohol as part of my lifestyle.
This seems to be squarely in the "no one ever got sick from an innoculation" camp of medicine; that the author knows better and so you should be carefully manipulated to make sure you do what they believe is right rather than being presented with the facts and treated as a rational being. Some will find that acceptable.
> Yeah, right, now you lost me completely by trying to cast moderate alcohol use as something that will _make_ me hit my wife
That's not what he says, though. He says alcohol could have that effect. Given that alcohol has notable connections to that effect, it's a reasonable statement. One could argue it's only connected to alcohol abuse, and that's also a reasonable argument, but (a) it's not the only risk related to alcohol consumption (the article notable focuses on cancer) and (b) there's the fact that some portion of the population is at risk for alcohol abuse in a way they are probably not at risk for, say, statin abuse.
> and talking of it as a bad medication.
If we're going to speak of health benefits of alcohol and talk about whether professionals should recommend it, then it's reasonable to compare it to a form of medication.
> You can't walk and have a glass of wine at the weekend?
The question here isn't whether you can do both. Obviously, anyone can. The question is what recommendations are likely to improve outcomes.
The evidence for benefits of alcohol consumption doesn't seem clear. The evidence for some risks does (even if many people who drink never experience them).
So the only people you should tell to take a walk and have a glass of wine are the people who are already having the glass of wine or really really want to for non-health related reasons.
(Or the people who can be confident something else will kill them first and don't need to be unintoxicated in the meanwhile, I suppose.)
> this piece just went of the deep end in lacking perspective and I can no longer trust that it will give me useful advice on keeping alcohol as part of my lifestyle.
The perspective seems pretty straight on to me (and, fwiw, entirely consistent with the advice I've gotten from a handful of doctors including two fancy cardiologists).
Alcohol has risks. The article discusses some and reasons why they may not be adequately appreciated. If that isn't useful as advice while forming an opinion about alcohol as part of your lifestyle, maybe the problem is less the article and more that you're not interested in making that decision based off an understanding of the risks.
And yes, we all accept activities we know have risks, so if drinking is something you enjoy enough you want to accept the measure of risk, fair enough! I do the same with some my own choices. I don't tell myself I'm doing it as part of a health regimen, though, when there are options that seem to have clearer benefits and better risks profiles.
>"Alcohol has risks. The article discusses some and reasons why they may not be adequately appreciated. If that isn't useful as advice while forming an opinion about alcohol as part of your lifestyle, maybe the problem is less the article and more that you're not interested in making that decision based off an understanding of the risks."
I set about intending to share it as advice to those females in my life it could help. It laid heavily in to the notion that moderate alcohol consumption might have health benefits in other areas (heart) - strictly suggesting all the researchers had been bought off by the alcohol lobby.
So then I was searching for the references to the studies excluding prior users ... and viola the smallest confession that recent studies that they don't cite contradict their diatribe.
Alcohol has risks in "public health" including violence, drink driving, etc., but they're not personal risks for a middle aged woman (say) and so are irrelevant.
The professor who said basically that even if alcohol would benefit you they wouldn't recommend it is looking at wider public health, fair enough, but that doesn't help an individual make choices on their lifestyle/diet.
I don't mind drinking, I drink occasionally in part due to papers linking it to better outcomes wrt heart disease.
I thought alcohol related mouth/throat cancers are more due to a tobacco connection. I would also imagine HPV is a big source as well, although maybe studies have controlled for this variable.
Her breast cancer fed on estrogen. Depriving her of that hormone in an attempt to starve the cancer was awful. Like sucking a persons life blood out of them. Her sparkling and childish personality vanished with the hormone.
Just like the author she was fit and loved exercise, ate all the right things in a balanced diet. And she was relatively young.