Also, FTA: “moderate alcohol consumption has been linked to an approximate 30 to 50 per cent increased risk of breast cancer”. Even if the real number is only 5%, that doesn’t look like “only looking for drugs that have minor effect” to me.
TLDR, less or no alcohol consumption is considered one of the main reasons for the anomaly in addition to fasting, etc. My first thought when I saw the video is that the main reason is the alcohol because majority of the population in Middle Eastern countries are Muslim and alcohol is strictly prohibited in Islam.
[1]Why Does the Middle East Have the Lowest Cancer Rates in the World:
A lot of food we eat contains small amount of alcohol, bread in particular. Vinegar, fruits and juices too. And generally, we are well equipped to deal with it, and it only starts to become problematic when we start to run out of the required enzymes and are left with the toxic byproducts that cause hangovers.
If the threshold is zero, it means that even "safe", easily metabolized alcohol is a problem and we should find correlations even between non-drinkers based on diet.
I'd assume it's a talking point that activists have adopted.
This is in the context of debate over whether some harmful things like radiation or ingestion of heavy metals go linearly to zero or of there is a specific threshold below which they suddenly stop being harmful.
It doesn't mean that all quantities of alcohol are equally harmful.
Other Group 1 carcinogens [0]:
- processed meat
- Salted fish, Chinese-style (?)
- solar radiation
- outdoor air pollution
- wood dust
- leather dust
A big problem with that CBC quote is that there is no way everything in Group 1 has the same (or even approximately the same) risk of causing cancer. How could eating cold cuts from a deli be equivalent to smoking a cigarette or inhaling mustard gas?
> The risk of dying from lung cancer before age 85 is 22.1% for a male smoker and 11.9% for a female smoker, in the absence of competing causes of death. The corresponding estimates for lifelong nonsmokers are a 1.1% probability of dying from lung cancer before age 85 for a man of European descent, and a 0.8% probability for a woman.[1]
*This* is the kind of smoking gun they should be showing; ~20% increase in the chance of dying from lung cancer for men who smoke. How much does alcohol increase chances of dying from cancer?
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_1
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#Canc...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Not the leading cause, but significant, especially when considered along with the other health based harms.
As with most things. Follow the money.
And I have not seen studies that show <7g/week of wine drinking causing cancer.
...
> In particular, the opinions described in this article seem like blatant victim blaming instead of any serious attempt to reduce harm from something that is never going to disappear from society given it's greater than ten thousand year history.
Isn't it good to challenge even established consumption, despite many not want wanting to, since such research has great potential to reduce harm?
Tobacco is a widely established product, yet because of research and education society is changing to reduce harm.
The people in the article are saying the public is not aware of the risk. But who is responsible for informing society of medical risks? The medical community! They say it's all the fault of the liquor industry, but they can give medical advice to all their patients and the liquor industry can do nothing about it. So why haven't they been informing everyone of this risk for decades? Almost everyone in the USA sees a doctor at some point, yet nobody has heard of this cancer risk? It seems to me they are to blame here for the lack of information. Yes, informing people of risks can be helpful. But it also has to be in context. Is driving a car a bigger risk than drinking? Then we should be putting warning labels on cars. Is air pollution a bigger risk than drinking? Then we should be warning people to move out of cities. Yet the medical community has ignored environmental concerns for decades. When was the last time a doctor recommended a standard test set to you to check your home environment for toxins? Never! I think these blindnesses on the part of medicine undermine trust in what they recommend.
I don't think it is research and education that changed society with respect to tobacco. Everyone knew the tobacco companies were lying. Plus the ill health effects of tobacco are obvious, people start coughing all the time. I think people themselves saw how their grandparents died and that is what changed them.
If the medical community wants to reduce harm by changing consumption they can start with better and more detailed advice on food, naming specific brands. For alcohol they could also say whether or not congeners have an effect on disease including cancer (is brandy different than vodka?) They could recommend replenishing B vitamins and rehydrating, study if that has an effect on cancer, which could be much simpler than stopping people from drinking. Yet you won't hear any such advice from a doctor. There has been an unspoken moral dimension to medicine for hundreds of years. Early research into reducing debilitating effects of alcohol was discouraged because "if we had a cure for alcohols bad effects people would be encouraged to drink more". They didn't study whether that was true, they just pronounced judgement. Doctors gave less pain killers to black people because they "believed" they had a higher pain tolerance, no studies involved. The flu, colds, and COVID-19 are spread by fomites they said, studies say they are spread by aerosols, and many in the medical community still don't believe aerosol spread is a problem (there are still recommendations for distancing rather than ventilation). There is a big dogma problem in medicine that is unacknowledged, it propagates unscientific beliefs from long ago. And when medicine fails I think it tends to blame the victim because of that dogma. This is playing out right now with obesity. Medicine says just eat less, it's a personal choice. But we're finding out it is not that simple. I think the same is true of alcohol. For example, there is not one word in this article about tapering drinking (because a sudden halt can cause harm). If they wanted to inform people of the risks to reduce harm why didn't they mention that risk? If this article causes people to quit drinking it may actually be doing harm by killing them.
Another aspect to this all is the apoliticalness of medicine. It has avoided confrontation with power for centuries. If power trumps medicine, what can you believe about what medicine says? This timidity was a survival characteristic, along the lines of do whatever the man with the spear says in the hope he'll let you save some of the people. The medical community has never overcome this even as society has changed. Fauci went along with Trump in the early days, rarely contradicting him, as an example. I think this has to change. Maybe this article is an outbreak of such courage. It seems long on condemnation and short on actual harm reduction though.
So here's some actual data:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16264180/
that says:
"The absolute rate of ER+ breast cancer (standardized to the age distribution of person-years experienced by all study participants using 5-year age categories) was 232 per 100,000 person-years among women in the highest category of alcohol intake, and 158 per 100,000 person-years among nondrinkers."
Sounds bad, a 50% increase in relative risk. Say most people live 80 years. So (158/100,000) * 80 = 0.1264 absolute risk. Do the same calculation for drinkers: (232/100,000) * 80 = 0.1856 The difference is 0.1856 - 0.1264 = 0.0592
So your absolute risk of getting breast cancer in your life is 12.64% if you are a woman and don't drink. If you drink that risk goes up 6%. The article doesn't say that, instead quoting only the relative risk increase of 50%. 50% sounds scary, does 6% sound so scary? Alcohol is one of the many risk factors for breast cancer, here's a list of all of the known ones:
https://www.breastcancer.org/risk/factors
Alcohol is lower on this list than radiation, being overweight, not experiencing pregnancy, not breastfeeding, and using hormone replacement therapy. Driving a car as a teenager is probably a bigger risk of death than getting breast cancer from drinking.
I'm all for meaningful harm reduction, but this article seems more like moral propaganda without a serious focus on all types of harm reduction for drinking or a statement of the absolute risk. I don't think a warning label would have much effect either, there is already a warning on alcohol that says "make cause health problems" and that is not stopping drinkers. If the label told the truth and said something like "drinking alcohol may cause a 6% increase in your risk of cancer, probably near the end of your life" would people pay much attention? Has anyone done a study to see if such a warning would have any impact at all or are these people just assuming it would have an effect? How many people ignore the California cancer warnings?
Actually this happens pretty often with radon gas and mold tests. There are even regulations for testing when selling homes in some places.
Rules requiring better informing consumers doesn't seem too onerous to me.
Rules requiring better informing citizens are good. I'd like the warnings to be proportional to the risk though, and I'd rather see the risks studied and reduced rather than just a warning meant to alter human behavior. Medical warnings often seem like EULA's, everyone pays no attention to them and clicks through. If there was instead a warning that described how to reduce risk, and where the worst risks are, and how to mitigate some of the risk, maybe people would pay more attention.