The link between alcohol and breast cancer

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.

Did she have big titties? Does high estrogen cause nice tits?

The article shows that there is good data.

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."

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.