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.
Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
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Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#32I 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-chem...
Everyone I know who drinks considers one or two a day to be healthy.
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#33This 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?
Do we need to care about your strawman?
No.
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#34It'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
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#35I 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”.
Isn't it widely claimed that red wine can have some health benefits. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease...
It always seemed to me that the claimed benefits of wine also exist in grape juice.
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#36I 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”.
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.
I call bullshit.
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#37What 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.
I'd like to see a study on alcohol addiction that shows that all or some specific alcoholic drinks are as addictive as heroin.
"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.
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#38Everything has risks. Oxygen is a carcinogen.
Yeah this is more of "why can't mommy protect us from the world?"
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#39I 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”.
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.
You had no idea there was anything unhealthy about consuming a neurotoxin until you heard "cancer"? : p
Re: Less than half of Americans know that alcohol is a carcinogen
#40I 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.