Alcohol and cancer risk
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@wtg There's a lot to absorb in your posts and I'll have to come back to them. But a few quick responses to a few points...
My mother almost never drank any alcohol, maybe a quarter cup of beer, three times a year. She died of breast cancer at age 54. I know people who lived well into old age partaking almost every day.
The question I would love to have answered is: Are these studies simply uncovering correlation? Or does it go beyond that? Every one of the people who has ever come down with cancer got out of bed the day(s) it started. We don't say that getting out of bed increases one's chances of having cancer. There are a lot of people who drink who don't get cancer, there are a lot of people who smoke(d), sometimes heavily, who never got cancer.
I can see that if they've studied the effects of alcohol on a cellular level why they could say it's a possible carcinogen, and might increase one's risk, but not that it causes cancer. Else everyone who ever drank or ever smoked will have contracted cancer. The Surgeon General's advisory says about 3 men out of a 100.
As a consumer, I use the nutrition information to inform me about what is in a prepared product. For people with food allergies, the labels can be a life saver.
I don't have a problem with nutrition and ingredient labels, I also use them all the time. (There was talk not long ago about requiring the labels to appear on the front of products and I'm not for that. The back is just fine.) My beef is about warnings on food. Just no. The government could just as well require any and all point-of-sale displays to prominently show a government warning without marking every instance of the product. It would be a lot cheaper and just as effective it seems to me.
Sidebar about forum stuff: If you're looking for an alternative to using italics to set off a block of text that you're quoting from somewhere, you can enter a > (greater than sign) in your post and paste your copied text immediately after the > No space.
@Bernard said in Alcohol and cancer risk:
There's a lot to absorb in your posts and I'll have to come back to them.
I get that a lot.
For the record, there is no obligation to read/respond to everything I post! My feelings won't be hurt. But I do think those links might answer a lot of your questions.
The question I would love to have answered is: Are these studies simply uncovering correlation? Or does it go beyond that?
I think that's an underlying problem with a lot of studies.
It's mentioned in the JAMA paper that I linked to above, but it was in reference to the opposite problem, namely whether studies that have shown positive link between low to moderate alcohol consumption and better health outcomes are flawed in some way. It was postulated that people who drink alcohol moderately take care of themselves a lot better in other ways, and that is the reason behind their being healthy rather than the alcohol alone. And that those factors weren't accounted for in some studies.People like @Piano-Dad have the skills required to identify when this happens. Don't know if you read the black plastic spatula thread, but after I posted about the error in that study where the concentration calculations were off by an order of magnitude, he talked about an experience he had. He and some other people identified certain problems in a dermatology study, resulting in it being retracted. Here's his post:
https://wtf.coffee-room.com/topic/963/throw-out-your-black-spatula/31?_=1736020377710\
It's unfortunate that the problem didn't get caught during peer review, but it didn't. And eventually a problem in a dermatology paper was identified by an economist. Go figure.
My mother almost never drank any alcohol, maybe a quarter cup of beer, three times a year. She died of breast cancer at age 54. I know people who lived well into old age partaking almost every day.
I have the flip side of the follow the rules and have a bad outcome..my grandfather was the classic case of breaking the rules and beating the odds...
He smoked two packs of cigarettes from the time he was a teenager. He ate smoked pork products (ham hocks and bacon). Fresh vegetables? If it wasn't a potato it didn't cross his lips. He filled his coffee cup halfway with coffee and filled it up the rest of the way with half and half and three teaspoons of sugar. With a piece of cake on the side.
His cholesterol was 180 and his blood pressure was 120/70. He broke all the rules and lived to be 92, far beyond the life expectancy of someone who was born in 1897.Lung cancer did finally get him at the end. It was six weeks from diagnosis to his death. But I'd say he beat the odds. Some kind of CES (Charmed Existence Syndrome).
Personal experiences with family members like yours and mine demonstrate that there are likely a lot of things that influence our health. But when the sample size is so small, it's impossible to generalize. That's where the studies come in.
I think there's a middle ground to be trod, both keeping up with the science but not assuming that it is gospel. I never gave up full fat dairy despite all the warnings, but I have avoided milk with rGBH. I still indulge in sweets on a semi-regular basis despite warnings about sugar. And on and on. If I'd have to boil it down to a life motto, it would be "All things in moderation, including moderation."
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@Bernard - I've been catching up a bit, reading other sources including what I think is the NYT article you mentioned. I see that people are talking about studies that seem to demonstrate that low to moderate alcohol consumption may be associated with positive health outcomes in some respects (cardiovascular in particular). In the other camp are the studies that seem to show an association with cancer. And of course the liquor industry is weighing in on everything because of its financial interest.
All of this made me think about the history of smoking and how things rolled out. Two Surgeons General, Leroy Burney in 1957, and Luther Terry in 1964, made headlines with their annoucements about the links between smoking and health.
Some background, if you're so inclined...
https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2014/01/10/smoking-in-america-50-years-on/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/surgeon-generals-1964-report-making-smoking-history-201401106970
Getting back to the alcohol debate...
My choice is easy. I'm someone who simply can no longer tolerate alcohol, so I don't consume it anymore because it makes me feel like carp within minutes. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if it didn't have that effect on me, I'd be having an occasional tipple myself.
For the rest of the country, I suspect the debate will go on for decades like smoking did.
Cheers!
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Eric Topol does a deep dive on three studies that look at alcohol consumption.
I chuckled at this:
I recently saw a patient and his wife asked me during the clinic visit, she said, is it okay for my husband to continue his moderate alcohol drinking? So I said, well, what is that? And she said, well, he has two tequilas and six beers every night. And I said, are you kidding with me? And she says, no. Does that fulfill moderate? I said, no. No, that's not moderate alcohol.
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Eric Topol does a deep dive on three studies that look at alcohol consumption.
I chuckled at this:
I recently saw a patient and his wife asked me during the clinic visit, she said, is it okay for my husband to continue his moderate alcohol drinking? So I said, well, what is that? And she said, well, he has two tequilas and six beers every night. And I said, are you kidding with me? And she says, no. Does that fulfill moderate? I said, no. No, that's not moderate alcohol.
@wtg said in Alcohol and cancer risk:
No, that's not moderate alcohol.
Nope, not moderate! Yikes!!
I don't think I commented in this thread originally, but y'all probably know that Mr. SK and I don't drink. Check back in about 50 years and let's see how we turned out.
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We barely drink real alcohol anymore. I had a little Prosecco at Christmas. I love all the new NA beers.
@Jodi said in Alcohol and cancer risk:
We barely drink real alcohol anymore. I had a little Prosecco at Christmas. I love all the new NA beers.
Sam Adams has excellent NA beers, IPA especially. Not sure I could tell the difference in a taste test.
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Alcohol now limited to one , maybe, two nights a week when we go out to dinner. Martini with oysters on the half my favorite appetizer.
And one of those little cartons of red wine if I’m cooking steak at home.
