Why We Are Still Arguing About the Health Effects of Moderate Drinking
Even moderate drinking could give you cancer, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned last week. But according to a congressionally commissioned report published last month, moderate drinking is associated with reduced overall mortality.
Although those findings are not as contradictory as they might seem, the dueling glosses reflect the complexities and ambiguities of epidemiology. The evidence on this subject is vast but open to interpretation, leaving ample room for spin, especially when it comes to this year’s politically fraught revision of the federal government’s dietary advice.
According to Murthy’s advisory, alcohol consumption has been convincingly linked to “at least seven different types of cancer.” And for some cancers, Murthy says, “evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.”
That level of consumption is well within the limits that the current edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, produced jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends: two drinks per day for men and one for women. Murthy, who thinks Congress should require cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages, argues that even drinking within those limits could be lethal.
By Murthy’s calculation, “17% of the estimated 20,000 U.S. alcohol-related cancer deaths per year occur at levels within those recommended limits.” That estimate of 3,400 or so deaths represents about 0.6 percent of total cancer mortality in 2024.
The threat highlighted by Murthy is also modest from the perspective of individual drinkers. He says the lifetime risk of breast cancer for women who consume less than a drink per week, for example, is 11.3 percent, compared to 13.1 percent for women who consume a drink a day.
Oddly, Murthy did not see fit to mention a new evidence review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), which Congress commissioned to inform this year’s revision of the Dietary Guidelines.
Article from Reason.com
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