A new study has found that drinking as little as one glass of wine per day still increases your chances of developing cancer.
It seems that everyday one group of researchers or another decides to inform the world that drinking this or eating that raises their risk of developing this type of cancer or that type of cancer. Maybe we should stop eating and drinking altogether? Except wait, no, we would also die if did that.
Well, you can now add drinking small amount of alcohol to the never-ending list of things you should apparently avoid. Alcoholic beverages have also been linked to colorectal cancer, liver cancer, larynx cancer and oesophageal cancer in the past, however researchers stressed that only heavy drinking should be avoided in the previous studies.
But in the new study, Women who regularly drink one (1) alcoholic beverage per day and non-smoking men who regularly drink two (2) alcoholic beverages per day have been found to only be in mild danger of developing any of the existing cancers.
However, women who regularly drink one (1) glass of wine per day, specifically, have been found to increase their chances of developing breast cancer significantly – 13 percent (13%) to 15 percent (15%) more likely of developing the disease.
And men who smoke have been found to significantly increase their chances of developing any of the existing cancers if they have as little as two (2) alcoholic beverages per day.
The researcher team informed that one standard alcoholic beverage has 15g of alcohol. This usually translated into a 118 ml glass of wine for women and a 355 ml bottle of beer for men.
For their study, a group of researchers from Harvard’s School of Public Health teamed up with colleagues from Brigham and the Women’s Hospital from Boston. They looked at the health histories of 88.084 women and 47.881 men, studying data that went back 30 years.
The results showed that every group of 1000 women with the age of 75 or younger had 11 extra cases of breast cancer for every additional alcoholic beverage consumed per day. The research team pointed out that while the number may seem small on paper, the large number of women who drink alcoholic beverages makes it a real danger to many, and a health threat that they should be aware of.
Jürgen Rehm, doctor from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Toronto), gave a statement explaining why it’s important to keep in mind that mild and moderate drinking increases one’s chances of developing cancer.
He said that “Light to moderate drinking should be limited to no more than 10g of pure alcohol a day for women and 20g for men (roughly one standard drink a day for women and two standard drinks for men, as defined in most countries)”.
And Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the chair of Alcohol Health Alliance in the UK, gave a statement saying that the findings are important enough that they could justify putting health warning on bottles of alcohol.
He informed that the new study reinforces the conclusions from previous studies and also shows that there’s really “no such thing as a safe level of drinking when it comes to the risk of cancer”.
What’s worse, he added, is that the general public still isn’t aware of the danger they put themselves in by drinking small amounts of alcohol. Or by drinking and eating everything else if every recent study is to be believed.
The new findings were published recently in the British Medical Journal.
Image Source: bcwineguysnelson.ca
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