All of these are well known carcinogens but it is crazy the lengths people will go to defend alcohol especially in this regard. Alcohol, in any amount, is a poison and is treated as so by the body. It breaks down into acetaldehyde and damages DNA.
I'm all for people making informed decisions on what they want to put into their bodies but informed is the operative word. There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.
I'm sorry to say that you are just plain wrong. Alcohol "in any amount" is not at all a poison, any more than formaldehyde (present in, for example, apples) is. At normal amounts (such as social drinking, and an occasional drink at home, or a regular glass of wine at dinner) it has never been strongly associated with increased cancer risk - in fact some studies show the the opposite. The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer, and if one is abusing alcohol they are often doing other things in their life that are unhealthy and may lead to other cancers. It is simply an easy flag to tease out of health data - more a signpost than anything else.
Here is a study suggesting the opposite to your claim:
Light alcohol drinking and cancer: a meta-analysis
Abstract
Background: There is convincing evidence that alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx. Most of the data derive from studies that focused on the effect of moderate/high alcohol intakes, while little is known about light alcohol drinking (up to 1 drink/day).
Patients and methods: We evaluated the association between light drinking and cancer of the colorectum, breast, larynx, liver, esophagus, oral cavity and pharynx, through a meta-analytic approach. We searched epidemiological studies using PubMed, ISI Web of Science and EMBASE, published before December 2010.
Results: We included 222 articles comprising ∼92 000 light drinkers and 60 000 non-drinkers with cancer. Light drinking was associated with the risk of oropharyngeal cancer [relative risk, RR = 1.17; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-1.29], esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) (RR = 1.30; 95% CI 1.09-1.56) and female breast cancer (RR = 1.05; 95% CI 1.02-1.08). We estimated that ∼5000 deaths from oropharyngeal cancer, 24 000 from esophageal SCC and 5000 from breast cancer were attributable to light drinking in 2004 worldwide. No association was found for colorectum, liver and larynx tumors.
Conclusions: Light drinking increases the risk of cancer of oral cavity and pharynx, esophagus and female breast.
The reply to this study from S-K Myung points out its flaws: https://www.annalsofoncology.org/article/S0923-7534(19)35822....
Further, as with all epidemiological studies on diet, there are plenty of studies showing the exact opposite (a protective effect of alcohol):
Not sure where your animosity and disregard for science is coming from, but it doesn't seem like you're interested in having a discussion, having made up your mind to simply ignore any evidence that doesn't suit you.
How about I drink anyway, still have a partner and kids, still drive (while I'm not drinking), live and visit in whatever country I have legal authorization to live, and I shitcan your opinion. Cheers!
So a significant amount, but most people would say that's an acceptable risk to continue their lifestyle. For comparison, living in an urban environment has a RR of 1.20 to 1.40 for lung cancer.
That data is looking over a 1985-1990 / 1950-1990 time period. I wonder what the numbers are now with modern emissions improvements 30 years later, which are pretty big now!
And with electric car & electric heat pump transitions, how much better will it get on top of that going forward?
Also urban people tend to be wealthier, and also live longer.
I noted that it simply defines "light drinker" as <= 1 drink per day. It's not clear to me from reading the study how someone who drinks once every two or three days, or once a week, would be classified. The authors note some of the studies they incorporated in their results considered occasional drinking as "non-drinker" while others did not, so it seems that it was not consistent. However, it seems that in some cases the "non-drinker" category means people who completely abstain from alcohol.
Presumably you're right, they would be less likely to smoke, and I would imagine also possibly more health conscious in other ways. The authors mention that a different analysis of 15 studies of alcohol use among never-smokers was similar to their own findings, but also caution that tobacco could indeed be having an influence on their results (or even a possible synergistic effect with alcohol).
There is no safe level of alcohol, the dose dependent risk is clear in studies sibling to this comment and as flagged by WHO, but I drink it anyway well informed of the very real risk to my health.
I'm surprised by that. I would expect low enough exposure to cause abnormally low bone density and other calcium-related problems via "vitamin"[1] D deficiency.
[1] It's not really a vitamin, because we do produce it internally (as opposed to having to ingest it in diet).
On the contrary, alcohol consumption is associated with lower rates of many types of cancers, as noted in my other reply, and light/social drinking has never been associated with a reduction in overall mortality (what people actually care about).
If you can get out of bed and have a social drink,you're probably pretty healthy to begin with.
My understanding is that more modern research has unambiguously debunked the "light drinking" assertions.
But this is not something I'd expect you to be convinced of, because I don't have hard evidence on hand. We will have to leave it there, and I will go refresh my understanding some other time, if you will too :)
Nutrition Facts dot Org just published a youtube video on this subject today. The studies that associated light drinking with benefits were found to have systematic errors in more recent analysis, and after correcting for those errors researchers found that there is a linear relationship between drinking alcohol and increased cancer risk. That is, there is no drop in risks with light drinking. Any amount increases risks of cancer.
I doubt very much that alcohol consumption in any quantity can cause a lower rate of any cancer and I have not heard of any study providing any kind of evidence for this.
When some studies show a lower cancer rate correlated with moderate consumption of certain alcoholic beverages, e.g. wine or beer, it is much more likely that those studies show a beneficial effect of some other substances contained in those beverages.
In that case, it is likely that drinking the non-fermented precursors of those beverages might have the same effects, even in the absence of alcohol, e.g. drinking fresh grape juice instead of wine, or even better, eating red or black grapes instead of drinking juice.
Alcohol in small enough quantities may have negligible bad effects, because humans and their relatives are adapted to tolerate the ingestion of fermented fruits, but there is no reason to expect any good effects.
Slippery slope is a fallacy, but I think it's worth being aware of in the case of addictive substances and behaviors. I cringe when a health-care professional advocates for "light drinking," when the chances of it getting its hooks in anyone far outweighs whatever nebulous, tenuous health advantages it might provide. Alcohol consumption is certainly associated with alcoholism, and alcoholics certainly have lower life expectancy than non-alcoholics.
> Alcohol consumption is certainly associated with alcoholism
Breathing is, too, but the important question is what proportion of light drinkers become alcoholics. According the the first legitimate looking hit, 56% of people have had a drink in the last month, 5.6% of people have an "alcohol use disorder."
So, ignoring details, 90% of light drinkers are fine.
I can remember a HN post not so long ago, linking a study, in which the result was alcohol in any amount being unhealthy. Now I don't know, if that includes carcinogenic, but you might want to look that up, before caps locking that "never". People associate all kinds of things with all kinds of other things. It seems highly unlikely, that "normal" (what is normal?) amounts have never been even associated with cancer risk.
This is just wrong. 0.5 liters of beer is already detrimental to health. Drinking a glass of wine daily does not have, on balance, a health benefit. Alcohol is not as bad as smoking, but it is a vice at any amount consumed. You do not need to defend an industry of billions for free.
I am writing this after having a couple of beers every evening for the past two weeks, and a wine tasting trip too.
I wear a fitness tracker every day, and it is extremely clear on which days I've consumed alcohol because my resting heart rate spikes by at least 5% the day afterwards. And I'm a one-beer drinker. It actually took tracking my entire food intake for about two months to figure out what was causing it.
Last time I mentioned this on HN, people here have claimed that the effect was psychosomatic.
I think people grossly underestimate the negative health effects of alcohol, and I doubt any amount of research will really change peoples minds.
Yes, I've noticed that I sleep longer and harder after having one glass of wine with dinner. It's a pretty solid correlation because I don't drink that often.
You called alcohol a "vice". Definition of vice from Merriam-Webster is "moral depravity or corruption; wickedness; a moral fault or failing." You are specifically asserting that people who drink alcohol are bad people. How is that not being preachy?
I do apologize then, as this was not my intention when I chose to use this word. Instead, I meant to convey that alcohol is a net negative healthwise, not unlike smoking cigarettes or consuming large amounts of bad food.
There are many shades of meaning to "vice"; it broadly indicates a weakness of character, not necessarily to the extent of making someone a bad person. If you know that alcohol is bad for you (and the people around you) and should not be drunk, and yet you drink it anyway simply because it feels good, is this not a failure of self control?
There's no evidence of the contrary from your side - drinking alcohol is like any abusing any other organic solvent, I can't imagine why anyone would presume it'd be any healthier.
Sorry but the study you linked doesn't support any of the specific claims from your initial post, and my other reply earlier in the thread lists plenty of evidence for a protective effect of alcohol consumption for certain cancers.
However, light to moderate drinking might reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and these might be enough to outweigh the extra risks from cancer. (This is still an active subject of research.)
> The reason alcohol shows up on this particular list is because alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer,
It also very much causes esophageal cancer. I've known serious alcoholics who have died from both. It makes intuitive sense that constantly irritating your throat might cause cancer.
> alcohol abuse is a surefire way to get liver cancer
...and even then, in the vast majority of primary liver cancer cases, cirrhosis is already present, and typically precedes the cancer. So yes, it's very likely that the generally unhealthy lifestyle of the alcoholic is the primary contributor, here.
i think most people know drinking isn’t good for you. people aren’t defending alcohol they’re defending the social value they receive from drinking; and it brings a lot. most people don’t drink that much anyway because it’s not great for you. alcohol usage is highly concentrated on alcoholics who drink like 90% of all alcohol produced
id say of these 3 the one people go to crazy lengths to avoid doing anything about is BMI. everyone knows it’s one of the biggest if they not biggest co-morbidities identified yet a good portion of the world has high BMI and does nothing about it
not only does a good portion of the world have high BMI and does nothing about it, we as a country have now gone so far as to say it's 'OK' to have a high BMI. I know in advance this comment will be misinterpreted, but it's genuinely sad that our advertisements, education, and social media all parrot the same message that it's okay to be overweight.
I think the intended message of these campaigns isn’t that high BMI is considered healthy; rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
I think that’s a good message. I certainly feel badly for obese people because, however they got there, they’re going to have a hell of a time getting back to a healthy body size.
I do agree that many people lose that key part of the message when they pass it on.
> rather, it’s that making people feel bad for having high BMI is doing them no favors in the journey to solve a very difficult problem. They are campaigns reminding people to be nice.
Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight. It might be bad for your mental health and it could do absolutely nothing for some people but the vast majority of people who keep their weight in check and/or are motivated to lose weight do so more for social reasons than they do for health reasons.
Compared to something like alcoholism, being overweight (which can be similarly deadly) is treated much differently. For alcoholism, the attitude has been changing from "alcoholics are degenerates with weak wills" to "alcoholism is a disease and these people need help" where the attitude toward obesity is going from "fat people are disgusting people who have no self control" to "big is beautiful".
The difference is with alcoholism the message goes from disdain to support but he solution remains the same, a great deal of personal work to solve the problem. With obesity, the message goes from disdain to acceptance and the solution is to just not bring it up.
> Feeling bad about your weight is a good motivator to lose weight.
Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it. For that feeling to result in meaningful action a bunch of conditions have to be met, e.g. the absence of eating disorders (including things like stress eating etc.), a concept of self-efficacy (the idea that one actually is able to change out of one's own will), impulse control, knowledge about food and dieting, the time and money to eat healthier and so on. Often people are perfectly aware that their behaviour is unhealthy, but they lack one or more of those conditions. It therefore is better to focus on providing people the actual means to change (knowledge, methods, better food in school and at work, a supportive environment, taxation to make unhealthy food/drugs more expensive (a thing in the EU)).
Note that I'm fully in support of emphasizing the unhealthy aspects of obesity, though. Providing the facts often just isn't enough.
> Educationalist here, actually it isn't :) For many people, this just makes you feel bad - and that's it.
Are you just asking overweight people or are you asking all people? The people who are overweight today are obviously the group of people for which social pressure is ineffective. I'm talking about all people including the people who are successfully at a healthy weight.
Wait, why would we study people at a healthy weight whether or not shame is an effective strategy to lose weight? I am genuinely confused why someone at a healthy weight would be the person to ask, because for all we know they never had weight to lose.
Because if you stop the social pressure to be a healthy weight (ie, big is beautiful), people who used to maintain a healthy weight due to social pressure may no longer feel the need to do so.
Do we have evidence that people who maintain a healthy weight do so primarily because of social pressure? I'm genuinely asking because I don't actually know that that's true. Most of the people I know of a healthy weight actually don't have a lot of shame about their bodies. In fact the most internal shamed people I know are either fat people or unhealthily thin people??
How do you know that "healthy people would feel shame if they got obese" -> "healthy people use shame as a motivator to maintain weight"? Doesn't that rely on the assumption that shame works?... but that's precisely the thing I'm questioning. I don't actually know shame works because I don't see evidence that healthy weighted people have more shame, are more sensitive to shame, or are shamed more often than fat people. If anything fat people have the most shame, are the most sensitive to being shamed, and are publicly shamed more often... and they're still fat.
30 years ago you would have gotten shamed if you gained a few pounds, that early signal makes people think about eating habits earlier and makes many people never go into unhealthy weight in the first place.
So even though shame might not work to get fat people to lose weight, it could still work to keep people from ever getting fat. Getting shamed for a few pounds means that you can fix the source of shame by dieting for a few weeks, very doable for average people.
Where is the evidence that shame has a causational relationship with people getting fat? You're still only pointing to correlation and saying that because shaming was more common in the past, shaming is effective now. This implies that healthy weight people respond to shame more strongly than fat people or something, but that's just not true in my experience.
This comment made me remember all of the anti-gay-marriage politicians saying that if we legalized gay marriage, men would just start leaving their wives and marrying men. As if the only thing keeping me from being fat or gay is some brave gatekeeper, rather than a lack of a desire (or makeup) to be fat or gay.
They also gave us insight into the mind of the gay anti-gay politician.
The difference is that the obesity doomsday predictions has already came true, and things are still getting worse every year. Today the median American is close to obese, and in some years will be obese unless something drastically changes. That would have been unthinkable 30 years ago when obesity was a tiny minority.
I had overweight people in mind. For both cases I'd argue that emphasizing the benefits of healty weight and the means of getting to/staying at that weight is the more effective approach, though.
I've definitely have zero science on this and these are anecdotes so keep that in mind but I know a ton of people who maintain healthy weight so they look good in a bathing suit. I also know overweight people who are _only_ motivated to lose weight due to health concerns (and still really struggle but I've seen more movement from that angle), they also feel the social pressure but it's not effective.
I think it's important to not lose sight of the fact that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge for nearly everyone and undermine what is currently working for those who are not overweight.
Furthermore, I think obesity has somehow found it's way to be more in line with the LGBT style movements of acceptance/tolerance instead of the changing view of addictions as disease instead of character flaws when it clearly should be much more like the latter.
My point was more that feeling bad, by itself, actually is a demotivator. I'm all for motivating! But that would mean emphasizing e.g. the health benefits, or positive reinforcement of actual lifestyle changes.
Sure, but if you overdo your campaign to prevent shaming (and I can say what happens now in US is definitely in that territory for quite some time), than even a slightest hint that obesity is something bad and should be actually worked on to get rid of becomes shamed too.
Then it becomes (well, became) the next taboo that nobody wants to touch with a 10 feet pole since its playing with a PR suicide.
And so we have the world we have, and we reached it step by step by exactly this logic. Simple thing is, fat people need help from society just like drug addicts, yet everybody desperately tries to avoid this framing, and thus help is often not deemed necessary/worth the risk of offending. Thus people die needlessly just that somebody doesn't have hurt feelings.
I don’t think we’re past — or even approaching — some sort of threshold where we’ve overdone compassion in America. In fact, studies have shown that the more compassion shown to fat people, the more likely they are to seek help [1].
I deal with chronic pain and I’m at the hospital or clinic frequently, often multiple times per week. As someone who is in that environment quite a bit, I can assure you that the dangers of obesity are very clearly and openly discussed; frankly, you can’t walk two steps in a hospital without seeing some sort of PSA about the dangers of obesity.
Your mental model just doesn’t track with what I’ve seen again and again in reality.
There's absolutely no necessity to shame anyone for being fat. You can be concerned about it with your friends and loved ones, and express that concern if the relationship you have is of a character where you're busybodies about each others' health. There are very few people in your life who would appreciate or desire that criticism from you.
The people being told to shut up about it are usually abusing strangers or enemies, and feel very abused and targeted for being criticized for targeting and abusing people. If you were talking about being fat with someone you obviously care about and cares about you, they'd take it in that spirit. If you shamed them for it, they'd hopefully end that fucked up abusive relationship. The only thing I would ever shame a loved one for is their abuse of other people. Otherwise, I want to lift them up, not tear them down.
They are unfortunately mixing up the messages there. It's one thing to fight the shame associated with body appearance (this should be the real fight), and another thing to claim BMI has no significance on health risks (which is what often the argument boils down). There are people comfortable with smoking, there are people comfortable with their weight too, I just hope both know the increased risks to which they are exposed. However shaming the one or the other is just disgusting, especially when it appeals to a "tradition".
I have started to wonder if there won't be a war at some point where Survival of the Fittest becomes a very literal factor in who wins. We seem to be rapidly circling back to the military superiority of the Hoplite.
Depending on location some sunlight exposure is certainly beneficial at least part of the year. Though that doesn't mean tanning or such activities are not harmful. Comes down to the reality that some times dose really matters.
True in women according to that study. Also they didn't ask specifically about sun exposure avoidance, they asked things like "Do you go abroad on holiday to swim and sunbathe". People on dialysis don't go abroad and people who can't swim secondary to poor health don't go swimming abroad. A poorly designed study with too many confounders imo.
The point is that for individual lifestyle decisions you can't take a reductionist approach and look at individual factors in isolation. Maybe moderate sunlight exposure causes DNA damage, but so what? Does it actually reduce lifespan (or healthspan)? Probably not, or at least we don't have any reliable evidence that it does.
They controlled for all the big health and lifestyle confounds, as described in the abstract, it was a huge study (1/5 of the female population of southern Sweden), they tracked the subjects for 20 years. Man if that's not good enough for you I don't think anything will be.
My issue with the study wasn't study size or duration, it was the questionarre. People who go to holiday in the mountains or go swimming are probably healthier. They could have just asked about sun exposure "how many days in the past month have you spent more than 2 hours in the sun". Also, why just study women? Did their analysis not pan out when they used men?
They asked four questions that all pertain to sun exposure and weighted them into a single metric. Seemed pretty reasonable to me. You may find interesting a recent article on how academia's stance on the benefits/dangers of sun exposure has changed in the past few decades, including that study specifically, how it was received, and what criticisms and accolades it's received.
"Outside online" does not seem like an unbiased source on this issue. Asking four questions that pertain to something does not make a good measure of that something. Agree to disagree on this one.
This is coming from someone who spends a lot of time in the sun. Melanoma was never going to have much of an impact on mortality at the population level, the incidence of high grade melanoma is far too low.
> This is coming from someone who spends a lot of time in the sun.
Is it coming from someone with a lot of experience evaluating the protocols of epidemiological studies? Sunlight (whether too much or too little) affects us in all sorts of poorly-understood ways; that's why it's useful to do a big correlation study instead of just examining melanomas.
"Is it coming from someone with a lot of experience evaluating the protocols of epidemiological studies?"
It is, but I prefer to not involve my own credentials as a boring appeal to authority and focus on the argument at hand. I mentioned spending time in the sun to show I have no horse in the race. I only bring up melanoma because the cohort is “Melanoma In Southern Sweden”, but I think your point is fair regarding likely multifactorial causes.
“Sunlight (whether too much or too little) affects us in all sorts of poorly-understood ways; that's why it's useful to do a big correlation study instead of just examining melanomas”
Still, if I were designing a study to measure the impact of exercise on all cause mortality, I would not have a question like “Do you frequently jog to the farmers market to pick up vegetables?”. Half of the questions ask about going on vacation, maybe we are seeing that people who have enough time to “go abroad” twice a year live longer, I would believe that. I hope this is obvious and that even someone who doesn’t have “a lot of experience evaluating” these studies can see the flaw.
The study didn’t include any men!!! A study of women only might not generalize to the whole population, especially when it comes to all cause mortality. One obvious example: men have 1.5x higher risk of dying from melanoma than women. The study excluded individuals with a history of malignant melanoma.
The no-exposure group exercised less and had lower education, and there is a large risk for residual confounding that could have likely been accounted for by using categorical variables with more than 3 options.
Further criticisms include the “no exposure group” having much more women aged 55-64 (with likely much more comorbidities). They used length to follow up time to account for this which has no place in an observational study. The study excluded women who had a history of cancer.
I appreciate the work the authors did, but remain unconvinced that it is sunlight that caused lower mortality in their study.
> Half of the questions ask about going on vacation, maybe we are seeing that people who have enough time to “go abroad” twice a year live longer, I would believe that.
First of all, they explicitly mention controlling for income disparity. Second, the questions seemed reasonable to me. One for sunbathing in summer, one for sunbathing in winter which mentions travel, one for tanning beds, and one for specifically about vacationing in sunny places.
Keep in mind the context. This study was not designed to answer "is sunlight good for you" or "do people who sunbathe a lot live longer". AFAICT it was designed to answer "is avoiding sunlight bad for you." Those questions seem reasonable to suss out how much someone seeks/avoids sun exposure. There might be better ones, but it seems hubristic to just assume so, so casually.
> The study didn’t include any men!!!
I don't know why they limited the study to women. I assumed it was to make it easier to control for confounds, but they could've had some other reason. Maybe sunscreen ads are mostly targeted towards women in Sweden, and they thought a larger number of women would turn out to be sun-avoiders. In any event, this isn't a problem with the study, this is just complaining that they studied something different than what you're interested in knowing.
> [differences between the most-sun and least-sun in education, exercise, age, etc]
Of course there were differences, those things correlate with pretty much everything worth studying. Are you saying that the authors didn't control for them (then why collect data on them and include it?), or that they did so badly (why do you think that), or something else?
> I appreciate the work the authors did, but remain unconvinced that it is sunlight that caused lower mortality in their study.
I don't think epidemiological studies ever prove that anything causes anything, we're talking about correlations here. The conclusion was that avoiding sun is associated with higher all-cause mortality among women. I'll believe that until there's a reason not to.
Re studying only women: it's a problem when you are making a claim about all cause mortality but failing to mention that it's all cause mortality "in women", you can't generalize.
"Are you saying that the authors didn't control for them (then why collect data on them and include it?), or that they did so badly (why do you think that), or something else"
Yes, I addressed this above, see my comment on residual confounding, amongst my many other criticisms.
Also drinking too much alcohol makes you feel like shit the next day, so it's somewhat self limiting (granted, some people have less self-control while drinking than others).
Even with a functioning ozone layer, and magnetosphere.
The thing with UV light though is that it also kills surface bacteria and is involved in vitamin D production. It's very like minerals in that way. Not enough kills you, but it's easy to go from too little to way too much.
> There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.
To be fair people are also inundated with X increases cancer risk by Y (typically marginal) amount. So much so the noise just gets tuned out. Cigarettes are one of the few things that dramatically increase cancer risk. Enough that just about everyone knows someone who caught a deadly disease from smoking.
See. You've actually fallen for it. The whole 80% of people with lung cancer are smokers means that if you smoke, you will get lung cancer.
Truth is, you will likely not get lung cancer if you smoke.
Only 6% of smokers will get lung cancer. You have a slightly worse than 19 in 20 chance of going through your whole life smoking and not getting lung cancer.
Now, in your statement itself, you move the goalpost. You start with cancer and end with "a deadly disease". Because, yeah, smoking is also linked to several other bad outcomes, not just cancer.
And it is fair to compare those other diseases when talking about why we demonize smoking way more than other things. But we can't do that by focusing on cancer. That's disingenuous.
And it is fair to say that the correct number of cigarettes to smoke is 0. The correct amount of alcohol to consume is none. And the correct BMI to be at is between 18 to 24.
As somebody working in cancer treatment; That lines up with my personal experiences, smokers are not really that overrepresented among our lung cancer patients.
They do exist, but the way this topic is usually talked about in public, and what numbers are often presented, one would have to assume the overwhelming number of lung cancer patients are smokers, but they ain't, at best they make up half, not even because most people with lung cancer stop smoking.
What is common is that pretty much everybody tried smoking at some point in their live or another, particularly when younger. That's what these "Most lung cancer patients smokers/used to smoke!" headlines are regularly based on.
But the number of people that are strict "never smokers", who never even touched a cigarette once in their live, is actually quite low. Yet those are regularly used as a comparison group.
The equivalent for alcohol would be counting every liver cancer as the result of alcohol on the basis of a patient having consumed alcohol, regardless how much or how often, before.
I won’t be able to find a source for this, but I remember hearing a discussion on NPR about how hard it was to design studies to test the link between alcohol and cancer. If you rely on rates between people that drink and people that don’t by choice there are way too many other variables. You’re not going to be able to get a large population to act as a control and not drink even though they want to for 20-30 years, and on the other side of the study ideally you’d want them to drink similar amounts of alcohol.
They estimated up to 40% of cancer could be caused by alcohol consumption.
This [0] says that as a light (1 drink a day?) drinker, different types of cancer have a 1.04-fold to 2-fold higher risk of cancer, depending on the type of cancer
Then I found [1] saying that being cigarette smoker gives you a 25-fold higher increase for lung cancer and 2-fold for bladder cancer.
Considering amounts, and types of cancer, that seems almost incomparable. Though cigarettes sound really bad, and I’m glad I quit with vaping ;)
Cannabis as well. Is it a kneejerk reaction from the days of Prohibition? Confirmation bias on the part of drinkers? The ways alcohol is woven into social gatherings that smoking tobacco is not?
Eh, maybe. Lots of "poisons" have hormetic effects. Intuition isn't always a great guide here, and studies seem significantly conflicted in the "modest intake" range.
Appreciate the discussion with lots of study references, with evidence on both sides of the alcohol issue- healthy in small amounts, unhealthy in any amount, etc- with usual issues of fuzziness around categories of consumption and accuracy of surveys and variations in age and background and so forth.
Will just add that since acquiring a rather sensitive personal wearable that continuously captures various quantitative measures about my body- heart rate, temperature, heart rate variability, spo2, and others- that even with the uncertainty that stems from having a single data source- it is VERY clear quantitatively to me how much even small amounts of alcohol affect MY body.
I had a semi serious sickness earlier this year that had me entirely out of commission for a day and at reduced capability for several days. Looking just at the data, a minimal amount of alcohol (for my definition of minimal) is roughly 1/10th the negative impact of that illness. It doesn't feel that way to me, but that's what the data says. That's amazing and terrifying to me.
I am not going to make a specific wearable endorsement but do highly recommend those who have opinions on this matter to collect their own data about their own bodies. Cheers.
Agreed, I didn't even know it was a carcinogen until this year. I'm really old. Growing up it was always about it causing brain damage, no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree. Can we make the "may cause health problems" warning made a bit more specific perhaps?
The education on alcohol could be a lot better and it shouldn't be hard. Obesity is a much harder problem to solve and I suspect we don't know all the reasons it is on the rise yet.
> no one mentioned it raised your cancer risks to such a degree
That's because it doesn't. For the kind of light social/dinner drinking most people do, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it increases your cancer risk (on the contrary, there is some evidence of protective benefits, but epidemiological studies on diet are always full of confounders, so who knows). The reason it appears on lists like these is that alcohol abuse is quite common and leads to liver cancer, among other things, and is associated with other unhealthy choices.
Not according to emerging research. Long term abuse is linked to liver cancer, but even light and moderate alcohol use generally increases the risks of other types of cancers (and diseases) too.
That's a big of a stretch. The DNA is "damaged", or better said changed, by everything. And not all alcohol beverages are equivalent. I'm all up for raising awareness at alcoholism especially due to experience in my family in the past, but this is a piss-poor job of doing so. Being alarmist about things has often the opposite effect, especially today.
people who do not drink alcohol die too and usually not at older age.
5 millions deaths worldwide is a drop in the bucket, considering things that could be prevented and are not related to people behavior (10 million people die every year of hunger, many are kids) and, most of all, even if we can correlate alcohol to those deaths (it's mostly smocking and BMI) that doesn't imply that if they did not drink they would have lived longer.
People who abuse of substances find a way to abuse of anything legal or illegal.
Car accidents cause around 1.4 million deaths and 50 million non fatal injuries (difference with alcohol being it doesn't need people to abuse of it).
Pollution is responsible for 9 million deaths/year.
Personally, I quit heavy boozing about five years ago and totally quit about two years ago. And personally, I can feel the difference in my mood, my behaviour, my thinking, and the effects on other around me. This applied to very light drinking, like half a pint, as well as heavy drinking - maybe six or seven pints plus extras. I tracked these things in an app so I can look back and correlate moods and drinking. Low sample size, but hey, you work with what you’ve got.
I also still spend a lot of time around heavy boozers and see how a variety of drunk people behave. So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues.
I’m not concerned with how alcohol causes death, I am concerned with how alcohol affects life.
On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear and global studies also conclude that no amount of drinking alcohol is safe for you. On the basis that drinking alcohol is a pretty binary choice under the direct control of a human, peer pressure aside, this probably explains why people get defensive because it’s an attack - if you like - on their personal choices.
I cannot personally have an impact on whether my personal pollution emissions - cue gags - affect my health, and improvements in my own driving skills have a ceiling limit on my own safety. But booze is easy, not drinking has a disproportionate impact on me personally.
There’s a difference between banning things to improve public health and personally not partaking in them.
Me observing that people are quick to get defensive over alcohol consumption in general is poking fun at a thing called denial. I get that it’s a defence mechanism to defer anxiety, and the moment I quietly mentioned to friends I wasn’t drinking anymore I received the same defensive reaction from a few of them.
> So I personally see how objectively bad it is before we really get to specific health issues.
I understand, but that's your personal experience, which is invaluable, but not in general.
People have been drinking since we call them humans and it hasn't affected our path to progress.
Many wild animals do it too! (elephants, bears, monkeys, squirrels, bats, and many others)
I don't think people defend alcohol despite the negative effects, people think alcohol is not the problem, but the way it is consumed can be.
I've also witnessed personally the difference on how Americans drink alcohol in my city (Rome) and how we drink it. It's always surprising to me that they survive to live another day, they drink as they want to destroy themselves, we usually do it for the fun of it.
Same way a wedding or birthday cake is not responsible for obesity, but most obese people love them and eat too much of it.
> On the health issues, the link between alcohol and cancer is clear
not alcohol per se, but large amounts of it.
Almonds contain cyanide, 10 of them raw and you're in big troubles, 50, you're dead.
Interesting. A common fruity off flavor (or desired flavor depending on what you want) of craft beer is caused by acetaldehyde being produced in the fermentation process. I wonder if certain craft beers are worse than regular beers because it contains acetaldehyde to begin with.
I'm guessing pear beer? Gave me the worst headache.
You can flush out acetaldehyde with 2 grams of Taurine before going to bed. It's probably why a big egg breakfast feels good after a long night. This isn't going to make alcohol safer, but you won't have a hang over the next day...
it's important to separate what is a threat (urban pollution) from what's a choice (abuse of substances)
One causes at least the same amount of damage of the other, but there's virtually no way to protect yourself from the former, while you can chose to quit the latter.
Another important distinction is that most people who drink (almost all of them) don't abuse of it, they consume a moderate amount of it in specific circumstances.
But they can't limit the amount of oxygen they need to survive and are forced to inhale venom from the air regardless.
These sorts of arguments just make people immediately think of Prohibition and the excesses of that era. No conspiracy required, just a knowledge of history.
We still have prohibition, it's just not for alcohol, so it's not that strange to consider. Prohibition wasn't about those kinds of health effects anyway, it was about reigning in a particularly egregious period of excess drinking as I understand it. I don't agree with it, but banning alcohol now would be a totally different situation and for different reasons.
Oh I see, I guess I just meant different motives and intent. I agree that it would probably play out the same though, even if the motives were health related this time.
Ah I can see that that could've been the intended reading. I agree the purported motives would've been different this time.
I'm overly cynical about this particular matter though. Here in Ireland, the government recently introduced minimum unit pricing, selling it as a public health matter—completely ignoring the fact that about a decade ago they had suggested the same policy, but with the motivation that it would encourage people to go to pubs rather than drink at home (among many other moral problems with that bill).
The fact that a bunch of commenters immediately came out to defend alcohol here is actually hilarious. The damage to DNA caused by acetaldehyde is very well studied, yet here we have people who likely aren't involved in biological research nor have any formal exposure to it coming out to defend their intoxicant of choice.
Nobody was saying make it illegal, yet that's what people jump to. We need to increase educational awareness of the harms of these compounds because prohibition just makes things worse. Prohibition is why there is fentanyl in the heroin supply for example.
Reading the HN comments, I didn't get the same "defending alcohol" feel you did. I think many (most?) people understand there is some risk. But, there's also risk in driving a car, eating red meat, or not sleeping enough - some just choose that the benefits they receive outweigh the risks. Life's short, eh?
Many people feel the small (possible) reduction in average lifespan is worth the enjoyment or quality of life they get from those things.
Optimizing your life strictly around maximizing potential lifespan is certainly an option, but one that many people would feel is an unworthy tradeoff with what they'd have to give up.
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The difference with smoking vs the other things mentioned frequently in this thread (beyond likelihood of addiction), is that the reductions in lifespan with smoking are huge.
The average smoker loses at least a decade of their expected lifespan from what I can see.
Alcohol's effect on expected lifespan is more disputed, but even those claiming it's a negative in all quantities, generally make far smaller claims as to the degree of reduction for moderate/average use than are the case for smoking.
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Additionally, the average smoker doesn't appear to even be particularly fond of their activity. I do not meet many middle aged smokers that talk in any sort of particularly positive terms about their smoking or that seem to have positive memories associated with it.
I mean, no offense, but your tone comes off as an "I told you so" anti-alcohol comment, so I'd be careful criticizing others for their decisions. As other comments have mentioned, there are often plenty of enjoyable, social side effects that come from drinking alcohol with others in a common setting. Obviously alcohol isn't required (though, obviously people enjoy it - the taste, the side effect, whatever), but that's the way a fairly huge industry is setup in many countries.
Also, to clarify, drinking alcohol does NOT equate to making one's life shorter - that's not at all what the article discusses. Moderate drinking may have no effect, or even a positive effect, on life span.
Mu-opioid agonists have positive prosocial effects as do other GABAergics such as kava and alprazolam.
How about the prosocial effects of low doses of ketamine or other NMDA antagonists such as PCP and dextromethorphan?
Perhaps I'm anti alcohol because you can get the exact same effect from compounds with better risk profiles. Alcohol is a very old drug with a lot of risks compared to the benefit. It hammers so many different receptors, the off target effects are nuts and that's not even mentioning the risk from the toxic metabolite acetaldehyde.
There's no reason to use ethanol with so many better options for the same behavioral modifications.
Just speaking personally, but it's the social aspect. It's simply fun (subjectively, of course) to head to a brewery with some coworkers, after work, hang out in a cool environment, and sip beverages that taste good. If I lived in a bubble to maximize life expectancy, I expect I'd look back with some regrets.
There are other hobbies and gathering places that don't revolve around consuming carcinogens such as restaurants, gyms, sports leagues, libraries, ice cream shops, opium dens (although I'm not sure how many exist nowadays) and likely more that I can't think of. Not to mention, there are many beverages that don't contain alcohol.
"That was a fun day of work, let's hit the library" is not the same as "Let's go have a beer," for many people, as you're probably aware :-) To each their own, though. Your argument is just that people should stop doing what they enjoy - again, I think most understand a potential risk, they've just decided it's worth it.
Well nonalcoholic beer does exist, but I assume you aren't talking about that.
I personally find libraries incredibly relaxing, but I assume what you mean by "it's not the same" in that a library doesn't serve highly rewarding GABAergic drugs.
People enjoy drinking alcohol because it is rewarding and most have learned to like the taste through the association of that neurological reward. That's generally what enjoyment is, association of reward with an activity. There are many other activities and compounds that are just as rewarding or relaxing but society is conditioned to accept alcohol as the default it seems, at least in some communities.
As for your last point, that is absolutely not true from my experience. Whenever I discuss the risk of cancer that's associated with alcohol consumption the other person generally has no idea, that has been over 90% of my conversations on the topic.
Some other facts left out of the Guardian version:
> "When examining environmental and occupational risks, researchers found that the cancer attributable DALYs were three-fold higher among males (3.9%) than females (1.3%), suggesting that males may be more likely than females to work in places that have higher risk of being exposed to carcinogens."
There's this rather unfortunate trend in corporate media reporting on cancer to bury any discussion of carcinogen exposure due to industrial activities, contamination of processed foods, agricultural use of pesticides and herbicides, etc. and instead focus on 'personal choice' issues like smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol and not maintaining personal health (i.e. obesity). While the latter are indeed significant, ignoring the former isn't justified.
This does somewhat mirror an academic trend over the past few decades in which cancer research turned towards 'inherited genetic' causes of cancer while also neglecting industrial and agricultural exposure to carcinogens. It's not hard to see a link between the corporatization of American universities, i.e. the spread of public-private partnerships between agribusiness and petrochemical corporations and academic institutions, and this trend.
I suppose this comes as no surprise. It almost feels like a conspiracy that With the exception of a few illegal drugs such as meth, heroin and cocaine, the only legal drugs are the ones that arguably carry fairly high risks. Though I suppose the damage from smoking comes mostly from combustion and not the nicotine.
High BMI is such a problem in the west and so trivially preventable. I have family in both medicine and the school system and the number of children who are morbidly obese seems to get higher every year. One thing I've done to pass the time is to count the number of obese people where ever I am. It's relatively shocking that within some margin of error the vast majority of people appear to be obese. Pairing this with the social contagion of "Healthy at Any Size" and we quite possibly have an epidemic worse than anything we have ever seen before. More than just cancer, obesity is expected to surpass heavy alcohol abuse as the #1 cause of severe liver damage.
I am surprised however that chemicals in food weren't studied as a sub-group of the BMI study. Endocrine disrupters are basically everywhere now. A standard western diet is so loaded with garbage.
It's obviously not trivially preventable on the personal level - otherwise people would be losing weight and keeping it off when they try. The reality is that almost everyone really struggles to lose more than about 15 pounds.
Perhaps it would be easy to prevent on a societal level by getting rid of endocrine disruptors, taking junk food out of grocery stores, or something similar.
Much like the smoking kills campaign it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have a similar campaign for sugar, fake foods, etc. You don't have to eat like a rabbit to stay a healthy weight, but certainly you shouldn't be eating microwave dinners and candy. The problem is sugar itself is analogous to a drug. Moreover, the food lobby is infinitely more powerful than phillip morris could even be in their wildest dreams. We are being poisoned by policy. Unfortunately the solution will remain personal responsibility until our policy makers stop allowing companies to poison us for profit.
The triviality of the solution is that to lose weight you simply eat less. Thermodynamics is all you need for that. 80% of the battle is won and lost here.
The complication is food is designed in laboratories to be addictive as possible. Even vegetables are harvested in such a way they contain extra chemicals and far fewer nutrients. The result is your monkey brain is drawn to Big Gulps and candy because they give you a dopamine release, whereas a steak and vegetables does not. Pair this with food that is deliberately designed to be less satiating and more addicting and you have the recipe for an obesity epidemic.
I think we're mostly agreeing. I do think that calorie for calorie not all foods are equal, and simply eating less is not quite the right thing to focus on. Eating 100 cals of sugar will do different things to your body that 100 cals of protein. Sugar signals the body to store fat. It also makes people crave more food. It is difficult to avoid added sugar these days. I do think people would naturally eat less if there were less sugars in food.
* Eat high-starch vegetables and high-sugar fruits sparingly
* Generally avoid most other foods
* Generally avoid harmful drugs such as nicotine and alcohol
* Incorporate some light physical activity into your daily routine (walking is an easy one)
* Ideally, lift every now and then
All of this should be within reach of most Americans. If someone accepts it as a viable strategy and commits to it, they can maintain or trend toward a healthy body composition.
Applying this on a societal level seems like a much bigger challenge to me. So much terrible nutritional advice is ingrained in the minds of the public (e.g. the food pyramid), so many terrible dietary choices are normalized and made convenient, and the whole "standard American diet" has so much economic momentum that convincing the public to change their lifestyles all at once might be a disaster in and of itself.
Imagine an alternate reality where the only soft drinks were La Croix and Zevia, McDonald's only served stir-fried meats and veggies with sides of berries, Dunkin' Donuts only served watermelon slices and coconuts, cereals and oatmeals were replaced with low-sugar trail mixes, etc. The obesity epidemic wouldn't exist.
Healthy at any size had a good origin. It was to get young women who saw unrealistic and unhealthy bodies in the media to focus on eating right and exercising rather than focusing on image. It later became an excuse for not doing those things. But the original idea was a positive one.
Adherence to doctors orders for weight loss is so bad most GPs don't even bother anymore. I'm not sure what the answer is.
I suppose when viewed charitably you could say that healthy at any size had a good origin.
However, the quantifier any is the problem with the entire campaign. It's patently obvious having a BMI > 30 or < 18 is dangerous to your health. Both of these are included at "any" size. The number of grotesquely obese models being shown by fashion companies is having a similar effect that sickly skinny models had. People get the idea that this is normal and ok. Neither is ok, but the literature has shown being a little too thin (not supermodel thin, but marginally underweight) carries less risk than being marginally overweight. Neither are great, but one is measurably worse.
Yeah, while I have more friends who were hospitalized due to eating disorders than obesity, time will change that as we all age.
I do think the larger models are due to obesity actually being the normal now. Not natural, but totally normal. When this many people are obese we need to recognize that simply continuing to say "eat right, exercise more" while correct, isn't working. It isn't like people don't know. Short of authoritarian bans which will inevitably be the wrong diet for some individuals, and get influenced by agriculture and manufacturers, I have no idea what might work.
I think that essentially was the campaign no? "Stop paying attention to places that try to convince you that someone who hasn't even had water for a day just to look a little more chiseled for the shoot is normal and put the fake food in the trash."
> High BMI is such a problem in the west and so trivially preventable.
Hardly. Tell that to the 1/3rd Americans who are overweight. If you know the secret to easy weight loss, please don't hold out.
It mostly comes down the the food we eat. Added sugars have made their way into nearly everything you can buy at a grocery store. Buying food that doesn't include added sugars is tricky because nearly everything has added sugar. The evidence that added sugars (especially high fructose corn syrup) are mostly to blame for the obesity epidemic, is becoming overwhelming. Significantly changing what you eat is not easy for everyone.
The biggest change needs to come as regulation to the food industry to discourage adding excessive amounts of sugars to foods. Also, stop subsidizing corn and the production of high fructose corn syrup. Obesity is a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution.
75% of Americans are overweight, and 40% are obese.
There is no secret. The trivial solution is to buy fresh/unprocessed ingredients and cook them yourself. Unfortunately in the land of convenience, cooking has become a chore instead of the enjoyable and rewarding activity that it can be.
I didn't know it was that high. I don't think it is trivial to completely change how one eats. In theory it is a simple solution, but in practice it is hard for people to accomplish.
>Endocrine disrupters are basically everywhere now.
Anyone have any recent research on environmental factors for obesity, etc.? With microplastics, beverages consumed out of plastic bottle (or plastic coated cans), xenoestrogens, obese pets and wild animals, etc, it wouldn't surprise me at all that we're unknowingly poisoning ourselves.
When I think about it, being low BMI is sort of a FIFO food queue, you wait to use all you stored fat before making some again; being overweight is more a LIFO mode, you carry with you constantly a concentrate of food in you (fat), but still eat more external food. But food is just like any other addiction, possible but hard to reason about
It's also the one addiction where you cannot resolve it by quitting.
People with unhealthy relationships with food actually have to do the work to resolve that. Alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, addicts of all stripes, etc, can just not partake. They never have to confront why they're addicted.
you can quit some bad eating habbits. There was something about the potato diet (which can work with rice, quinoa, ...), if someone have restricted (in choice, not quantity) and unprocessed food, I think there are good chances they'll lose weight
You really discount the mental effort it takes to say NO to your deepest instincts and forgo that creeping urge to eat unhealthy(after all this food tastes good and is designed to release pleasure in the brain). You dismiss all the daily interruptions and stressors that repeatedly tilt the table towards giving into your inner voice.
I wonder if at some point people will start raise the possibility of excluding/restricting access of obese people to socialized/subsidized healthcare unless they commit to loosing weight?
They will start to tax obesity foods (and in some places already have).
A lot of the reason that industrial food in America has such bad health characteristics is because it's cheaper. Filling things which taste bad because pre-prepaired, frozen, shelf-stable is hard to do with pleasing flavor without taking out most of the water and filling things with sugar, fat, and salt. Making it less affordable will make people make different choices, and scaling up other kinds of foods will make them at least a little cheaper.
...which immediately turns into a tax on the poor, because if you are working three jobs to get by then you have little choice except the cheaper, more readily available "obesity foods".
The medical profession is generally against witholding healthcare from people for sin/moral reasoning. Historically, this has been used to treat black people, gay people, single mothers, poor people, etc. with substandard care and does not lead to population-level good outcomes. Additionally, there is no way to access obese people with the medical processes they may need to lose the weight if the medical field is also systemically depriving them of basic medical care unless they lose weight.
Why not structure government programs to help people lose weight? Get rid of corn in everything, subsidize healthy fresh food instead of corn. Have centers in each town teaching people nutrition and proper cooking. Make the incentives align with healthy eating and well being.
Small nit. Smoking, alcohol, and high BMI are the big risk factors, but not causes. The interesting question is why these risk factors are associated with cancer.
Cancer isn't a disease. It's a class of diseases. It's a class of diseases characterized by the inability of your cells to regulate reproduction. Typically caused by cells that had errors in reproduction. Caused by various mutations. Those mutations are more likely with the introduction of certain things.
All of those things, smoking, alcohol, high BMI, are things that cause more mutations. Either through more reproduction or affecting that reproduction.
We kind of "get" cancer all the time. You could have cancer right now. But usually our body is good at getting rid of it by itself. It's when it can't that it becomes a problem.
Right, and for some more detail, recent studies on cellular energy metabolism and epigenetics suggests that DNA damage may happen more often when you're eating or metabolizing. This is because, your cells tend to reproduce when it has available food, and in order to reproduce, they need to make a copy of your DNA, and so it must open up structures and read your DNA to make a copy of the DNA. However, DNA is at greater risk of being damaged/corrupted (from chemicals like those in smoking, or food itself) when this process is occurring because the DNA is open for access, rather than being in an otherwise mostly packaged/protected state.
I’m not clear what the takeaway from this is as a human on the macro scale. Is this just support for time restricted eating?
Presumably most adult humans have, all else equal, roughly the same number of cells that live on average X days and then must copy themselves at some point during their lifespan. If I space my eating out to small amounts over the whole day but don’t increase calories am I going to get more DNA damage without more net cell growth in numbers?
I'm sure there's causal effects in there, but I also wonder if it's not similar to how riding an unregistered motorcycle puts you in a much higher risk cohort. Of course, riding an unregistered bike is not going to cause an accident, but it's a behavior of people with very high risk profiles.
As a motorcyclist, if you have a license, and your bike is registered, you become part of a behavior cohort that's barely represented in crash statistics when compared to the other cohort.
Someone who's likely to smoke, is potentially the type of person who doesn't take care of themselves in a number of dimensions, putting them in a higher risk behavior cohort.
Smoking, alcohol, and high BMI are among the easiest things to track on a population level study.
Smoking introduces large amounts of carcinogens into the body, I would expect these results to hold up even when you drill down to the finest level.
Alcohol and high BMI are surely direct factors for many cancers as well, but they may also be correlated to other risk factors that are harder to track on population level studies.
How does this correlate with research that looks into the very old - populations where people live the longest lives - and find that wine consumption seems to be rather high? I believe there was a link to such research on HN a month or so ago.
I’m not denying the risks associated with alcohol - just wondering if all alcohol should be looked at in the same way.
There are quite a lot of factors that affect lifespan. From what I understand from reading those studies, factors such as lack of stress, strong social contacts, exercise, sunlight exposure and good diet all likely play a large part in reducing mortality in these populations. Perhaps they would live even longer if they drank alcohol free wine? And how much wine do they actually drink?
I don't think this means anything at all. It's similar to the people with genetics such that they'll have low LDL no matter what posting their blood panels to social media after trying the carnivore diet. It doesn't mean the general population can draw any conclusions from it.
It doesn't mean the risks of drinking in moderation outweigh whatever benefits you think you're getting from it, but living past 100 is unlikely to be one of those benefits for any particular person.
The actual study said that almost half (44.4%) of cancer deaths were attributable to any risk factor, not just those.
Smoking is by far the biggest risk fctor, coming in at over twice the attributable deaths than alcohol and high BMI combined. Cervical cancer from STIs, high blood glucose, and air pollution were almost as high as alcohol and BMI.
Of these, one has a very low effort solution on the personal level: get the HPV vaccine (Gardasil). Have your kids get it too. HPV causes many cancers in both men and women, but by far the most significant in terms of number of attributable cases is cervical cancer. Almost half of people have HPV, but it's never tested for and you won't know you have it until you get cancer. Gardasil may either save your life, save the life of your partner, or save the life of a stranger (by preventing the spread of HPV in general).
Quitting smoking, alcohol, or junk food can be hard, but getting Gardasil is easy.
I agree, it doesn't work for extremely muscular athletes but for the vast majority of people it works very well because the number of extremely muscular athletes in any country is small. So in this case it still serves its purpose very well.
A lot of body builders (even clean ones) are not healthy at all. 270 pounds is 270 pounds, whether it's fat or muscle. And 270 pounds of muscle is harder on the heart.
Many professional athletes shrink down to a healthy size after retirement because being so big is just bad for you.
What about when you control for bodyfat percentage? Genuinely curious. I've heard that waist circumference is associated with lots of negative outcomes even when you control for physical fitness, but I don't actually know this is true.
I have been trying to get more exercise lately and been frustrated by how my smart watch is telling me that some of my biometrics are dead flat while other things like duration and intensity have been going up.
Recently, but well after I started to make changes, I heard someone say in passing that a sedentary lifestyle is as big of a risk factor as smoking. Initially I had a histamine reaction to that, but it actually isn't that surprising, once you get over the strong emotional response (like feeling attacked).
Many of these studies and related conversations seem to presuppose that everyone wants to live to a ripe old age, or that the society with the highest life expectancy wins.
Clearly there is value to being fit and healthy throughout life, but there's also value to living in the moment. I've been enjoying cigars quite a bit recently, I'm not particularly interested in cutting that out of my life to weight the die a bit more in favor of a few more years on the planet. And I'm saying that as someone who was holding my wife as she took her last breaths after a ruthless and painful battle with cancer.
As amateur cyclist who used to compete at relatively high level.. Sports, even amateur sports, is not healthy beyond certain point. Competitive amateurs probably reach that point much sooner because most of them don't have proper supervision and learn off youtube and friends.
Sports is good as long as it's „healthy mind in healthy body“ attitude. But beyond that...
"Everyone who doesn't first die of something else will die of cancer" is trivially true and doesn't offer any real insight. The particular timing and circumstances of death is often salient.
Dr. Gabor Maté appears to be a quack trying to sell some dubious books and courses. His hypotheses are not supported on an evidence-based medicine basis.
I thought that the emotional life-history pattern of cancer patients is quite well researched and linking trauma, anxiety and stress to cancer is not his hypothesis, he is just popularizing it.
I’m so sick of these articles, this is another useless correlations study that tells me nothing. I’m going to continue to drink until someone can tell my clearly and succinctly how much of a risk it is.
There's a book that dives into the FDA and Tobacco Industry beef, and one of the big points is that, neither was a good source for consumers. Big Tobacco wouldn't admit smoking was bad in any way, and the FDA wouldn't admit that any level of smoking was negligibly bad. Instead of allowing consumers to make informed choices, the government treated everyone like idiots and said no amount is safe. The fact is - smoking cigars, less than 5 full sized cigars per day, is basically a negligent contributor to any risk. A long term study of pipe smokers found they lived longer. Nicotine itself isn't much worse than caffiene in many ways. Instead of promoting studies into safer smoking, they didn't allow Big Tobacco to make any health claims. Now we know that certain filters (primarily those Charcoal ones popular in Japan) may have a big impact on reducing carcinogens. Snuff (nasal) and snus (cured tobacco from scandinavia) are both basically negligent in any side effect.
Give consumers useful information. Let them make choices. The lying on both sides helped nobody at all.
Big tobacco couldnt admit cigarettes caused cancer, and the FDA wouldn't admit a small amount probably wouldn't - leaving consumers wondering "how safe is it if I smoke 1 cigarette a day, 5 cigarettes a day, or once a month" the actual useful bits for people.
I agree. These studies view life on strict biological terms, which, in their defense, is the only way to quantify life. While some folks here believe that any amount of alcohol is poison, it's also true that red wine and fatty beef are an excellent pairing. And drinking a cocktail with friends is time well spent.
When we were children, our elders were well aware of a link between alcohol and cancer (among other failures like cirrhosis) because their elderly friends would pass away from one or more of these. It was, albeit unscientifically, established that there does exist a strong enough correlation to warrant warning children about it. To this day, none of us needed a study for any of this. What happened?
To see HN stand up for Big Alcohol and twist this study with whataboutism and other nonsensical detractions is just plain morbid.
> To this day, none of us needed a study for any of this.
I guess this means I should stop cracking my knuckles then since my elders told me doing so would give me arthritis in my hands.
I mean, shit, by this logic I should wear a 3M respirator 24/7 since the elders of my elders (of my elders…) believed "bad air" and "foul smells" were the cause of The Black Death.
I'm all for people making informed decisions on what they want to put into their bodies but informed is the operative word. There's a reason people don't associate drinking or being fat with cancer the way they do with cigarettes.