The reaction you're seeing is not because we've all got drinking problems. It's due to the reactionary way this and other similar studies are headlined: "No level of alcohol consumption is safe...". It's click-bait, and so you're seeing the resulting clicks.

I'm sure you wouldn't have seen anywhere near this kind of reaction if the headline was instead "Any level of alcohol consumption increases liver cancer risk by X in 10,000" or "Adjustments to confounding factors show that non-drinkers have a 0.0000X% longer life expectancy".

Beyond the headline designed to invoke a reaction, I think there's a good basis for general fear of this kind of judgment - it invokes the language around many other prohibitions of all that is good and fun in the name of our physical or moral health.

We are only just working through lifting prohibitions on Cannabis here in the west, albeit with many strings attached. Many countries (and a good number of North American counties) still have prohibitions on alcohol. We as a society prohibit many kinds of mushroom, plant roots, leaves and oils.

Here in Canada the health authority has a "no safe levels" attitude towards absinthe, house-made mayo, rare burgers and many of the world's greatest cheeses. We've put "for external use only" warning labels on cooking ingredients like mustard oil and tamarind extracts. We've banned cooking wines entirely!

So yes. When I see "no safe levels of alcohol" I do tend to over-react. Keep your grubby little hands off my bottle.

> Here in Canada the health authority has a "no safe levels" attitude towards absinthe, house-made mayo, rare burgers and many of the world's greatest cheeses. We've put "for external use only" warning labels on cooking ingredients like mustard oil and tamarind extracts. We've banned cooking wines entirely!

jeez, i use all of those here in the uk, except for absinthe, which you can't get [actually, you can, but not in your average offie or supermarket].

i remember when a bbc comedy program had a sketch "the worst thing you can hear when you turn on the tv" - it was a shit-eating voice, introducing a documentary, saying "welcome to canada; friendly giant of the north!"

sorry, it just popped into my brain and i had to share it - i don't really hate canadians.

Maybe read the well documented history of self-righteous teetotalers? It's not too hard to understand what the goal of this type of rhetoric is.

I'm genuinely curious - do you have some good references of this history I could read?

Here’s a publicly available overview of the temperance movement and just how insane it was: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216414/

I'd be perfectly fine never touching a drop of alcohol again, and think this sort of dire warning is crap. It's actively harming the dissemination of good health advice.

How would you frame it differently? If even small amounts over a long period of time gives you cancer, how else to state it?

"X amount of alcohol increases odds of disease by Y%".

Without values, we can pretty much say that anything increases odds of disease: walking, driving, eating, shitting, sleeping.

And what's to gain? Hysteria because there's a million ways to die? Or increased distrust in health recommendations, as they're barely actionable?

I think the current recommendations are: do exercise, eat well and get good sleep. They should get you a good baseline. But you don't need to be a fundamentalist: you don't need to obey them 100% of the time!

I scrolled almost through the entire conversation. This is the first sane comment. Thank you.

being told what you should be doing by the self-righteous will tend to produce this effect

All the article proposes are warnings on labels like they exist for tobacco. No telling you what to do at all.

I've never had more than a literal sip, usually when parents let me see what a drink tasted like, and I don't plan on drinking and my reaction was much the same as other reasonable people in this thread. The framing of the title and contents is absurd.

How is it denialism? What I’m reading here is mostly people acknowledging there is some risk to alcohol consumption, but judging the risk to be worth it. Life is fundamentally risky.

Not the same at all, I don't know what you're getting at.

First sane comment I see here.