A drink a day won’t keep the cancer away. New research shows even light amounts of alcohol consumption might raise people’s risk of several cancers. Scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle examined the medical literature on alcohol and cancer. They found convincing evidence that any amount of regular drinking is linked to a higher chance of breast, colorectal, and other cancers. At the same time, the clearest dangers of alcohol, for cancer or other health conditions, came from heavy drinking. “While potential health impacts at low-to-moderate levels varied by outcome, high levels of alcohol consumption were associated with increased risk across all outcomes,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published Monday in Nature Health. No threshold of safety for cancer The relationship between alcohol and our health can be complicated. Though studies have often linked health problems like cancer to even moderate alcohol consumption, for instance, others have suggested light drinking might actually help protect the heart.
To get a better sense of the big picture, researchers at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), an independently run research program based at the University of Washington, carried out a sweeping analysis of the data. They conducted 16 systematic reviews across four databases, which collectively included 843 cohort and case–control studies, and looked at how alcohol might affect 20 different health outcomes.
