OBESITY is #1 problem
wine, beer, cocktails not so much
Actually if you look at the data it would be:
Smoking ~480k deaths/year
Obesity ~280k deaths/year
Alcohol ~180k deaths/year
Drug overdoses ~110k deaths/year
However you looked at life years lost, drug overdoses are the highest.
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Final comment: during my lifetime, doctors, scientists, and others have said animal fat is bad; now itās good. Milk and butter were bad and margarine(!) was good, before margarine became bad and milk and butter are good again. When women my motherās age were nauseated during pregnancy, cigarettes were prescribed. Saturated fat was bad, then good, now, it depends on who you ask. Saccharine was good, now itās bad. Baby powder was good, now itās bad. My aunt was prescribed DES when she became pregnant with my cousin, that cousin was not able to carry a baby to term and has not had any children as a result.
The lunatic fringe has plenty of company in authoritative health/science realm and govt in creating skepticism about their every pronouncement and warning.
Face facts: health science has been unreliable and inconsistent. And the govt focuses on warning label poultices.
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Well, maybe, just maybe all those examples you cite are actually examples of science getting better. Health science was almost non-existent when your mother and aunt where young. The structure of DNA was only determined a few years before I was born, and even then science couldnāt do much with it.
I really donāt know what it is you want from government in the area of health and science. Sounds like youād rather government got out of the business altogether.
And just to come back to it: if science has now concluded with sufficient evidence that alcohol can cause cancer, adding that line to existing government mandated labels is hardly a burden on producers and manufacturers. And is probably the only way most people in this country will ever know that fact.
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Iām on record as saying that a lot of clinical nutrition research is bullshit, and thereās a lot of reasons for that. That all being said, I think itās difficult for most people to understand the challenges that researchers face in this field.
Most of the effects of dietary or lifestyle modifications are long term. Itās not practical to do a randomized clinical trial for 30 years. Thatās basically the entire career of a researcher in order for you to get results. Some case/control/cohort studies can be performed over a long period of time, but some issues still remain like patients being lost to follow up, dying from accidents, or having any number of confounding variables. That really leaves some sort of observational trial, which leads to a whole host of other issues, like patients lying. Any internist knows patients lie about how much coho they drink, or other things like risky sexual practices, drug use, whatever. Studies are taking self-reported data and trying to draw conclusions from it.
Take into account industry influence, the fact that the top researchers are likely going into fields with higher earning potential (like oncology) and you can see that the landscape is tough.
That all being said, the insurance industry both has a lot of money, and a vested interest in their subscribers not being sick, so thereās a lot of high quality research based on the large insurance data sets. The results iāve seen are similar to the published data weāve discussed.
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Science is an iterative process. Often self correcting as the body of knowledge improves and expands. Policy and politics are not. People in this thread seem to confuse the two. Anecdotes are not science.
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Thatās an awfully big āifā and likely overendorses the findings from observational data. Further, the increased risks in the Surgeon Generalās charts seem to be based on extrapolations from a single study conducted in Australia. If you torture the data long enough, they will confess to anything.
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A lot of bad policy and health/science proclamations are predicated on and the result of āiterativeā science. Perhaps scientists and those who write policy around scientific findings should be more modest. A lot more modest. The race to be first should be the race to be the most correct and accurate.
If booze is all that bad, ban it. That wonāt happen because the governed wonāt stand for it. Slapping a warning label on the bottom of the back of a can or bottle is an ineffective, unwanted band-aid.
Not true. The association with female breast cancer is extremely well documented in meta-analyses with 5+m pooled patients. Thereās also a lot of genetic/epigenetic data.
For example:
The effect, as I said earlier, for light drinking is quite small, but ramps up pretty quickly, with a well-defined dose response curve.
Hereās the most recent meta-analysis looking at all previously published trials (23 studies)
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I mean, we havenāt banned smoking, despite much more negative health effects, so thatās unlikely.
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From the linked meta-analysis of observational data:
āWe included a total of 26 prospective studies with 5,795,688 participants (139,993 cases) for the meta-analysis on breast cancer incidence. ā¦ Overall, alcohol consumption was signifcantly associated with increased breast cancer incidence risk with RR estimates of 1.07 (95% CI 1.04, 1.10) for light drinkers, 1.21 (95% CI 1.14, 1.28) for moderate drinkers, and 1.21 (95% CI 1.17, 1.26) for heavy drinkers compared to abstainers.ā
With nearly 6 million participants, the findings are likely to be statistically significant. And the dose-response, overall, is flat ā not increasing ā as between moderate drinkers and heavy drinkers. The RRs for both are 1.21, with similar 95% CIs. Compare that with the RRs for smoking and lung cancer ā which are, what, 10-fold higher?
The other thing people arenāt taking into account is that an individualās cancer risk isnāt equal for everyone. A huge percentage is based on your genetics. Another chunk has to do with environment and epigenetics. Someone growing up near a chemical plant or busy freeway will have a much higher cancer risk.
What weāre talking about are modifiable risks.
Baseline risk could vary from nearly zero (good genetics, no epigenetic exposure) to nearly 100% (brca 1/2 or other genetic syndrome, plus poor epigenetics/environment).
If you have a super low baseline risk, then it doesnāt matter as much what you do. You can smoke, drink heavily, eat ultra processed foods, whatever, and maybe you lifetime risk increases to the national average risk (~12-15%).
If someone has a 60-70% baseline risk, a 20% increase can be catastrophic.
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Yeah, unfortunately the dose response for other cancers escalates much more quickly. Esophageal is like 10% for light/moderate and 40% increase for heavy.
The other meta-analysis has a pretty clear dose response relationship.
āThe meta-regression showed a positive association; relative risks (RR) of breast cancer were 1.05 (95% CI: 1.04, 1.06), 1.10 (95% CI: 1.08, 1.12), 1.18 (95% CI: 1.15, 1.21), and 1.22 (95% CI: 1.19, 1.25) for 0.5, 1, 2, and 3 standard drinks per day compared with nondrinking, respectively.ā
At the end of the day, like I said, weāre all adults and make our own decisions. For most people, drinking a low/moderate amount likely wonāt increase their risk of cancer a huge amount. I posted in the other thread that the risk of cancer from alcohol is similar to the risk of eating a high quantity of ultraprocesssed foods. Eating red meat increases the risk of cancer, and Iāll still do that. Eating meat at all compared to a vegetarian diet and Iām certainly not switching.
Everything we do has risks and benefits. If people decide that drinking regularly is worth the increased risk, then great. I just think people should have the information they need to make informed decisions.
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As if people make decisions based on being informed.
Just look at all the obese people around you everyday.
It is just uninsurable liability that we all pay for in inordinate amounts.
Put that on a label. Please.
Cool, whatās your plan for making everyone lose weight?
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been there, done that.
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whatever
You canāt fix big guns, big trucks, big gulps and small brains
Why canāt there be selection bias the other way? We already handled in the other thread about this that IOGT-NTO or the temperance movement was in very big part of the WHO shepherding the studies put in front of them.
Iām not disputing any of these studies showing a link, but as Milton Friedman once said: āanything run by man, has self interestā.
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The studies included huge populations, 5.6 million patients in the first, way more in the second. The last meta-analysis included every single study thatās ever been done measuring alcohol and cancer risk. You get selection bias when you exclude or focus on specific populations, generally not by including everyone. The womenās health study (nurses study) included the entire surveyed cohort that had been followed for 35 years:
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