A new study published on June 19 in the journal PLOS Medicine suggests that alcohol consumption and the risk of getting cancer can be associated to each other. Researches in the past have also shown that drinking small amounts of alcohol can be beneficial for the heart but does it have the same effect on the risk of developing cancer? While there may be a strong association between alcohol consumption and cancer but the research does not, in any way, establish a cause and effect relation between the two. The research claims that drinking less alcohol might mean low risk of getting cancer. According to Andrew Kunzman, lead author of the study, the research sets itself apart from other similar researches done in the past because past researches did not necessarily try to find a connection between alcohol consumption and mortality rates.
For the research, the drinking habits of about 100,000 adults from all over the United States of America were observed for about nine years. When the study began the participants were between the ages of 50 and late 70s. Researchers found out that participants who drank less alcohol had a very low risk of developing cancer – even lower than those who did not drink at all! Kunzman explains, “The study results suggest that minimizing alcohol intake may help individuals who already drink to lower their risk of developing certain types of cancer, such as breast, colorectal and liver cancer. The results perhaps also suggest that [decisions about] drinking that second glass each night shouldn’t be made for health reasons.” Kunzman also made a point of that we should be careful about the fact that all the participants were older adults so the study does not necessarily show the effect of frequent drinking in young adults.
But how much alcohol is ‘less alcohol’? While the researchers themselves do not give us a specific number, they also do not agree too much with the recommended alcohol intake of countries like the U.K and the US. The health guidelines of the U.K recommends less than one drink a day for both men and women and US guidelines recommend that men not have more than two drinks a day and that women don’t have more than one drink a day. “We’re not telling people what they can or can’t do or what they can or can’t drink,” explains Kunzman, “We’re just trying to give them reliable evidence so that they can make their own informed, healthy decisions.”