Beer Buzz Kill – Does Drinking Cause Cancer?

When you write about drinking daily (as we do), you learn pretty quickly that it pays off to accentuate the positive and down play the negative if you want to grow. But at the same time the MOST important thing we’ve learned is that readers can smell bullshit and that it’s always better to err on the side of truth.

Which leads us to the question…does drinking cause cancer?

Even though it’s a buzz kill for publications such as ours to admit, some researchers feel that a strong relationship can be drawn between drinking alcohol and some cancers. Not cigarette strong, but still, some argue, scientifically persuasive.

But whether the drinks industry is responsible to acknowledge this possibility, as certain academics are reportedly advising, is whole different matter, one that pits economics up against scientists researching business ethics.

A paper compiled by researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that was recently published in the Drug and Alcohol Review, was been picked up by the UK’s Guardian and it’s now causing an uproar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not because the paper draws a direct linkage between drinking and cancer (that, it assumes), but for its activist indictment of the drinks Industry for “misleading the public by downplaying and misrepresenting the link between alcohol and cancer, in a bid to protect its profits.”

These are strong assertions against the industry by a team researchers speaking to social, economic and political doctrine more than to scientific fact.

Bottom Line: The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently published paper “How alcohol industry organizations mislead the public about alcohol and cancer” is activist document thinly disguised as hard science…and its blatant directive obscures whatever valid points might have been made.

You can read it if you want…but unfortunately it will only make you want another drink…And given their assertion of links between alcohol and cancer, you may not want to do that