Beer Buzzkills – Does Drinking Alcohol Cause Cancer?

Seems like everything might cause cancer nowadays, even your beer. And if it does, is it the industry’s responsibility to acknowledge the possibility?

Here’s the deal…

When you write about drinking daily as we do), you learn pretty quickly that it pays off to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative when you enjoy what you’re doing.

But at the same time the MOST important thing we’ve learned is that our 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 alcohol cause cancer?

Even though it’s a buzzkill 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 it’s the drinks industry responsibility 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 first published in the Drug and Alcohol Review, and picked up by the UK’s Guardian caused 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 were strong assertions against the industry by the team’s researchers that spoke to social, economic and political doctrine more than it did to scientific fact.

Bottom Line

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

It’s more of an opinion piece than it is anything directly based on hard scientific data. It’s a study of past studies into the relationship between alcohol and cancer.

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.

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Want more Beer Buzzkills?

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BEER BUZZKILLS – DRINKING BEER COULD CAUSE ‘MAN BOOBS’