Not long after researchers at Kaiser-Permanente announced widely reported findings that supported the link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer last month came a new, extensive joint report with similar news from the World Cancer Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research. Following a 5-year extensive review of over 7,000 studies, the groups' nine independent teams of experts came to 3 "overall" conclusions about alcohol:
- Alcoholic drinks are a cause of cancers of a number of sites and that, in general, the evidence is stronger than it was in the mid-1990s.
- The evidence does not show any 'safe limit' of intake.
- The effect is from ethanol, irrespective of the type of drink.
The report's bottom-line 8 recommendations for Cancer Prevention include suggestions to be "as lean as possible within the normal range of body weight" and to be "physically active." The experts recommend limits on "energy-dense food," red meat, alcoholic drinks and salt. They recommend consumers "avoid" sugary drinks, processed meat and moldy cereals or legumes, and to "eat mostly foods of plant origin." The drink limits they recommend are familiar: 2/day for men, 1/day for women. Importantly, "in light of the evidence suggesting that small amounts of alcohol protect against heart disease, however, the panel decided to recommend limiting rather than avoiding consumption" of alcohol, said one panel member while introducing the report. The full report - Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: A Global Perspective - runs over 500 pages. The section on food and alcohol beverages includes detailed information on relative risks by cancer site, alcohol beverage (where data available) and the drinking threshold at which risk rises.
Interestingly, in more general remarks, the panels reject a focus on average consumption as a measure of harm. "In many countries, alcohol is a public health problem. This is not so much because of the average level of intake, but because a minority of the population, which in high-income countries includes an increasing number of young people, drink alcohol excessively." The report recommends a "public health goal" of reducing the "proportion of the population drinking more than the recommended limits