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    The alcohol industry still promotes the idea that drinking is good for you Archived Message

    Posted by Morrissey on March 5, 2023, 1:55 pm

    What the alcohol industry doesn't want you to know
    5 March 2023
    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/300819126/what-the-alcohol-industry-doesnt-want-you-to-know

    In The Drinking Game (Allen & Unwin, RRP $36.99), journalist Guyon Espiner explores what drives drinking culture, and why the alcohol industry is given a “free ride” despite selling a drug that causes enormous harm. In this edited extract, Espiner delves into exactly the problem with alcohol.

    The 2005 election was a great campaign if you were a political journalist. It was intense, full of drama and very close, with National leader Don Brash coming within a whisker of depriving Labour’s Helen Clark of a third term.

    In the 2005 campaign I was covering Labour, which meant where Clark went, a camera operator and I went, too. On one flight, while Clark read her papers near the front of the plane, the senior Cabinet minister Annette King spent some time chatting with the political reporters in the cheap seats near the back.

    King had been minister of health for six years by that point and the inflight conversation turned to the damage the ‘work-hard, party-hard’ lifestyle might be doing to us thirty-something journalists. I can’t remember her exact words, but I do recall the thrust of her contribution: Don’t worry about the booze, just stay off the cigarettes.

    Her words stuck with me, perhaps because it was the news I wanted to hear. Sure, she was just a politician, but as minister she had access to the best health advice, so I took her opinion seriously. To be fair to King, it may have just been a throwaway comment which fell on receptive ears.

    I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but until 2020, when I began working on the documentary Proof which led to this book, I was woefully ignorant about the health impacts of alcohol. I knew that heavy drinking could lead to cirrhosis of the liver, but that was about it.

    In fact I believed, as many others did, that moderate drinking was actually good for you.

    In the mid-1980s, when I was a teenager embarking on my long love affair with alcohol, drinkers around the world began to imbibe some welcome news. It became known as the French Paradox and claimed to explain why it was that French people had a lower incidence of heart disease, despite a diet high in fat.

    Part of the answer, according to this theory, was that the French washed down all that cheese, cream and foie gras with lashings of red wine. A 1991 story on the American TV current affairs show 60 Minutes had an immense and lasting impact in promoting the idea that red wine was protective against heart disease.

    In Morley Safer’s story the theory was that red wine could flush away fatty deposits clinging to the walls of the arteries.

    Another theory popular at that time, and which endures today, was that red wine is good for you because it contains organic compounds known as polyphenols. The polyphenol that gained the most attention was resveratrol, which is found in the skins of red and purple grapes and is believed to have heart-protecting properties.

    Resveratrol has been found to offset the negative impacts of high-calorie diets in mice, according to research by the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Ageing, published in Nature in 2006.

    But the mice were given 24 milligrams of resveratrol per kilogram of body weight – and according to a New York Times analysis of the study, a 70 kilogram person would need to consume between 750 and 1500 bottles of red wine every day to get a similar dose.

    The alcohol industry still promotes the idea that moderate drinking is good for you, and that wine can be protective against heart disease, but the evidence underpinning the claim has been disintegrating over the past decade.

    The party was officially over with the publication of a major study in the Lancet in 2018.

    ‘The conclusions of the study are clear and unambiguous: alcohol is a colossal global health issue and small reductions in health-related harms at low levels of alcohol intake are outweighed by the increased risk of other health-related harms, including cancer,’ the study said.

    ‘There is strong support here for the guideline published by the Chief Medical Officer of the UK who found that there is “no safe level of alcohol consumption”.’

    We leave the door wide open to myth-making about alcohol partly because we put so few requirements on the industry to give consumers full and accurate information about their products. Look at that bottle of wine in your fridge. Can you see the label telling you how many calories are in it? No. It isn’t there, and by law it doesn’t have to be.

    Nearly every food and drink item you buy has to display nutritional information. But not alcohol.

    The rules in New Zealand, according to the Ministry for Primary Industries, are that beer, wine, spirits and liqueurs ‘don’t require an ingredient list or nutrition information panel’ unless the product makes a specific claim, such as ‘low carb’ or ‘gluten-free’.

    So, mostly we have no idea how many calories are in our alcoholic drinks – and many would be alarmed to know the truth.

    Drinking one whiskey and cola RTD with an alcohol content of 7 per cent is the equivalent of eating a 50 gram bar of chocolate. Some pints of lager contain 180 calories – similar to a slice of pizza – and a 250ml glass of red wine contains nearly 230 calories, equivalent to eating a jam doughnut.

    I, like most people, had no idea about the strength of the link between alcohol and cancer until after I had stopped drinking. The information was there if I’d looked. The World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen in 1988.

    ‘This means the strength of the relationship between alcohol and cancer is similar to that of asbestos, arsenic, tobacco smoke, ionising radiation, vinyl chloride and ultraviolet radiation.’

    Alcohol is now known to be a cause of – not just linked to – several types of cancer. According to the WHO, cancers of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, colorectum, liver and breast are ‘causally related’ to drinking alcohol.

    In 2020, nearly 750,000 newly diagnosed cancer cases around the world, or about 4 per cent of the total, were attributed to drinking alcohol, according to a study published in the Lancet. Data from eight European countries showed that 10 per cent of cancers in men and 3 per cent of cancers in women could be attributed to current or former alcohol use.

    Moderate drinkers have a 1.8-fold increase in getting throat cancer than non-drinkers. Heavy drinkers have a five-fold risk of pharynx cancers. Any amount of drinking will increase the risk of oesophageal cancer, with the risk (compared with non-drinkers) ranging from a 1.3-fold increase for light drinkers to a five-fold risk for heavy drinkers.

    Big drinkers roughly double their chances of getting liver cancer and have 1.5 times the chance of getting colorectal cancer.

    In New Zealand it is estimated that about 950 new cases of cancer a year are attributable to alcohol. In 2019 about 6 per cent of all cancer deaths were linked to drinking. Breast cancer is the leading cause of alcohol-related death for New Zealand women.

    Unfortunately, this is not just at the heavy drinking end – about a third of breast cancer deaths attributed to alcohol were due to an average consumption of fewer than two standard drinks per day. Even consuming one standard drink a day increases the risk of developing breast cancer by up to 10 per cent.

    It turns out it wasn’t just me who was entirely ignorant about this. Research cited by the Health Promotion Agency says that only 9 per cent of New Zealanders know that alcohol is even a risk factor for breast and bowel cancer.



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