First off, contra the Times coverage of it, the report doesn’t single out drinking alcohol as an especially major cause of cancer, only as one of many lifestyle risk factors that people should pay attention to. Which is reasonable enough in and of itself.
Nor does the report rely on any new “breakthrough” science. We’ve suspected for quite some time now that there is a link between cancer and alcohol consumption, with moderate alcohol use slightly increasing the risk, and heavy alcohol use being a major risk.
On that point, it is true that social alcohol consumption is associated with a slightly increased risk for certain cancers. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that alcohol consumption causes cancer. There are lots of things that go with drinking alcohol that might lead to cancer, such as smoking cigarettes, working a high stress job, or becoming disinhibited and eating junk food, for example. (Heavy alcohol consumption by contrast is unambiguously bad, and certainly can cause a number of cancers, with liver cancer being the most obvious one). But let’s leave that aside and grant for the moment that alcohol consumption in and of itself probably does increase the risk for some cancers – the honest truth is that we can’t know with complete certainty, but there’s other evidence (animal studies, for example) to suggest alcohol does play a causal role sometimes. Even so, it still doesn’t support the implication made by the article.
Clearly there has been a rise in cancer among younger people. And obviously many younger people (and older people for that matter) drink alcohol. But – shocker – young people also drank alcohol in the past. In the 1950s, the “three martini lunch” was socially acceptable in many American workplaces, and Europeans have consumed wine (the French, Italians, and Spanish for example) or beer (the Germans and British, for example) with their meals for centuries. It may be true that being a drinker has always raised the risk for cancer. But unless we believe that young people are suddenly drinking way more than their counterparts in the past, this can’t possibly explain why diseases like colorectal cancer were vanishingly rare in anyone younger than age 50 as recently as the 1990s, but are now increasingly common in this age group. In other words, it might be true that a young person who drinks alcohol is more likely to get cancer than a young person who doesn’t, but that doesn’t tell us anything about why more young people who drink alcohol are getting cancer now than young people who drank alcohol in the past.
While I can’t prove it, I suspect that the rise in cancer is more likely due to pesticide exposure, junk food, a high stress/socially isolating culture, the disrupted sleep that computer/cell phone screens have brought into our lives, the unintended consequences of heavy pharmacologic exposure (keep in mind that even if you don’t take any medications, traces of medications are routinely found in our drinking water and our food supply), disruptions to our gut microbiomes from excessive antibiotic exposure and various toxins in the environment, and many other possible sources.
Of course, if any of these factors were implicated in the tragic cancer deaths of so many young people, our congress and the large corporations who they answer to might have to actually make some changes to the way we run things around here. Far easier to just blame the patient themselves. “We didn’t give you cancer. It was that glass of Pinot Noir you like to drink on the weekend.” If the people who made this mess had to take some of the blame for it, it might hurt profits, and, well – we can’t have that now, can we?
