Does Drinking Increase Your Cancer Risk?

Would you drink acid or formaldehyde, the chemical they use to preserve dead bodies? Would you volunteer to inhale cigarette smoke, wood dust, or engine exhaust?

The answer is obvious, right? Of course, you wouldn’t. It’s absurd.

And yet we consume a substance that is just as toxic to us to unwind after a hard day, party with our girlfriends, or project a certain level of sophistication at social events. (Think about wine tastings or toasting a colleague’s success with a flute of champagne.)

It might sound hyperbolic, but it’s not. Alcohol, acid, formaldehyde, cigarette smoke, wood dust, and engine exhaust fumes all appear on the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) list of known carcinogens.

In other words, studies show that these substances, without a shadow of a doubt, cause cancer. Anyone can access this list and see that alcohol is on it for themselves.

Even worse, most adults don’t even know about the link between alcohol and cancer. Only 30% know alcohol causes cancer.

Think about how this is stripping us of our power and agency.

Of course, some people might still choose to drink if they knew about the risks, just like some people still choose to smoke. But it’s seriously worth noting that smoking rates have fallen 68% since 1965 and that’s largely because of public health campaigns and the widespread knowledge that smoking isn’t very good for you.

Would more women choose to change their relationship with alcohol if they knew about the cancer risk? I wholeheartedly believe the answer is yes. My soul tells me there are women out there who have no idea they’re routinely exposing themselves to a group 1 carcinogen and, if they did, they would absolutely want to do something about it.

Discover the true facts about alcohol and its link to cancer, why you may not have heard about it before, and the first steps you can take if this information empowers you to cut back or go alcohol-free.

The Facts

Beer, wine, and liquor increase your cancer risk. Big Alcohol has been busy successfully convincing people that the opposite is true. Ten percent of adults believe red wine lowers cancer risk, and, of course, we know that’s just not true.

What is true, and why is it so hard to tell fact from fiction? Why do some doctors continue to talk about the benefits of a 5 oz glass of red wine?

Here’s what we definitively know:

Alcohol is linked to mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus, liver, colon and rectal, and breast cancer.
Alcohol is the “leading modifiable risk factor for cancer in the United States.”
Drinking ANY alcohol, even one glass of wine, increases your cancer risk.
For every single glass of wine a woman drinks, her risk of breast cancer goes up by 7%.

Studies show there are no benefits to drinking any amount of alcohol. The American Cancer Society says: “It’s best not to drink.”

The reason why doctors may continue to perpetuate the myth that red wine has protective benefits is these studies are new and, according to the 2020 Health Information National Trends Survey, people are most likely to be aware of these studies if they’re part of younger generations or they’re 18-39. Adults 40 and up, including medical professionals, are statistically less likely to know this information.

There’s also a lot of flawed studies (funded in part by the alcohol industry) that conflated drinking with health. We now know that there is no cardio-protective benefit to alcohol and that it only raises your risk of cancer, heart disease, and dementia over time.

Why Haven’t I Heard This Before?

Did you know, for women, drinking a bottle of wine is the equivalent of smoking TEN cigarettes?

Now that I’m throwing all this information at you, you may be wondering, “Why haven’t I heard this before?” Why isn’t it common knowledge that alcohol causes cancer?

The first reason is new studies are coming out every day. It took decades for the general public to learn about the harmful effects of cigarettes. There’s a gap between when this information first becomes available and when it becomes the science that is well-known and generally accepted by our culture.

The second reason is your social circle. If you hang out with people who drink every weekend and bond over wine tastings, chances are they aren’t going to talk about the harms of alcohol. When we’re drinking, we don’t like to talk or think about the damage alcohol is doing to our bodies.

When you put something out there, your experiences will keep reaffirming it.

When we drink and believe drinking is a social lubricant and helps us form friendships, we’re more likely to remember information that confirms it. We’re more likely to remember commercials with people laughing, dancing, and raising their glasses of champagne. We’re more likely to remember the signs we see for happy hours and food and wine pairings.

We’re also more likely to tune out information that goes against that narrative. Even if you’ve heard of the link between alcohol and cancer before, your brain is more likely to filter out that information so you can keep going out with your friends and drinking. You might think, “Oh, but there are studies showing the opposite is true”—these have been debunked—“Who knows what to believe?” That’s your brain hard at work to keep conforming.

We’re pack animals. This is a protective mechanism. Your brain is trying to help you fit in and survive. The reason we survived—and not the Neanderthals—is because we worked together. We’re still wired to be a part of the pack. It still feels just as essential to our survival.

When you ditch alcohol, you choose to go against the popular narrative. To go against the pack. You choose to empower yourself with information and do what’s truly best for your emotional and physical well-being.

Ditch Alcohol

If you’ve been drinking since you were a teenager, you’ve literally drank hundreds or even thousands of times in your life, and it can feel really uncomfortable to stop. Not to mention the guilt and the shame that comes along with it. If you have trouble breaking the habit, what does that say about you? Does that mean you’re an alcoholic or that you have to adopt a label for the rest of your life?

You want to ditch alcohol, you want to be health conscious and lower your cancer risk, but the fear of judgment—the fear of what your friends and family might think—keeps you drinking.

Know you’re not your behaviors and you’re learning a new skill.

You’re not your behaviors.

I wholeheartedly believe people do the best they can with what they have, and the truth is most of us didn’t know about the link between alcohol and cancer until just recently.

Now that you know, you can start taking steps to do something about it.

Learning a new skill

Ditching alcohol is like learning a new skill.

You would never expect to pick up the flute and master it after practicing for 20 minutes, right? You know that it will take many, many days—months or even years of practice—before you can hit the right notes and play more complicated songs. That doesn’t say anything about you. It’s just the nature of learning something new.

Think about going alcohol-free the same way. It takes practice. Give yourself permission to try. Do a 22-day challenge or dry month. Commit to 90 days alcohol-free. If you slip up, think of it as new information or a learning experience and try again.

When a baby is learning to walk, we don’t expect them to get up and walk to the other side of the room. Chances are they’re going to teeter back and forth, lose their balance, and maybe even fall and get back up again. As long as you keep getting back up and walking across the room, you’re doing exactly what you need to do.

If you’re ready to practice the skill of ditching alcohol, I highly, highly recommend signing up for Dry Bootcamp. Join our immersive community of women for a 22-day break from alcohol. Together, you’ll learn to take care of your emotional needs in new healthy ways.

If you’re working on changing your relationship with alcohol, you’re at the forefront of the alcohol-free movement. I truly believe you’re ahead of the curve, and you’re doing so much important work to normalize socializing and having fun without alcohol.

You don’t have to do it alone, and I don’t believe you SHOULD, either.

When empowered sober curious and alcohol-free women come together, we can and will change the world.

Will you join us? Will I see you in the next round of Dry Bootcamp?

YES, save me a spot!