For a while, alcohol had a healthy-living moment. A daily glass of wine, promoted as part of the Mediterranean diet, was said to lower cardiovascular disease risk and overall mortality—a claim that studies are still confirming. However, the picture has become more complicated, with the American Cancer Society finding that alcohol significantly raises your risk for many kinds of cancer.
Let’s look at how alcohol relates to cancer risk, how much is too much and whether it’s ever safe to drink alcohol.
Why Does Alcohol Raise Cancer Risk?
Alcohol raises cancer risk directly by how it acts on your body and indirectly by helping other cancer-causing substances.
- Alcohol can damage your DNA, which acts like a blueprint for your cells. With faulty DNA, cells can start to spread out of control, fail to repair themselves or have other problems that lead to cancer.
- Alcohol can increase your levels of estrogen, a hormone related to breast cancer risk.
- Alcohol helps cells in your mouth and digestive tract absorb other cancer-causing substances, such as chemicals found in tobacco.
- Alcohol is related to chronic inflammation, which can cause harmful changes to your DNA over time.
- Alcoholic drinks tend to be high in calories, leading to weight gain. Excess weight can contribute to cancer risk.
How Many Drinks Does It Take to Raise Your Cancer Risk?
Even moderate amounts of alcohol can raise your cancer risk. The more alcohol you consume, the greater the risk. For example, women who drink less than one drink a week have a total lifetime cancer risk of between 16% and 17%, while women who have a single drink each day increase their risk to 19%. With two drinks a day, that risk rises to almost 22%.
Men have less cancer risk from drinking alcohol, but their risk also rises with every additional drink per day.
The American Cancer Society recommends against drinking alcohol and suggests that if you do drink, you should stick to these limits:
- No more than two alcoholic drinks per day for men
- No more than one alcoholic drink per day for women
An alcoholic drink is defined as 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of liquor, such as whiskey.
Because alcoholic drinks can interfere with some cancer treatments, avoid drinking while you are receiving any cancer therapy until you have talked to your doctor.
Which Cancers Are Linked to Alcohol?
Commonly associated with liver cancer, drinking alcohol leads to increased risk for many other types of cancer, as well. Researchers have discovered connections between alcohol use and:
How Does Alcohol Compare to Other Risk Factors?
Although alcohol can raise your risk of cancer, it’s not the only—or the worst—culprit. To get the most bang for your buck in terms of cancer risk reduction, stop smoking. Tobacco smoke is the No. 1 cause of preventable cancer cases and deaths in the U.S.
Next most effective? Lose weight by eating a cancer-prevention diet and getting plenty of healthful exercise. Having excess weight is also a major cancer risk factor.
By the Numbers
The following conditions and behaviors are some of the biggest contributors to preventable cancers in the U.S.
- Smoking tobacco: Responsible for 20% of cancers
- Being overweight: Responsible for 11% of cancers in women and 5% of cancers in men
- Drinking alcohol: Responsible for 5% of cancers
Other cancer risk factors you can take steps to change include:
- Being sedentary (lying or sitting down for much of your day)
- Consuming sugary foods or drinks
- Dipping or chewing tobacco
- Eating red meat, processed meats or charred meats
- Using tanning beds
Of course, many cancers cannot be prevented, either because they have risk factors you can’t change (such as age or a genetic condition) or they have no known cause.
Should You Stop Drinking?
If you stop drinking, will you lower your cancer risk? Various studies have looked at this question, and the results are quite interesting.
Mouth and voice box cancer risk was found to drop when participants stopped drinking, while esophageal cancer risk trended up for the first few years after people quit alcohol, then fell to well below the cancer rates for people who continued to drink.
Studies of colorectal cancer risk after people stopped drinking had mixed results. Risk rose in some studies, while it fell in others.
Breast cancer showed a nuanced response to quitting alcohol. In some studies, stopping drinking didn’t seem to influence breast cancer risk. However, studies showed that the risk for the kinds of breast cancers influenced by estrogen and progesterone (hormone receptor-positive breast cancer) may fall when people stop drinking, possibly because alcohol use can raise estrogen levels in your body.
Taken all together, stopping drinking won’t hurt your cancer risk, and it may help, especially if you’re concerned about head and neck or breast cancer.
Is Drinking Ever Safe? The Bottom Line for People Who Drink
According to the American Cancer Society, it’s never safe to drink beer, wine or liquor. The negative effects of alcohol are just too great.
Of course, their priority is protecting you from cancer. Talk with your doctor about your individual cancer risk and how drinking may affect it, and consider your values, priorities and tolerance for risk.
To sum up:
- If your aim is cancer prevention, you’re safest not drinking.
- If you do drink, limit yourself to one drink per day for women or two drinks per day for men.
- Even more important than cutting out alcohol? Quitting smoking and achieving a healthy weight. Then again, why not do all three?
Concerned about your risk for cancer? Learn more about cancer screenings available at Capital Health.