On Friday, U.S. surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy released a new advisory warning of the link between alcohol consumption and increased cancer risk and called for an update to the existing health warning label on alcohol-containing beverages.
According to Dr. Murthy, alcohol is the third-leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S., behind tobacco and obesity, respectively. The advisory points to an increased risk for at least seven types of cancer including colorectum, esophagus, liver, mouth (oral cavity), throat (pharynx), voice box (larynx), and breast. With breast cancer specifically, approximately 16.4 percent of cases are attributed to alcohol consumption.
“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer, and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States… Yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” the surgeon general said in a press release. “This Advisory lays out steps we can all take to increase awareness of alcohol’s cancer risk and minimize harm.”
One of the ways Dr. Murthy seeks to increase awareness is by updating warning labels on alcoholic beverages to include the elevated risk for these types of cancers. Currently, labels warn about the dangers of consuming while pregnant, operating machinery or driving, and include a statement that reads “may cause health problems.” For the label to be updated, Congress would need to approve the change, and no alterations have been made since the Alcoholic Beverage Labeling Act (ABLA) was introduced in 1988.
The advisory also calls for a reassessment of the limits for alcohol consumption to account for cancer risk. This call to action comes just as the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are set to be updated for 2025-2030. Current guidelines suggest that safe consumption is capped at one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men, but many are pushing for that to change, prompted by claims from the World Health Organization (WHO) that no level of alcohol is safe for human health.
“Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview, according to The New York Times. “The data does not bear that out for cancer risk.”
This advisory is the latest development in a long and fierce debate regarding the safety of alcohol consumption. Dr. Murthy’s claims subvert the long-held belief that moderate drinking comes with some health benefits — an argument bolstered just last month by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in the Congressional-funded report “Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health.”
Interestingly, the NASEM report and the Surgeon General Advisory are not entirely congruent. In “Review of Evidence on Alcohol and Health,” experts do concur with “moderate certainty,” that alcohol consumption increases the risk of breast cancer, but their findings end there. Given the current information, the scientists were unable to form a conclusion regarding the “association between moderate alcohol consumption and oral cavity, pharyngeal, esophageal, or laryngeal cancers.”
The NASEM report, along with reports from the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD), will be used by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to determine the updated recommendations. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans are expected to be released in late 2025.
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