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What have scientists discovered very recently that most people should absolutely know ?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Party pooper: Consuming alcohol significantly increases your chance of getting cancer. To the point that it compares with asbestos, radiation and tobacco.
https://www.partnershipagainstcancer.ca/topics/alcohol-policies/background-statistics/
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/04-01-2023-no-level-of-alcohol-consumption-is-safe-for-our-health
https://www.aacr.org/patients-caregivers/progress-against-cancer/americans-largely-unaware-of-link-between-consumption-of-alcoholic-beverages-and-risk-of-cancer/
https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/alcohol-use-cancer-risk
A recent study counters that info a little bit (says there isn't a link for some cancers) but it's important to note that the study is still disputed. Also, cancer is on top of liver and heart disease, dementia and many other things that alcohol is known to directly increase.
You should do your best to reduce your alcohol consumption or cut it out completely - if you care about your health.
This is kind of ambiguous; it's in the IARC group 1, which indeed includes asbestos and radiation. It also includes a lot of other things, like therapeutical hormones, many viruses and bacteria, being a firefighter, leather dust, being a painter, processed meat, wood dust, plutonium, vinyl chloride and outdoor air pollution.
Seems like the grouping is pretty non-specific.
Outdoor air pollution can include many different things. It can be an area where people are smoking for hours or roads of the times before catalytic converters.
I clicked one of the links, and read the study.
450ml of liquor per week isn't light to moderate by most definitions? If you don't drink 2 nights a week that's 5 medically significant binges per week, every week. One "drink" in this context is 1oz (~29ml). Most of the doctors I've been to, when asking how much you drink, will even ask of you have 15 drinks per week. They cut that off at 7+.
While a lot of us don't know the link to cancer, I'd imagine most of us know there's something there.
I'm fine with doing alcohol like we did cigarettes, I was just kinda shocked that they called "5 medically significant binges per week" light to moderate drinking??? Even when I was drinking an amount that people were talking about doing an intervention for, it was less than half of that (1oz (29.5ml) per day)
450ml of what? 1oz of what? 100% ethanol? Drinks and liquor vary extremely widely and has no definition.
Liquor is commonly understood to be 40-50% ABV
None of this is really exact anyway. This is what doctors seem to go on
The problem is the beer I usually drink is in a 24 ounce can, and has 9.8% abv, and I don't know a single person who would call that 4 drinks (which it is! One drink is .6oz of ethanol, and that can of beer has 2.4oz of ethanol)
Doctors try to get people to accurately report their lives because people aren't thinking about this. I remember there was a place (Scotland maybe?) where they put how many "Units" of alcohol were in drinks, which I think is a good idea for these kinds of things. A unit seemed to be that 0.6oz (~17ml) of ethanol you get if you do the math on the earlier measurements.
I like a drink (obviously) as part of enjoying food, cooking, hosting and manage the risk by never having more than one in a day (this is probably 2 'units' of alcohol if a cocktail or one if a glass of wine) but also not two days in a row, I try not to drink today if I did yesterday. Generally 3 drinks a week, 2 cocktails one glass of wine so 5 units. Sometimes less. I feel good physically, better than I did in the years I did not drink, but would not attribute it to drinking, we have more money now and better lifestyle overall, so slightly less stress.
If you read the one published by the WHO, It says "light" to "moderate" is less than 450ml, presumably meaning 450ml and over is considered "heavy" (which more or less lines up with 2 drinks a day.)
Generally, light is considered to be 1 drink a day, moderate is 1.5 and heavy is 2. So 1 drink a day is the cause of half of all alcohol-attributable cancers (according to the WHO).
People wanted to intervene because you were drinking one short shot per day?
Yep. Admittedly they didn't know how much I was drinking, just how often, compared to the fact that I only drink a couple times a month most of the time.
WHO classifies alcohol as carcinogenic as tobacco and asbestos. This is not new or controversial.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37905315/
The comment this was a reply to was specifically about many Americans not knowing there's a link. I wasn't even disputing the link in the comment, more just pointing out that 2 cups of liquor seemed like a whole lot to be classed as "Light to moderate" drinking imo
Edit: The comment this is in response to links an article that states many Americans don't know there's a link between the two*
TBF ingesting anything that's not what the orifice in question is intended for might be harmless, but probably isn't. Don't breath smoke, don't drink a concentrated light organic compound.
The WHO did a meta analysis, which is how they came to their conclusion.
The title "No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health" is slightly misleading though, since they focused on typical alcoholic beverages. There is no statement about alcohol in fruits.
Bottom line:
Drinking even a little bit of safe? Likely no.
Eating : unknown
From the WHO article:
So no, you're wrong, it specifically says your example is not "safe". They said "beverage", but consuming alcohol laden fruit would fall in the same category. The same would go for many "non-alcoholic" beers which are <0.5% alcohol, and many other things like kombucha, baked goods, chocolate, etc. You can debate whether they're correct or not, but they were very clear that tiny amounts are not safe.
Now, it's all about risk. And the more alcohol consumed, the higher the risk of developing cancer. The question is at what point the benefits outweigh the risk. Benefits could range from vitamins, minerals, fiber and healthy compounds, to reduced social anxiety and other psychological factors.
Thank you for your point of view. Since I have shared the article a lot of tibes myself, it's nice to take another perspective on it.
I haven't dived very deep into the research, but from what I have gathered the research did focus on beverages. Whether the alcohol content of a alcohol-free beer also falls into this category and therefore alcohol content in apples must be considered as well, was not conclusive to me. Sure, if fruits reach alcohol levels of average alcoholic beverages I suppose it's safe to label them as problematic as well. But until then I'd like to avoid reading too much into the research, until it has been clarified whether this really does apply to alcohol levels like in fruits as well.
Is binging on fruits a thing humans do?
And why would it be any different from binging on a variety of other substances containing the same ingredient in common?
Habit? Tradition? There are establishments in town that sell beer, wine, whiskey, or cidre. It's a thing, people do.
From a health perspective, I mean. If wine and beer and vodka all cause cancer, well wine is closer to a rotting pear than to the other two.
(Maybe you mistook me for OP)
I follow your logic. The alcohol in rotting fruit is the same substance in our drinks and most likely has the same effect. But, is this a problem that needs research? Who eats their booze?
How does it compare to CT scans? Asking for a friend.
I'm not a statistics expert, so very possibly bad wording or outright errors ahead.
Versus non-drinkers, 1 drink a day increases the absolute risk of getting cancer by 2% 2 drinks a day increases the absolute risk of getting cancer by 5%
(https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/alcohol/alcohol-fact-sheet)
Unfortunately, I'm having trouble finding the absolute risk increase for a single CT scan... But I think it is around 0.1%. This is based on the recent JAMA study that said that the scans from a given year (about 93 million of them) would it in 103000 future cancers developing.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2832778
A couple of takeaways: on an individual basis the risk of developing cancer from a CT scan is pretty low. On a population scale, its pretty damn high. Also though the increased chance is low (especially compared to the numbers above for alcohol) it's actually pretty significant if you consider it takes just one scan.
Ballpark, you might be talking the equivalent of 3 drinks a month?
It's an interesting question. I actually turned down a CT scan recently because it wasn't clear what the benefits of knowing the results would be, versus this extra risk.
Not nitpicking your numbers at all (mainly cause im too lazy to go hunting down the original sources), but a big problem that science media gets completely wrong is how they report risk percentages. They conflate changes in absolute risk with relative risk constantly, and it really hurts messaging.
For example, a few years back, the WHO released a report on consumption of processed meat and how it relates to colorectal cancer risk. Even their own press release, which should be perfect, says "each 50 g portion eaten daily increases the risk by 18%". That is really misleading if you dont know they are talking about a relative risk. The average person will interpret this as new risk %= baseline risk % + 18%.
The absolute lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is ~4%, so daily consumption of processed meat should bump it to ~4.7% (well, technically lower since the 4% includes processed meat consumers). Giving the before/after percentages helps communicate the risks way better. Even better is a risk curve showing how the risk changes as consumption increases (obviously that relies on the data being available).
Its also better to be able to contextualize so you can make well informed decisions across your life, e.g., it's dumb to deprive yourself a joy that increases lifetime cancer risk by 0.5% while ignoring other facets of your life that increase cancer by a much larger margin.
I tried not to conflate absolute and relative risk. The numbers I was going with came from the link I posted, which was not from a science journalist, but from the US National Cancer Institute. Also, note that the comment you replied to was more about an off the cuff comparison of the risk between CT scans and drinking alcohol. It wasn't meant to present scientific rigour.
Below is directly from the linked article, emphasis mine:
Using data from Australia, recalculated using US standard drinks, the recent Surgeon General’s Advisory reports that
This means that women who have one drink a day have an absolute increase in the risk of an alcohol-related cancer of 2 per 100, and those who have two drinks a day an absolute increase of 5 per 100, compared with those who have less than one drink a week. For men, the number of alcohol-related cancers per 100 is 10 for those who have less than one drink a week, 11 for those who have one drink a day (an increase of 1 per 100), and 13 for those who have two drinks a day (an increase of 3 per 100).
1 drink a day is quite a bit though, that is about the amount doctors ask if you drink more than here (14 units a week, 140ml ethanol).
As far as CT scans go I live in the UK, I doubt that the NHS is paying for that unless its actually necessary.
Is that really a recent discovery, i got taught that in school
Yes, recently (the past couple of years) the connection between small amounts of alcohol and increased cancer risk has been more thoroughly documented. Check the link from the WHO.