I’ve been drinking for 7 years. Typicall I’ve only drank 3-4 drinks a year. If I stop drinking now, would that help decrease chances of cancer? If it does will it take a long time?
Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re worried about getting cancer from 3-4 drinks per year, it sounds like you might be dealing with a fair bit of anxiety.
Stress caused by anxiety is bad for your health and a possible cancer risk, and almost certainly worse for you than 3-4 drinks a year. I don’t want you to now be anxious about your anxiety, but this might be a good thing to focus on to improve your general quality of life (and possibly reduce your cancer risk in the process).
You could start by talking to a doctor or other medical professional about it, or try finding a therapist in your area. The therapist search on https://www.psychologytoday.com/ is a good place to look, or try an online service like Better Help.
[edit: corrected overstatement about stress being a major cancer risk]
Stress caused by anxiety is a major cancer risk, definitely much more so than 3-4 drinks a year.
Oh great, another thing to be anxious about. My anxiety is going so out of control it’s going meta now.
Have you ever had chest pain because of anxiety…and then the chest pain itself gives you anxiety about having chest pain?? Lmao
Have a drink and relax.
3-4 drinks per year won’t affect your cancer risk. Unless you’ve been drinking radium or something.
What if I’ve been drinking radium
That’s completely wrong. There’s no safe level of alcohol intake:
https://time.com/6248439/no-safe-amount-of-alcohol/
Edit: from the articles, in case you don’t have time to read them:
“We cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. It doesn’t matter how much you drink—the risk to the drinker’s health starts from the first drop of any alcoholic beverage”
No safe level of sunlight by the same logic.
Oh come on, you don’t have to drink. Drinking is a choice and an easily avoidable health risk.
deleted by creator
Are you my coworker?
deleted by creator
I might!
As a non-drinker who has seen the ravages of alcohol abuse in several loved ones, I completely understand the “no level is safe” guideline.
That said, 3-4 drinks per year is far below any measure of alcohol use that is seriously studied, where researchers look at drinking at the “amount per week” level. 3-4 drinks per year is essentially on the level of being a non-drinker.
Alcohol, similar to eating red meat, smoking, sunlight, smoked food, etc a cancer risk, but it does not always cause cancer. Given that you lifetime chance of developing cancer is around 50%, a 0.5% increased chance of cancer is fairly insignificant on an individual level (but from a public health standpoint it might be), but a 20% increase is.
A small amount of alcohol like this presents a fairly insignificant risk. There is no truly safe level, but you would have to drink a lot for a significantly increase in cancer risk. At that point you are at a far higher risk of other forms of poisoning. Even just drunkenness itself highly increase your risk of major falls, car crashes, even house fires. With alcohol, cancer is the least of it’s problems.
There are some large, easily avoidable cancer risks in daily life, like sunlight exposure, which can be prevented with sunscreen. Whenever you hear that “X causes cancer”, always find out how big the effect is, it could be almost insignificant like eating red meat, or a huge risk, like smoking or sunburns .
I’m going to assume you mean 3-4 drinks per week and not per year. If its per year, your not a drinker (unless these are multiday black out binges).
Alcohol is hard on your liver, so reducing that stress will help your liver stay healthy. Alcohol is processed into fructose, and then into sugar into your blood stream. Cancer cells are typically defined as having mitochondrial dysfunction… meaning they can’t eat fat/ketones. Cancer cells can only eat Sugar in the blood stream. If you have cancer and you have excessive sugar in your blood your feeding it!
So yes, if you reduce alcohol consumption, you reduce your cancer risk because there is less food for baby cancer to eat to grow into a big threat.
Jesus, dude. You need a drink.
Drinking alcohol doesn’t cause cancer. It destroys your liver. And it would need more like 4 times a week (depending on how much you drink every night).
Alcohol absolutely increases the risk of cancer. But yeah, 3-4 drinks a year is nothing.
Lol. Okay. Your risk of getting cancer doubles (or becomes three times) if you drink 1,5l of beer or half a liter of wine daily?! four and a half cans/small bottles of beer each day? who does that? at that point i’d be afraid of becoming an alcoholic.
Half a liter of wine is what? Two cups? There’s a lot of functional alcoholics who easily drink a whole bottle at dinner each night.
My parents are perfect examples. 1700 hits and it’s cocktail time, have a couple before dinner, wine with dinner, and often after dinner drinks as well.
Nearly every single day.
Note that moderate intake of alcohol can be beneficial to health.
More than 100 prospective studies show an inverse association between light to moderate drinking and risk of heart attack, ischemic (clot-caused) stroke, peripheral vascular disease, sudden cardiac death, and death from all cardiovascular causes.
But if you’re only considering cancer, then as some of the other answers suggested, cutting alcohol intake to zero could reduce the risk of getting cancer, although the reduction is likely very small that’s neglectable.
The better conclusion is “people who drink in moderation have a decreased risk of cancer”, which is different. Causation is hard to prove, especially when we can only ethically do observational studies. It’s likely that people who drink in moderation are more likely to make healthy choices in other areas of their life or have other factors that reduce risk.
If you’ve been drinking 3-4 drinks a year for 7 years, you’d almost decrease your chances of cancer by drinking more lol
If you are referring to the J curve (that the lowest point is those who drink a little), it’s usually explained that those who don’t drink at all usually do so because of poor health.
I don’t drink because alcohol gives me bad heartburn and a headache long before I get drunk. Guess that does sorta count as being in poor health.
I hardly ever even drank a drop until I “discovered” alcohol at 26. Enjoyed it on and off for a few years and now only at 29, drinking gives me an instant headache and makes me feel like shit before I’m even drunk. I don’t get what happened, but it’s like any amount of drinking instantly gives me a mild hangover.
it might. but the difference would be absolutely marginal. also there’s a line between reasonably moderating your life not to die of cancer at 30 and worrying about everything and micromanaging every single aspect of your life to minimize your risk of cancer, which could ironically increase it. i know you didnt say anything like that, but many keep reading that x thing causes cancer and cut it out of their lives, then read that y causes it too and so on, just be reasonable
