Drinking three beers a week increases your risk of breast or colon cancer, while drinking a glass of wine a day can increase your chances of developing heart disease and increases your chances of having a stroke, according to a new report highlighting the health risks. even moderate alcohol consumption. The report, released Monday by the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), reviewed several studies and said they show strong links between moderate to heavy alcohol use and certain fatal diseases, including cardiovascular disease and some forms of cancer. The centre, which advises Parliament on how to tackle addiction, also recommends mandatory labeling of alcoholic drinks to indicate safe portion sizes. “We’re coming out with a recommendation where we share with people in Canada a continuum of risk associated with different amounts of alcohol,” said Catherine Paradis, interim deputy director of research at the CCSA. The report is open for public consultation until 23 September. Dr Paradis explained that the proposed labeling is intended to show exactly how much alcohol each drink contains. Around the world, a standard drink is defined as a unit containing 8 to 20 grams of alcohol – that’s about half a shot to a shot and half whiskey. In Canada, a standard drink contains 13.45 grams of alcohol, which is the amount in a 30 ml shot of hard liquor or a 354 ml bottle of 5 percent beer. According to the CCSA report, to be at low risk of experiencing adverse, acute and/or long-term health consequences from drinking, a person would need to consume, on average, only zero to two standard drinks per week. As consumption increases from there, so do the potential negative effects. Three to six drinks a week puts someone at moderate risk of negative health outcomes. Six or more typical drinks a week puts a person at high risk. These numbers change slightly based on body weight and physiology. While men and women showed no overall difference in premature death, men can consume more drinks on average than women before suffering other serious health effects, including liver damage. High-risk drinking among women also has a serious impact on reproductive health. Public health experts have advised against drinking alcohol during pregnancy for decades because the adverse effects of fetal exposure include brain damage, behavioral problems and learning disabilities. Also, recent research shows that moderate to high-risk drinking can affect a woman’s overall fertility and ovulation cycle, potentially complicating the ability to get pregnant. “The whole philosophy behind this project is that people have the right to know and make informed decisions,” said Dr. Paradis, who adds that the label recommendations are not intended to prevent people from drinking. “It wasn’t so much about whether or not the label would work, but that if you want to count your drinks, you need to know how many drinks or how many standard drinks are in a certain container of alcohol.” Some research highlighted in the report has shown that labels have a deterrent effect on high-risk drinking. A study from Whitehorse, Yukon, which looked at more than 2,000 people who visited a single liquor store where the liquor was labeled for regular drinks and a cancer warning, found that sales for the labeled alcohol dropped by 6 .6%. Other studies have shown that alcohol health labels led to a 10% increase in recall of cancer risks and a 50% increase in recall of low-risk drinking guidelines among consumers. Alcohol consumption in Canada is associated with high health and economic costs. In 2017, according to the CCSA report, alcohol contributed to 18,000 deaths in Canada, and in the same year, $5.4 billion was spent on alcohol-related health care. Although the CCSA report examines the role of alcohol in issues such as intimate partner violence, an area that Dr. What remains unresolved, Paradis said, is how to deal with its relationship to mental health, which he said is poorly understood. “Unfortunately, we were unable to find evidence that met the very high quality criteria we set out to use for this project,” Dr Paradis said, noting that Australia faced a similar problem when revising its alcohol guidelines in 2016. Deep brain stimulation may help reduce cravings and alcohol consumption, study finds Canada’s drinking problem: why alcohol is the new cigarette According to a 2020 report by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHRCA), a systematic review of research found “no reliable evidence” to support a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and almost any mental health issue, with “limited evidence of an association” between alcohol consumption and worsening of bipolar disorder. Both CCSA and NHRCA said they gave poor grades to the state of research on the topic because most studies were limited in scope, difficult to interpret or based on low-quality data collection. Dr Paradis said some research would compare non-drinkers and drinkers, but included former abstinence at the time of data collection in the non-drinkers category, thus clouding the results. “This is definitely a next step for the scientific community to continue to improve our methodologies and our studies on the association between alcohol and mental health, so that in the future, guidelines can also take this very important dimension,” said Dr. Paradis. he said. Our Morning Update and Afternoon Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.
