Large Study Warns That Consuming Alcohol Can Represent Direct Cause for Cancer

Society has always been pretty tolerant when it comes to alcohol consumption. Getting this substance into your system through various types of booze is generally considered fine as long as you’re not exaggerating with it. Alcohol consumption can even be a way to form relationships.

But is all that really true? Couldn’t there be a major downside to alcohol consumption? New Atlas writes about a new genetic study that will surely make many of us worry and rethink our drinking habits.

The new study in question seems pretty reliable, as it included the analysis of roughly 150,000 subjects for more than a decade. They were asked to complete surveys and reveal their drinking habits. As a result, the researchers involved claim that there’s a direct causal connection between alcohol consumption and developing cancer. The highest risk is represented by oesophageal cancers, as well as head and neck cancers.

Factors such as smoking, having a poor diet, and sedentarism have always been known as increasing a person’s risk for developing cancer. These factors are also associated with heavy alcohol consumption. So it’s no wonder how researchers started to suspect that consuming too much alcohol can lead to cancer.

Researchers observed that those participants who had low-alcohol tolerability genes have consumed significantly less alcohol compared to those without the gene variants.

Pek Kei, the lead researcher of the study, declared as quoted by New Atlas:

These findings indicate that alcohol directly causes several types of cancer, and that these risks may be increased further in people with inherited low alcohol tolerability who cannot properly metabolize alcohol.

Darren Griffin is a geneticist from the University of Kent, and he explained as quoted by the same source:

The study design inherently isolates the fact that it is alcohol consumption (not other lifestyle factors) that seem to cause the cancer,

Such studies have far-reaching implications for lifestyle choices, however, there are range of other ways in which alcohol can be damaging to the health.

The new study was published in ‘Cancer Genetic and Epigenetics’.