Dr. Tabatha Barber explains how alcohol damages cells and raises cancer risk. Ethanol converts to acetaldehyde, which weakens your body's ability to repair DNA. Alcohol also shifts estrogen metabolism toward forms linked to cellular damage.
Dr. Tabatha Barber.
April 4, 2024.
When you drink ethanol, alcohol, it gets broken down by alcohol dehydrogenase. That turns it into acetyl aldehyde, and aldehydes destroy things. So it blocks our antioxidative defense system so that we can't repair our DNA the way that we normally would. It also increases our overall estrogen level because it, it blocks the two hydroxy pathway to the liver. So once we're done using our estradiol, it gets turned into estrone and then it can go down different pathways. Alcohol increases the production of 4 hydroxy estrone. This is the red pathway on the Dutch test that you don't want too much of. This is what damages the cells, damages the DNA inside the cells, and that increases your risk of cancer.
