A Fox News panel examines studies linking moderate alcohol to cancer risk and whether drinking could become the new smoking. Dr. Marty McCarrey and other medical experts discuss conflicting research on alcohol's health effects, cardiovascular benefits versus cancer risks, and industry PR concerns around moderation.
New medical studies link moderate drinking to— get this— cancer, sending shockwaves through the alcohol industry and your local bar. So could drinking become the new smoking? New studies revealing alcohol can cause cancer in even moderate drinkers. After years of hearing about the health benefits of an occasional drink, especially red wine. These studies are sending shockwaves through the alcohol industry and of course your local bar, fearing the booze business could take the same financial hit the tobacco industry did when smoking was found to cause lung cancer and heart disease, among other things. So is drinking the new smoking? Here to break it down for us, Dr. Tiffany Di Pietro, board-certified cardiologist, and Dr. Marty McCarrey, cancer surgeon at Johns Hopkins University. Show of hands, either of you think that smoking and drinking are equally damaging to your health?
Only with binge drinking.
Only binge drinking.
All right, I'm really glad we cleared that up. Thank you very much. Okay, so Dr. McCarrey, first to you. What's really going on here? How do you have all these studies that say drink red wine because it lowers your blood pressure and has all of these antioxidants that are good for you, and now we hear it causes cancer?
Yeah, you hear everything, you know, it's good for you, now it's bad, and good again. Well, it turns out that no one has ever suggested that binge drinking is good. It's, it's terrible for your heart, liver, pancreas, and everything. But moderate alcohol use, moderate use, is controversial. We in medicine tend to study the impact on the heart separate from the liver and everything else, and it turns out there's, there's mixed views out there. And some latest, some of the latest research has suggested It may not be good for general cancer types. We've known it causes head and neck cancers. We've known it's maybe contributed to colon cancer, but no one's understood its general impact on broader cancer. It turns out there are insulin receptors on cancer cells. We're just starting to understand that. The industry is trying to get ahead of this. They're worried about a PR nightmare.
Well, well, Chris, certainly the headline is a nightmare for any industry. If you think your product causes cancer. Dr. Sussman, is there a point though that we sort of all have to say, okay, we could all eat vegetables all day and have no fun of any kind and then live to be 140 but might be miserable doing it? Sort of this idea that there's a balance between whether or not you're gonna have a drink or a Coca-Cola or a Snickers bar, any of them have consequences.
You hit the nail on the head. It's all about moderation, right? I mean, this is like telling a diabetic patient that they're never allowed to have a piece of cake, right? So there has to be some, some moderation. I mean, me as a cardiologist, if I try and tell one of my cardiology I tell my patients that's, you know, a mom of 3 kids that comes home after working all day to a dirty house that she can't have a glass of wine, I can kiss my private practice goodbye, right? I mean, there's definitely some, some element to moderation in this, and, and we do know statistically and through research that moderate amounts of alcohol, that which is 1 glass of wine or 1 alcoholic beverage for a woman, or 1 to 2 for a man, we do know that that decreases heart disease, and we do know that heart disease is the number 1 killer of men and women in the United States, not worldwide, but in the United States. So if we're talking about decreasing death and decreasing mortality, I'm all for a glass of wine a day.
I don't think you'll get any argument for anybody on the all for a glass of wine a day. I always just say, just depends on the size of the glass. So thank you guys.
Right, well, that's the pour in a restaurant, not the pour at your house.
Okay, all right, there we go. You know, these are distinctions we'll leave out. All right, docs, thanks guys.
Thanks so much for having us. I'm glad we ended on that point.
Yes, exactly.
Going into the holiday weekend.
So we all have a little permission from the good doctor.
