Surgeon General calls for new label on drinks to warn Americans of alcohol's cancer risk

New studies have proven that alcohol is carcinogenic. The WHO has listed it as carcinogenic, but the U.S. agencies refuse to take that step. A warning label is quite appropriate. It is almost criminal, IMO, to not warn consumers in this manner.

Probably be good to be careful what you ask for. Red meat, white flour, and sugar all have far higher death counts than alcohol. If government would be consistent, we could see a LOT of warning labels in the grocery store. Also, to put things in perspective, let's compare to the "king" of cancer, tobacco. More or less, the quarter of Americans who used tobacco since 1966 have ~260,000 deaths from lung and oral cancers per year, versus ~20,000 for the ~3/4 of Americans who've used alcohol. That's a ~40x difference in relative risk.

Side note; it always baffles me when esteemed medical researchers don't use the proper quantification in terms of relative risk. This is no exception.

Regarding alcohol in particular, the interesting thing that I've seen is that most/all of the studies I've seen, even those that claim to show "no safe level" for drinking alcohol, show a "dip" between 0-2 drinks where the overall risk is lower than being a teetotaler. That's the classice "hormetic" curve that most substances have, really. So (just like red meat, butter, dairy, white flour, sugar, etc..) the risks involved are--as the CDC has known for decades, really--concentrated among those who over-use liquor.

So I guess that we might put labels on wine bottles saying "the over-use of this product results in preventable accidents, cirrhosis, some cancers, and avoidable arrests", but if we're going to be consistent, we need to put labels on red meat, butter, and the like warning that "the over-use of this product can lead to overweight, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and in general being a fatso".

The question is whether very many people really are unaware that alchol leads to these things, or that red meat/butter/cheese/sugar leads to those things, and whether whatever portion of people are actually unaware of this actually would respond well to warning labels. And let's be blunt; we've been putting warning labels on cigarettes since 1966, and the main things that have reduced smoking are (1) the government no longer drafts most young men and (2) vaping. Like it or not, the warning labels don't seem to have been a big effect.

And so our government, in its infinite lack of wisdom, is also attacking vaping, despite the fact that substituting nicotine alone for nicotine plus tars (cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco) has about halved the smoking rate. Again, it's that question of "can esteemed medical researchers get with the program and state their results in terms of relative risk?".

I'm getting rather suspicious of the anti-alcohol lobby to be honest. Alcohol consumption has been massively on the wane, cancer cases are skyrocketing, and we get all this focus and constant barrage of articles on alcohol? Yeah, I smell something, and it's not stale beer. Sorry.

It seems almost everything has a warning label these days. And now nobody pays attention, because once warning labels are on just about everything they might just as well be on nothing since they're no longer noticed. Warning labels should be used sparingly for things that truly have significant detrimental impact even in small amounts.

In the private sector, warning labels are to reduce liability by generally stating things that are self-evident to most people. "Don't stick your head in our industrial meat grinder" and so on. You tell the estate of the guy who did just that "we had a warning label, dummy", and the jury dutifully nods and acquits your client, hopefully.

In the public sector, it's about pretending to do something while you're really clueless about how to address the real problem. And if you look at the actual data, the statistically sound conclusions occur only at higher dosages--i.e. heavy drinking/drunkenness. Murthy knows this, but he's got to pretend to do something when he knows the problem is intractable.

As I read the data, the biggest problem with alcohol is the question of what do you do for people who drink (generally cheap) liquor to excess. Few people get totally trashed, for example, on good wine, single malt scotch, or microbrews. It's simply too darned expensive, and the taste simply isn't designed to go down easily. It also takes time & effort to impart these flavors--oak barrel aging, etc..

Heavy drinkers, on the other hand, tend to favor things with less taste--the point is to get drunk, not to enjoy the taste. Remember those "optimized for drinkability" Bud Lite commercials? What they actually do is to get guys into a room and try a few recipes, and the winner is the one they drink the most of--generally the beer with the least malt and hops and most adjuncts like corn syrup. Cheap wines, alcopops, and bottom drawer liquors follow the same pattern.

One thing the government did that helped was that about 30 years back, they increased the tax on wine, and the response of the U.S. wine industry was to stop shipping wine coolers and ship "alcopops" based on hard liquor instead. So long and short is that if you want to cut drinking of cheap liquor, you make it more difficult to make cheap.

And the best way to do that--most cheap liquor relies on corn syrup and sugar--is to stop grain and sugar subsidies. Obviously you would also get a big gain in ordinary nutrition out of that as well.

(edit; a final note is that since so many people in the government depend on agricultural subsidies for their jobs, getting an end to grain and sugar subsidies is a huge "lift". But right now is a great time, as Cuban sugar production is plunging, and the impact would not be as great as before)