Science Vs - Alcohol: A Pour Decision?

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

For decades we’ve been told that having a glass or two of wine is good for you. But recently there’ve been reports that even a little bit of booze is bad for you. So what is going on? Is just a bit of alcohol dangerous? To find out we talk to epidemiologist and nutritionist Prof. Eric Rimm, psychologist Prof. Tim Stockwell, and cancer researcher Dr. Susan Gapstur. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/31p8pk5 Selected references: Eric’s study of drinking and heart attacks in over 40,000 men Tim and Kaye’s meta-analysis critiquing the heart benefit hypothesisMeta-analysis showing the increased risk of cancer and other diseases from drinking different amounts Credits:  This episode was produced by Meryl Horn with help from Wendy Zukerman as well as Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Editing help from Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Michelle Dang. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks especially to Michelle Dang for her all her research help on this episode. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode including Dr. Arthur Klatsky, Dr. William Kerr, Dr. Tim Niami, Professor William Ghali, Dr. Wendy Chen, Max Griswold and many others. Recording help from Andrew Stelzer, Susanna Capelouto, Katie Sage, and Joseph Fridman. Also thanks to Lynn Levy, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We are back for a new season. It's good to be here. We missed you. And we're kicking off the season by pitting facts against old fashions. Today, alcohol. Is it good for you or not? For decades, we've been hearing that drinking a glass or two is practically a health food. There is groundbreaking new research on the benefits of drinking alcohol moderately. Many studies have shown that drinking a moderate amount of red wine can help the fight against heart disease, Alzheimer's and some cancers.

One to two glasses of something a day, that might actually be pretty good for you. But while many of us were drinking up this news, things recently changed. If you turned on the telly last year, you were hearing a very different story. We hate to be the ones to break some sobering news to you, but a major new study says no amount of alcohol is good for your overall health. So what's going on?

Is science now saying boo to booze? Even that one glass of wine at dinner does more harm than good. No amount of alcohol is good for you, not even a little bit. Is this thing that we love doing after a stressful day of work really killing us? Well, it turns out that what we thought was a fairly simple question took us down this rabbit hole where things just got curiouser and curiouser and it became almost impossible to know what to think.

We even surveyed around 50 experts about their thoughts on alcohol and they couldn't give us a clear answer either. So, might as well give up, right? Never. Here at Science Versus, there's no question too confusing, no research quagmire too sticky. Strap on your beer goggles and get yourself ready for a peer-reviewed adventure to find out once and for all,

is alcohol good for us or not? When it comes to alcohol, there are lots of opinions. But then there's science. Science vs Alcohol is coming up just after the break. Cheers! just after the break. Cheers. Welcome back. Today we are finding out if that cheeky beer is killing us. We all know that drinking a lot, like four drinks a day, can be bad for us.

It increases our risk for all kinds of diseases, like liver disease, and it makes it more likely that we'll get into serious accidents. But where it's confusing is when it comes to drinking in moderation. You know, cracking open a cold one or two. Because it seems like every day we hear something different. Some say it's good for you, some say it's bad for you, and all I want to know is can I have a beer? To start our journey in answering this question, we wanted to take you to a time where basically no one was seriously arguing that alcohol was good for you. Alcohol is a violent narcotic, almost as if its aim in life was to transform man back

into an animal. This is a PSA from 1952. All it takes is five drops of alcohol for every thousand drops of blood. And brother, you're a dead duck. Things changed for alcohol in the 1970s, though. That was when a very curious study came out showing that alcohol might actually be good for you. It found that people who drank had far fewer heart attacks

than those who didn't drink. And it caused a huge stir. Heart disease kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. It's the biggest killer around. And if this finding was true, no longer were drinkers dead ducks, but they might be majestic eagles soaring to health. Other scientists immediately bellied up to the bar and wanted to find out, could this be true?

Could alcohol really be good for you? I was surprised that there was something that seemed so simplistic. It really was, gee, just really having a couple glasses of wine with dinner can have that strong of an impact. Eric Rimm is a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard, and one of his first big studies was checking to see if that 1970s paper was right. After all, the idea that alcohol could help your heart? It sounded too good to be true. Yeah, I think people were skeptical. Anecdotally, alcohol was bad. People who showed up in hospitals

had too much, and therefore, if too much was bad, then, you know, a moderate amount was bad too. So in the 1980s, Eric tried to get to the bottom of the glass. He got more than 40,000 men to tell him how much they drank, their medical history. And he also asked the men what they ate to see if maybe it wasn't the alcohol, but something the drinkers happened to be eating that was protecting their heart. Maybe we can sift out, is it the alcohol or is it the diet? So we had four pages where we asked them about their diet, and it was a list of about 130 foods. So you'd go through and tell us how many sweet potatoes you ate on average over the last year, how much red meat you ate. To make sure that Eric could trust that people were accurately filling out

his survey, Eric's team later made sure that what people said they ate lined up with what was actually in their bodies. So they'd look for specific chemicals found in certain foods. So if you eat a lot of carrots, that means you should have a lot of beta carotene in your blood. And sure enough, people that reported more carrots had much higher levels of beta carotene. And people that reported more tuna had more mercury in their toenails, which we'd expect because there's mercury in tuna. So you actually went and measured the mercury

in people's toenails to make sure that they were reporting their tuna consumption correctly? Yeah. We have one of the world's largest collections of toenails. Yeah, I don't like to brag about that, but that comes up at parties. Yeah, sounds like a real rager. Okay, back to Eric's first study. So as the late 1980s were rolling into the 90s,

Eric starts plugging all this info about what people drank and ate and whether they got a heart attack into a computer, which was very fancy for the time. You hit the enter key. In this case, you know, I had to wait eight hours for it to churn through because the computers were pretty slow at that time. And when the results popped up, Eric found that alcohol really was good for the men's hearts.

Any amount of alcohol lowered their risk of heart diseases. And generally speaking, the more they drank, the stronger the effect. And the benefit from booze was huge. Like men who drank three glasses a day, they had a 35% lower risk of getting a heart attack than those who drank nothing. And this was after you considered what they ate. And I looked at the result going, no, it can't be that strong.

It can't be that strong that there really is a 35% reduction. Eric's like, hardly anything you do makes that big of a difference. So the absolute risk reduction is very similar to exercising regularly. Wow. Eric found that drinking booze lowered the men's risk of a heart attack as much as exercising regularly, which is bonkers. And if you're into liquor, the news for booze was about to get even better. It didn't make a difference what you drank, that if you liked vodka or if you liked beer or if you liked white wine, you had the same benefit as red wine. Other studies have come out backing this up too. Beer, gin, whiskey, tequila, all of them were found to be good for your heart.

And while Eric's first study was only in men, other research has found that it worked for women too. Their risk of coronary heart disease dropped if they only had one or two glasses a day. And as all this research on alcohol came out, scientists immediately started wondering why. When researchers did some digging, they found a few things going on that might explain this. For example, alcohol may raise your good cholesterol,

keeping plaque from building up in your arteries. It also might prevent blood clots. All good stuff for preventing future heart attacks. It seemed my case of wine closed. I dare say there is a few people at my institution who have toasted me for 30 years since my initial publication. Yeah, it is not just my friends. It is my colleagues.

It is the dean of our school. So, drinks all round. I'm cracking open a cold one. And I'm taking a sip. Well, before I down this, you should know that not everyone is toasting this idea that alcohol is good for your heart. Hang on a minute. This is so flawed. This is so fundamentally flawed.

This is Tim Stockwell. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria in Canada. And Tim, he is battling team booze. He's part of team booze. That's going to get confusing. So before we jump to the conclusion, it's the alcohol, which is such a nice conclusion. It's no, it's more complicated than that. Scientists in Tim's camp, they were the ones who threw a wrench into all this intoxicating booze research.

But Tim wasn't always a party pooper. In fact, he used to think that alcohol was good for your heart. Then he met a sociologist called Kay Fillmore. It was really when I met Kay Fillmore and got to know her and her work that I began to seriously question the scientific evidence. Tell me about Kay. She was quite, she was one feisty woman. She's about five foot nothing, heavy smoker.

She liked her scotch. And, oh, my God, she would give it to anybody in large public meetings. And Kay was about to start giving it to scientists like Eric. She died several years ago, but Tim told us that Kay started thinking there was something fishy about all these alcohol studies. So she phoned Tim. And, yeah, I get this call, this gravelly voice. She was smoking away, puffing on a cigarette.

And, Tim, can you help me? Tim said yes. So Kay's like, all right. All these studies are showing that those who drink have less heart disease than those who don't. Well, have you ever thought, who are these non-drinkers in these studies? Like, what kind of person doesn't drink anything? It might seem like people who don't drink would be these healthy types, you know, my body is a temple.

But Kay suspected that wasn't true. She started looking into the studies that have been done on people who don't drink and found something kind of shocking. Generally speaking, they were more likely to be unhealthy. Many of them used to drink but then had to stop for some medical reason. And so the team figured, well, if you want to know if alcohol is good for you, then it's a bad idea to be comparing drinkers to these sick teetotalers. You know, they're unhealthy, so they make the moderate drinkers look good by comparison.

The people who did drink and then stopped, well, some scientists call them sick quitters. And it sounds like a bad burn, but it basically means they didn't stop drinking because it sounds like a bad burn, but it basically means they didn't stop drinking because they were running a triathlon, but because they weren't well. So Tim and Kay thought, let's only look at the studies that we trust, like those that don't have this problem with sick quitters.

And when they did that and ran the numbers, then all of a sudden, alcohol wasn't good for your heart anymore. Tim remembers the moment that the team figured it out. I remember being stuck in there in the snowstorm and talking with her on the phone and working over the data and, yeah, it was pretty clear that the significance fell away. Significance fell away. That's the dorky way of saying that his paper couldn't find evidence that beer is good for my heart. Are you someone that people want to invite to parties

based on your research? Oh, oh, I was invited around to dinner at friends last night, so I'm not a complete pariah. I do occasionally leave my house. And when Tim and Kay published their study in 2006, it got a lot of media attention, making headlines across the US saying that alcohol might not be good for us anymore. And it really set the stage for the confusion that's been mixing us up today. Even that one glass of wine at dinner does more harm than good.

One day it'll kill you, the next it'll save your life. For Eric, Tim's research was like a shot of vodka across the bow. Eric says he's taken these sick quitters into account in his studies, and he still finds that alcohol is good for our heart. But Tim has other problems with this research and it basically centres around this idea that it's just really hard to account for everything that might be different about people who drink and those who don't.

And so if you're finding that drinkers have lower rates of heart disease, it's hard to know that alcohol is the reason why. This is a very complex issue. These are hugely complicated things to resolve. And so the two sides have gone round and round on this, with no end in sight. And by the way, the fact that no one has put a cork in this yet made us wonder if maybe other than these nerdy gripes,

could this be about the alcohol industry? Like, are they brewing up their own research? I mean, a big National Institutes of Health study just got cancelled because of worries about interference from big alcohol. Our producer Meryl Hor Horn asked Tim about it. Do you think it explains this debate, why there are some researchers that are so convinced that alcohol is good for your heart?

Well, the industry funding, I think it's just a small part of it. Most of these studies are not funded by the alcohol industry. And full disclosure, we have alcohol advertising on Science Versus. Away from industry funding, though, Eric actually has a totally different complaint for us. I am concerned that by doing this story, you're doing somewhat of a disservice. By giving equal weight to both sides, you've essentially said, well, this is what the field's like. When you go to a conference, there'll be equal people on both sides of the aisle. This is not like a wedding where there's equal number of people on the bride's side and the

groom's side. After talking to Eric, we weren't sure what to think. And so we ended up reaching out to hundreds of scientists to find out what was going on here. Like, was this booze battle for real? And it turns out that a bunch of scientists are now questioning if alcohol is good for your heart. So we heard back from around 50 experts, and they were split.

Half agreed with Eric, and the other half either didn't think alcohol helped your heart or they said they didn't know. So clearly, this is still a spirited debate. Ultimately, where did we land? Well, last year, two big reviews came out, pulling together work from this entire field. And these newer studies tend to show that Eric is right.

Alcohol seems to be good for your heart. But there are a couple of caveats. Now that more studies are being more careful with things like the sick-quitter effect, they're finding some things that are different to what Eric found. For one, men and women get a benefit to their heart after just about one drink a day. It's not the more you drink, the stronger the effect.

Also, more sobering news. Alcohol isn't as good at protecting your heart as that early research had found. Conclusion. It does look like alcohol can protect us against heart disease, which is the biggest killer in the United States. But it's not the lifesaver that those earlier studies had found. So, bottom line, I'm taking a sip of my beer, but I'm a little less excited about it.

Now, while the heart is getting all this attention, there's something else going on with alcohol and your body. Something else that might make you think twice before picking up that glass. Now when I go home and I go to take a beer from the fridge, I'm now going to be thinking of what you just said. Good. Not for me. And we're going to tell you about that right after the break. Welcome back.

So for years, as we've been hearing that some alcohol is good for us, the conversation has basically centred around your heart. You could say it's the heart of the issue. But something's been bobbing under the surface this whole time, like the olive at the bottom of a martini glass. And this thing might overshadow any of the potential benefits that alcohol is giving to our heart. And it's cancer. Susan Gapster at the American Cancer Society is looking

into this, which she says can make for some awkward conversation over cocktails. Of course, you get the original, oh my gosh, don't show her my drink. Really? But, you know, then it's people are curious. They want to know. Yeah, and we wanted to know. So when it comes to cancer, how much alcohol is safe to drink? So the most recent evidence has shown that when it comes to cancer, there is no safe amount. No safe amount. What Susan is saying here is that even that cheeky glass or two

of wine every day is bad news when it comes to many different types of cancers. Even at low amounts of consumption, drinking alcohol increases the risk of mouth and throat cancers, cancers of the esophagus, which is that tube in the body just beyond your throat. Another big one for women is breast cancer. Light drinking bumps up your chances of getting it. The research suggests it's even riskier if you binge. And the news gets worse the more you drink. Then your risk of getting all kinds of cancers go up.

So how is alcohol doing this? How is it causing cancer? Well, here's one way it can happen. Susan told us that after you have one drink, the alcohol is broken down into something called acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde reacts with DNA and with proteins to basically glob onto them. Acetaldehyde sticks to our DNA and it can squish itself right in the middle of the double helix,

getting all up in the DNA's business. And all this can trigger mutations in our DNA, leading to cancer cells. And that's just one mechanism. There are others. Acid aldehyde can prevent those cells that are damaged from dying. This is a problem because our body has a way to clean up damaged cells so they don't stick around and grow into tumours. But acid aldehyde mucks this up too. And when those dud cells with messed up DNA don't die,

we can get cancer. We want damaged cells to die, and acetaldehyde can help inhibit that death. I mean, I'm imagining myself now when I go home and I go to take a beer from the fridge, which I know is currently sitting in the fridge. I'm now going to be thinking of what you just said. Good.

Not for me. So, alcohol increases our risk of getting cancer. But, I mean, doesn't basically everything give us cancer? What we wanted to know is how bad is it? Like, is alcohol a liquid cigarette? Well, we all know that when it comes to cancer, ciggies are the worst. About 19% of cancers in the population

can be attributed to smoking. And Susan told us that almost 6% of cancers in the US are caused by alcohol. 6%. So not as bad as Siggy's, but still not great. And if you've got a cold one sitting next to you, what does all this mean? Like, how much will that drink increase your risk of getting cancer?

Well, to give you an example, one of the cancers that you're most likely to get from having a drink each day is actually breast cancer. That's for a woman anyway. So let's zoom in on this. Susan told us that the average woman's lifetime risk of getting breast cancer is a little more than 12%. But if she's drinking about five drinks a week, her risk jumps up to a little more than 13%. And it can be hard to know what to feel about a stat like that. So here's how Susan thinks about it. This is something you can do if you're worried about your cancer risk. If you are a woman and you are worried about

your breast cancer risk, you know, minimizing your consumption. If you are a two drink a day drinker, you know, starting to reduce that is something you can do. Currently, the national guidelines in the U.S. recommend that women shouldn't drink more than one drink a day and men should keep it to two. When we dug into these recommendations, we realized that there wasn't clear science as to why the cut-off is like this. It's now looking like everyone's risk for cancer goes up if they have just one glass a day. And as we mentioned, the newest research is showing that the benefit to everyone's heart, on average, comes from one drink too. So when it comes to alcohol, should we raise a glass?

1. Does alcohol help our heart? Yes, probably. While there is some nerdy argy-bargy going on, overall, the research does show that it can reduce your risk of getting heart disease. And that is the number one killer in the US. 2. Does alcohol increase our risk of cancer? Yes, even if you don't drink very much. And the more you drink, the greater your risk.

And by the way, cancer, that's the second biggest killer in the US. So, alcohol, good for the heart, bad for the cancer. Should I drink this beer or not? We asked all of our experts where they personally stood on drinking, and while none of them were big boozers, none of them had cut out alcohol completely. I'm a red wine fan mostly, although a good Chardonnay from California is great. Well, look, I like a glass of wine or a beer. These days, I never drink more than two, I think.

You know, I love buttery Chardonnays. So for me, I'm going to finish this beer, but I won't crack open another one. So, cheers?

That's science vs. Alcohol. Hi, Meryl Hawn, producer at Science vs. Hi, Wendy. So, how many citations in this week's episode? This week, we have 90 citations. 90 citations! And that includes our survey. Yeah, shout out to Michelle that includes our survey. Yeah.

Shout out to Michelle Dang, our fantastic new intern. Oh, my God. She contacted so many researchers for this. If you want to see the results of it, where can you look? At our website. Oh, my gosh. It really is a bar graph. All right.

Let's get out of here. And Science Versus is now on Instagram. Yeah, you can see behind the scenes photos and just generally photos of us being nerds. So find us on Instagram. We're at science underscore VS. That's science underscore VS. This episode was produced by Meryl Horne

with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, as well as Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Editing help from Caitlin Kenny. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Michelle Dang. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Thanks especially to Michelle Dang for all her research help on this episode. Also, a big thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Arthur Klatsky, Dr William Kerr, Dr Tim Nyami, Professor William Garley,

Dr Wendy Chen, Max Griswold and many others. Recording help from Andrew Stelzer, Susanna Capilouto, Katie Sage and Joseph Friedman. Also, thanks to Lynn Levy, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. Next week, we'll take you to an ugly and long-forgotten chapter in America's science history.

And we ask, what went wrong? We were putting poison on people's backs. And at the time, I thought it was the most interesting thing. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next week.