Public Health ‘Experts’ Set The Stage For A New Prohibition

You may have noticed that there has been, in recent months, in the media and among our sainted “public health experts,” a full court press against booze. We constantly hear, now, about how incredibly dangerous alcohol is — in any amount. Of course, we’ve always known that alcohol consumed immoderately — consumed in too great a volume, or too quickly — can be very dangerous. But the idea that alcohol is significantly dangerous in any amount, no matter how you drink it, or how much of it you drink, is rather new. It is the latest narrative from our self-appointed public health authorities. And it is the opposite of the narrative they were spreading up until approximately five seconds ago.

Now, I know that some people will say that it’s not worth questioning this narrative. After all, if fewer people end up drinking alcohol because of it, that’s seemingly not a bad thing. Maybe they’re overstating the dangers, or even lying about them, but it’s for the greater good. Let’s just go with it. But I happen to think it’s always worth questioning the official narrative. Also, I think that false narratives from “health experts” for the sake of the greater good always lead to bad things. I would like to think we all understand that by now.

So let’s take an honest look at this issue. Just a few days ago, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that blames alcohol, in all its forms, for causing cancer. Watch:

The upshot of this advisory is that the Surgeon General wants new, prominent warning labels on alcohol products, just like we see on tobacco products. He also wants to, “incorporate proven alcohol reduction strategies into population-level cancer prevention initiatives and plans.” In other words, the Biden administration wants to set the stage for more regulations, bans, and maybe even prohibition, at some point in the future. As the Surgeon General puts it in his advisory, “Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity.” He goes on to say, “For certain cancers, like breast, mouth, and throat cancers, evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.”

Yes, drinking less than one alcoholic drink per day is now dangerous, apparently. A sip of wine “may” be fatal, we’re told. If you’re keeping track, this is the opposite of what we were told for decades. Just a couple of years ago, for example, we were informed that drinking wine in moderation is a great way to live longer. Watch:

We went from “pop those corks” to “wine is basically cyanide” in record time. So, what exactly explains this sudden reversal in public health guidance?

From the Surgeon General’s advisory, it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of new data. Pretty much every study he cites is from several years ago. That’s why I went looking at some other news reports. As far as I can tell, only one local anchor has bothered to ask this question. Here’s how it went:

 

Apparently, during the lockdowns, people drank a lot and bad things happened to them. Therefore, in just the span of a couple of years, we can apparently now conclude that drinking extremely small amounts of alcohol can increase your risk of throat cancer. People drinking large amounts of alcohol while they were locked in their homes, alone and depressed, apparently also tells us that it’s bad to drink small amounts of alcohol socially.

That logic of course doesn’t make any sense, so I pulled up the studies from 2019 (and earlier) that the Surgeon General cites in his advisory. And what I found is that the COVID lockdowns, of course, have nothing to do with this, because they happened a year after these studies were even conducted. And when I read the fine print in these studies, I realized very quickly that they don’t actually support what the Surgeon General is claiming. Most of them are “meta studies” that collect a bunch of other studies that supposedly link moderate alcohol consumption to cancer.

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But when you pull up those underlying studies, here’s what you find. There’s one paper from 2018 entitled, “Colorectal Cancer and Alcohol Consumption.” It’s from the peer-reviewed journal “Cancers.” It doesn’t say anything about “less than one drink” causing cancer, or anything like that. Instead, the researchers state that, when it’s broken down in the body, alcohol does release a substance that can potentially damage DNA.

But then they include this very important disclaimer:

Alcoholics themselves are predisposed to a poor diet, low in folate and fiber, and circadian disruption, which could further augment alcohol-induced colon carcinogenesis.

In other words, it’s difficult to isolate the specific effects of alcohol on cancer development, because people who drink a lot of alcohol tend to have many other health-related issues — and it’s basically impossible to fully control for all of those variables.

Several other studies that have looked into the link between alcohol and cancer have said the same thing. Here’s another one, from the peer-reviewed journal “Alcohol Research & Health.”

Alcohol intake may appear to be positively associated with lung cancer but the actual association may be confounded by cigarette smoking, which is related with both alcohol intake (because people who smoke also tend to drink) and the risk of lung cancer.

Again, they’re admitting that there are “confounding factors” that they aren’t able to fully control for. Someone who drinks a lot is more likely to smoke a lot of cigarettes. That’s why it’s difficult to say the alcohol is responsible form them developing cancer. That’s especially true since all of this information is self-reported, and people often aren’t honest about what they’re drinking or smoking.

This is all a pretty big problem for the Surgeon General’s claim that drinking even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer, or that alcohol is directly causing tens of thousands of cancer deaths. He simply doesn’t have the evidence to support what he’s saying. It’s true that alcohol does release a substance that’s been shown to damage DNA, but by itself, that fact doesn’t tell us much. A lot of everyday substances can damage DNA. Sunlight, for example, damages DNA. That doesn’t mean we should never go outside.

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There was also a study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013 that demonstrated that pretty much everything we eat can, in some way, increase our cancer risk. From the study:

We selected 50 common ingredients from random recipes in a cookbook. … Forty ingredients (80%) had articles reporting on their cancer risk. … 72 percent [of these articles] concluded that the tested food was associated with an increased or a decreased risk … Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients.

Just to reiterate: nearly everything you eat supposedly impacts your cancer risk. The Surgeon General knows all of this, but he’s decided to push a political agenda instead of actual science. And it’s not the first time he’s done that. There was a recent deep-dive in the Wall Street Journal op-ed into this Surgeon General, whose name is Vivek Murthy. He’s a pro-censorship activist who says that “gun violence” is a public health issue that needs to be regulated like a virus.

And his timing with this alcohol advisory couldn’t be worse. Just a few weeks ago — in December — there was a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. And it found that moderate drinkers actually have a lower risk of premature death from a number of ailments than non-drinkers — which again, is what they’ve been saying for years.

This whole episode is yet more evidence that health and dietary guidelines from our “trusted” health authorities are constantly changing, backtracking, and contradicting themselves. The truth is that nobody has the elixir for immortality. Nobody knows or will ever know the precise recipe to avoid disease and live a long life. There is no such recipe. Everyone will die. And almost everyone, if they live long enough, will get cancer. Almost anything can therefore be linked to cancer. Public health “experts” are able to use this uncertainty and anxiety to herd the public in one direction and then another and then back in the other direction again.

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The other thing to keep in mind is the actual level of risk we’re talking about here. Public health “experts” have been able to manipulate mass amounts of people in all kinds of ways by exploiting the fact that most people don’t understand or conceptualize relative risk. They just hear the word “risk” and get scared, not differentiating in their head between a 0.01% risk and a 99% risk. All that to say, even if moderate alcohol consumption does increase your cancer risk — and that’s still a big if — the percentage increase is likely to be very, very small.

A few years ago, a professor of pediatrics wrote an article for the New York Times reacting to an announcement from the American Society of Clinical Oncology claiming that moderate alcohol consumption increases your risk of cancer. He tried to put that increase into perspective:

Let’s stipulate that there may be a correlation between light or moderate drinking and some cancers. We still don’t know if the relationship is causal, but let’s accept that there’s at least an association. For breast cancer — which is the cancer that seems to be garnering the most headlines — light drinking was associated with a relative risk of 1.04 in the announcement…

A 40-year-old woman has an absolute risk of 1.45 percent of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years. This announcement would argue that if she’s a light drinker, that risk would become 1.51 percent. This is an absolute risk increase of 0.06 percent. Using what’s known as the Number Needed to Harm, this could be interpreted such that if 1,667 40-year-old women became light drinkers, one additional person might develop breast cancer. The other 1,666 would see no difference.

Now you might say that 1 out of 1,667 is still a risk not worth taking. That’s fine. It’s your prerogative. Although, I will say, you have to be willing to take that level of risk in order to live a functional human existence. You can cut out alcohol, but nearly everything else you eat, drink, or do carries some kind of risk. And in many cases, the risk is greater than 1 out of 1,667. But that’s fine. I’m not trying to convince anyone to drink alcohol, or to continue drinking it if they want to stop.

But I’m still sick of “public health experts” getting everyone panicked on flimsy or fraudulent grounds. We should always question them when they do that. And we should always wonder about their real motivations. Especially when their “guidance” constantly changes and contradicts.

Of course they never show any humility about it. They always have supreme confidence in their recommendations, no matter how often their recommendations turn out to be terrible, and no matter how often their recommendations directly refute the recommendations these same people were making 15 seconds earlier. What they should say about alcohol is something like this:

Booze definitely isn’t good for you if you drink it immoderately. But if you can control yourself, you’re probably fine. Then again, you might not be. It might help you ward off heart disease, or if you’re the rare unlucky person, it might be one factor among dozens that triggers some form of cancer. We don’t know exactly how it will work out for you and we never will. Just make your choice and accept the consequences either way. Nearly everyone currently living on Earth will be dead in the next six or seven decades anyway, no matter how much booze they drank or how many booster shots they got.

Just go ahead and print that warning label on every food and beverage product on Earth and be done with it.

But the larger issue here is our government’s priorities. They relentlessly demonize alcohol, just like they have with tobacco for decades. Meanwhile Americans are getting hooked on marijuana in numbers never before seen. A recent study showed that, for the first time ever, daily use of marijuana has surpassed daily use of alcohol. There are always trade offs, and this is the trade off with the reduction in alcohol consumption. We often see celebratory headlines about how younger Americans in particular are drinking far less booze. But the headlines are rarely interested in why that’s happening, and even less interested in the question of whether the trade off is an improvement.

As it happens, young people are drinking less because they’re getting stoned a whole lot more. And guess what: there are plenty of studies claiming a potential link between cancer and marijuana. So why are we seeing this war against alcohol and not weed? At the same time, fentanyl and other lethal drugs pour across the border with little being done to stop it. It would seem that the powers that be prefer to have us high and stoned. That’s also why the tax on cannabis in New York is many times lower than the tax on tobacco products. That should tell us something.

Strictly speaking, I don’t think any of this stuff is healthy. I do know, however, that booze and tobacco were heavily consumed by many of the most advanced and successful civilizations on Earth, including our own until recently. That doesn’t mean you need tobacco and booze for society to flourish. But history clearly shows that those two substances do not prevent society from flourishing. On the other hand, I’m not aware of any society of stoners or hard drug addicts that built anything but mud huts and teepees.

So, if this advisory from Joe Biden’s Surgeon General tells us anything, it’s that the field of “public health” hasn’t changed at all since COVID. They’re still interested in weakening and ultimately remaking this country, so that we’re all subservient to their edicts. They still believe that they can terrify Americans into submission by raising the mere prospect of death, even though death is unavoidable for all of us.

What they don’t seem to realize is that, five years after COVID, some of us just aren’t listening to them anymore.