BF2S Forums The Dead Pool

In 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent.

The research linking alcohol to breast cancer is deadly solid. There’s no controversy here. Alcohol, regardless of whether it’s in Everclear or a vintage Bordeaux, is carcinogenic. More than 100 studies over several decades have reaffirmed the link with consistent results. The National Cancer Institute says alcohol raises breast cancer risk even at low levels.

‘Britain’s most glamorous hell-raiser: How Girls Aloud’s ‘Hardcore Harding’ became famous for wild-partying, explosive love affairs and stints in rehab – but now faces a battle against cancer’. T

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The industry’s attempt to transform its products into health tonics might never have succeeded without the help of Morley Safer. In 1991, Safer hosted a 60 Minutes segment about the “French paradox,” the idea that the French eat heaps of red meat, cheese, and cream but have lower heart disease rates than Americans, who were many years into a low-fat dieting craze. On the show, he held up a glass of red wine and declared, “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass.” New research, he said, showed red wine might flush out fatty deposits on artery walls and counteract the effects of the heavy French diet.

That TV episode, which according to the International Wine & Food Society was viewed by more than 20 million people, created a media sensation and caused a spike in red wine sales nationwide. Researchers soon debunked the idea that wine was helping French heart health, and France’s heart disease rate turned out to be higher than advertised. Meanwhile, all the wine the French consumed was killing large numbers of them. The same year as the 60 Minutes episode, France passed some of the world’s strictest regulations of alcohol advertising to combat prevalent liver cirrhosis.

Even so, the US wine industry lobbied to include a positive health message about alcohol in the 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans published by the Department of Agriculture. The new guidelines removed language indicating that alcohol had “no net health benefit” and stated that for some people, moderate alcohol consumption might reduce the risk of heart disease.

Scientists have long known that heavy drinking causes high blood pressure, strokes, and heart attacks. That’s why early studies investigating drinking and heart disease started with the logical supposition that people who abstain from alcohol should have low rates of heart disease compared with moderate or heavy drinkers. As it turned out, they didn’t. When plotted on a curve, drinkers fell into a J-shaped pattern: Abstainers in the studies had rates of cardiovascular disease similar to those of heavy drinkers.

But this J-curve is deceptive. Not all the nondrinkers in these studies were teetotalers like the ones I grew up with in Utah. The British epidemiologist A. Gerald Shaper began a wide-ranging men’s heart health study in the late 1970s, and when he examined the data, he found that 71 percent of nondrinkers in the study were actually former drinkers who had quit. Some of these ex-drinking men were as likely to smoke as heavy drinkers. They had the highest rate of heart disease of any group and elevated rates of high blood pressure, peptic ulcers, diabetes, gallbladder disease, and even bronchitis. Shaper concluded that ex-drinkers were often sicker than heavy drinkers who hadn’t quit, making them a poor control group.

Yet for decades, researchers continued to include them and consequently found an implausible number of health benefits to moderate drinking, including lower rates of deafness and liver cirrhosis. The industry has helped promote these studies to doctors.

That’s one reason why, until recently, alcohol’s heart health benefits have been treated as incontrovertible science. But in the mid-2000s, Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a researcher at the University of California-San Francisco, decided to study Shaper’s ex-drinkers. When no one in the United States would fund her work, she persuaded Tim Stockwell, then the director of Australia’s National Drug Research Institute, to help her secure Australian government funding.

Stockwell and Fillmore analyzed decades’ worth of studies on alcohol and heart disease. Once they excluded studies with ex-drinkers—which was most of them—the heart benefits of alcohol largely disappeared. Since then, a host of other studies have found that drinking does not provide any heart benefits. (Some studies have found that drinking small amounts of alcohol—sometimes less than one drink per day—can be beneficial for certain people at risk of heart disease.) Robert Brewer, who runs an alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says, “Studies do not support that there are benefits of moderate drinking.” The Agriculture Department removed language suggesting that alcohol may lower the risk of heart disease in the most recent US Dietary Guidelines

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SuperJail Warden wrote:

The actor that played Omar Little died. Last film is the upcoming Sopranos movie.

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Dilbert_X wrote:

Wait I thought drugs were good.

Alcohol, Violence, and Aggression

Scientists and nonscientists alike have long recognized a two-way association between alcohol consumption and violent or aggressive behavior (1). Not only may alcohol consumption promote aggressiveness, but victimization may lead to excessive alcohol consumption. Violence may be defined as behavior that intentionally inflicts, or attempts to inflict, physical harm. Violence falls within the broader category of aggression, which also includes behaviors that are threatening, hostile, or damaging in a nonphysical way (2). This Alcohol Alert explores the association between alcohol consumption, violence, and aggression and the role of the brain in regulating these behaviors. Understanding the nature of these associations is essential to breaking the cycle of alcohol misuse and violence.

Extent of the Alcohol-Violence Association

Based on published studies, Roizen (3) summarized the percentages of violent offenders who were drinking at the time of the offense as follows: up to 86 percent of homicide offenders, 37 percent of assault offenders, 60 percent of sexual offenders, up to 57 percent of men and 27 percent of women involved in marital violence, and 13 percent of child abusers. These figures are the upper limits of a wide range of estimates. In a community-based study, Pernanen (4) found that 42 percent of violent crimes reported to the police involved alcohol, although 51 percent of the victims interviewed believed that their assailants had been drinking.

Alcohol-Violence Relationships

Several models have been proposed to explain the complex relationships between violence or aggression and alcohol consumption. To avoid exposing human or animal subjects to potentially serious injury, research results discussed below are largely based on experiments on nonphysical aggression. Other studies involving humans are based on epidemiological surveys or data obtained from archival or official sources.

Alcohol Misuse Preceding Violence

Direct Effects of Alcohol. Alcohol may encourage aggression or violence by disrupting normal brain function. According to the disinhibition hypothesis, for example, alcohol weakens brain mechanisms that normally restrain impulsive behaviors, including inappropriate aggression (5). By impairing information processing, alcohol can also lead a person to misjudge social cues, thereby overreacting to a perceived threat (6). Simultaneously, a narrowing of attention may lead to an inaccurate assessment of the future risks of acting on an immediate violent impulse (7)
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Many researchers have explored the relationship of alcohol to aggression using variations of an experimental approach developed more than 35 years ago (8,9). In a typical example, a subject administers electric shocks or other painful stimuli to an unseen "opponent," ostensibly as part of a competitive task involving learning and reaction time. Unknown to the subject, the reactions of the nonexistent opponent are simulated by a computer. Subjects perform both while sober and after consuming alcohol. In many studies, subjects exhibited increased aggressiveness (e.g., by administering stronger shocks) in proportion to increasing alcohol consumption (10).

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