By now, you’re probably aware that alcohol can do some pretty significant damage to your body. Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol can and will do some lasting damage to your system if you’re not careful. Of course, almost everyone is going to have a drink here and there. Aside from the well-known issues associated with alcohol consumption, you should know that drinking has a direct relationship with one of the deadliest diseases in the world: cancer.Scientists have known that there is a relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer for a long time. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest alcohol is carcinogenic, but we don’t often think of it as being as destructive or dangerous as other substances like tobacco. A new study, conducted by researcher Jennie Connor at the department of preventive and social medicine at the University of Otago in New Zealand, suggests that it’s time we take the carcinogenic properties of alcohol more seriously.
Alcohol as a carcinogen — further evidence
Published in the journal Addiction, Connor’s research shows that drinking is more or less a direct cause of no less than seven types of cancers. Again, we already knew alcohol consumption increased the likelihood of a cancer diagnosis, but Connor’s work says that 5.8% of the world’s cancer deaths can be attributed to drinking — a figure we didn’t have before.
“There is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer at seven sites in the body and probably others. Current estimates suggest that alcohol-attributable cancers at these sites make up 5.8% of all cancer deaths world-wide,” the study concludes. “Confirmation of specific biological mechanisms by which alcohol increases the incidence of each type of cancer is not required to infer that alcohol is a cause.”
For more details, be sure to read through the entire brief. But for the specific types of cancers Connor’s study points out, read on.
1. Liver cancer
Drinking does damage to your liver, there was never much doubt about that. And we already knew that booze can have a potent carcinogenic effect on the liver. This study simply adds another log to the proverbial bonfire, as far as evidence goes. If you care about your liver, it would serve you well to moderate your drinking habits.
2. Colon cancer
Colon health isn’t something you hear much about, especially compared to all the campaigns focusing on breast or prostate health awareness. But aside from cancers of the lung, colon cancer is the second-most-deadly form you can be diagnosed with. For that reason, you’ll want to take the risks very seriously.
3. Breast cancer
If you’ve been on Earth for any amount of time over the past decade or so, you’ve seen all of the work being done to raise awareness about breast cancer, and the risks and dangers associated with it. Well, it turns out that drinking and alcohol consumption are one of those risks.
4. Rectal cancer
Cancers of the rectum are closely associated with and are sometimes synonymous to those of the bowel and the colon. But they’re not exactly the same, and there are some differences in the treatment courses for each. If you’d rather not deal with either, staying away from booze should be added to your list.
5. Larynx cancer
When you drink, you’re putting your larynx in harm’s way — almost directly. Your larynx is what many people may commonly call a voice box. It’s the structure in your throat that holds your vocal cords and passages to your lungs. Needless to say, it’s pretty important, and if you want to avoid a diagnosis, steer clear of alcohol.
6. Oesophageal cancer
As far as your neck and throat goes, the larynx isn’t the only biological structure in danger from your drinking habits. The esophagus, or the tube that connects your mouth to your stomach, is also at risk. As booze passes from bottle to belly, it seems there’s some real damage being done.
7. Oropharyngeal cancer
Last but not least, the oropharynx is another part of the throat and digestive system that’s put at serious risk by drinking alcohol.The base of your tongue, your tonsils, and other parts of your throat are all a part of the oropharynx. If you can’t imagine life without those, then cutting out alcohol would be a wise choice — at least according to the available research.
Washing down some cold ones is an international pastime, but people around the worldare drinking less alcohol for the first time since 2001, MarketWatch reported. Except for Americans, that is.
According to Euromonitor International, a market research firm, consumption fell from 249.7 billion liters in 2014 to 248 billion liters in 2015. (That’s a 0.7% decrease.) Global alcohol consumption has been steadily rising ever since Euromonitor International began tracking market trends in 2001, so this is an unprecedented dip.
But there’s some good news for the beer and spirits industry, at least: North Americans are still boozing it up. (Good job, ‘merica!) In 2015, the continent bought 33.8 billion liters of alcohol, 700 million more liters than in 2014.
Small batch brew-loving hipsters (and everyone else who likes fancy brewskis) might have something to do with it, too. The strong North American economy and the popularity of craft beer and microbreweries have given sales a bump, analyst Spiros Malandrakis told MarketWatch.
View photos
Source: Saturday Night Live/Giphy
More
Other than suds, what else quenches America’s thirst? Beer is far and away the beverage of choice for Americans, but 34% of Americans who drink say they prefer sipping wine, and 21% drink liquor most often, Gallup reported in 2015.
View photos
Data from Gallup shows Americans prefer beer over other types of alcohol
More
Mo’ money, mo’ drinking: No matter the country, economic strength has a strong influence on alcohol sales. MarketWatch reported that the struggling economies in China and Brazil led to less alcohol consumption in 2015. Similarly, U.S. consumption fell during the 2008 to 2009 recession, a Harvard School of Public Health study showed.
But in an ironic twist, wild nights might not be so great for the economy. A 2015 reportfrom the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that binge drinking, aka consuming four to five drinks in a matter of two hours, cost the U.S. economy $250 billion in 2010 due to lost productivity and alcohol-fueled crimes.
So… better rethink that last tequila shot. For your future self, and for your country.
Drinking alcohol is a direct cause of at least seven forms of cancer, and the more you drink, the higher your risk, a new analysis found.
The report’s author said she hoped to cut through the barrage of studies and stories that can leave readers with conflicting views of alcohol’s effects.
After all, isn’t a nightly glass of wine supposed to be good for you?
“There is no argument, on current evidence, for a safe level of drinking with respect to cancer,” Jennie Connor, the author and a professor of epidemiology at Otago University in New Zealand, wrote in the analysis, published Thursday in the scientific journal Addiction.
She added that studies touting the perceived health benefits of casual drinking are “seen increasingly as disingenuous or irrelevant,” given the rising risks of a range of cancers.
Connor’s report found there is strong evidence that alcohol causes cancer of the liver, colon, rectum, esophagus, larynx, pharynx and female breast.
Image: Getty Images/EyeEm Premium
Her conclusions are based on comprehensive research and analyses carried out in the last decade by groups such as the World Cancer Research Fund, a U.K.-based nonprofit, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization in France.
Scientists at the agency similarly highlighted the link between alcohol and the same seven cancers in a 2013 paper published in the journal Future Oncology.
“Alcohol consumption is one of the most important known risk factors for human cancer and potentially one of the most avoidable factors, but it is increasing worldwide,” the authors of that study wrote.
Around 5.8 percent of total cancer-related deaths, or nearly half a million deaths, were directly caused by alcohol in 2012, a group of U.S., Canadian and Italian scientistsestimated last year.
Image: Getty Images for NYX Professional Makeup
U.S. alcohol producers pushed back against Connor’s analysis.
“To declare that alcohol definitively causes cancer based upon cherry-picked epidemiology articles lacks scientific credibility,” Sam Zakhari, senior vice president of scientific affairs for Distilled Spirits Council, a national trade group, said in an emailed statement.
“Cancer is a complex disease that is not yet entirely understood and requires more research,” he said.
Connor’s report noted the risks of getting cancer from drinking is highest among heavy drinkers, a group roughly defined as men who drink more than four alcoholic beverages a day, and women who drink more than three.
But even light consumption — typically one daily drink for women, and two for men — can “minimally” raise the overall cancer risk, Harvard University researchers found in a2015 paper.
In the U.S., one drink is equal to a 12 ounce can of beer, a 5 ounce glass of wine, or 1.5 ounces of 80-proof distilled spirits, according to the American Cancer Society.
Those risks multiply for people who both drink and regularly smoke, particularly when it comes to cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx and esophagus, Connor said.
Image: Getty Images
That doesn’t mean people who drink are necessarily doomed to get those cancers. And there’s some evidence that people who ditch alcohol can reduce their risks of liver, laryngeal and pharyngeal cancers, according to the Addiction report.
Still, Connor noted that, while heavy drinkers face higher cancer risks, low to moderate drinkers still experience a “considerable burden” of health hazards from alcohol. Yet many people don’t know about the risks, a problem Connor partly attributed to the news of alcohol’s potential benefits.
In an interview with the Guardian, Jana Witt, a health information officer at Cancer Research U.K., applauded the study and offered a few simple tips for lowering alcohol consumption.
“Having some alcohol-free days each week is a good way to cut down on the amount you’re drinking,” Witt said. “Also, try swapping every other alcohol drink for a soft drink, choosing smaller servings or less alcoholic versions of drinks, and not keeping a stock of booze at home.”
This article was updated to include comment from Distilled Spirits Council.
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) reports that age 13 is a turning-point year because a thirteen year old is almost 3 times more likely to know a student drug dealer,and more than 3 times more likely to be able to buy acid, cocaine or heroin plus other drugs.
There was an estimated 675, 000 new cocaine users in 1996 ,What it is today we need to research,The numbers would be double,possibly.Between the ages of 12 and 17 increases from 4.0 million in 1991 to 11.million. In 1998, 78% of high school teens report that drugs and used,sold and kept at their schools, Alcohol has been implicated in up to 75% of rapes 70% of domestic violence and 20% but rising in numbers of suicides. The average age for taking their first drink of alcohol is 111/2 years. According to the Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol harms virtually every organ and system in your body as radicals. There are more than 3.3million teen alcoholics in the U.S. A 1996 CASA study on Substance Abuse and the American Woman reveals that 212.5 million smoke,4.5 million are alcoholics or alcohol abusers.3.5 million misuse prescription drugs,and 3.1 million use illicit drugs., 4,000 people die annually from alcohol overdosing. At least one out of every five pregnant women (more than 800,000 yearly) smokes drinks and /or uses drugs endangering both her life and the ife of her newborn. kids start cigarettes ages 12 to 13,and is rising. In 1996 it is estimated 171, 000 persons used heroin for the first time and also rising. reaching high levels, by signal press Evanston Ill 1999,
Today, when Elizabeth Vargas walks down the streets of New York City on a warm evening, passing wine bars filled with people enjoying glasses of wine, it’s a very different experience for her than it once was.
“I don’t look at them and think, ‘I want one,’” Vargas said. “But I look at them and I think, ‘I miss that.’ I miss that time when, you know, it felt so innocent and romantic. But that’s just me romanticizing something that turned out to be really monstrous for me.”
The veteran ABC News network anchor sat down with Diane Sawyer for a special edition of ABC News “20/20” to talk for the first time about her long struggle with alcoholism and anxiety, and her recovery process.
In the interview and in her new book, “Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction,” to be released on Tuesday, Vargas shares that she suffered repeated relapses, was almost fired from ABC News and that her marriage to singer-songwriter, Marc Cohn, ended in no small part because of her drinking.
Vargas, 54, who says she hit rock bottom two years ago, knows it’s an act of grace that she’s alive today. There was one occasion, she said, when her blood alcohol level was at .4 – a lethal amount.
“And even that didn’t scare me into stopping,” Vargas said.
“When you’re in the cycle of this disease though, it doesn’t matter how much you have or how little you have, I—it didn’t matter,” she continued. “It leveled me. It knocked me flat on my butt. I lost sight of everything.”
Throughout her 30-year career, Vargas has been known for her strong reporting around the world, her tough interviews and her steadiness during breaking news live coverage. On Sept. 11, 2001, it was Vargas who took over the breaking news coverage from ABC News anchorPeter Jennings.
In addition to “20/20,” Vargas has also been a frequent co-host on “Good Morning America.”
In 2016 alone, Vargas anchored breaking news coverage of the Orlando nightclub shooting, the shooting ambush in Dallas, the death of pop star Prince and the passing of boxing icon Muhammad Ali.
For years, Vargas says she drank socially, like anyone else, and was able to control it until she hit rock bottom.
“There are days when you wake up and you feel so horrible that the only thing that will make you feel better is more alcohol,” she said. “That’s when you’re in the death spin.”
This year, more than 30 million Americans are locked into a battle with alcohol, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), an arm of the National Institutes of Health.
The hardest part, Vargas said, was knowing that her alcoholism affected her two sons, Zachary, 13, and Sam, 10.
“I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself for hurting them with my drinking, ever,” she said.
Vargas says she never physically endangered her kids with her drinking and never drove under the influence.
“But let me just say something,” she said. “Because I didn’t physically endanger my children doesn’t mean I didn’t devastate them or put them in danger emotionally or psychologically.”
Vargas grew up in a military family and moved to 14 homes, nine Army bases and eight schools as a child. When she was little, she said she suffered from anxiety daily, even panic attacks, but she learned to hide them. Her struggle with that crushing insecurity continued when she started out as a local reporter out West.
“Because I am basically so insecure and anxious and afraid I never, ever, in my life learned to reach out for help, ever,” Vargas said.
Studies show that nearly 63 percent of women in trouble with alcohol say they are also fighting anxiety. But when she was starting out, Vargas said she didn’t understand then that the disease of alcoholism could slowly take over and threaten her life.
“There’s a real temptation… to whitewash what you did, ‘It wasn’t as bad as everybody says,’ or ‘it wasn’t as bad as I remember,’” Vargas said. “And for better or for worse, I have recordings of myself on TV and audio recordings that remind me how bad it was.”
Vargas said her drinking began after she got her first job and the news team would head out to the local bar after work.
“It was like, ‘I finally feel relaxed,’” Vargas said. “All my insecurities would sort of fade back.”
She finally found someone to confide in about her insecurities when she married Marc Cohn, best known for his song, “Walking in Memphis,” in 2002. She said he used to calm her by singing her to sleep. But even before they were married, Vargas said he noticed her drinking at night.
“He thought I drank too much,” she said. “I remember he was angry when he said it, and grabbing my arm and saying, ‘You have a problem with alcohol,’ and that just made me really mad.”
She said his words got her attention and for several years, she did control her drinking. She gave birth to their two sons and was caring for them while continuing to work – once even through a miscarriage.
After Peter Jennings died from complications of lung cancer on Aug. 7, 2005, Vargas and ABC’s Bob Woodruff were named co-anchors of “World News Tonight.” But 27 days later, Woodruff was severely wounded by an IED in Iraq.
“It was devastating. Devastating to everybody who worked there,” Vargas said. “I felt like I was in a hurricane of life.”
Four months later, she was replaced by senior anchor Charlie Gibson.
“I was demoted,” she said. “No sugarcoating it.” The self-doubt mixed with anger and fear came roaring in.
By 2009, Vargas said she felt her husband pulling away. She grew resentful, the exhaustion of all that travel while she was still trying to be a good mom and being the big financial responsibility for the family, and she said wine became her consolation. Eventually, she said she began keeping the amount she was drinking a secret.
“I would stop on my way home work, you know, and have a glass of wine or two at a bar,” Vargas said. “Alone, feeling really pathetic, you know I would actually pretend to talk to someone on my phone.”
When she would head home, she said she would pop a couple of Altoids and hope that she wasn’t “breathing white wine fumes” when she greeted the kids.
But like millions of other people, Vargas said she didn’t think she had a drinking problem because she didn’t drink all the time and she had no family history of alcoholism. As time went on, she said her glasses of wine at night became entire bottles and her husband noticed.
“It made all the real problems we needed to discuss and work through frivolous in comparison,” Vargas said. “You know, ’What do you want to talk about? Why don’t you ask me about how my day is?’ Or ‘Why don’t you support me more?’ when ‘why are you drinking two bottles of chardonnay every night?’ You know? I’ve just gone and changed the narrative in a pretty dramatic and destructive way.”
At one point Vargas said she even hid bottles of wine under her bathroom sink.
“Looking at myself in the mirror thinking, ‘This is who I am, sneaking into my own bathroom to gulp down from my toothpaste cup a half cup of wine so I can get through another hour feeling good,’” she said.
She said she fell into a pattern of secret drinking and then rewarding herself by binging on vacation. Her sister Aimie Vargas had no idea how much she was drinking until they took a trip together with their kids in summer 2011.
“It was in the middle of the afternoon and she was drunk,” Aimie Vargas said. “She told me that she drank too much because she was so unhappy.”
When Aimie tried to intervene, Elizabeth said she wasn’t an alcoholic, just having a rough time. Then a year later, in 2012, she was on another family vacation with Marc and the boys in Florida.
“That was our big vacation and my idea of a vacation was to empty the minibar by drinking everything in it,” Vargas said.
Marc was so worried about her, he arranged for a nurse to secretly come to the hotel room and give her IV re-hydration fluids. At one point, she said her son Sam came in to the room.
“I was drinking and sleeping and I do vividly remember one afternoon Sam standing by my head in the bed saying, ‘Mommy, when are you going to get up,’” Vargas said. “And I remember I could smell the sunscreen and I could feel the heat from his little body because he had just come in from the beach.”
“I wouldn’t give a nanosecond’s worth of thought to die for my children, to kill for my children,” she continued. “But I couldn’t stop drinking for my children.”
After that 2012 Florida vacation, Vargas decided to make a secret visit to her first rehab facility, telling her ABC News bosses she had a medical issue. The minimum stay at these facilities is usually 30 days, but Vargas said she was “so deluded and in denial” that she convinced the rehab facility to let her come for just two weeks.
Doctors say heavy drinking over time can change the structure of the brain and the cells in your body. The chemical receptors start to demand more alcohol to feel normal and that the first three months of attempted sobriety are the most dangerous for relapse.
A few weeks after she left rehab, Vargas said she started drinking again. She was never drinking on live TV at ABC News, but there were rare occasions when she would drink before interviews and it affected her performance. Vargas said she drank to calm her nerves, but one instance led to a terrifying blackout.
“There was one occasion on a Saturday,” she said. “I woke up that morning and I was feeling horrible, that shaky, horrible, fluttery heart… and I was on my way to the shoot on Columbus Avenue [in New York City] and I saw a liquor store.”
On her way to the interview, Vargas said she had the car stop, she bought wine and drank some of the bottle before she started taping. Afterwards, Vargas said she slipped into a nearby room and drank again. When she got in the car to be driven home, she said she the last thing she remembers is fastening her seatbelt. Her next memory was waking up in the emergency room.
“I don’t know where I went. I don’t know what I did. I don’t know what I drank,” Vargas said. “I drank enough to be at a lethal blood alcohol level.”
Since that day, Vargas has pieced together what happened. She now knows she wandered by Riverside Park in New York City and a stranger driving by saw her and stopped to help.
“I was able to tell her my address,” Vargas said. “She said she saw some men nearby that she didn’t like the look of who might have been, at that point, probably seeing me as a vulnerable person and she brought back here [home]. And at that point I was apparently unconscious.”
Her husband called 911 while their kids remained upstairs unaware that their mother was unconscious in the lobby of their apartment building.
After her near-lethal blackout in 2012, Vargas told the president of ABC News that she needed time off to confront her addiction.
“I was too embarrassed to him that it was just alcohol because I thought it was so unfeminine, like, to be a drunk,” she said. “Even now I have a hard time saying that word so I told him alcohol and Ambien.”
With the support of ABC, Vargas went to rehab for a full month.
At least 2,300 Americans die every year from alcohol poisoning, according to the Centers for Disease Control, though some experts believe that number is underreported.
On average, an alcoholic will take three to four attempts to get sober for good. After spending that full month in rehab it was not long before Vargas was drinking again.
“It only took me six months, seven months later before I was back to looking at myself in that bathroom mirror wondering, ‘how did I get here,’” she said.
Vargas said her parents, her sister and her brother all took time to try to help her.
“You sort of are standing by watching a train wreck. It was awful,” her sister Aimie Vargas said. “You just want to shake her and say, ‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’”
After this, Elizabeth went to a different rehab facility for a month, but after a few days at home, she went back again after her brother Chris Vargas flew in from California to take her.
“I walked into her apartment and she was completely out it,” Chris Vargas said. “It had been 7:30 in the morning, a couple of empty wine bottles beside her bed… I remember wanting to tell her, ‘Look, you can walk into a room and you can light up that room, but don’t show up drunk.’”
In 2014, Vargas was forced to go public with her alcoholism after it was leaked to press. She sat down for an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. That same year, her husband came to her and said he wanted a divorce. ABC also put her on notice to stay sober or lose her job.
That summer Vargas decided to take the kids on a vacation and rented a beach house in California, taking someone to help with the kids full-time.
“I drank again and I ruined it,” she said.
While in California, Vargas said she started with wine and then a bottle of tequila. But she got word that ABC needed to record her voice for a report to air the next day. When a crew arrived at 8am to tape her, Vargas said she was still drunk.
“I remember that day, sitting there, and I could read the words and I couldn’t make my mouth work to say the words,” she said.
Vargas said she feels sick to her stomach when she listens to that tape and other recordings of her where she had been drinking.
“But I’m glad I listened to it, because I never want to be there again,” she said.
Her bosses at ABC were alerted that she was drinking again, and she called her sister to say she was in trouble.
“It was the first time that she called and said, ‘I need help,’ and I’ll never forget that,” Aimie Vargas said. “It’s still really hard to talk about because I think I instantly knew, ‘This is bad.’”
Aimie said she dropped everything and flew to California to be with her sister. Elizabeth also called an ABC colleague who knew an actor/director in the area who was also a recovering alcoholic. He raced over, along with Vargas’ siblings, to comfort her two sons as she went into detox.
“I honestly, I thought it was all over,” Aimie Vargas said. “I thought she was going to lose the boys, and I thought she was going to lose her job. We all did.”
Embarrassed, ashamed and deeply humbled, Elizabeth Vargas said she decided to get help and fight to stay sober. A counselor flew with her back to New York. The first thing the counselor had her do was make a calendar of all the days she was drunk and what it did to those around her. Vargas said that’s what forced her to stop living in denial.
Vargas told her ABC bosses that she had finally grasped how important it was to surround herself with constant, daily help.
Vargas went to a sober house where they tested her blood for alcohol and ABC News agreed to give her unpaid time off to deal with the addiction and its underlying causes, and one more chance to prove she could stay sober.
“Thank God they gave me one more chance,” Vargas said. “Thank God, because, you know, many other employers wouldn’t have.”
She went back to work again, sober and grateful, and apologized to the colleagues who had to redo her work because of her drinking.
“I’m also really grateful to my colleagues in the “20/20” offices,” Vargas said.
The hardest of all, Vargas said, was she forced herself to confront what she had done to her children and apologized to them for the pain she caused them.
“You can’t just say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry I hurt you,’ and then, you know, leave it at that,” she said. “’I’m sorry I drank. I’m sorry I scared you. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for you. I’m sorry I fell asleep and missed your recital. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’”
After their divorce, Vargas and her husband Marc Cohn agreed to joint custody of their sons.
In a statement, Cohn told “20/20,” “Elizabeth has always had, and will always have my support, especially in regards to her recovery. I have tried my best to protect our family during the course of this very complex and challenging journey, and that has included honoring Elizabeth’s privacy.
Now I applaud her efforts to shed some light on the link between anxiety and alcoholism, which I imagine will help countless numbers of people and families. As for our own family, we continue to be loving parents to our two incredible boys and I’m extremely grateful that we work well together in putting their needs front and center.”
Vargas has hope for the future. She has learned that if she ever feels tempted to drink, she has to leave and she makes time for meditation. She said anger is still a trigger for her to want to drink, but now she reaches for the phone and calls someone immediately if she feels those feelings coming on.
Most of all she said she hopes her children know she fought to pull herself out of the abyss for them.
One of the things we do know about teenagers is the earlier they try alcohol (beer) to tobacco the more likely they are later on in life to develop a dependency or abuse problem. The alcohol industry is well aware of this. This is why Hollywood has been paid by big corporate to promote their advertising focused on funny advertising and in movies to get into their subconscious. Hollywood movie producers have for many years focused on this, for profit and the violence. This is how it all began for unaware parents addicted. The most significant, most influential part of any teenager’s life is their family.
It’s time to be holding the parents responsible for the crimes their kids commit by their alcoholism DUI and parenting abusive home environment? Children who hear a clear message from parents as role models that drug and alcohol use will not be tolerated are less likely to smoke pot, 50 percent less likely to drink, and use other illegal drugs according to reports.
A parent who educates themselves by being an example including a spiritual guided family is the biggest deterrent to substance abuse and tragedy’s… Look for signs and symptoms’ by organizations on line, and we encourage you to stay connected to this site for the truth .for you and your family’s safety.
citizensadvocates4justice.org 