Just one glass of wine a day linked to breast cancer: researchA review of research on alcohol and breast cancer has found that just one drink a day can increase the risk of breast cancer by five per cent.
Women drinking 'heavily' by having three or more drinks a day are up to 50 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who abstain, it was found.
It could mean that thousands of cases of breast cancer in Britain each year are caused by alcohol.
There is no safe level of drinking, one drink can kill etc. etc.
Also from the Telegraph...
Glass of wine a day 'fights breast cancer'Women with breast cancer can boost their chances of surviving the disease by drinking a glass of wine a day, according to research.
Those who drink a medium-sized (175ml) glass a day cut their chance of dying within a decade of diagnosis by a fifth - from 20 to 16 per cent, say Cambridge University doctors.
So there you have it. If you want to avoid breast cancer, don't drink wine (or other alcoholic drinks—I assume the focus is on wine because it's the Telegraph). But if you develop breast cancer, be sure to drink plenty of the stuff.
Truly, as the philosopher Homer Simpson once said, alcohol is the cause of—and the solution to—all of life's problems.
Where would we be without all these indispensable experts?
ReplyDeleteThank heavens they are there to guide us poor, foolish plebs with their infinite wisdom.
Mark Twain said it right over a hundred years ago:
ReplyDelete“The Moral Statistician.”
Originally published in Sketches, Old and New, 1893
"I don’t want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.
I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man’s health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years’ indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question.
You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can’t save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash?
It won’t do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees, with your ears buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box comes around; and you never give the revenue officers a full statement of your income.
Now you know all these things yourself, don’t you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age? What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don’t you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous “moral statistics”?"
So now we know statistics has always been the weapon of prohibitionists! So we can see why epidemiology should be taken with a whole glass of wine!
ReplyDelete