A bottle of wine is as dangerous as 10 cigarettes
Monday, April 1, 2019 IST
Drinking a bottle of wine increases the risk of cancer to the same extent as smoking 10 cigarettes, a study has found.
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Scientists calculated the cancer risk of alcohol compared to smoking and came up with the shock statistic for women. For men, researchers found a bottle of wine a week had the same risk as smoking five cigarettes.
The risk from alcohol was higher for women because of the link with breast cancer, which women have a 14% lifetime risk of developing.
One bottle of wine per week, or 10 units, means an increased absolute lifetime cancer risk for non-smokers of 1% for men and 1.4% for women, researchers at University Hospital Southampton, Bangor University and Southampton University found.
Dr Theresa Hydes said: “It is well established that heavy drinking is linked to cancer... Yet, in contrast to smoking, this is not widely understood by the public. We hope that by using cigarettes as the comparator we could communicate this message more effectively to help individuals make more informed lifestyle choices”.
However, Brigid Simmonds, of the British Beer and Pub Association, said: “This is an absurd study which does little to educate people...” Some experts, too, argued that smoking carried much greater cancer risks than drinking, but also added that weighing drinking on the same scale as smoking might result in accomplishing a decrease in alcohol consumption.
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