TIME: PHI’s Dr. William Kerr Highlights the Relationship Between Alcohol and Injuries in the U.S.

“The tide has largely turned against alcohol. Drinking, at least in moderation, was once seen as a harmless—or even healthy—indulgence that could strengthen your heart and even lengthen your lifespan. But in many scientific circles, consuming virtually any amount of alcohol is now seen as toxic.

On Jan. 3, outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory warning that alcohol consumption raises the risk of at least seven types of cancer. Shortly afterward, a second federal report warned that people who consume more than nine drinks per week have a one in 100 chance of dying from their habit, due to alcohol’s links to a range of health problems.

Increasingly, reports like these conclude there is no safe level of drinking. Even moderate consumption—no more than one alcoholic beverage per day for women, and no more than two per day for men—comes with dangers, and the situation snowballs the more a person sips.

But alcohol is an ancient and natural beverage, made by fermenting grains, fruits, or vegetables—all of which are part of a balanced diet in their original forms. So what’s so bad about booze, exactly?

It creates a toxic byproduct

After you drink any kind of booze—vodka, wine, sake, you name it—enzymes in your body get to work metabolizing the alcohol (chemically known as ethanol) in your system. Most of this process happens in the liver.

Ethanol breaks down into a byproduct called acetaldehyde, and that’s where the trouble begins, says Dr. Eden Bernstein, an assistant professor and internal-medicine physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “If I were to point to one thing that alcohol does that’s harmful to the body,” Bernstein says, “it would relate to the production of acetaldehyde.”

Acetaldehyde is “very toxic to a lot of different tissues,” says Dr. Sarah Wakeman, senior medical director for substance-use disorder at Mass General Brigham. It can damage body parts that are directly involved in alcohol metabolism, such as the liver, pancreas, and brain, as well as DNA itself. Exposure to acetaldehyde can result in DNA damage and mutations that lead to cancer, Bernstein explains.

Alcohol creates inflammation

Drinking alcohol also leads to inflammation in the body. This, too, happens when booze is metabolized. The process creates what’s known as oxidative stress, or an imbalance between different types of molecules that results in inflammation.

Drinking may affect hormones

Drinking-related cancers are typically seen in parts of the body that alcohol directly touches: the mouth, throat, stomach, and so on. But there’s also a “unique relationship around breast cancer risk and alcohol use,” Wakeman says.

Alcohol and injury

In addition to the complex domino effect that alcohol sets off inside the body, intoxication has “direct effects on health through people falling and crashing cars and getting in all kinds of other accidents,” says William Kerr, scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute in California. More than 30% of alcohol-related deaths recorded in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021 were due to acute issues including accidents and injuries.

What about those heart benefits?

Scientists are still learning about the true relationship between drinking and heart health, Wakeman says. But given all of the other known risks, it’s safe to say that “drinking is not a health-promoting activity,” Wakeman says. “No one should fool themselves into thinking that they are starting to drink for their health.”

Click on the link below to read the full article.

Originally published by TIME