Dr Federica Amati

So in some people, like it's almost like their body rejects it, which is good because the relationship it has with increasing risk, each unit of alcohol increases breast cancer risk by a measurable amount.

Yeah.

in all the data analysis so i think you know if people i do get asked about alcohol drinking by the press because it's people love reading about it and do i do i drink do i have an occasional glass of red wine yeah i do i do when we have family around for dinner or maybe we're celebrating a birthday but genuinely that's the only time i will drink alcohol and i think

when it's in a social context where it's part of the social gathering not the point of the social gathering because if you're going out for drinks you're going out for the drink and then who's there's their kind of thing it's just different um so i think that there is such a thing as maybe drinking um in a way that isn't going to be too detrimental to health but for those people who

don't like drinking like there's no benefit to drinking right so if you cannot if you can live without drinking alcohol you're probably better off not drinking alcohol okay and and also with alcohol as well it's not only the sort of effects that it has physically as mentally as well it

And Jamie, if you look at, so David Nutt, another legend, Professor David Nutt, who got thrown out of parliament for saying that ecstasy was safer than alcohol.

He was right.

He did this beautiful study where he plotted the harm to health and the harm to society of each drug.

and you have all the different drugs and you get you know right at the bottom which is not harmful to anyone is like mushrooms just harmless you know people who take mushrooms don't really harm themselves they don't really harm anyone else um and then you could go up and heroin and cocaine pretty harmful to self a little bit harmful to society right then you go to alcohol and it's off the scale it actually means alcohol is so harmful to society that it's the only reason that that access is so big it's just up there somewhere like completely off the scale and

Why?

It makes you aggressive.

Like the amount of alcohol-related incidents, driving, aggression, rape, I mean, name it.

Alcohol is not a good drug for society.

I mean, probably partly, right?

But still that doesn't... But I think it's also just because alcohol does tend to cause aggression generally.

More generally, it's a bit more of an aggressive drug.

Yes, 100%, yeah.

Of course.

I think it's really important that we think of human beings as a whole thing.

So our mental health is not detached from our physical health.