Dr. Sarah Wakeman
speaker
484 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Sarah Wakeman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So yes, you're over if you're drinking that size. Yep.
Lower risk drinking.
You'd be in what we call moderate risk, which is associated with pretty much every form of cancer, which I think people don't know.
Yes.
Yeah. So the data is growing and really worrisome. So for breast cancer, so there's really, there's a few cancers that even at low risk limits, you see the risk begin to increase. So where we would say there's kind of no healthy, or there's no even like low risk amount. So breast and esophageal cancer, two examples of that.
So breast cancer, if you were to drink below those low risk limits, so in the US that would be fewer than seven drinks, but a drink in the US is five ounces of wine, which is smaller than that, or in the UK is below that 14 units. So it would be fewer than seven of that size glass of wine. We still see a slight increase in the risk of breast cancer. It's about a 5% increase.
So that means your risk of breast cancer would increase by about 5%. And that's not huge. So I think percent increase is kind of hard to do the math on. But if you think in the US, for example, the average woman has a 13% likelihood of getting breast cancer in their lifespan.
Really? Yeah. Wow. Really high. So 5% increase would increase that to like 13.6 or so.
In their life, yep.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so the reasons for that are likely environmental because your genes don't change over that time period. So the risk factors, you know, if you think about breast cancer, it's alcohol, it's obesity, it's, you know, age when you have children or don't have children because it's a really hormonally driven cancer. Same thing if you think about colon cancer.
That's a really scary one where we're seeing more and more cases in younger people. Some of the drivers of that, eating meat. So processed meats increase your risk of colon cancer. So, you know, these very sort of normal behaviors. There's probably other environmental things, honestly, that we're not yet measuring or able to measure.
Just given the rate of acceleration, when I talk to my colleagues who are oncologists, you know, things like plastics or other things that we don't yet know, it's clearly something in the environment that is driving these increased cancer risks.
So that would be one unit. So that would be fewer than 14 of that. So you could see like, you know, if you had double that, it would be a decent pour of wine. You could not have more than seven of those in a week to be in low risk. But even drinking that amount, your risk of breast cancer would go up a little bit.
There's really sort of no safe amount of alcohol when it comes to breast cancer.
So that low-risk category, so these big cancer studies categorize people as sort of low-risk or light drinkers, moderate or heavy. And for pretty much every cancer, once you get to the moderate category, we start seeing increases. And there's what we call a dose-response relationship. So the more you drink, the higher your risk of cancer.
There's only a few cancers that the risk seems to increase even at that very low level. And breast cancer is one of those. And then esophageal cancer is one of those. So there are certain cancers where even a small amount of alcohol will increase your risk.
Yeah. So colon cancer, we're seeing that in a lot of young men. Liver cancer. Yeah. Prostate cancer, which is obviously a male cancer we don't think of as much as being sort of an alcohol-sensitive cancer. But most cancers, because the way alcohol impacts your risk of cancer is not really on a specific organ outside of the liver. It's really about how it changes our DNA.
So it's about inflammation and what are called reactive oxygen species that sort of change our cells and increase the risk over time of the mutations that lead to cancer.
If you're drinking two of those glasses, yeah, you'd be in the heavy category. Okay.
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