Sarah Wakeman

So, you know, these are scientific studies where it's not precise to you as an individual.

They're based on large populations, but definitely the more you drink, the greater the risk.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly, if you smoke.

So one of the main drivers of alcohol too and cancer is that it actually makes you more susceptible to the cancer-causing effects of tobacco.

So if you drink and smoke, your risk of cancer is going to be even higher.

The thought is like if you take esophageal cancer at like the cellular level, it makes you more susceptible of the carcinogens, which are kind of the cancer-causing compounds in tobacco.

And so rather than just seeing like an additive risk, you actually almost get a multiplied risk in terms of the risk of cancer.

So smoking and then obesity is the other big one.

So a lot of cancers, your risk goes up if you have an increase in your body mass.

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different mechanisms.

I mean, maybe starting just with what does alcohol do in your body?

So you ingest alcohol.

The fancy name for that is ethanol.

It's a molecule.

And it basically gets absorbed pretty quickly from your stomach.

And so it hits your bloodstream usually within 10 minutes or so of having a drink.

How much it hits your bloodstream depends on how much water you have in your body.

So alcohol doesn't penetrate into your fat.

It just kind of diffuses into the water parts of your body.