Sarah Wakeman

I mean, you know, I know you talked about this, Dr. Lemke, but your body always wants to restore what's called homeostasis.

Your body's always going to fight to get back to what it feels its normal is.

And so ethanol is not something that belongs in your bloodstream.

Your body's going to try to excrete it as fast as it can.

And then it converts it into something called acetate, and then you can pee that out and breathe that out and get rid of it.

So to eliminate the alcohol in your body, you have to go through this process.

And part of that process includes this toxic molecule that's going to be floating around and causing damage to your cells.

So that's one way that alcohol can cause cancer.

The other is just general sort of inflammation.

People have probably heard that inflammation is just not good for the body and increases the risk of cancer.

And alcohol generates a lot of that inflammation in the process of getting eliminated.

And so it can actually change your cells that over time that can lead to cancer.

Yeah, great question.

So here's our little mannequin.

So just to orient people to the body.

So we're looking at the inside of the body.

So like the ribs are gone.

The outside of the skin is gone.

These two pink things are the lungs.

They kind of encase the heart.