The Lies We’ve Been Told About Alcohol
And the facts everyone should know.
It took only seven years for cigarette sales to dip after the U.S. Public Health Service’s first public acknowledgment that smoking causes cancer. Drinking alcohol causes cancer, too, and we’ve known that for at least 37 years, since the World Health Organization (WHO) first published findings in 1987. Yet sales remain strong: In 2023, the alcohol market hit $37.7 billion.
After nearly four decades, the open secret that alcoholic beverages are known carcinogens has finally bubbled into broader awareness, starting a shift in conversations if not yet behavior. Experts’ voices are getting louder, and more people are listening.
But it’s not just the link to cancer that is cause for worry. Last year, public health leaders at the WHO declared that no amount of alcohol consumption is safe for our health—research has shown that it can play a causal role in more than 200 types of disease and other health issues, including heart disease and dementia, as well as everyday problems like weight gain and sleep disruption.
The ongoing cycle of funding and research on alcohol’s negative health impacts, in addition to the growing sober and sober-curious movements in the U.S., seem to suggest that we’re at a turning point in our collective relationship with alcohol that is similar to where we once were with smoking. But one challenge still looms large: For so long, we thought alcohol could potentially be healthy.
To this day, alcohol enjoys a lingering “health halo” effect, with long-standing beliefs—such as that, in small amounts, it can protect against heart disease and help promote longevity—getting in the way of newly realized dangers. As of 2024, 62 percent of Americans identify as drinkers, therefore (knowingly or unknowingly) taking on these additional health risks. Over half of respondents in a 2020 study were unaware of alcohol’s carcinogenic risk (other data suggests two-thirds of people are unaware of this link), and around 10 percent believed that moderate red wine consumption could actually help prevent cancer, says study author Kara P. Wiseman, an epidemiologist at the University of Virginia, who studies public perception of alcohol as a risk for cancer and ran the study.
It makes sense that we’d lean into any good news about a beverage that’s helped prop up most of our civilizations, says David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Low-alcohol beers likely provided essential calories and nutrients in early Europe and Africa, and wine’s ritual importance in multiple major religions stretches so far back that it can be hard to parse where divine mandate ends and pure pleasure takes over. “It was beer that brought humans together, not bread,” Nutt says.
