Sunday, May 01, 2011

Alcohol and Cancer

Forget safe drinking levels - any amount of alcohol could give you cancer. Alcoholic drinks and ethanol are carcinogenic to humans and there's no evidence there's a safe consumption threshold to avoid cancer, the Cancer Council says in the Medical Journal of Australia. There's convincing evidence that alcohol is a cause of cancer of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, oesophagus, bowel (in men) and breast (in women), the council says in a position statement. Drinking alcohol increases the risk of bowel cancer in women, and liver cancer, and, because it might contribute to weight gain, it could also be associated with cancers linked to excess weight and obesity, the council says. It's bad news for those justifying the occasional drink as a preventer of coronary heart disease. "The previously reported role of alcohol in reducing heart disease risk in light-to- moderate drinkers appears to have been overestimated," the council said. Drinking alcohol might have played a dominant role in defining Australian culture for more than 200 years, the council says. "It is also an important cause of illness, injury and death, whether resulting from short-term episodes of intoxication or from long-term, chronic use," it says. The only way to reduce the risk of cancer is to limit your drinks or avoid alcohol altogether.

2 comments:

Meditation Raleigh said...

Are you including the so called benefits of red wine?

jeronimus said...

Thanks for bringing up this point. I'm not an expert on alcohol's effects and was just quoting the news article, but I have also read that the partial benefit of red wine comes from the crushed grape seeds which contain good oils. But this benefit may be had from consuming grape seed oil without the toxic ethanol. The other supposed benefit is said to be wine's relaxing effect.
Alcohol is a downer, so it does feel like the body and mind have become relaxed. But from a yoga point of view, the reality is that the drinker is pushed into the sleepy left channel, where they are potentially vulnerable to subsconscious entities. It sounds wowserish but any level of alcohol consumption is incompatible with a state of true meditation, in which the Kundalini rises through the central channel. This is why all the Avatars (Incarnations of the Divine) have advised strongly against drinking. When Jesus talked about wine, he would have used an Aramaic word meaning grape juice, which has been mistranslated to mean alcoholic wine. In the old testament there are many warnings against alcohol. Despite this many of the Jews in Jesus' day drank. Jesus, however, was probably an Essene, a group who despised alcohol.