And What about the stated benefit on the cardiovascular system?
“If you don’t drink alcohol, don’t start,” the American Cardiology Association says in its 2021 Guidelines for Cardiovascular Health (published in “Circulation” in 2021 on page 476), and they add that if you do drink alcohol, you should So in moderation. In particular, the guidelines of the European Association of Cardiologists state that “abstinence is the lowest risk for preventing cardiovascular disease. Each level of alcohol is associated with arterial hypertension and arrhythmias. The American Society of Clinical Oncologists argues that “the benefit of alcohol consumption on cardiovascular health is exaggerated. Alcohol consumption should never be recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, as it increases the risk of cancer.” So we can say that the scientific evidence is clear.
And from a dependency standpoint, how do we frame ethanol?
We must consider that ethanol is a psychoactive substance and its power is enormous, and its effect from a psychoactive point of view is behind the substances that are considered directly lethal. There are people with high blood pressure, who are not addicted to alcohol at all, and continue to drink two or three glasses of alcohol a day and cannot quit, and therefore prefer to take a lot of medication to treat their problem. So the problem with the psychoactive relationship with alcohol is not so much about the quantity, but with the fact that each of us manages this quantity differently. Unfortunately, someone falls into a real addiction to alcohol and it is these people who are referred to as those who have gone looking for it or who lack willpower, but when one reaches addiction we should know that this now, though it is within us, must interest him. And independent of our will.
How does he respond to those who say that despite drinking, they lived ninety or a hundred years?
We must start from the fact that bad luck in each of us increases with age. Let’s pretend that we are very healthy people who do not have a genetic predisposition to cancer: tumor cells are created in our body every day, especially with regard to cells of highly regenerative tissues (such as the digestive tract), but on average everything is put to silence because there are systems that repair the damage In another way, it causes a cell that has become neoplastic to burst and die of its own accord. Then there are the involuntary risk factors, including environmental pollution, and occupational harm, since we as individuals can do nothing about it. The first five cancer risk factors have been added, which are cigarette smoking and improper nutrition (this does not mean that food causes cancer, but reducing certain foods, such as fruits and vegetables, can increase the risk of cancer, or increasing consumption of certain types of food, such as Sugar or snacks, you increase your risk of cancer), being overweight, not moving enough, and then of course drinking alcohol. The fact that I drink ethanol does not necessarily mean that I will get cancer, but this substance is not only related to cancer, it increases high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, hemorrhagic stroke and about 60 diseases, the risk of which is already increased by very low doses of alcohol.
What does very low dose mean? What do they correspond to?
The risk of some diseases is already increased by one unit of alcohol per day, that is, the 12 grams of ethanol that we find in a small 125 ml wine glass at 12 degrees, in a 300 ml beer at 5 degrees or in a standard bar cocktail 40 ml or 80 ml. So, with 1 unit of alcohol per day, the risk of developing 60 different diseases increases, among which there are also some tumors. If I had 100 ladies (and I also spoke about this from Corrado Formigli) who had an alcoholic drink a day, we know 6 of them would get breast cancer, but we don’t know who. There are some tissues that are more sensitive than others. The breasts, the neck organs, and the esophagus are very sensitive; So the risk actually increases about 6/10% more at very low doses, even less than a cup a day, while there are organs that are more resistant, like the intestines, so we know that the relative risk of developing colon and rectal cancer increases for doses above a unit of alcohol One for females and more than two units of alcohol for men. On the other hand, the liver is a very resistant organ, so hepatocellular carcinoma can arise for doses that are certainly higher than the light and medium dose. We can say that each organ has its own strength of resilience to ethanol.
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