Questionable Alcohol Risk Reporting

Published: June 10, 2025

Author: Tim Platnich

Alcohol consumption, of any amount, is now reported to be akin to playing Russian roulette. Not a day goes by without some media report about the harms of alcohol consumption. The new standard of toxicity is applied: if it is toxic in any amount, it is toxic in all amounts. The old standard for toxicity was the threshold standard. According to this view, most substances are only toxic once they pass a certain threshold.

The latest article that caught my eye is from the New York Post. The headline reads, and I am paraphrasing, not quoting, that 14 out of 100 women who drink alcohol will develop breast cancer. That, according to the headlline, is what experts say. Wow. That's a lot. Put another way, if women drink alcohol, they have a 14% chance of developing breast cancer. In Russian roulette, with one bullet in one chamber of six, you have a 16.6% chance of blowing your brains out. Would you play Russian roulette?

Let's dig a little deeper into the article written by McKenzie Beard and published by the New York Post on June 6, 2025.

The article says the 14 out of 100 statistic is for women who consume 2 bottles of wine per week. Assuming one gets 4 glasses of wine out of a bottle, that is 8 glasses of wine per week - a little more than 1 per day. Not exactly heavy drinking. It's worse for post-menopausal women. Their risk of breast cancer, with the same amount of drinking, goes up 27%. The article doesn't say what their risk becomes out of 100. I calculate the risk for them goes up to 17.78 out of 100. This is worse than Russian roulette!

If one keeps reading down the article, one will note that even non-drinking women face an 11 out of 100 chance of getting breast cancer. So, drinking two bottles of wine per week for pre-menopausal women increases the risk of breast cancer by 3%. Now we are getting closer to the truth. A less sensational headline might have said that women drinking 2 bottles of wine per week increase their risk of developing breast cancer by 3%.

At another point, the article notes that women who have just one drink per day face a 10% higher risk of breast cancer than non-drinkers. Ok, 10% of 11% is 1.1%. This statistic suggests that women who have one drink per day (not far off the 2 bottles per week volume) increase their risk of breast cancer by 1.1%.

The link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer is correlative. The Post article discusses some causal links which may or may not be in play. Some of those causal links are indirect. For example, it is noted that excess body fat increases the risk of cancer and alcohol is loaded with calories. Is there any increased risk of breast cancer for women who do not have excess body fat?

Other statistics cited by the article are as follows. It is anticipated that 316,950 new cases of breast cancer will be diagnosed in the US in 2025. Alcohol use is expected to be linked to 6% of those diagnoses. What does linked mean? How does this 6% line up with the 14% mentioned above or the 3% or the 1.1%?

Breast cancer is treatable. Only a small percentage of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer die from it - about 13%. If, as a drinking woman, you have a 14% risk of getting breast cancer, your chances of dying from it is 13% of 14% which is 1.82% But even if you are a non-drinking woman, your chances of dying of breast cancer is 1.43% By drinking 2 bottles of wine per week you increase your risk of dying of breast cancer by about .4%

The article seems more intended to scare than to inform. The percentage of women who get breast cancer regardless of cause is indeed scary. The contribution of alcohol to the risk, when drank in moderation, is not a scary as the headline suggests.

If you are concerned about the risks of breast cancer, no matter how small, and don't enjoy wine, or other spirits, by all means STOP DRINKING. On the otherhand, consider keeping risks in perspective and live your life without a constant fear of death. As Marcus Aurelius said: "It is not death that [a person] should fear, but [the person] should fear never beginning to live."