Should you give up alcohol to reduce your cancer risk? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Alcohol for consumption should come with a warning label about cancer risk, outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy asserts. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, says this is an issue that’s surrounded by complexity.

Nelson: The issue of alcohol's effects on health have been extensively studied. There's been a tremendous attempt to try and figure out what even low levels of alcohol consumption might reflect. One of the things you can start to wonder is if there's someone who consumes a single drink every day or every other day, does that person have two dozen other habits which are generally health promoting as compared to someone who's a teetotaler, or someone who drinks very heavily. And it's difficult to get at that.:29

Nelson says he’s focused on what he calls the three legged stool: too many calories in, not enough calories expended, and storing those calories as fat, which is increasingly linked to cancer risk, as well as cigarette smoking cessation. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.