A new study involving nearly 1.3 million middle-age British women - the largest ever to examine whether alcohol increases a woman's risk of cancer - found that just one glass of chardonnay, a single beer or any other type of alcoholic drink per day poses a danger.
"That's the take-home message," said Naomi Allen of the University of Oxford, who led the study being published March 4 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "If you are regularly drinking even one drink per day, that's increasing your risk for cancer."
Understandably, the study may leave many women scratching their heads - and perhaps needing a drink more than ever - given all the talk about red wine being something akin to a fountain of youth.
"I thought drinking wine was good for you," said Mirella Romansini, 27, of Chevy Chase, Md., outside a Washington liquor store. "Now they are saying it increases your risk for cancer? Yes, I would say I'm surprised."
Romansini is hardly alone. At least half of U.S. women drink sometimes, and even the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, the government's official bible on what we should be putting into our mouths, say alcohol can have beneficial effects, allowing women up to one drink a day (men get two, of course).
Confused? It turns out the guidelines were never intended to recommend that anyone drink for their health.
Yes, it's true that studies have indicated that moderate drinking may cut the risk of heart disease and other ailments. But officials have long worried about sending the wrong message, giving people who should never drink - young people, pregnant women, those prone to alcoholism - permission to abuse alcohol. As a result, they have long tried to walk a fine line between acknowledging the possible benefits of alcohol without encouraging people to start drinking or to abuse it. The guidelines were intended to set an upper limit on what might be safe, not a recommended daily dose.
"It's a level of consumption that generally has been found in scientific studies to be associated with a relatively low risk of harms," said Robert Brewer of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But low risk does not mean no risk."
Based on the findings, the researchers estimated that about 5 percent of all cancers diagnosed in women each year in the United States is due to low to moderate alcohol consumption.
Most are breast cancers, with drinking accounting for 11 percent of cases - about 20,000 extra cases each year - the researchers estimated.
In any group of 1,000 U.S. women up to age 75 who consumed an average of one drink a day, the researchers calculated there would be 15 extra cancers; two drinks per day would result in 30 extra cancers and so forth.
The risk appeared the same regardless of whether women drank wine, beer or any other type of alcohol. Allen noted that even less than one drink per day may increase the risk.
"There doesn't seem to be a threshold at which alcohol consumption is safe," she said.
Several researchers noted that the findings were essentially consistent with previous studies, and despite its size the study does have shortcomings. The researchers could not, for example, distinguish between women who drank only one or two drinks every day and those who drank seven drinks all at once.
Some researchers worried that the findings could possibly frighten women and deprive them of the possible health benefits of an occasional drink.
