Alcohol At Any Dose Causes Cancer, Violence & It Shrinks Your Brain!

As Jason Christoff will tell you, we have been intentionally brain-washed into thinking that alcohol is cool and serving and drinking it is somehow ‘required’ to meet the basic expectations of our current societal ‘norms.’

Yet, as he points out, it actually dumbs us down, makes us more dependent and makes us easier to control, especially if that control requires us to be fractured, divided and violent amongst ourselves.

I haven’t told you this before, but in a previous life many years ago I was part of that brainwashing program. My particular responsibility was the marketing of Guinness in Africa and the Caribbean. At the time I loved the job. It came with the perks of exotic travel and lots of free beer!

However, it wasn’t long before many of us in our marketing team started to question what we were doing and the morality of it. Although we didn’t see the full darkness of the ‘big picture’ that Jason Christoff talks about now, back then we knew, deep down, that boosting Diageo’s profit by increasing high-alcohol beer sales in poor developing countries was not a good thing.

Over time, many of us including myself, left the business and ‘atoned.’ Our CEO was so impacted he actually went to work for Billy Graham’s organization in the US! While I wasn’t that extreme, I certainly saw the dark side of alcohol and the impact it has on human behaviour – and human health. Yet, from my own experience, and my lingering love of Guinness, I know how alluring it can be – and the industry intentionally preyed on that.

Yet, at the time we would justify it with the good old “moderate drinking is safe” narrative. And that was all it was, a very convenient, justified “story” to boost sales and corporate profit. But as with so many stories, it appears that this one was also a blatant lie!

Recently, Dr. Robert Yoho has been looking into how the “moderate drinking is safe” myth was manufactured, who profits from it, and what ethanol (which is basically what alcohol is) does to the human body. By his own admission, after reviewing this, he gave up his “occasional tequila shot.” Now, having read his full article on the subject, I am seriously thinking about giving up alcohol altogether as well.

The key points that Dr. Yoho reveals about the impact of alcohol consumption on our society are as follows:

• Alcohol kills roughly 178,000 Americans per year, more than all illicit drugs combined, yet its producers spend $2 billion annually on advertising with almost no regulatory pushback.
• The “safe at moderate doses” doctrine, often cited as 1 to 3 drinks per day, has been systematically dismantled by the 2018 Global Burden of Disease study and subsequent research confirming that NO safe level of consumption exists.
• Alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States; it drives cancer at 7 distinct tissue sites, atrophies the brain with as few as 1 to 2 drinks per day in women, and triggers cardiovascular damage that the industry’s “French paradox” mythology long concealed.
• The global alcohol industry dominated by a handful of conglomerates including AB InBev, Diageo, and Pernod Ricard, funds the research that downplays its harms and finances political lobbying at every level of government. It has also embedded itself into public health organizations the way Pharma embedded itself in medical journals, university research labs and medical regulatory colleges.
• Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) affects 28.9 million Americans; fewer than 10% ever receive treatment, and the pharmacological tools that work, naltrexone and acamprosate, are prescribed at a fraction of the rate at which antidepressants are doled out for far less disabling conditions.
• Alcohol accounts for 30% of all fatal traffic crashes in the United States, contributes to at least 55% of domestic violence incidents, causes fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) in an estimated 1 to 5% of Americans, and fuels a ski resort injury economy where on-mountain medical clinics profit from the impairment the industry created.

Dr. Yoho goes on to reflect on his personal experience with the “moderate drinking is safe” story, stating that, “During the 1970s, we physicians in training heard the lecture repeatedly: a drink or two a day protects the heart. The evidence was “solid.” Red wine, in particular, was said to possess almost magical properties; its resveratrol and polyphenols were supposed to offset the toxicity of the ethanol it contained. France drank heavily and lived long. QED (which is an acronym for the Latin phrase “Quod Erat Demonstrandum”, which translates to “that which has been demonstrated” or “thus it has been proven”).
          That story was wrong, and the people who promoted it knew it was at best incomplete. Forty years of research has since demolished the moderate-drinking hypothesis with the thoroughness it deserved. The 2018 Global Burden of Disease study, published in The Lancet, analyzed data from 195 countries and reached a conclusion that left no room for negotiation: the safest level of alcohol consumption is zero. Not one drink per day. Not a glass of wine with dinner. Zero.
          That finding did not end the debate. The industry funded counter-analyses. Compliant academics circulated op-eds. The New York Times health desk ran soothing pieces about Mediterranean diets. The “one to two drinks” permission slip survives in popular culture the way bloodletting survived for centuries after the evidence against it accumulated: because moneyed interests needed it to survive.”

For me personally that is the great tragedy of all this, how big corporate interests always sacrifice human health and wellbeing over profit, and we see it all the time. Obviously the Covid vaccines were the big one, but it is the same story with the excessive childhood vaccine schedule, the Ozempic scandal, the over-prescribing of statins to name but a few, and sadly now we can also add the “moderate drinking is safe” myth to the list.

I would recommend you read Dr. Yoho’s article at the link below, and if anyone would like to join me in an ‘alcohol avoidance’ challenge, let me know – I could certainly do with the support! 🙂

Alan Brough

You can read Dr. Robert Yoho’s full article on the dangers of alcohol on his excellent substack at: https://robertyoho.substack.com/p/425-alcohol-at-any-dose-causes-cancer