Charlebois: New alcohol guidelines will be tough for Canadians to swallow

Looks like we all need to drink less alcohol. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), a national organization that provides information and advice on substance use and addiction, recently shared its final report on recommendations that we should all drink no more than one or two drinks a week.

Since 2011, in Canada, moderate drinking was defined as up to two standard drinks per day for women and up to three standard drinks per day for men, with no more than 10 standard drinks per week for women and 15 standard drinks per week for men. So, a limit of one or two drinks a week is a complete departure from the public recommendations we had been given before. Furthermore, the CCSA also recommends that we add warning labels on bottles, stating that alcohol can cause cancer.

It’s unclear whether Canadians would appreciate such labels, but when looking at the scientific literature and the links between alcohol consumption and cancer, the findings in recent years are overwhelming. The evidence that alcohol causes seven types of cancer is now incredibly strong. Numerous global studies can easily be found and many of them aren’t even cited by the CCSA. Some articles claim that current estimates suggest that alcohol-attributable cancers make up 5.8 per cent of all cancer deaths globally.