Plain English with Derek Thompson

What’s the Truth About Alcohol, Cancer, and Your Health?

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Hosts

Derek Thompson

About the episode

Today’s episode has been a long time coming. For years, more scientists and health influencers have claimed that even moderate drinking does serious damage to one’s health. As someone who likes being healthy and also loves a glass of wine (or Scotch), Derek really wanted to understand this issue more deeply. This week, he published a long article in The Atlantic about his research on the health effects of moderate drinking—meaning one or two drinks a night. In today’s episode, he breaks down his research process and conclusions, sharing audio from his interview with Canadian health researcher Tim Stockwell, who is one of the most prominent skeptics of the supposed benefits of moderate drinking.

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Summary

  • In the following excerpt, Derek explains what drew him to the question of whether moderate drinking is OK and goes through the research he conducted in an attempt to answer that question.

    Derek Thompson: This is a show that I’ve wanted to do for a while. It’s a deep dive into a question that I consider both common and also quite personal. Is moderate drinking OK? Is having a drink every night healthy, as scientists and the media long promised us? Or is it conclusively unhealthy, as many scientists and health influencers and even members of the federal government now claim? This episode builds on an article that I wrote for The Atlantic this week entitled, appropriately enough, “Is Moderate Drinking Okay?” That article is linked in the show notes, and I encourage you to read it, share it. But I wanted to spend a little bit of time in this episode getting personal about both my own life, my reporting process for this article, and why I came to the conclusion that I’ve come to.

    I grew up drinking wine with my family all the time. My late dad was a lawyer in Washington, D.C., but he moonlighted as the wine columnist for The Washington Post in the 1980s. He was actually one of the first journalists to go into Ronald Reagan’s wine cellar, or at least this was the family lore. If you do an online search for “Robert Lewis Thompson, Ronald Reagan, Washington Post,” you will find a December 1981 column that he wrote entitled “Presidential Wine Policy—The Californians Have Arrived.”

    And this is actually a funny story. After the piece was published, Nancy Reagan actually sent to our house a life-size cardboard cutout of herself that she signed as a thank you, which my dad kept in our little wine cellar room in the basement. For years, I thought this was my nana. I thought it was normal, of course, for families to have life-size cardboard cutouts of their relatives. Only later did I realize the far stranger reality, which was that the first lady sent thank you cards in the shape of her own cardboard body, which is an incredible flex when you think about it. “Thanks for dinner. Here’s a permanent reminder of what my torso looks like.”

    Anyway, my dad loved wine like he loved few things in this world, and he passed that love along to me, and then I took that legacy, and as children sometimes do, I amended it in various ways. He was pretty much exclusively a California cab guy. Personally, I love red wine, California, Argentina, Spain. I also love scotch and American whiskey. During the pandemic, I learned to make cocktails, which I love to do when we have company over. We have a vermouth that goes really nicely with a chip of ice and a splash of lemon juice. Overall, I’d say I probably have a drink about every night or every other night, and then let’s say two on weekend nights.

    This is all to say I’ve been following with great interest and deep curiosity and even a little bit of alarm the news over the past few months and years as I’ve seen more and more headlines claiming that the scientific literature had turned hard against the old presumption that moderate drinking was good for you. And this was moving into a stronger claim that moderate drinking was actually quite bad for people. Just this month, in January, the U.S. surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, published a long paper outlining the cancer risks of light or moderate drinking, including advice to put new, scary warning labels on all alcoholic beverages to alert people to the cancer risk of even having as little as one glass of wine every evening.

    But here’s the confusing part and the thing that really inspired me to put together both the article and this podcast: Around the same time that the surgeon general published a report tying even moderate alcohol to cancer, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a 200-page meta-analysis of hundreds of alcohol studies and came to what sounded like the total opposite conclusion. Their finding is that moderate alcohol drinking is actually associated with longer living. Defining moderate drinking, as most researchers do, as about two drinks a day for men or less and about one drink a day for women, this review found that “Moderate alcohol consumption is associated with lower all-cause mortality.” In the span of two weeks, two different august institutions came to what sounded to me like two totally opposite conclusions on this all-important question of: Is moderate drinking OK? And that’s when I decided that I really, really wanted to get to the bottom of this.

    In the interest of me-search is research, and because this is a topic that is both personal to me and I think deeply interesting to many, many people, I wanted to go deep. I spent hours and hours in the last few weeks researching for this episode. I pored over studies, commentaries on those studies, meta-studies, commentaries on the meta-studies. I think I crashed my web browser with an oversupply of tabs two or three times. I spoke to researchers, I consulted with scientists who disagreed with those researchers, and, most importantly for our podcasting purposes, I recorded the main interview that I conducted for this article.

    I thought what I’d do for today’s episode would be something a little bit different than I typically do. I’ve never really done something quite like this before, but I thought it may be a fun experiment to kick off—we’re still in January, experimenting with kicking off the year. I wanted to walk you through my reporting for this Atlantic essay, explaining to you as well as I can my read of the data. And I’ll let you hear firsthand from the researcher that I consulted, a researcher who I think represents a sophisticated yet cautious view about the risks of moderate drinking, someone who fundamentally disagrees with what I would hope to be true, which is, of course, that drinking wine is purely good for you.

    And then finally, because I think most people listening are interested in nuance and interested in science but also fundamentally interested in just the answer to the question “Is moderate drinking OK?,” I promise that at the end of this episode, I will come down on this topic with advice, with hopefully memorable advice, and I’ll tell you how I’m folding the conclusion of this research into my own life.

    Host: Derek Thompson
    Guest: Tim Stockwell
    Producer: Devon Baroldi

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