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Do you enjoy capping off your night with a nice glass of wine? Well, then you should probably stop reading this article. Because according to a recent study published in the journal BMC Public Health, wine is as bad for your health as cigarettes.
The British researches discovered that drinking one bottle of wine a week is as cancer-causing as 10 cigarettes in the same time frame.
“Our estimation of a cigarette equivalent for alcohol provides a useful measure for communicating possible cancer risks that exploits successful historical messaging on smoking,” Theresa Hydes, said in a statement about the report. “We hope that by using cigarettes as the comparator we could communicate this message more effectively to help individuals make more informed lifestyle choices.”
That’s a bummer.
But don’t get too down on your nightly routine, because the wine consumption increases the “lifetime cancer risk” of men by only 1 percent and 1.4 percent in women. That’s something we are willing to take a risk on.
Oh, and before you feel too bad about drinking wine because it is as harmful as half of a pack of cigarettes, don’t forget to put everything into perspective. Because in response to the report, Francisco Esteva, the head of breast medical oncology at New York University’s Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, criticized the study by pointing out it did not consider factors linked to smoking like heart and respiratory disease.
So take that, science. Bottoms up!
