 We've known about the possible association between the consumption of alcohol with excessive mortality from cancer for more than 100 years. Though the evidence is accumulating that alcohol drinking is also associated with pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, and melanoma, we're pretty certain that alcohol increases risk of mouth cancer, throat cancer, esophageal cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, voice box cancer, and breast cancer. Current estimates suggest that alcohol causes about 5.8% of all cancer deaths in these organs worldwide. Here's how that breaks down for men and women. In men, alcohol causes mostly head and neck cancers and gastrointestinal cancers, whereas it's mostly breast cancer in women. Alcohol appears to cause more than 100,000 cases of breast cancer every year. Yeah, but is that just among heavy drinkers? No, all levels of evidence shows a risk relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of breast cancer, even at low levels of consumption. Now eating a healthy diet may help modulate that risk. Yeah, alcohol increases the risk of breast cancer, but a fiber-rich diet may have the opposite effect. And so eating more whole plant foods may be able to help ease the adverse effects of alcohol. Alcohol has been shown to increase sex hormone levels like estrogen, which may increase breast cancer risk. But you see the opposite happening, eating fiber-rich foods. Fiber appears to bind estrogen and the colon help flush it out of the body. But even so, there does not appear to be any level of alcohol consumption that is completely safe from a cancer standpoint. So that's why you see commentaries like this in the medical literature, exclamation point, and all that consumption of an addictive carcinogen cannot be considered a healthy lifestyle choice. Thus, the final message on alcohol should be clear. It is toxic, carcinogenic, birth defect-causing, and potentially addictive. By arguing otherwise, scientists can give the alcohol lobby and advertisers the opportunity to manipulate the scientific evidence to place profits over public health. They do this through denying the evidence, distorting the evidence, and trying to distract the public's attention. The alcohol industry, Big Booze, appears to be engaged in the same kind of extensive misrepresentation of the evidence for which Big Tobacco is best known. Yet they are able to maintain this illusion of righteousness. Alcohol, tobacco, and junk food companies increasingly seek to present themselves as objective providers of health information about their products. But health information should come from health authorities, not the 21st century's most successful drug peddlers. Alcohol industries profit hugely from this disconnect, though, and sometimes even appropriate the cause of cancer prevention in order to promote their carcinogenic product. Case in point, Mike's hard pink lemonade. Join the fight-drink-pink carcinogens associating the creation of their pink ribboned alcohol with the death of one of its employees from breast cancer, ironically contributing to risk in the name of prevention. You, after all, can forget Kentucky Fried Chicken's Buckets for the Cure Campaign. Cancer risk is one of the things the alcohol industry won't tell you, but why doesn't your doctor tell you? There's relatively little public awareness of the link, and the medical community has largely remained silent. The medical profession may be getting more hip to corporate conflicts of interest in general, but why are we ignoring the alcohol industry? In other words, why is alcohol cancer's best kept secret? Maybe it's because the doctors are drinkers themselves, and swan to remain in denial all over the whole thing. Not only do most doctors drink a significant proportion to admit to drinking while on call, and reported encountering fellow physicians who were on call who were apparently impaired, even though most doctors felt they had an obligation to tell their patients it should such a situation arise. Guess how many actually do? Only 12% reported that they informed their patients they've been drinking. The industry has identified the alcohol causes cancer messages as a considerable threat. They have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of relative ignorance, uncertainty, and denial among the general population and their trusted health advisors. In the face of this, it is time the health professionals set aside any leanings that might stem from their own drinking and convey unreservedly to their patients and the communities they serve that alcohol causes cancer.