It's time to put cancer warning labels on alcohol, experts say

The pressure on the government to put cancer warning labels on alcohol containers is growing, as experts say the majority of Canadians don't know the risks that come with consuming even moderate amounts.

The latest catalyst is Canada's new Guidance on Alcohol and Health, which updates the 2011 Low Risk Drinking Guidelines. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA), which released its final report today, points out that no amount of alcohol is safe and that consuming any more than two drinks a week is risky. 

It's a drastic shift from previous guidance, which recommended no more than 15 drinks for men and 10 drinks for women per week to reduce long-term health risks. The CCSA says the new advice reflects thousands of studies in the last decade that link even small amounts of alcohol to several types of cancer.

The new recommendations lay out a continuum of risk. Three-to-six drinks a week increases the risk of developing certain cancers, including colorectal and breast cancer, and more than seven drinks a week also increases your risk of heart disease and stroke. The danger goes up with every additional drink.

"The last time we did the guidelines, it was in 2011," said Catherine Paradis, the interim associate director, research, for the CCSA, who co-chaired the scientific expert panel that came up with the new guidance. "In 10 years there's definitely been significant improvements in our understanding of mortality and morbidity associated with alcohol use. We have a much better understanding of the link between alcohol and cancer."

According to the report, many Canadians are already in risky drinking territory, with 17 per cent of Canadians consuming three-to-six drinks a week, while 40 per cent drink more than six drinks a week.

Paradis says the panel spent the last two years combing through nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies, including research that now confirms alcohol use as a risk factor for an increasing number of diseases including at least seven types of cancers. 

But despite the evidence, most Canadians are unaware or overlook the risk, says Paradis, and many still believe there are health benefits to drinking, though she says the most recent studies show that's not true. 

Based on its findings, the CCSA is now calling for health warning labels that include the cancer risk on alcohol containers, and labels that inform people of how many standard drinks are in every container.

"Standard drink labels are necessary because people need to be able to count their drinks," said Paradis.

"Labels about the health risk will provide people with that rationale as to why they should follow the guidance."

The CCSA's call for health warning labels, recently echoed by the World Health Organization, is based on research led by Canada. Erin Hobin, a senior scientist with Public Health Ontario, ran one of the only real-world experiments of cancer warning labels on alcohol in Yukon in 2017. The labels were placed on alcohol containers in two government-owned liquor stores for a month.

"What we learned from that study was that the cancer warning grabbed consumer attention," said Hobin. "They read the cancer warning very closely. They thought about that message. They talked to their neighbours and their friends about that message, so there was real deep processing of that message." 

People not only talked about the warnings, Hobin said — they drank less, too.