If wine consumption is reduced significantly it will hurt wine grape growers in my home state of Oregon, across the country, and in the rest of the world. I don't know what crops, if any, would replace the grapes growing in our beautiful wine country. The picture is from one of our many road trips to this part of the state.
Rawstory has an article (above) about lawmakers calling the new surgeon general report about even light alcohol consumption being a cancer risk being an example of the "nanny state."
The report is on the NIH National Cancer Institute website so RFK Jr's opinion on this is important. The report could be taken offline when Trump takes over. It is important to consider that Trump not only doesn't drink, but he has negative feelings about drinking. This is because of his alcoholic older brother, Freddy, who died at 43. It has been reported (see article in VICE) that he never had a sip of alcohol.
Whether this would influence the infamously transactional Trump to try to suppress the report or not remains to be seen. The alcohol lobby in Washington is huge and many MAGAs rage against government interference in their lives. It is not only "the deep state" that is evil in their eyes, but "the nanny state." This has not been part of the current poltical zeitgeist but with alcohol it could be.
On the health side, the crucial parts of the report for light to moderate drinkers are those explaining the cancers that this may cause. Even light drinking increases the risk for esophageal cancer. The more a person drinks the greater the risk for head, neck, liver, breast, and colorectal cancer. Just as people could understand how inhaling smoke into their lungs could lead to the deadly lung cancer, it is common sense to understand how drinking can cause cancer in the organs that involve digestion.
The major medical news here is that for years moderate drinking was considered acceptable healthwise, and for red wine, even beneficial.
People must have accurate up to date medical information of risks. A signficant number of people stopping or cutting down on alcohol consumption would be a hardship for grape growers, manufacturers, and retailers. The economy wouldn't crash but it would certainly be affected.
It is instructive to look at what happened when the surgeon general announced the danger of smoking and thereafter.
Excerpt:
Sixty years ago, about 70 million Americans smoked tobacco. An estimated 42 percent of adults identified themselves as smokers in 1965, and advertisements for cigarettes were impossible to avoid. Tobacco products were stylish and healthy, manufacturers insisted, with Camel claiming its cigarettes “don’t get your wind” and Old Gold saying its were “fresh as mountain air.”
So it came as a shock to the American public when, on January 11, 1964, their surgeon general appeared on television saying that smoking tobacco leads to disease and death.
Here's a photo from that article:
I have no idea if the surgeon general realized the coincidence of his releasing the report on this day.
For the alcohol habits of Americans to change and thus effect the economy it would take a huge cultural shift. This was written in 2014:
Excerpt:
"The surgeon general's report in 1964 was groundbreaking and led to an important cultural shift against smoking," said ACC President John Gordon Harold, MD, MACC. "Those important findings have been followed up by countless studies on the effects of smoking, which we now know are even worse than we thought. Physicians often discuss 'moderation' when helping patients change and maintain their health habits, but that is not the case with smoking. No amount of smoking is good and several studies have shown that even a small amount tobacco is very harmful. As a society we need to eliminate smoking from our culture. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in both men and women, and if almost half of those cases are from tobacco, then that is a serious problem."
(Personal Note: I feel lucky that my partner and I never developed even a taste for, let alone a need for, alcoholic beverages and we don''t drink. I'll have a small glass of champagne at a party to make a toast, but that's it.)
----------------------------------------
I post my blogs on Stressline.org where you can subscribe (for free everywhere) and on Substack where, if you want to submit your email, you can be notified of all new blog posts. I also post them on Medium because this enables them to be easily found on internet searches.
The halbrown.org platform includes a Disquis comment section. To use it you have to register on Disquis.
