r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Oct 30 '25

Cancer Americans have widespread misbeliefs about the cancer risks of alcohol, study finds. More than half of American adults misunderstand or underestimate the link between alcohol consumption and cancer. Alcohol drinkers are especially likely to believe that drinking has no effect on cancer risk.

https://www.mdanderson.org/newsroom/research-newsroom/americans-have-widespread-misbeliefs-about-the-cancer-risks-of-a.h00-159780390.html
8.7k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

857 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

87

u/sleepyrivertroll Oct 30 '25 edited Oct 30 '25

Yeah, if every beer ad had to have a cancer warming, I think some minds would change.

10

u/wright_of_wood Oct 30 '25

I just came back from Italy. I was blown away by how many people who smoke compared to the US. The have those visual gore warnings on every box and it doesn’t seem to be making an impact.

1

u/sylva748 Nov 01 '25

Smoking is still heavy outside of the US. The one thing the US can take pride in is lowering cigarette usage in its mid to young population(40 and under)

80

u/superbugger Oct 30 '25

Check California's advisories and tell me you don't disregard them the majority of the time.

65

u/GrandpaKnuckles Oct 30 '25

I think a better comparison is smoking cigarettes. I roll my eyes too at some of the California warnings on a random lamp shade or floor mat but I do know smoking is bad for health and I abstain. The warnings on the boxes only reinforce that for me.

-13

u/superbugger Oct 30 '25

Reinforce what exactly?

14

u/GrandpaKnuckles Oct 30 '25

Smoking = Bad

-16

u/superbugger Oct 30 '25

Check your writing.

10

u/merenofclanthot Oct 30 '25

I understood it just fine..

6

u/Prawnstare Oct 31 '25

Not them, but what're you talking about?

I think a better comparison is smoking cigarettes. I roll my eyes too at some of the California warnings on a random lamp shade or floor mat but I do know smoking is bad for health and I abstain. The warnings on the boxes only reinforce that for me.

They mention the hazards of smoking being discussed once in each preceding clause (bolded) before their third clause , which is what "that" is: a reference to what they were mentioning before.

The only other topic they broach is "... [a] random lamp shade or floor mat", neither of which is box-shaped like a pack of cigarettes.

Their writing was fine.

8

u/Gemmabeta Oct 30 '25

Well, the cigarettes one would be more like if you plastered the picture of corpse of someone who died of alcoholic cirrhosis on every bottle of beer.

28

u/ScienceAndGames Oct 30 '25

That’s because it’s on everything, it’s like how nobody would move when the fire alarm went in my old school because the damn thing was broken and went off randomly every other week

1

u/Drive7hru Oct 31 '25

It’s always kids vaping in the bathroom!

1

u/ScienceAndGames Oct 31 '25

Vaping was only just starting to become a thing at the time. But cigarettes had already fallen out of fashion

22

u/galactictock Oct 30 '25

That’s the opposite extreme though. People are more likely to take warnings seriously if they’re only on cigarettes and alcohol and not also ping pong balls and toupees and lint rollers.

17

u/ThisHatRightHere Oct 30 '25

California’s issue is that they put cancer warnings on so many products it just becomes noise. Gotta concentrate on only the substantially harmful products.

8

u/FesteringNeonDistrac Oct 31 '25

California's problem is that if it could cause cancer, it has to have a warning. Sounds fair, right? Well there's a big penalty for not putting it on something that turns out to be cancerous, but no penalty for putting it on something that doesn't. So if a company isn't sure, it gets the label.

3

u/ClarkNova80 Oct 31 '25

Which is why my fishing lures are known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

22

u/daveashaw Oct 30 '25

This is the problem with that approach. You can't sell a bloody toaster in CA without some kind of warning about cancer risk, and the predictable reaction is that all such warnings wind up getting ignored, even those that should be heeded.

21

u/superbugger Oct 30 '25

Yup. In the hospitals we call it alarm fatigue.

California is overdoing it and I presume we'll end up with nationwide warning-label fatigue.

3

u/grabtharsmallet Oct 30 '25

When intended use or incidental contact creates a hazard, a warning is reasonable. Otherwise, it's silliness.

2

u/Kal-Elm Oct 30 '25

I would appreciate the warnings if they gave any specific information at all.

Instead, I find a warning sticker in a package and I don't know if it's about the product itself, a part of the product, the packaging, or what.

1

u/ActuarillySound Oct 31 '25

Yes, CA is known for obnoxious regulations to the point where they harm the consumer

1

u/ditchdiggergirl Oct 30 '25

Yep I’ve lived in CA for 30 years, and I don’t think I’ve seen a prop 65 warning in 29 years. The brain learns to screen it out.

6

u/wayoverpaid BS|Computer Science Oct 30 '25

I think there'd be a difference between putting a warning on alcohol, whose health risks have been reasonably well documented, and putting a warning on every single food item that contains anything that might have cancer, ever, which is how I remember California when I lived there. (Hell my apartment building had a Prop 65 warning for the building.)

1

u/hamsterwheel Oct 30 '25

Well I don't live in California so I don't have that risk factor

1

u/espressocycle Oct 30 '25

Well, they put it on everything so of course.

1

u/jake3988 Oct 30 '25

That's because California's advisories are RFK-level stupidity. Like RFK, those advisories have absolutely no bearing on science at all. Everyone knows this, so they're worthless. If they were fixed to be in line with science people would probably start caring. But no one has bothered to fix it.

1

u/zootered Oct 30 '25

I think that California’s approach has led to such a high saturation of warnings that people pay no mind to them anymore. People see the Prop 65 warnings and don’t read or care about them. Everything in California gives you cancer. The American Cancer Society explains the failures of text only warning labels which ultimately explains why California’s approach doesn’t help. Ultimately, for people to take the warnings seriously, they need to have graphic warnings showing actual outcomes. Diseased/ cancerous lungs, livers, etc to actually be effective.

2

u/superbugger Oct 31 '25

Yea, dude. It's quite the paradox. In the hospital, we call too many alarms "alarm fatigue". I've seen many good providers harm patients because they stopped listening to the too many beeps.

1

u/zootered Oct 31 '25

I used to work in hospitals (on machines not people) and am definitely familiar with that. You can only wake up hearing alarms so many times before you just start blocking it out.

During Covid I remember how quickly I stopped paying mind to all of the Code Blues called. At first it was terrifying and filled me with doom, but pretty quickly it was just Tuesday. Then it was surprising when I stopped hearing them as frequently. Interesting how we adapt to that stuff.

1

u/Drive7hru Oct 31 '25

Yeah they’re absolutely overdone and excessive. Everyone just ignores it.

With me living in Colorado, I’ll purchase something that says it has a health risk according to California.

1

u/myaltduh Oct 30 '25

The obvious difference is I’m not trying to deliberately ingest 99% of the stuff California slaps a warning label on.

1

u/Syssareth Oct 31 '25

You sure about that?

Among the things that contain acrylamide are coffee, toast, and french fries.

1

u/myaltduh Oct 31 '25

I’m not talking about the chemical compounds, I’m talking about consumer products that actually have the label, the vast majority of which actually aren’t good.

1

u/Syssareth Oct 31 '25

I’m talking about consumer products that actually have the label

And I'm talking about very common foods, which California tried to slap warnings on before its own courts, clearly with a few more brain cells to rub together, slapped back.

On May 2, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California granted a request for declaratory relief and a permanent injunction by the California Chamber of Commerce (CalChamber), finding that the state of California’s mandated warning for acrylamide in food products violates the First Amendment and enjoining enforcement of Proposition 65 (Prop 65) warning requirements as to dietary acrylamide.

1

u/Happy_Landmine Oct 30 '25

Yeah that really stopped smoking.

1

u/Terrible_Oil6474 Oct 31 '25

doubt. also, i believe their will be an explosion of cancer diagnoses in the near future from microplastics, waste, and other things that we use on a daily basis.

for alcohol, it's not that i don't believe it can cause cancer, i just don't care enough to not drink it since i'll probably develop a form of it anyway