Stephanie Mencimer has written one of the most important articles in recent years. It’s on alcohol, breast cancer, and the industry’s efforts to try to make moderate alcohol use seem healthy. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Here are just some of the many important points in this exceptional piece:

• At 47, I was a decade and a half younger than the median age for breast cancer diagnosis in the United States. Was this just bad luck? Maybe, but the journalist in me was still curious to know: Why me? So I dug into the literature on risk factors to see where I might have fit in…While doctors have frequently admonished me for putting cream in my coffee lest it clog my arteries—a correlation that’s been pretty thoroughly debunked—not once has any doctor suggested I might face a higher cancer risk if I didn’t cut back on drinking.
• I quickly discovered that way back in 1988, the World Health Organization declared alcohol a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it’s been proved to cause cancer. There is no known safe dosage in humans, according to the WHO. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, but it kills more women from breast cancer than from any other. The International Agency for Research on Cancer estimates that for every drink consumed daily, the risk of breast cancer goes up 7 percent.
• The research linking alcohol to breast cancer is deadly solid. There’s no controversy here. Alcohol, regardless of whether it’s in Everclear or a vintage Bordeaux, is carcinogenic.
• Observant Mormon women don’t drink, and like other populations that abstain, they have significantly lower rates of breast cancer than drinkers. In Utah, Mormon women’s breast cancer rates are more than 24 percent lower than the national average.
• Fearing health advocates would do to alcohol what they had done to tobacco, the industry fought back with an audacious marketing campaign. Alcohol companies worked to rebrand booze as a staple of a healthy lifestyle, like salads and jogging.
• Marketing alcohol as a health product should be a tough sell. Cancer is only one of the many ways it can kill you. Drunk driving, alcohol poisoning, injuries, domestic violence, liver disease—alcohol is responsible for the deaths of nearly 90,000 Americans every year, more than double the estimated 40,000 US opioid deaths in 2015.
• Big Tobacco had set up research centers to dispute science tying smoking to lung cancer and funded research designed to show benefits from smoking, like stress reduction, to help fend off stricter regulation. The alcohol industry took a similar tack, aided by research it had been funding since the late 1960s.
• Between 1972 and 1993, Turner bragged, the beer foundation and its precursor funded more than 500 studies on alcohol and distributed grants to dozens of researchers and universities.
• At least a half-dozen government officials working on alcohol policy have left for gigs with the industry over the past 20 years.
• Like 76 percent of Americans surveyed by the American Heart Association in 2011, I believed a little wine was good for the ticker. The fact is, people wantto believe that drinking is good for them, and the science in this field is easy to manipulate to convince them.
• Stockwell and Fillmore analyzed decades’ worth of studies on alcohol and heart disease. Once they excluded studies with ex-drinkers—which was most of them—the heart benefits of alcohol largely disappeared. Since then, a host of other studies have found that drinking does not provide any heart benefits. (Some studies have found that drinking small amounts of alcohol—sometimes less than one drink per day—can be beneficial for certain people at risk of heart disease.) Robert Brewer, who runs an alcohol program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says, “Studies do not support that there are benefits of moderate drinking.” The Agriculture Department removed language suggesting that alcohol may lower the risk of heart disease in the most recent US Dietary Guidelines.
• Yet the debate rages on, in part because the industry continues to fund and promote studies indicating that alcohol helps the heart. The NIAAA is currently embarking on another one with $100 million in funding, most of which was solicited directly from the industry, according to the New York Times.
• Public health experts say that even if there is a small heart benefit from alcohol, it will never outweigh the risks….That’s why the American Heart Association strongly warns people not to start drinking if they don’t already.
• Other studies suggest that the risk of premenopausal breast cancer goes up 34 percent for every daily drink consumed before the age of 30. And the longer women go between their first period and their first baby, the riskier drinking becomes.
• Just as the evidence was becoming clear that women are disproportionately vulnerable to alcohol’s cancer risks, the industry mounted a campaign to get them to drink even more.
• The campaigns seem to have worked. An NIAAA study found that drinking by women jumped 16 percent between 2001 and 2013, more than twice the increase among men. The change is greatest among white women, 71 percent of whom drink today, compared with 64 percent in 1997, according to a Washington Post The alcohol-related death rate for white women more than doubled between 1999 and 2015.
• South Korea has tightened its recommended alcohol limits, and new Dutch guidelines urge people not to drink at all, but if they do, to consume no more than one drink a day. In December, Ireland’s upper house of parliament approved a cancer warning label for alcohol that is now being debated in the lower house. Even the Russians raised their alcohol taxes.
• For more than a decade, the alcohol industry has bulldozed long-standing public health regulations designed to reduce harmful consumption. It has mounted successful campaigns to allow the sale of liquor in supermarkets and on Sundays and to loosen restrictions on the hours liquor can be served in restaurants and bars. Not surprisingly, alcohol consumption per capita in the United States, which hit a 34-year low in 1997, has shot up to levels not seen in two decades.
• While other countries are considering World Health Organization recommendations to impose steeper alcohol taxes, the tax law President Donald Trump signed in December further slashed US alcohol excise taxes, which, thanks to inflation, were already down as much as 80 percent since the 1950s.
• …higher excise taxes, limits on the number of outlets selling alcohol in a particular area, stricter enforcement of underage drinking laws, and caps on the numbers of days and hours when alcohol can be sold…There’s a huge body of research supporting the effectiveness of these policies, yet there is not a single public health group in Washington lobbying for any of them.
• Government funding for alcohol harm reduction has also dried up. In 2009, the Justice Department budget for grants to states to enforce underage drinking laws was $25 million. By 2015, it was zero. At the request of the Obama White House, Congress also eliminated an Education Department program that combated underage drinking, among other initiatives.
• The press, which starting with Morley Safer has flooded readers with stories declaring that drinking is good for your health, has repeatedly accepted alcohol companies’ largesse