Alcohol, Canada, and the CCSA Report: The Devil’s in the Details

Alcohol is back in the news in Canada and the new report from The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) is making waves. The CCSA report updates their guidelines on safe alcohol consumption, and this is the first update in 11 years. The TL:DR on this one is that it significantly lowers the amount of alcohol advised to drink.

How much lower?

The new report states that no amount of alcohol is truly safe, suggesting a maximum of two drinks a week for both men and women. This guidance is far more conservative then the original guidance, which previously advised up to 15 drinks a week for men and 10 for women. Furthermore, health experts are now pushing for cancer warning labels to be placed on all alcoholic beverages.

The report is 84 pages long, looks at 5915 reports, and concludes that there is no safe amount of alcohol. Furthermore, the report suggests that anything more than 2 standard drinks a week will dramatically increase your chances of cancer and of dying early.

So, I looked at the report and went down to the results section to see what they actually say. The report lists 5915 sources for its report on the dangers of alcohol, and it goes into a lot of detail about how the study was conducted, adds some cool and scary charts, but if you…