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Consuming one bottle of wine each week equals the cancer risk of smoking ten cigarettes per week, according to new research, and consuming three bottles per week for women more than doubles the cancer risk.
In the first study of its kind, scientists compared the known dangers of smoking to those of alcohol consumption. The study was carried out by researchers at University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, Bangor University and the University of Southampton and published in the journal BioMedCentral Public Health.
The researchers analyzed data to arrive at the “cigarette equivalent” in terms of cancer risk. This equated one bottle of wine (broken up into roughly 10 units) per week, with that of ten cigarettes per week for women, or five cigarettes per week for men.
The researchers estimated that for those who drink one bottle of wine per week, 14 out of 1,000 women would develop cancer, as would ten out of 1,000 men.
Breast cancer was the most likely risk for women, while men were at the highest risk for gastrointestinal cancer.
The risk of developing cancer increases with the amount of weekly alcohol consumed, the researchers found.
Women consuming three bottles of wine per week more than doubled their likelihood of developing cancer, affecting 36 out of 1,000 women. The likelihood of developing cancer in men drinking three bottles of wine per week increased to 19 and of 1,000.
In comparison to cigarettes, three bottles of wine per week is equivalent to smoking 23 cigarettes per week for women. For men, it is equivalent to eight cigarettes per week.
The researchers broke alcohol into units. A large glass of wine is considered to contain 10 units, while a pint of beer is approximately 2.3 units.
