Drinking Will Make Your Tits Fall Off

Here we are on the first day of January 2013, and the shitbag prohibitionists who invented Dry January have wasted no time at all in getting their propaganda out in the mainstream press to assure you that if you stop drinking (and smoking) then you will live forever. The Telegraph has a gem of an article a propaganda piece called "Alcohol guidelines 'too high' say doctors."   Ah, just from the title we know it's going to be a doozy.

They have been set too high and fail to take into account new evidence showing that drinking only modest amounts raises the risk of cancer and other diseases.
[...]
A Harvard University study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2011, found that women who drank just four small glasses of wine a week - about five units - increased their risk of developing breast cancer by 15 per cent compared to teetotallers. 

OK, for argument's sake, let's say that this risk increase of 15% for women who drink a paltry 5 units per week is an accurate statistic (and let's be honest, I'm pretty sure that this arbitrary five unit limit is reached within a couple of hours on a daily basis, but I digress).  That sounds frightening?   FIFTEEN PERCENT INCREASED RISK!  ZOMG!  Stop drinking now, ladies, or your waps will rot and fall off!  It's the end of the world! Right?

Ahem.

So what does this 15% increased risk of tit cancer mean in real terms?  How concerned should you be, ladies? To get that answer, I visited the web site of CRUK, our favourite evil, prohibitionist, nannying charity.  Here they give the estimated risk figures for women getting breast cancer over the course of their lifetime.  I don't know if it's accurate or adjusted / weighted in any way, but for our purposes it doesn't matter.  We're going to assume that it too is accurate.

To start, here is their table of women's estimated risk for breast cancer:

The first thing we notice is, which CRUK even says on their site, is that your risk increases greatly as you get older.  That's fair, because your risk of getting every kind of cancer increases greatly as you get older.  But anyway, the stats are presented in a way to make it look as scary as possible.  1 in 2000 seems like a pretty high chance and a lot of women are getting breast cancer before 30, doesn't it?  "One in Two-Thousand Women under 30 will DIE from breast cancer!" the papers will claim!

Well, no.  Here's a another way of looking at that figure.  1 in 2000 = 0.05% or five hundredths of a percent (which also looks like this in pure decimal form: 0.0005)  That's rare. In fact, as a statistic, it's considered negligible (although, I readily concede that anyone under 30 who does get breast cancer would argue that it's not that negligible because it happened to them), and your risk is practically non-existent.

So if you have a nearly non-existent risk of 0.05% and you increase that risk by an additional 15% because you're a filthy drinker of alcohol, then what's your new risk of watching your tits fall off before 30?  The answer is still non-existent at 0.0575%.  It didn't even increase a whole hundredth of a percentage point.  The additional risk of 15% is still negligible, statistically-speaking.

Anyway, I've done the maths on the rest of the ages noted in CRUK's table.  Actually, my Excel spreadsheet did them for me, because I'll be honest here, my maths skills are fairly rubbish these days. But I still know how to calculate percentages and write a formula for Excel (maybe), so without further ado:

Looking at the table's Lifetime risk values, the highest actual increase in real terms that any woman who drinks the dirty booze could expect to see is just 1.875%.  And for all women under 60 years of age, your increase in real terms doesn't even reach 1%.  So, ladies, your waps are fine if you keep drinking up to 5 units per week.  (Of course, if you drank 6 units per week, then you'd probably drop dead within a month.)  I should add that even my table of stats must be considered dodgy, too. I just used CRUK's table and calculated from there, and I'm conflating data from different sources, which is a no-no.  It's only meant to be illustrative, not scientific or factual.  Truth be told, what I have just done is par for the course these days in Public Health, so I feel at ease doing so.

Regardless, I hope that clearly illustrates exactly how the media, its flunky-junky medical correspondents, our activist doctor enemies and a host of ill-meaning university departments deceive you on a daily basis in order to promote their prohibitionist agendas. They don't tell you the real truth. They don't tell you what the statistics mean in real terms.  They are in effect lying to you by omission, and that makes them deceitful scumbags from hell. Do not trust any of these people. Ever.

Those puppies gon' be jus' fine! Keep drinking!

PS:  I'm sure you all know about Drinkuary, a wonderful riposte to Dry January. Don't you?  Such a shame this isn't happening next month, then we could have had "Febrewary."  Oh, well.