Canadian Bodybuilding
23-04-2008, 01:40 AM
JUDITH TIMSON
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
April 22, 2008 at 8:47 AM EDT
One of my closest friends calls me occasionally at about 6 p.m. and jokes, "Is it time yet?" I know exactly what she's talking about. We've both been working our rear ends off and she wants to know if I'm as ready as she is for an end of day glass of wine.
That glass of wine is symbolic - the start of evening and a so-called personal life. And palliative - so soothing after a day of frustrating work, traffic tie-ups, soul weariness. It's a reward for making it through another day, as well as a dollop of sophistication amid domestic duty - the Sisyphean task of cooking the evening meal or getting the kids to bed.
Yet that one glass of wine - the pleasure of it, the taste of it and, most of all, the beloved ritual of it - is now under siege. The release last week of startling research on the link between drinking alcohol and getting breast cancer has sparked new fears in many women.
According to the study conducted by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the headlines blared, women who consumed less than one drink a day had a 7-per-cent increase in their risk of developing certain very common estrogen-fuelled breast cancers.
Take one or two drinks a day and your chances of getting these tumours increase 32 per cent, and three or more drinks boosts your risk 51 per cent.
Now, I am able to block out all sorts of dire health warnings - possibly because I'm relatively healthy, diligently downing my steel-cut oatmeal in the morning and my broccoli at night - but this one was unsettling. If you believe the statistics, what comes through loud and clear is that basically no alcohol is best for women, especially postmenopause.
In fact, alcohol could be the new nicotine for women - with black and white warnings on every bottle of pinot grigio soon to come, announcing drinking alcohol may lead to breast cancer.
Yet unlike with cigarettes, this feels like an assault on our lifestyle.
If I am honestly totalling up what I imbibe, I can get to six or seven drinks a week pretty quickly: one small glass of wine on many nights, with a second glass at dinner on the weekends. I haven't been drunk in years. I am not known in my social universe as an eyebrow-raising drinker.
Yet I now feel like a shiraz-fuelled ticking cancerous time bomb.
It isn't fair. Whatever happened to the "red wine is good for your heart" story? Can we not bring this back? In fact, we can, but researchers made it clear it's a matter of naming your poison. If breast cancer is in your family history, then reducing alcohol would be a good idea. If there's no breast cancer but there is heart disease, keep drinking - moderately. And if there's both? No fun there - just take a brisk walk and eat more veggies. No alcohol for you.
What a bore. I feel as though the last bastion of civilization is about to fall. I grew up watching my mother enjoying her glass of sherry before dinner. It's what adults did. She eventually switched to wine and religiously adhered to her (one) cocktail until she died at 90, with no sign of breast cancer.
Although when I was growing up, no one served wine with dinner, we're a wine-drinking society now. One predinner drink just leads to more wine around the table.
The new findings also make me concerned for the twentysomething generation of female drinkers. Go on Facebook and look at your daughters, most of them with glasses in hand and goofy grins on their faces.
Of course, I could be called a hypocrite for monitoring my children's alcohol intake while craving a nightly drink myself.
Juergen Rehm, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, was slightly reassuring on the subject.
While he doesn't like to give direct advice, he said in a telephone interview, in general, "because the risk is only slightly elevated, if it's really one glass a day, frankly, I would not care. Life is risky anyway."
However, if it's more than that, Dr. Rehm said, everyone would do well to cut back. The other problem, he added, is that most of us underestimate how much we really do drink.
I was just about to get off the phone when he added cheerfully: "There's one more thing to consider." Of all the life risks we knowingly assume, Dr. Rehm said - such as living in homes with radon, driving on highways or drinking water with questionable chemicals in it - "no other risk is as high or as unregulated as the risk we assume drinking alcohol over our lifetime."
That took my breath away. I'm definitely cutting back, I told my friend, I'll make mine mineral water with a twist of lemon. "Me, too," she said.
Two days later, we were back on the phone: "I started thinking about those warmer nights and sitting on the patio with a ... glass of wine," she said.
"I had wine last night at an Italian bistro," I confessed.
Sometimes you've just got to stare down the risk and go on living. One cocktail hour at a time.
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
April 22, 2008 at 8:47 AM EDT
One of my closest friends calls me occasionally at about 6 p.m. and jokes, "Is it time yet?" I know exactly what she's talking about. We've both been working our rear ends off and she wants to know if I'm as ready as she is for an end of day glass of wine.
That glass of wine is symbolic - the start of evening and a so-called personal life. And palliative - so soothing after a day of frustrating work, traffic tie-ups, soul weariness. It's a reward for making it through another day, as well as a dollop of sophistication amid domestic duty - the Sisyphean task of cooking the evening meal or getting the kids to bed.
Yet that one glass of wine - the pleasure of it, the taste of it and, most of all, the beloved ritual of it - is now under siege. The release last week of startling research on the link between drinking alcohol and getting breast cancer has sparked new fears in many women.
According to the study conducted by the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the headlines blared, women who consumed less than one drink a day had a 7-per-cent increase in their risk of developing certain very common estrogen-fuelled breast cancers.
Take one or two drinks a day and your chances of getting these tumours increase 32 per cent, and three or more drinks boosts your risk 51 per cent.
Now, I am able to block out all sorts of dire health warnings - possibly because I'm relatively healthy, diligently downing my steel-cut oatmeal in the morning and my broccoli at night - but this one was unsettling. If you believe the statistics, what comes through loud and clear is that basically no alcohol is best for women, especially postmenopause.
In fact, alcohol could be the new nicotine for women - with black and white warnings on every bottle of pinot grigio soon to come, announcing drinking alcohol may lead to breast cancer.
Yet unlike with cigarettes, this feels like an assault on our lifestyle.
If I am honestly totalling up what I imbibe, I can get to six or seven drinks a week pretty quickly: one small glass of wine on many nights, with a second glass at dinner on the weekends. I haven't been drunk in years. I am not known in my social universe as an eyebrow-raising drinker.
Yet I now feel like a shiraz-fuelled ticking cancerous time bomb.
It isn't fair. Whatever happened to the "red wine is good for your heart" story? Can we not bring this back? In fact, we can, but researchers made it clear it's a matter of naming your poison. If breast cancer is in your family history, then reducing alcohol would be a good idea. If there's no breast cancer but there is heart disease, keep drinking - moderately. And if there's both? No fun there - just take a brisk walk and eat more veggies. No alcohol for you.
What a bore. I feel as though the last bastion of civilization is about to fall. I grew up watching my mother enjoying her glass of sherry before dinner. It's what adults did. She eventually switched to wine and religiously adhered to her (one) cocktail until she died at 90, with no sign of breast cancer.
Although when I was growing up, no one served wine with dinner, we're a wine-drinking society now. One predinner drink just leads to more wine around the table.
The new findings also make me concerned for the twentysomething generation of female drinkers. Go on Facebook and look at your daughters, most of them with glasses in hand and goofy grins on their faces.
Of course, I could be called a hypocrite for monitoring my children's alcohol intake while craving a nightly drink myself.
Juergen Rehm, a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, was slightly reassuring on the subject.
While he doesn't like to give direct advice, he said in a telephone interview, in general, "because the risk is only slightly elevated, if it's really one glass a day, frankly, I would not care. Life is risky anyway."
However, if it's more than that, Dr. Rehm said, everyone would do well to cut back. The other problem, he added, is that most of us underestimate how much we really do drink.
I was just about to get off the phone when he added cheerfully: "There's one more thing to consider." Of all the life risks we knowingly assume, Dr. Rehm said - such as living in homes with radon, driving on highways or drinking water with questionable chemicals in it - "no other risk is as high or as unregulated as the risk we assume drinking alcohol over our lifetime."
That took my breath away. I'm definitely cutting back, I told my friend, I'll make mine mineral water with a twist of lemon. "Me, too," she said.
Two days later, we were back on the phone: "I started thinking about those warmer nights and sitting on the patio with a ... glass of wine," she said.
"I had wine last night at an Italian bistro," I confessed.
Sometimes you've just got to stare down the risk and go on living. One cocktail hour at a time.