Is wine different from other alcoholic drinks when it comes to cancer risk?

It is strongly associated with cancers such as those of the mouth, liver and breast

- Wong Seng Weng

Warning: This column on wine and cancer may be confusing. There is no debate: Alcohol increases cancer risk. Right? Earlier in 2025, the United States Surgeon-General issued an advisory calling for cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages. He emphasized that in the US, alcohol ranks as the third leading preventable cause of cancer, following tobacco use and obesity.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a body under the World Health Organisation, classifies alcohol as a Group 1 carcinogen. In simple terms, this means alcohol is definitively linked to a higher risk of cancer in humans.

The most strongly associated cancers include those of the mouth, throat (pharynx and larynx), oesophagus, liver, breast and colon/rectum.

If things were this straightforward, this might be the shortest Doc Talk column I've written. But wine, among alcoholic drinks, is often an outlier in scientific research.

According to market research firm ReportLinker, wine consumption in Singapore has increased steadily over the past two decades, reaching an annual per capita volume of 2.6 litres in 2023 and has remained stable since.

With more Singaporeans drinking wine, questions about its potential harm or possible benefit are increasingly relevant.

The idea that light to moderate alcohol consumption might offer health benefits is not new. Numerous studies have suggested that moderate wine drinking could reduce the risk of heart disease, slow ageing and lower mortality. These benefits were often attributed to wine's anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

But the star of wine has dimmed in recent years.

Two recent studies are particularly notable. One, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) in 2022, found that all levels of alcohol consumption—mostly wine and beer—were associated with increased cardiovascular risk.