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Dr. Sarah Wakeman

lines on the record: 127
first: 2025-05-22
most recent: 2025-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, first of all, there's whole like Reddit threads and online communities about this where people were prescribed it for diabetes or for weight loss and they all of a sudden were like, I don't really want to smoke or drink like that kind of urge has gone away entirely. And for some people, they really describe it as being like miraculous. They've been trying to stop drinking for years and years and for the first time they don't feel that sense of like craving and urge. And there recently have been some actual clinical trials where they've done, you know, placebo-controlled, blinded studies and have shown that it does reduce drinking. And so it's a really interesting area where it seems like those medications kind of reset craving an appetite more globally and not just for food.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, people have looked at Ibigane for opioid use disorder. Those studies have been less promising than psilocybin, although it hasn't been tested in the same kind of rigorous ways recently, partly for opioid use disorder. We have really effective medications that have been shown to improve recovery and reduce death, and so it's sort of hard to be better than that. One really interesting new whole class of medications for alcohol is medications that are being used for weight loss that people have probably heard of. So like wigovi, ozempic, that whole class of GLP1 medication seems to also reduce alcohol use, which is kind of interesting.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, one of the most groundbreaking trials in the last couple years for alcohol use disorder was psilocybin. So there's a big study of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for alcohol use disorder, which showed really remarkable effects. So people took psilocybin, they actually compared it. Folks came in and the other got a big dose of benadryl or psilocybin. And then they sat with a therapist for like eight hours for this guided psilocybin journey. And they found that people drank much less after it. So it does seem to have some effect. And the thought is that part of the way psychedelics work is they increase neuroplasticity, meaning the ability for the brain to form new pathways and kind of retrain itself. And so it does seem to be a potential therapeutic for alcohol use disorder.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's this medication I mentioned at the beginning that actually blocks your opioid receptors. Seems kind of funny that it works on alcohol, but the reason it does is that for people who part of the thing that drives them to drink is that they drink, they feel this like pain relief, pleasure, sensation from the release of opioids in their brain, and that makes them want to drink more, that if you block that, people don't get sick if they drink, but they just don't find it as rewarding. And so someone named Sinclair actually in Europe did some fascinating experiments of even just using it as needed. So rather than taking it as an everyday medication, if you know that when you go to like a holiday event, you're going to drink way more than you want to drink. You take it like 30 minutes before you go. And then what people find is they have like one drink and they're like, I'm good. I don't have that same urged want to drink more and more because I didn't get the same sort of tickle of feeling better and feeling relief.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The model is really built around this idea of like you remove yourself from this environment, you do some groups while you're there, sometimes often they're based on more of like a peer support model, sometimes the therapies that are offered are frankly not very evidence-based. Like we actually did this study. It was a secret shopper study where we called rehab programs across the country to like ask about what they offered and many of them offer things like horse therapy or like dolphin assisted therapy, which like I'm sure it's very nice to swim with dolphins and to work with horses, but it's not something that's been like studied and effective and many places don't offer the things that we know are actually effective, which are trained clinicians doing evidence-based treatments or medication treatments. So it's a combination of like this short-term fix for a long-term problem and not actually getting the treatment that you need. So what does work, like for alcohol use disorder, most people don't know? We have very effective medications that can help you. Even if you just want to not drink as much.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generally no. So, you know, rehab is this idea that you go away somewhere for a week, a couple weeks, and then you're kind of cured, right? It's almost like people have thought of addiction as an infection where you need like two weeks of antibiotics and then you're done. What we really understand is that for many people, addiction is more like a chronic illness or even like cancer, where you need a lot of treatment up front for the first few years. And then over time, you get into stability and remission and you're almost like a cancer survivor. You're in long-term recovery. And so this idea that you go somewhere for a couple weeks and then you come out and you're all better really doesn't match what we know of addiction. The other problem is that much of what happens in rehab is not all that therapeutic most of the time. So the things that we know are most effective for addiction. One are medications, which there's a lot of stigma misunderstanding about. And then two are like evidence-based psychotherapies. So things like cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational enhancement therapy, working on your underlying trauma, often in rehab.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first, like, there's no judgment here. So, a molecule of ethanol is not more moral or immoral than a molecule of glucose. You could see the same thing about diet. We have lots of awareness now about processed food.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is some element of dehydration, don't get me wrong, and that's partly because, right, if you think again, alcohol is diffused in water. So if your total body water is contracted because you're dehydrated, your ethanol level is going to be higher. So drinking is going to help you sort of flush it out and feel better. I'm drinking water, but it's not only because of dehydration.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is not just being dehydrated. There's actual sort of effects of ethanol on your brain that leap to the hangover. Think if you are drinking at an amount that you're getting a hangover, it is a good sign that you're drinking above a limit that would be considered okay for your body.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your hangover is a fascinating thing that people are, you know, there's a lot of emerging evidence about it and trying to understand what happens. It seems to be most related to how high the ethanol concentration in your brain gets because they've actually done a ton of studies with mice and with people. It was initially thought to be due to the byproducts of alcohol, like that acetylhyde molecule we talked about, but it doesn't seem to be related to that. It seems to be related to ethanol. But essentially it's the syndrome where after you drink once your blood alcohol content comes down to zero, you feel sort of apathetic, you're tired, you have a headache, you often feel nauseous. And so it's sort of that sequeli of your brain essentially being bathed in this ethanol. And then as it leaves, you just feel totally crappy.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, first of all, I think the interesting story there one is not just the body fat, but also that people metabolize alcohol at different rates. You probably, I don't know if you found this feature, you probably had fewer hangovers than your friend because hangover does seem to be related to the amount, how high that your blood alcohol level gets. So people who don't metabolize alcohol as quickly tend to have worse hangovers. So that may have been something you experienced, but it doesn't protect you from the other health harms about alcohol, like liver damage, like cancer, like over time, you know, heart problems or esophageal problems.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet'cause they have less body water, and alcohol doesn't go on your body fats. Essentially, it's like if you took a glass of water and you dropped red dye in it, you're going to diffuse into that water. So the more water you have, the more diffuse it'll be and the lower your blood alcohol content. So if you have very low body fat, you probably have more body water. And so, you know, two drinks for you is going to diffuse into a larger amount of water.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so you get a single impulse that goes to the bottom of the heart says pump and that pumps blood out to your brain and your body and your organs and your liver. In atrial fibrillation, the top of the heart is just kind of quivering with this abnormal electroactivity. And so the heart can't pump in a normal way. We actually, there's a term in medicine called holiday heart because we see sometimes people drink a ton over the holidays and we'll end up in this abnormal rhythm just from that binge drinking pattern. And then over time, if you're drinking at high levels, your heart actually dilates and you can end up with congestive heart failure from a cardiomyopathy, which means the heart muscle gets kind of weak and thin and floppy and can't pump the way that it needs to.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in your heart, there's four chambers. The two chambers at the top. This is really showing the ventricles and the atrium. So there's two chambers that blood flows through. And in a normal heart, your electrical activity comes from the top of your heart, goes down to the bottom of your heart, and tells the heart to pump.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the brain. So the brain, for sure, the next is the mouth and your esophagus. So obviously you're drinking alcohol, it's bathing your mouth, it's bathing your esophagus in your stomach. So we do see an increase in cancer like we talked about and that's accelerated by smoking. But we also see like benign but annoying and problematic health conditions, most notably acid reflux, so heartburn. So if you notice like I'm like always having heartburn, I'm having to pop all these like anacids and take this medicine. You might want to think like, how much am I drinking? Is that contributing to my heartburn? So that's a very common thing. The heart is affected by alcohol. So, you know, the heart is an organ where at low risk levels, there doesn't seem to be harm from alcohol, but once you get into the moderate and high, we see harms, and the harms can be a couple folds. One is something called atrial fibrillation, which is basically where your heart starts beating really irregularly.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I remember I said ethanol, which is the molecule, crosses a blood brain barrier. And so especially when you're having these high levels of blood alcohol, that ethanol is sort of bathing your brain. And if you think about what we talked about, inflammation and changes to cells and to DNA and proteins that is happening at the brain level, the other thing that can cause, accelerate the brain damage we see with alcohol is actually nutritional deficiencies. So people may be drinking a lot and they're actually not getting really crucial nutrients in their diet. And that can accelerate the process of brain damage. We can even see a very like sudden onset amnesia from heavy alcohol use in the setting of not getting enough nutrients in your diet.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. So when we do an MRI of someone's brain, we basically, this is like a cross slice, so it's almost like you're facing me and I'm cutting your face off and looking your brain onwards. Healthy brain tissue is the gray and white matter, and you want it to be as plump and like taking up as much space as possible because that's where all of your brain activity is. When people get really old or have dementia, one thing we see is more and more of the black space is essentially water. So we see the brain starts shrinking and shrinking and there's more water and less active healthy brain tissue. That process is accelerated with heavy alcohol use and you can see here this is a 43 year old person with severe alcohol use disorder where their brain looks away a 90 year old with dementia would look because of that brain damage over time from alcohol use. And so we can actually a form of dementia is related to alcohol use and so your brain can be hugely impacted with alcohol.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm an alcohol has effects across our body. So many parts of the body can be affected by alcohol. So kind of starting from the top, your brain, and we can look at this with pictures like an MRI.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, it varies person to person. For liver damage, it does tend to be the moderate to higher amounts that cause damage. One thing is that having these big surges, like these massive binge episodes is probably more harmful than drinking at a moderate level for a long period of time. Those like big surges cause a big buildup of that toxic byproduct that your body has to clear. And so, you know, if you have several years of binge drinking heavily, that actually probably is going to cause more damage than a longer period of time of just drinking above the risk limits. So really trying to minimize and avoid those very heavy drinking episodes is incredibly important. And then keeping it to those low risk guidelines, which we just learned are kind of eye-opening and how low risk they are is going to reduce the risk of liver damage.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, food, so your liver is very involved in glucose metabolism So our diet and our body weight impact our liver health. The other medications, so acetaminophen or tylenol, which is a very common over-the-counter pain reliever, above a certain threshold can cause serious liver damage. So sometimes you'll see cases where someone didn't realize that like their cold medicine plus the tylenol they were taking both had that ingredient and then they go out and drink heavily and that kind of combination effect can cause liver damage.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Changes over time, we see the development of what's called fibrosis, which is like scar tissue. And then that scar tissue gets more and more advanced to the point that your liver stops functioning and you either die or you need a liver transplant.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As long as you haven't gotten to that scarring phase. So once you get too far down that path, even if you were to stop drinking, your liver won't recover. The hard thing is that that we don't totally understand who and why that happened so young to. So this is an active area investigation because there are people who've been drinking for 60 years and their livers don't show signs of scarring. And then we're seeing these young people at 25 who come in and die in the hospital. And so there are individual factors that you don't have any way of knowing that are going to impact your risk of developing liver inflammation and scar tissue. And so the safest way to prevent that is to not drink in these really high ways that we know are going to lead to harm. The other way is to get medical care because often we do detect these things through blood tests and we can do ultrasounds and when we see those early phases so what happens first is you actually get fat deposition in your liver that's the first step and then we see inflammation and fatty liver and if you don't stop the thing that's driving those”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, so first, every person is different. One blowout weekend, you probably would be fine. Anyone would probably be fine. The challenge is one blowout weekend then leads to like multiple blowout weekends. And then over time, that can actually accelerate the damage to your liver.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obesity, other things. But once you pass that point into scar tissue, the liver can't regenerate anymore. And so when you think about that graph or just the rising rates of liver disease, the main drivers of liver disease are obesity, and two is alcohol. And so those are the leading causes of liver transplant. And the thing that is, you know, so sad is, I mean, I see this all the time working in the hospital is, first of all, we're seeing younger and younger people coming in and liver failure. So people in their 20s coming in and fulminate liver failure from alcohol and then dying in the hospital. And the terrible thing is that they often didn't even know that this was causing a problem in their health. And by the time they get to the hospital, they're so sick. It's too late. And yet all of that could have been prevented or even repaired if it was caught sooner. And so that's where I think this education of understanding like what really are the health harms of alcohol and that we have normalized binge drinking in many occasions, especially in young.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the oven, and you forgot the eggs, you can't pour the eggs on top and make the batter the same. And the liver is sort of like that, that up to a certain degree, you can actually completely repair the effects of things like alcohol or”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, it is. Really? Yeah, it's a giant organ. And it's an amazing organ. So you can actually cut out 80% of the liver and it would regrow itself. So kind of like, you know, those lizards that you cut off their tail and they regenerate a tail. The liver is fascinating. It's why we can do living liver transplant. So I could take half of your liver and give it to someone who needed a liver. You would still be able to live and they would get a second chance at life from that part of your liver. So it's this really cool organ that can regenerate. But it can only regenerate up to a point. So once you get to a level where you have a lot of scar tissue in your liver, we call that cirrhosis. You sort of reach a point of no return where at that point the liver can't heal itself. So I sort of think of it like to use a baking analogy. If you're making muffins or a cake, you're going along, you're mixing all your ingredients and you realize before you put things in the oven like, oh, I forgot the eggs. You can still add the eggs in and like whisk it all together and it's going to be okay. If the muffins are baked.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, great question. So here's our little mannequin. So just to orient people to the bodies who are looking at the inside of the body, so like the ribs are gone, the outside of the skin is gone. These two pink things are the lungs. They kind of encase the heart. You can see the hearts behind the lungs pumping your blood. The liver is this brownish organ. It's on the right side of your body right under your ribs. It's quite large and it's big. An amazing organ it is quite big. It processes much of what any kind of toxins that we take in, things that we eat, your glucose, alcohol, ninety percent of its metabolized by the liver. So the liver is sort of the clearinghouse getting rid of byproducts in your body. The other are the kidneys, but the liver plays a huge role especially in alcohol. So it sits right here”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, you know, I know you talked about this, Dr. Lumke, but your body always wants to restore what's called homeostasis. Your body's always going to fight to get back to what it feels its normal is. And so ethanol is not something that belongs in your bloodstream. Your body is going to try to excrete it as fast as it can. And then it converts it into something called acetate, and then you can pee that out and breathe that out and get rid of it. So to eliminate the alcohol in your body, you have to go through this process. And part of that process includes this toxic molecule that's going to be floating around and causing damage to your cells. So that's one way that alcohol can cause cancer. The other is just general sort of inflammation. People have probably heard that inflammation is just not good for the body and increase. Alcohol generates a lot of that inflammation in the process of getting eliminated. And so it can actually change your cells that over time that can lead to cancer.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Level keeps going up, then you start having impaired judgment. You might have motor, lack of motor coordination. So we've all seen this and many people have probably experienced it. You know, you may be stumbling, not able to drive safely. You're not going to make the same decisions you would make if you weren't drinking. And then if you keep drinking, then you can actually lose consciousness, so pass out, and people have experienced that. Your body is going to try to break down alcohol as quickly as it's able to, like anything. We want to kind of excrete any abnormality and get back to our normal functioning. And so that process happens mostly in your liver, which is why the liver is so sensitive to alcohol.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's lots of different mechanisms. So, I mean, maybe starting just with what does alcohol do in your body? So you ingest alcohol, the fancy name for that is ethanol. It's a molecule. And it basically gets absorbed pretty quickly from your stomach. And so, you know, it hits your bloodstream usually within 10 minutes or so of having a drink, how much it hits your bloodstream depends on how much water you have in your body. So alcohol doesn't penetrate into your fat. It just kind of diffuses into the water parts of your body. So that's actually why for many women, they will get more sort of drunk or more of an effect from alcohol at a lower level than men because women have more body fat than men. But that's going to depend on you as an individual if you have more body fat. You're going to have a different impact. So alcohol gets in your bloodstream. Alcohol can instantly cross across what we call your blood brain barrier. So it impacts your brain instantly. And that's where you feel the initially pleasurable effects from many people of feeling a little relaxed, feeling more social, feeling a little bit, you know, less anxiety. If you keep drinking and that”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thought is if you take esophageal cancer at the cellular level, it makes you more susceptible of the carcinogens, which are kind of the cancer-causing compounds in tobacco. And so rather than just seeing like an additive risk, you actually almost get a multiplied risk in terms of the risk of cancer. So smoking and then obesity is the other big one. So a lot of cancers, your risk goes up if you have an increase in your body mass.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly if you smoke, so one of the main drivers of alcohol too and cancer is that it actually makes you more susceptible to the cancer-causing effects of tobacco. So if you drink and smoke, your risk of cancer is going to be even higher.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it varies by cancer, but roughly we're talking like a 40% increase in cancer depending on the cancer type. And the more you drink, the more that's going to go up. So, you know, these are scientific studies where it's not precise to you as an individual. They're based on large populations, but definitely the more you drink, the greater the risk.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So colon cancer, we're seeing that in a lot of young men, liver cancer. Yeah, prostate cancer, which is obviously a male cancer we don't think of as much as being sort of an alcohol sensitive cancer, but most cancers, because the way alcohol impacts your risk of cancer is not really on a specific organ outside of the liver. It's really about how it changes our DNA. So it's about inflammation and what are called reactive oxygen species that sort of change our cells and increase the risk over time of the mutations that lead to cancer.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that low risk category, so when these big cancer studies categorize people as sort of low risk or light drinkers, moderate or heavy. And for pretty much every cancer, once you get to the moderate category, we start seeing increases. And there's what we call a dose response relationship. So the more you drank, the higher your risk of cancer. There's only a few cancers that the risk seems to increase even at that very low level, and breast cancer is one of those. And then esophageal cancer is one of those. So there are certain cancers where even a small amount of alcohol will increase your risk.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so that would be one unit. So that would be fewer than 14 of that. So you could see like if you had double that, it would be a decent pour of wine. You could not have more than seven of those in a week to be in low risk. But even drinking that amount, your risk of breast cancer would go up a little bit.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so the reasons for that are likely environmental because your genes don't change over that time period. So the risk factor is, if you think about breast cancer, it's alcohol, it's obesity. It's when you have children or don't have children because it's a really hormonally driven cancer. Same thing if you think about colon cancer. That's a really scary one where we're seeing more and more cases in younger people. Some of the drivers of that eating meat. So processed meats increase your risk of colon cancer. So, you know, these very sort of normal behaviors, there's probably other environmental things, honestly, that we're not yet measuring or able to measure, just given the rate of acceleration. When I talk to my colleagues for oncologists, you know, things like plastics or other things that we don't yet know. It's clearly something in the environment that is driving these increased cancer risks.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the data is growing and really worrisome. So for breast cancer, so there's really, there's a few cancers that even at low risk limits, you see the risk begin to increase. So where we would say there's kind of no healthy or there's no even like low risk amount. So breast and esophageal cancer, two examples of that. So breast cancer, if you were to drink below those low risk limits. So in the US, that would be fewer than seven drinks, but a drink in the US is five ounces of wine, which is smaller than that. Or in the UK is below that 14 units. So it would be fewer than seven of that size glass of wine. We still see a slight increase in their scope of breast cancer. It's about a 5% increase. So that means your risk of breast cancer would increase by about 5%. And that's not huge. So I think, you know, percent increases kind of hard to do the math on. But if you think in the US, for example, the average woman has a 13% likelihood of getting breast cancer in their lifespan.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd be in what we call moderate risk, which is associated with pretty much every form of cancer, which I think people don't know.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd be right at that limit. The problem is, most people don't drink just one glass if you, you know, you have two glasses one day and then one glass one day and then three glasses one day because you're at a social function, all of a sudden you're actually quite a lot over that limit.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A part of the challenge is what we think of as one drink. So I think much like if you learn to read the serving size on a food, you realize that like, oh, a serving of ice cream is like a half scoop. It's not like a giant ice cream sundae. The same is true with alcohol. So in the UK, the kind of low risk drinking limits talk about units of alcohol, which is the equivalent of eight grams of alcohol. So how much of a drink has eight grams of alcohol? And to be in that low risk category, you have to be below 14 units. The problem is that glass of wine, just eyeballing it, has several units of alcohol. So it is not a, even though we think of it as a single drink, it's probably, I mean, I have to guess, but it's probably like three units of alcohol.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I would never say drinking alcohol is good for your health. That doesn't mean that drinking at what we call low risk levels can't be a part of a healthy lifestyle, so it's a slight, slight shift that like don't fool yourself into thinking that drinking that glass of wine is like going to exercise for 30 minutes. Like it's not something that's going to promote your health. I think of it more like having dessert, eating bacon, going out in the sun. There are risks associated with all those activities. It doesn't mean that I would say you can never do any of that, but you need to understand what the risks are and then make choices for yourself.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That in the people who don't drink at all, many of those people are not drinking because they're actually really unhealthy for another reason. Like they might have heart failure and they don't want to drink because they don't want it to mix with their medication. Or they might have had a history of alcohol use disorder and they're actually in recovery. So they've already had some damage from alcohol and they are not drinking because of that. And so when you change the reference group, you actually make the sort of group that you compare people to people who very rarely drink. So it's not that they're not drinkers at all, but they drink, you know, very, very light levels. Then you start to see that those like health benefits of alcohol go away, especially if you look across all conditions.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where I think we got wrong. And the reason why was actually from how we were looking at the data. So first, if you look at only one health condition, there are some health conditions where a moderate amount of alcohol actually improves your health. But it was also how people were conducting the study. So in most of those studies, what people do is they take a massive population, tens of thousands of people, where we have some data where they're reporting how much alcohol they used. And then we look at health risks over time. And scientists would lump people into sort of non-drinkers versus light drinkers, moderate drinkers, or heavy drinkers. And what they're finding is that people who are drinking in the even up to the moderate level were actually doing better than the people who weren't drinking at all. And so that was where that concept that drinking is good for your health came from. And so people talk about this like J-shaped curve, meaning that moderate drinkers actually have lower risks of health problems. And then it's really only when you start drinking very high levels that you start having more risk of health problems than people who don't drink at all. What they realized was wrong with that is”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the journey of alcohol is fascinating. So, first, I think we think of this as a relatively modern thing, but archaeologists have discovered like beer making equipment in hunter-gatherers' cave dwellings from 13,000 years ago. That's wild. Like 13,000 years of people figuring out how to make beer. You know, you look at China 9,000 years ago. It was really about a spiritual journey or a social thing. It was never really about health. At some point, we started talking about this as something that is good for your health. Like drink red wine, it's going to improve your health.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on the type of addiction and their situation, but in most cases it's some combination of psychotherapy medication”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This idea that that's a safe intervention. And you hear these stories, right? Of someone who they get locked up and that's their eureka moment. And yet, if imprisonment were an effective intervention for addiction, for example, we wouldn't see that actually the time after getting released from prison, there's 130 times increased risk of dying from a drug-related cause after people leave prison and that your risk of dying ever from addiction is much, much higher if you've ever been imprisoned. And so I think there are those stories, but we tend to elevate those like amazing narratives and we miss the fact that so many other people are going to die in pain and alone and isolated because they have no hope. And so it's not to discount those moments. And some people are incredibly resilient and against all odds, even with the most trauma, they can, you know, make it through. And that's incredible. But that doesn't mean that we should like create a system that makes it as hard as possible on people.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there are those times for sure it's not to discount that and I hear those stories too, but I think there are from evidence what we know there are probably more times where people just endure the pain again and again until they never change and I think the part that we don't see are the folks who change happens when they begin to get enough hope that things could be better for them, that you know someone loves them, someone cares enough that they're reaching out a hand in the darkness that there actually is a path forward. I think people stay stuck when they feel hopeless, when they feel like nothing could ever that they're never going to get this they're never going to be able to change their life would never get better and so you know take the example I'll often hear from family members when their loved one is in jail that they're like thank heavens you know they're they're in a safe place at least like there's actually this sense of relief there's even a term for it called a rescued that people feel I think it just goes to the desperation that families are dealing with but this”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In recovery, or you're actively using, and this is good, and that is bad, is that we lose the fact that like people who are struggling with addiction are amazing, funny, loving people who have a problem that they're dealing with, but if someone was dealing with cancer, you wouldn't want to spend time with them. You know, you miss all of that time. both cases that I'm thinking about it, like I'll never get that back, you know.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, I think about that all the time. And, you know, I think when I think of a friend, I lost overdose, I think of the family member. I lost alcohol and not only things that I could have done differently, but also those people, they saw their doctor. They were in the hospital. They had all these touch points, all of these reachable moments where someone could have engaged with them and offered them kindness and actual effective care that's backed by science and they weren't. And so there are all of these like missed moments and missed opportunities. But the other thing I think about is how much time I lost with them because I think often in this model of like tough love and kicking people out or thinking like, I'm not going to see you until you stop using or stop drinking because I think that's going to help make them make that change. You lose out on like all of these moments of time with people that you love and you can't get those back. And so there is this problem, I think in that binary model of like you're either like sober.”
2025-05-22 · The Diary of a CEO · How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT