With “Dry January” underway, encouraging people to consider reducing their alcohol consumption, the United States’ top doctor has also issued a call to label alcohol as cancer-causing.

But Brock University Professor of Health Sciences Dan Malleck says there needs to be a more nuanced approach to discussions regarding alcohol consumption before people rush to chucking their wine collections in the bin for good.

“The anti-alcohol perspective is our default setting,” he says. “We are too willing to accept research showing it’s bad and be skeptical of evidence that says otherwise. This is a problem.”

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s advisory, which was released on Friday, Jan. 3, warns that alcohol consumption can increase the risk of cancer and that an updated health warning label is needed on alcoholic beverages to identify that risk.

These advisories are typically reserved for issues deemed to require immediate awareness and action and can be associated with major changes in a nation’s health habits. The surgeon general’s 1964 report on smoking is one such example.

Malleck, who is also the Director of Brock’s Centre for Canadian Studies and studies alcohol in the social and cultural environment, says similar calls were made by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) two years ago. This followed the release of new alcohol consumption guidelines in the country, which Malleck also reflected on at the time.

 “As with the CCSA guidance, the initial response from the surgeon general lacks any attempt at balance,” Malleck says. “It’s as if we all agree that alcohol is bad — we just need the right evidence. This is common temperance research methodology. He is cherry-picking the evidence to advance an anti-alcohol agenda.”

That is problematic, Malleck adds, because it does not give the public a complete understanding of the effect of alcohol on health and longevity.

“Although drinking may slightly raise the risk of certain cancers, they are not the most lethal forms of cancer,” he says. “Moreover, some cancers, such as breast cancer, have complex causations that cannot be reduced just to how much alcohol you have consumed.”

But most troubling, Malleck says, is that “evidence consistently shows that moderate drinking is still protective against cardiovascular disease, the single biggest cause of premature deaths in Canada and the United States.”

A detailed report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, released in December — but not referenced by the surgeon general — concludes that moderate alcohol consumption reduces the risk of all-cause mortality.

“Those risks include cancer,” Malleck says. “In other words, moderate drinking results in better health outcomes than abstinence.”

He also cautions the public to “pay attention to the use of cancer” as a type of scare-tactic, since it can distort understandings of risk.

“Unlike cancer risk, which gets instant panic responses, talk of cardiovascular disease risk gets little traction,” he says. “Is this just playing on broad cultural fears? Why is reducing risk of some forms of cancer that are not related to large numbers of deaths more important than reducing cardiovascular disease risk?”