How Alcohol Rewires Your Brain and Increases Cancer Risk by 40%! The Alcohol Doctor, Dr. Sarah Wakeman

**Sarah Wakeman** (0:00)
The amount of alcohol it takes to begin to cause health-related problems is much lower than you think. Okay, so if I have this glass of wine every day, you'd be in what we call moderate risk, which is associated with pretty much every form of cancer.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:11)
So say that I'm drinking two of those a day.

**Sarah Wakeman** (0:12)
If you drink two of those glasses, we're talking like a 40% increase. But even drinking that amount, your risk of breast cancer would increase by about 5%.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:19)
This amount?

**Sarah Wakeman** (0:20)
Which for many people is very normal. So there's a lot of misinformation out there about how much should you drink, which I think people don't know, but I can take you through everything.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:28)
So Dr. Sarah Wakeman is a Harvard Professor and Addiction Expert.

**Sarah Wakeman** (0:32)
Leading the charge against one of the biggest public health crises of our time. Addiction, bringing facts, empathy, and hard-earned truth. One in three people may have a problem with alcohol at some point in their lives, and globally 2.6 million people every year die from alcohol-related causes because pretty much every organ in the body is impacted by it. You can see here this is a 43-year-old person where their brain looks the way a 90-year-old with dementia would look because of that brain damage over time from alcohol use. But what drives people to use substances is probably the most important question. And if we look at studies, one is about 40 to 60 percent genetics, and the other half of the equation is trauma. And so when we hear someone talk about alcohol gives them pain relief, whether that's emotional or physical, that's a very real thing. That's because your sort of natural painkiller system is activated by drinking. It's an anti-anxiety, anti-pain medication sort of all in one.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:18)
So when you think about how we treat addiction, where are we going wrong?

**Sarah Wakeman** (1:22)
The biggest problem is that people haven't been given the evidence and tools to understand addiction, but also many rehabs don't offer the things that we know are actually effective.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:30)
And what is it that people need?

**Sarah Wakeman** (1:31)
Great question. One of the most effective tools we teach people is something called... And they found that people drank much less after it.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:38)
Wow. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button. Wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
Dr. Sarah Wakeman, with all the work that you do, what is the mission that you are on?

**Sarah Wakeman** (2:31)
My mission is really to change the way people think about and understand alcohol and drug problems, and also to give people the evidence and the facts, both to understand addiction, which are sort of problems related to alcohol and drug use, but also to just understand the science around, for example, how much should you drink? Is drinking healthy? Is it not healthy? There's a lot of misinformation out there, and I want to give people the tools to make the right decision for them in their lives.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:53)
Who are you and what is your body of experience and education?

**Sarah Wakeman** (2:58)
I'm a medicine doctor by training, so I still do some general medicine, like in the hospital, take care of pneumonia and heart failure, and in the outpatient setting, take care of people's diabetes and depression. But I train especially in addiction medicine, so I'm board certified in addiction medicine, and that's been my life's work. I work in a big academic medical center in Boston, Massachusetts, where I would say my kind of focus professionally has been thinking about how do we bring addiction care back into the medical system, so that it's not this separate and unequal and often very poorly done sort of siloed system, but actually just a part of the health care that people get. And then I train people, so I'm program director of our fellowship program, so I train doctors who want to be specialists in addiction medicine.