Dry January is a time when many people think about taking a break from alcohol and giving their liver a rest. But what does that look like in terms of individual benefits? What if you knew how many minutes of life you could potentially regain by skipping that last drink, or how your weekly alcohol intake measures up compared to smoking cigarettes?
A team of researchers at the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at University of Victoria and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health is launching KnowAlcohol.ca, a tool and calculator designed to show people personalized estimates of their potential health risks related to their alcohol use — and the benefits of cutting back.
Using the science behind Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health, the Know Alcohol calculator shows people their individualized risks of alcohol-related disease, including several types of cancers, measures like cigarette equivalency, and minutes of life lost per drink, as well as information about costs and calories related to alcohol — all tailored to you based on your age, sex, and amount you drink per week.
Given alcohol’s tremendous impact on Canadian society, and the lack of credible information people in Canada have about alcohol, our team set out to develop a tool to empower people to learn more about alcohol’s impacts on their health and their wallet.
Table of Contents
1. What’s the deal with alcohol in Canada?
Alcohol is a legal substance that is consumed by most Canadian adults; it has social, cultural and religious uses. However, it also can cause harms to those who drink, the people around them, or to society overall.
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Alcohol causes 17,000 deaths annually in Canada, and costs society more money than tobacco and opioids combined. Each drink sold amounts to 38 cents more in direct public costs than it brings in from taxes and fees (the alcohol deficit). This adds up to a massive taxpayer-funded subsidy of alcohol companies and those who consume most of the alcohol in Canada.
And yet the federal government recently suspended inflation adjustments for alcohol taxes, and as we documented in our Canadian Alcohol Policy Evaluation project, approximately half of provinces and territories lack alcohol-specific taxes or minimum pricing policies, both of which would reduce harms … and raise revenues to help cover alcohol’s cost to society.
2. The Guidance and its aftermath
Canada’s Guidance on Alcohol and Health was released in 2023. Mandated, funded and overseen by Health Canada, and convened by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, it involved more than 20 researchers (including ourselves) from 16 academic institutions across Canada. The group followed a comprehensive process to evaluate the latest scientific evidence, much of which has evolved since Canada’s last drinking guidelines, created in 2011.
The most important and consistent finding was that if you use alcohol, less is better in terms of health, and the risk of harm is related to how much alcohol consumed. Rather than prescribing a single level of consumption as desirable, the Guidance contains a series of risk zones that are meant to be relevant to those who drink at all levels.
The Guidance also called for mandatory labelling of alcohol products to convey health risks, along with standard drink information, to enable consumers to more accurately track their drinking and translate their personal risk.
While the Guidance was well publicized and much talked about, it was met with strong industry backlash, lobbying and efforts to discredit the Guidance and its scientists. There have been no official federal policy changes since the release of the Guidance.
Despite these industry efforts, there is clear evidence to show provincial, territorial and federal governments the high cost of alcohol and the need for more public knowledge.
There is far more information on a can of peas than on a bottle of alcohol, which lacks information about health risks (unlike labels for tobacco and cannabis), the number of drinks per container or the serving size for a standard drink, drinking guidance, or calorie content.
Alcohol, a Group 1 carcinogen (most carcinogenic, like cigarette smoke and benzene), receives privileged treatment compared to other packaged food or beverage products, or even other psychoactive substances like tobacco and cannabis.
3. Why should Canadians be empowered to know more?
There is a fundamental disconnect between the risks and costs of alcohol versus existing efforts to inform and protect consumers. Those of us who worked on the Guidance believe in the importance of a consumer’s “right to know,” considering how much of what we do or don’t know about alcohol is influenced by the alcohol industry through messaging and marketing activities. Unfortunately, this information is often misleading, incomplete or inaccurate. As it is, only slightly more than half of Canadians are aware that alcohol causes cancer, and only one-third of women we surveyed to develop KnowAlcohol.ca were aware that alcohol can cause breast cancer.
Due to a scarcity of political leadership and heavy industry lobbying, many effective policies to protect consumers have been implemented sub-optimally, or not at all.
So given these circumstances, consumer awareness and empowerment are critical. In addition, better knowledge about the effects of alcohol, particularly as it relates to cancer or its second-hand impacts on non-drinkers, has been shown to increase support for effective public policies that reduce risky drinking and protect vulnerable people from harm.
4. How does KnowAlcohol.ca fit in?
It’s important to translate population-level drinking guidance in a format that resonates with individuals and is relevant to a person’s circumstances. Deciding to think about and engage with one’s drinking, and to consider drinking less, is a very personal decision.
To develop the KnowAlcohol web application, we first surveyed 900 adults across Canada to find out what they knew about alcohol and what alcohol-related topics were of interest. We then used a 20-person advisory group to test out effective messages and ways to effectively present and communicate information.
Using the same science used to determine the Guidance risk zones, we developed an online tool to make information about health risks specific to a person’s drinking level, age and sex. Since folks are interested in knowing more than just health effects, we include information about alcohol-related costs per month or over one’s lifetime, and calorie equivalents from their drinking.
Importantly, this calculator doesn’t just show risks from drinking, but focuses on the benefits from drinking less, as users are invited to enter a target drinking amount and view the gains in real-time as they explore cutting back. And the site also includes lots of general information, quizzes, resources, and a standard drink calculator.
Want to learn more? Give it a shot.
Timothy Naimi receives funding from Health Canada that supported the development of the application discussed in the article.
Peter Butt co-chaired the development of the Canadian Guidance on Alcohol and Health, a project funded by Health Canada and managed by the Canadian Centre for Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA). He continues as a consultant with CCSA and the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR) on various aspects of knowledge mobilization and raising the level of alcohol literacy in Canada. In the past two years he has participated in projects funded by Health Canada and CCSA (CGAH), the Public Health Agency of Canada (Alcohol Toxicity), and the University of Victoria (CISUR alcohol app).
