If your go-to beverage of choice is a bottle of moscato, reisling, or pinot grigio, it’s officially time to change your drink order. First of all, it doesn’t pair as well with colder weather, and in the interest of a rapidly approaching spring break, you might want to go for tequila tonics to cut back on the excess sugar content. However, there’s something more important at play than the seasonality of your bar Instagrams or your bikini body aspirations – science has now shown that there’s a significant link between white wine consumption and rates of skin cancer, so I’d like to take this moment to mourn all of the chardonnays I’ll never get to meet.
Drinking any alcohol comes with a cancer risk, because unfortunately, the trade-off for getting blackout is that alcohol produces a byproduct once it’s consumed that’s associated with cancer. This has been known for a while, but thanks to new research from the American Association for Cancer Research, we now have a better idea of how specific types of alcohol affect specific types of cancer, and for those of you who are white wine drinkers, it’s not great news. If you drink every day, your risk of melanoma is 14% higher than those who don’t drink. For white wine drinkers in particular, the risk is 13% higher than those who consume beer, liquor, or red wine more frequently than white.
This is a huge blow, because who doesn’t love curling up in bed with a bottle of reisling and a Hulu queue full of old episodes of the Bachelor? Sadly, my weeknight tradition will likely involve me swapping out my bottle of white for a fruity pinot noir. You know, for my health. Once we hit summer, the white will be a little more tempting, but if you lower that percentage of white consumption by opting for a rosé and making sure you’re slathered up with SPF 30, the chances are that you’ll still be just fine..
[via Cosmo]
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